The Life of Florence Nightingale Volume I Part 6

Which of them to the better part, G.o.d only knows. Popular prejudice gives it in favour of marriage. Should we not look upon marriage, less as an absolute blessing, than as a remove into another and higher cla.s.s of this great school-room--a promotion--for it is a promotion, which creates new duties, before which the coward sometimes shrinks, and gives new lessons, of more advanced knowledge, with more advanced powers to meet them, and a much clearer power of vision to read them. In your new development of life, I take, dearest friend, a right fervent interest, and bless you with a right heartfelt and earnest love.

We are only just returned to Embley, after having pa.s.sed through London, on our way from Derbys.h.i.+re. News have I none, excepting financial, for no one could talk of anything in London excepting the horrid quant.i.ty of failures in the City, by which all England has suffered more or less. Why didn't I write before? Because I thought you would rather be let alone at first and that you were on your travels.

And now for my confessions. I utterly abjure, I entirely renounce and abhor, all that I may have said about M. Robert Mohl, not because he is now your brother-in-law, but because I was so moved and touched by the letters which he wrote after your marriage to Mama; so anxious they were to know more about you, so absorbed in the subject, so eager to prove to us that his brother was _such_ a man, he was quite sure to make you happy.

And I have not said half enough either upon that score, not anything that I feel; how "to marry" is no impersonal verb, upon which I am to congratulate you, but depends entirely upon the Accusative Case which it governs, upon which I do wish you heartfelt and trusting joy. In single life the stage of the Present and the Outward World is so filled with phantoms, the phantoms, not unreal tho' intangible, of Vague Remorse, Tears, dwelling on the threshold of every thing we undertake alone, Dissatisfaction with what is, and Restless Yearnings for what is not, cravings after a world of wonders (which _is_, but is like the chariot and horses of fire, which Elisha's frightened servant could not see, till his eyes were opened)--the stage of actual life gets so filled with these that we are almost pushed off the boards and are conscious of only just holding on to the foot lights by our chins, yet even in that very inconvenient position love still precedes joy, as in St.

Paul's list, for love laying to sleep these phantoms (by a.s.suring us of a love so great that we may lay aside all care for our own happiness, not because it is of _no_ consequence to us, whether we are happy or not, as Carlyle says, but because it is of so much consequence to another) gives that leisure frame to our mind, which opens it at once to joy.

But how impertinently I ramble on--"You see a penitent before you,"

don't say "I see an impudent scoundrel before me"--But when thou seest, and what's more, when thou readest, forgive.--You will not let another year pa.s.s without our seeing you. M. Mohl gives us hopes, in his letter to Ju, that you won't, that you will come to England next year for many months, then, dearest friend, we will have a long talk out. If not, we really must come to Paris--and then I shall see you, and see the Deaconesses too, whom you so kindly wrote to me about, but of whom I have never heard half enough....

The Bracebridges are at home--she rejoiced as much as we did over your event--Parthe is going at the end of November to do Officiating Verger to a friend of ours on a like event.--Her prospects are likewise so satisfactory, that I can rejoice and sympathize under any form she may choose to marry in. Otherwise I think that the day will come, when it will surprise us as much, to see people dressing up for a marriage, as it would to see them put on a fine coat for the Sacrament. Why should the Sacrament or Oath of Marriage be less sacred than any other?

The letter goes on to speak of a visit recently paid to Mrs. Archer Clive, well known in her day as the auth.o.r.ess of _Poems by V._ and of _Paul Ferroll_, a sensational novel of some force,--a lady whose powers of heart and mind were housed in an infirm body. Miss Nightingale admired her talents and her character, and valued her friends.h.i.+p.

But new friends.h.i.+ps and varied interests did not bring satisfaction to Miss Nightingale. She was still constantly bent on pursuing a vocation of her own. Her parents caught eagerly at an opportunity which offered itself at the end of this year (1847), for giving, as they hoped, a new turn to her thoughts.

CHAPTER V

A WINTER IN ROME; AND AFTER

(1847-1849)

Six months of Rome and happiness.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE (1848).

