Essays in Rebellion Part 18

Modest beyond all common decency; most sensitive to pain, for it always made her cry; conscious, as she said, that in battle she ran as much risk of being killed as anyone else, she rode among men as one of themselves, bareheaded, swinging her axe, charging with her standard which all must follow, heartening her countrymen for the cause of France, striking the invading enemy with the terrors of a spirit. Just a clear-witted, womanly girl, except that her cause had driven fear from her heart, and occupied all her soul, to the exclusion of lesser things.

"Pity she isn't an Englishwoman!" said one of the enemy who was near her after a battle, and he meant it for the most delicate praise. In a few months she changed the face of her country, revived the hope, inspired the courage, rekindled the belief, re-established the unity, staggered the invader with a blow in the heart, and crowned her king as the symbol of national glory. Within a few months she had set France upon the a.s.sured road to future greatness. Little over twenty years after they burnt her there was hardly a trace of foreign foot upon French soil.

It was all quite natural, of course. The theologians who condemned her to death, and those who have now raised her to Beat.i.tude, were concerned with the authenticity of her miracles, and there is nothing miraculous in thus raising a nation from the dead. Considering the difficulty of their task, we may forgive the clergy some apparent inconsistency in their treatment. But for myself, as a mere layman, I should be content to call any human being Blessed for the natural magic of such a history; and compared with that deed of hers, I would not turn my head to witness the most astonis.h.i.+ng miracle ever performed in all the records of the saints.

XXV

THE HEROINE

It is strange to think that up to August of 1910, a woman was alive who had won the highest fame many years before most people now living were born. To remember