It was an event of some importance in the Nightingale family when Florence set out with Mr. and Mrs. Bracebridge, in the autumn of 1847, to spend the winter at Rome. The attraction to her was the society of Mrs. Bracebridge, the friend of whom she spoke as "her Ithuriel."

Moreover the mental unrest from which Florence constantly suffered at home was beginning to tell upon her health. "All that I want to do in life," she wrote to her cousin Hilary, in explaining the motive of the tour, "depends upon my health, which, I am told, a winter in Rome will establish for ever." She took the foreign tour as a tonic to enable her the better to fulfil her vocation. By her parents and her sister the tour was regarded as a tonic which might divert her from it. They hoped that foreign travel would distract her thoughts, and dispel what they perhaps considered morbid fancies. She would enjoy pleasant companions.h.i.+p. She would see famous and beautiful things. She might return converted to the more comfortable belief that her duty lay in accepting life as she found it. The point of view comes out clearly enough in a letter from her sister to Miss Bonham Carter:--

EMBLEY, _October_ [1847]. It is a very great pleasure to think of her with such a companion, one who, she says, lives always with the best part of her; one who has all the sense and discretion and the warm-hearted sympathy and the quick enjoyment and the taste and the affection which will most give her happiness; who will value her and take care of her, and do her all the good mentally and bodily one can fancy. Yes, dear, G.o.d is very good to provide such a pleasant time, and it will rest her mind, I think, entirely from wearing thoughts that all men have at home when their duties weigh much on their consciences, while she will feel she is wasting nothing; for Mrs. Bracebridge has not been at all well and Flo will _feel_ herself a comfort and a help to her, I hope, for I know she _is_ a great one.... Though it is but for so short a time, yet it seems to me a great event, the solemn first launching her into life, and my heart is very full of many feelings, but yet the joy is greatest by an incalculable deal, for one does not see how harm can come to her. Yet when one loves a great deal, one cannot but be a little anxious.... It is so pretty to see Papa wandering over the big map of Rome remembering every corner, and Mama over Piranesi, and both over all the fair things that dwell there as tho' they had just left them.

And Florence herself did find comfort and pleasure in the tour; but it was destined not to divert, but to strengthen, her purpose, as also to lay a train of circ.u.mstances which was to lead her to the Crimea.

Florence and her companions reached Paris on October 27, took s.h.i.+p at Ma.r.s.eilles for Civita Vecchia, and stayed in Rome--in the Via S.

Bastinello (No. 8)--from the beginning of November till March 29, 1848.

Florence entered heartily into all the pursuits and occupations of elegant tourists in Rome. She studied the ruins; explored the catacombs; copied inscriptions; visited the churches and galleries; spent a morning in Gibson's studio and another in Overbeck's; collected plants in the Colosseum; rode in the Campagna, and bought brooches, mosaics, and Roman pearls. Her father had drawn out a programme of famous sights and pretty walks and drives; and the methodical Florence duly ticked them off on the list. She read her own thoughts and aspirations into many of the works of art. She greatly admired the Apollo Belvedere, seeing in it the type of triumphant Free Will. "We can never lose the recollection of our poor selves while we still do things with difficulty, while we are still uncertain whether we shall succeed or not. The triumph of success may be great and delightful, but the divine life--eternal life--is when to will is to do, when the will is the same thing as the act, and therefore the act is unconscious." Of the Jupiter of the Capitol, again, she says: "Jupiter is that perfect grace in power where the divine _Will_, pure from exertion, speaks, and It is done." But what chiefly interested her, what really impressed her mind and stimulated her imagination, was the genius of Michael Angelo:--

(_To her Sister._) _December_ 17 [1847]. Oh, my dearest, I have had such a day--my red Dominical, my Golden Letter, the 15th of December is its name, and of all my days in Rome this has been the most happy and glorious. Think of a day alone in the Sistine Chapel with [Greek: S] [Selina, Mrs. Bracebridge], quite alone, without custode, without visitors, looking up into that heaven of angels and prophets.... I did not think that I was looking at pictures, but straight into Heaven itself, and that the faults of the representation and the blackening of the colours were the dimness of my own earthly vision, which would only allow me to see obscurely, indistinctly, what was there in all its glory to be known even as I was known, if mortal eyes and understandings were cleared from the mists which we have wilfully thrown around them.

There is Daniel, opening his windows and praying to the G.o.d of his Fathers three times a day in defiance of fear. You see that young and n.o.ble head like an eagle's, disdaining danger, those glorious eyes undazzled by all the honours of Babylon. Then comes Isaiah, but he is so divine that there is nothing but his own 53rd chapter will describe him. He is the Isaiah, the "_grosse Unbekannte_" of the Comfort ye, Comfort ye my people. I was rather startled at first by finding him so young, which was not my idea of him at all, while the others are old. But M. Angelo knew him better; it is the perpetual youth of inspiration, the vigour and freshness, ever new, ever living, of that eternal spring of thought which is typed under that youthful face. Genius has no age, while mind (Zechariah) has no youth. Next to Isaiah comes the Delphic Sibyl, the most beautiful, the most inspired of all the Sibyls here; but the distinction which M. Angelo has drawn even between _her_ and the _Prophets_ is so interesting. There is a security of inspiration about Isaiah; he is listening and he is speaking; "that which we _hear_ we declare unto you." There is an anxiety, an effort to hear even, about the Delphian; she is not quite sure; there is an uncertainty, a wistfulness in her eyes; she expects to be rewarded rather in another stage than this for her struggle to gain the prize of her high calling, to reach to the Unknown that Isaiah knows already. There is no uncertainty as to her feeling of being called to hear the voice, but she fears that her earthly ears are heavy and gross, and corrupt the meaning of the heavenly words. I cannot tell you how affecting this anxious look of her far-reaching eyes is to the poor mortals standing on the pavement below, while the Prophets ride secure on the storm of Inspiration.... I feel these things to be part of the word of G.o.d, of the ladder to Heaven. The word of G.o.d is all by which He reveals His thought, all by which He makes a manifestation of Himself to men. It is not to be narrowed and confined to one book, or one nation; and no one can have seen the Sistine without feeling that he has been very near to G.o.d, that he will understand some of His words better for ever after; and that Michael Angelo, one of the greatest of the sons of men, when one looks at the dome of St. Peter's on the one hand and the prophets and martyrs on the other, has received as much of the breath of G.o.d, and has done as much to communicate it to men, as any Seer of old. He has performed that wonderful miracle of giving form to the breath of G.o.d, wonderful whether it is done by words, colours, or hard stones....

The thoughts and emotions which have been suggested by the contemplation of the vault of the Sistine Chapel are countless. None are more enthusiastic than those which it inspired in Florence Nightingale, and few have been so discriminating. It is at once the privilege and a mark of consummate works of art to be capable of as many meanings as they may find of competent spectators. Each man brings to the study of them the insight of which he is capable; and each, perchance, finds in them some image of himself or of his own experience. "There are few moments, most probably," Florence Nightingale went on to say, "which we shall carry with us through the gate of Death, few recollections which will stand the Eternal Light." She felt as she came out of the Sistine Chapel that her first sight of Michael Angelo's stupendous work would be one of those few for her. We may surmise that the wistful uncertainty which she found in the face of the Delphic Sibyl had especially appealed to her in its truth to life as she had experienced it; conscious as she was of a call from G.o.d, conscious also as she could not but have been of great powers, and yet doubtful whether on this side of the gate of Death it would be given to her to interpret the Divine voice aright. She retained to the end of her life the same reverential feeling for Michael Angelo. She had photographs and engravings of the Sistine ceiling hanging in her rooms, and she sent some framed and inscribed photographs of the symbolical figures on the Medici tombs to hang at Embley on the little private staircase, where her father fell and died. Those at her home were bequeathed specifically in her Will.

The afternoon of the day on which the revelation of the Sistine Chapel came to her was spent by Florence and her friend in walking up the Monte Mario, to enjoy the famous view from the Villa Mellini, not then, as now, included within a fort:--

"We spent an exquisite half-hour," she wrote, "mooning, or rather sunning about; the whole Campagna and city lying at our feet, the sea on one side like a golden laver below the declining sun, the windings of the Tiber and the hills of Lucretilis on the other, with Frascati, Tivoli, Tusculum on their cypress sides, for in that clear atmosphere you could see the very cypresses of Maecenas' villa at Tivoli; with long stripes of violet and pomegranate coloured light sweeping over the plain like waves; one stone pine upon the edge of our Mellini hill; and Rome, the fallen Babylon, like a dead city beneath, no sound of mult.i.tudes ascending, but the only life these great crimson lights and shadows (for here the shadow of a red light is violet) like the carnation-coloured wings of angels, themselves invisible, flapping over the plain and leaving this place behind them.

We rushed down as fast as we could for the sun was setting, and we reached St. Peter's just as the doors were going to close. We had the great Church all to ourselves, the tomb of St. Peter wreathed with lights. It felt like the times when a Christian knight watched by his arms before some great enterprise at the Holy Sepulchre; and one shadowy white angel we could see through the windows over the great door; and do you know he quite made us startle as he stood there in the gloaming. Of course it was the marble statue on the facade; and there were workmen still laughing and talking at the extreme end, and their sounds, as they were repeated under the long vaults, were like the gibbering of devils, and their lanthorns, as they wavered along close to the ground, were like corpse-lights. I thought of St. Anthony and holy knights and their temptations. And at last the Sacristan took us out of that vast solemn dome through a _tomb_! and we glided into the silvery moonlight, and walked home over Ponte St. Angelo, where I made a little invocation to St. Michael to help me to thank; for why the Protestants should shut themselves out, in solitary pride, from the Communion of Saints in heaven and in earth, I never could understand. And so ended this glorious day."

The obsession of Rome, which sooner or later comes upon every intelligent visitor to the Eternal City, dated in the case of Florence Nightingale from this golden-letter day. She surmounted the sense of confusion which sometimes oppresses the traveller. "I do not feel," she wrote, "though Pagan in the morning, Jew in the afternoon, and Christian in the evening, anything but a unity of interest in all these representations. To know G.o.d we must study Him as much in the Pagan and Jewish dispensations as in the Christian (though that is the last and most perfect manifestation), and this gives unity to the whole--one continuous thread of interest to all these pearls."

II

The politics of modern Italy interested her no less than the ruins of ancient Rome or the monuments of mediaeval art. She had met many Italian refugees, both at Geneva and in the _salon_ of Madame Mohl in Paris, and was a whole-hearted enthusiast in the cause of Italian freedom. Her present visit to Rome synchronized with that curious and short-lived episode in the struggle during which Pio Nono was playing "the ineffectual tragedy of Liberal Catholicism." All Rome seemed seized with sympathy for the cities beyond the Papal states, which were fighting for liberty, and within the states themselves Pio Nono's offerings of mild benevolence sufficed to call forth "floods of ecstatic, demonstrative Italian humanity, torchlight processions, and crowds kneeling at his feet."[38] Miss Nightingale saw the Roman n.o.bles, Prince Corsini, Prince Gaetano, and others, presiding at "patriotic altars," which had been set up in the public squares for the receipt of gifts in money and in jewellery. She heard the famous Father Gavazzi preach the crusade in the Colosseum. She cheered as the Tricolor of Italy was hoisted on the Capitol. "I certainly was born," she wrote to her cousin Hilary, "to be a tag-rag-and-bob-tail, for when I hear of a popular demonstration, I am nothing better than a ragam.u.f.fin." She heard the rumble of a distant drum, and rushed up for Mr. Bracebridge, and he and she broke their own windows because they were not illuminated; stayed to see the torchlight procession of patriots singing the hymn to Pio Nono, and were rewarded by the crowd crying "G.o.d save the Queen," as they pa.s.sed the English "milord" and his companion. "Very touching," she said; "though royalty was the very last thing I was thinking of"; for at this time, as she often avowed in her letters, her sympathies were Republican. "When this memorable year began with all its revolutions," she wrote later to Madame Mohl, after disillusion had come (June 27), "I thought that it was the Kingdom of Heaven coming under the fate of a Republic. But alas!

things have shown that more of us must slowly ripen to angels here, before the regime of the angels, _i.e._ the Kingdom of Heaven, will begin." But for the moment everything seemed radiant. She recorded with pleasure in February that a deputation of Romans had gone up to the Pope to express their "complete confidence in him." In her note-books she collected particulars of his life and character; and when in March he granted what can only be called a sort of a Const.i.tution, she wrote to Madame Mohl: "My dear Santo Padre seems doing very well. He has given up his Temporal Power. No man took it from him; he laid it down of himself.

I think that he will reign in history as the only prince who ever did, and that his character is nearer Christ's than any I ever heard of."

History will hardly confirm this saying; but if Miss Nightingale's words seem ill-balanced in the light of subsequent events, let it be remembered that, as Mr. Trevelyan says, "the cult of Pio Nono was for some months the religion of Italy, and of Liberals and exiles all over the world. Even Garibaldi in Monte Video, and Mazzini in London, shared the enthusiasm of the hour." A year later, when the Roman Republic had been declared and the Pope had fled, and the French troops besieged Rome on his behalf, Miss Nightingale had only pity for Pio Nono; her anger she reserved for the French "cannibals," for the one Republic that was devouring another. "I must exhale my rage and indignation," she wrote in a diary (June 30, 1849), "before I have lost all notions of absolute right and wrong. It makes my heart bleed that the French nation, the nation above all others capable of an ideal, of aspiring after the abstract right, should have lent itself to such a brutal crime against its own brother--one may say its own offspring, for the Roman Republic sprang from the French; it is purest cannibalism; this breaks my heart.

When I think of that afternoon at Villa Mellini (now occupied by a French general), of Rome, bathed in her crimson and purple shadows, lying at our feet, and St. Michael spreading his wings over all--the Angel of Regeneration as we thought him then--my eyes fill with tears.

But he will be the Angel of Regeneration yet." The French, she said, might reduce the city and occupy it; but the heroic defence of the Republic "will have raised the Romans in the moral scale, and in their own esteem." They would never sink back to what they had been. Sooner or later, Rome would be free. She was especially indignant at the talk which she heard on all sides in cultivated society at home about the "vandalism" of the Romans in exposing their precious monuments of art to a.s.sault. She loved those monuments, as we have seen; but if the defence of Rome against the French required it, she would have been ready to see them all levelled to the ground. "They must carry out their defence to the last," she cried. "I should like to see them fight the streets, inch by inch, till the last man dies at his barricade, till St. Peter's is level with the ground, till the Vatican is blown into the air. Then would this be the last of such brutal, not house-breakings, but city-breakings; then, and not till then, would Europe do justice to France as a thief and a murderer, and a similar crime be rendered impossible for all ages. If I were in Rome, I should be the first to fire the Sistine, turning my head aside, and Michael Angelo would cry, 'Well done,' as he saw his work destroyed." It was not only in relation to the restraints of conventional domesticity that Florence Nightingale was a rebel.

[38] G. M. Trevelyan, _Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic_, p. 65.

III

During her own stay in Rome, however, there was something which interested her more than Roman politics or Roman monuments. It was the philanthropic work of a Convent School. Every visitor to Rome knows the Trinita de' Monti. The flight of steps between the church and the Piazza di Spagna is celebrated alike for its own beauty and for the flower-girls and women in peasant-costume who frequent it. The church itself contains many fine works of art, and the choral service is one of the attractions of ecclesiastical Rome. The neighbourhood is rich in artistic and literary a.s.sociations. Florence Nightingale had sympathetic eyes and ears for all these things; but what attracted her most was the convent attached to the church, with its school for girls, and (in another part of the city) its orphanage. She was broad-minded, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, in relation to church creeds. It was by works, not faith, or at any rate by faith issuing in works, that she weighed the churches. It was characteristic of the thoroughness of her mental character that during this sojourn in Rome she made a methodical study of Roman doctrine and ritual. Among her papers and note-books belonging to this time, there are careful a.n.a.lyses of the theory of Indulgence, of the Real Presence, of the Rosary, and so forth. She made, too, a careful collation of the Latin Breviary with the English Prayer-Book. She summed up her comparative study of the churches in this generalization: "The great merit of the _Catholic Church_: its a.s.sertion of the truth that G.o.d still inspires mankind as much as ever. Its great fault: its limiting this inspiration to itself. The great merit of _Protestantism_: its proclamation of freedom of conscience within the limits of the Scriptures. Its great fault: its erection of the Bible into a master of the soul." Her deep sense of the self-responsibility of every human soul kept her free from any inclination to Roman doctrine; but she was profoundly impressed by the practical beneficence of Roman sisterhoods. An example of such beneficence she found in the school and orphanage of the Dames du Sacre C[oe]ur. She had picked up a poor girl called Felicetta Sensi, and procured her admission as a free boarder, paying for her care and education for many years. She formed a warm attachment to the Lady Superior, the Madre Sta. Colomba. She studied the organization, rules, and methods of the large school, and for ten days she went into Retreat in the Convent.[39] Her intercourse with the Madre Sta. Colomba, of whose talk and spiritual experiences she made full and detailed notes, made a very deep impression on her mind. She studied rules and organization, but, as in all her studies, she was seeking a motive, as well as, and indeed more than, a method. Many years later, a friend wrote to her: "It seems to me that the greatest want among nurses is _devotion_. I use the word in a very wide sense, meaning that state of mind in which the current of desire is flowing towards one high end.

This does not presuppose knowledge, but it very soon attains it."[40]

This was a profound conviction of her own, often expressed, as we shall hear, in her Addresses and Letters of Exhortation in later years. What she set herself to study at the Trinita de' Monti was the secret of _devotion_. She made notes of the Lady Superior's exhortations; of the spiritual exercises which were enjoined upon novices; of the forms and discipline of self-examination. She sought to extract the secret, and to apply it to the inculcation of the highest kind of service to man as the service of G.o.d. For many years the thought in her mind was to be the foundation of some distinctive order or sisterhood; and though in the end she came to be glad that she had not done this, she never abandoned the high ideal which was behind her thought. Nor, though in some ways and in some cases she came to be disillusioned about nursing sisterhoods, did she ever cease to speak with admiration of what she had seen and learnt in some of them. She thought more often, and with more affectionate remembrance, about the spirit of the best Catholic sisterhoods than of Kaiserswerth, or indeed of anything else in her professional experience.

[39] The Convent was giving hospitality at this time to the Abbess of Minsk (in Lithuania), whose persecution by the Russian Government formed the subject of much debate. Miss Nightingale wrote a long account of the extraordinary adventures which the Abbess related to her. She was advised in 1853 to print this, but I cannot find that she did so.

[40] Letter from R. Angus Smith, July 7, 1859.

In such studies upon the Trinita de' Monti in the winter of 1847-48, she was taken, as she said in a note of self-examination, out of all interests that fostered her "vanity"; it was her "happiest New Year."

"The most entire and unbroken freedom from dreaming I ever had," she wrote at a later time. "Oh, how happy I was!" And so again, looking back after twenty years, she wrote: "I never enjoyed any time in my life so much as my time at Rome."[41]

[41] Letter to M. Mohl, Nov. 21, 1869.

IV

Another incident of Miss Nightingale's sojourn in Rome was destined, though she knew it not at the time, to have a far-reaching influence upon her career. Among the English visitors who spent the winter of 1847-48 in Rome were Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Herbert. Mr. Herbert had already been Secretary at War under Peel, a post to which he was afterwards to return under Aberdeen. The resignation of Peel's Cabinet in 1846 released Mr. Herbert from official work. Later in the year he married a lady with whom he had been long acquainted, Elizabeth a Court, daughter of General Charles Ashe a Court; and in the following year he and his wife set out for a long Continental tour. Mr. and Mrs.

Bracebridge were friends of the Herberts, and thus Florence Nightingale made their acquaintance in Rome. In her retrospect she specially recalled the beginning there of her friends.h.i.+p with Sidney Herbert "under the dear Bracebridges' wing." Compatriots who meet in this way in any foreign resort are apt to see a good deal of each other, and from this winter dates the beginning of a friends.h.i.+p which was to be a governing factor in the life of Florence Nightingale. Sidney Herbert, when they met in galleries or at soirees, or rode together in the Campagna, must have been struck by Miss Nightingale's marked abilities, and for Mrs. Herbert she formed an affectionate attachment. She noted "the great kindness, the desire of love, the magnanimous generosity" of her new friend. Mr. and Mrs. Herbert saw much of Archdeacon Manning (the future cardinal), who was also spending the winter in Rome, and Miss Nightingale was on friendly terms with him.[42] This also was an acquaintance which had some influence on her future career. Sidney Herbert, aided by the ready sympathy of his wife, was devoting much thought, now liberated from official duties, to schemes of benevolence among the poor on his estates. "He felt strongly the disadvantage at which the poor were placed in being compelled after illness, and perhaps after undergoing painful operations, to return in the earliest stage of convalescence, without rest or change, to their accustomed labour."[43]

He was full of a scheme for a Convalescent Home and Cottage Hospital (such as is now no rarity, but was then almost unknown), and it can be imagined with what zest Miss Nightingale shared his thoughts. One of the first things which she records in her diary after return from the Continent is "an expedition with Mrs. Sidney Herbert to set up her Convalescent Home at Charmouth"; but this was only a pa.s.sing incident, and return to the habitual home life, after the distraction of foreign travel, left her no more contented than before.

[42] Purcell's _Life of Manning_, vol. i. p. 362.

[43] _Sidney Herbert_: _a Memoir_, by Lord Stanmore, vol. i. pp. 97-98.

On her return to London in the early summer of 1848 she sent her friends occasionally the talk of the town:--

(_To Madame Mohl._) _July_ 26 [1848]. In London there have been the usual amount of Charity b.a.l.l.s, Charity Concerts, Charity Bazaars, whereby people bamboozle their consciences and shut their eyes.

Nevertheless there does not seem the slightest prospect of a revolution here. Why, would be hard to say, as England is surely the country where luxury has reached its height and poverty its depth. Perhaps it is our Poor Law, perhaps the strength of our Middle Cla.s.s, perhaps a greater degree of sympathy between the rich and poor, which is the conservative principle. Lord Ashley had a Chartist deputation with him the other day, who stayed to tea and talked with him for five hours. "That a man should ride in a carriage and have twenty thousand a year is contrary to the laws of Nature," said their leader, and slapped his leg. "I could show you, if you would go with me to-night," said Lord Ashley, "people who would say to _you_, that a man should go in broadcloth and wear a s.h.i.+rt-pin (pointing to the Chartist's s.h.i.+rt) is contrary to the laws of Nature." The Chartist was silent. "And it was the only thing I said," says Lord Ashley, "after arguing with them for five hours which made the least impression."

Her acquaintance with Lord Ashley (afterwards Lord Shaftesbury) brought her in touch with Ragged School work. But society grew more and more distasteful to Miss Nightingale. She explained the reasons in a letter to her "Aunt Hannah." Why could she not smile and be gay, while yet biding her time and not forsaking her ultimate ideals? It was, she said, because she "hated G.o.d to hear her laugh, as if she had not repented of her sin." There is something obviously morbid in such words, and they might be multiplied indefinitely, if there were good reason for doing so, from her letters, diaries, and note-books. The sins of which she most often convicted herself were "hypocrisy" and "vanity." She prayed to be delivered from "the desire of producing an effect." That was the "vanity"; and it was "hypocrisy," because she was playing a part, responding to friends' conception of her, though all the while her heart was really set on other things, and her true life was being lived elsewhere. The morbidness was a symptom of a mind at war with its surroundings. Then again the kind "Aunt" reminded her, in the spirit of George Herbert, that anything and everything may be done "to the glory of G.o.d." But Miss Nightingale at this time was deep in the study of political economy; and "can it be to the glory of G.o.d," she asked, "when there is so much misery among the poor, which we might be curing instead of living in luxury?"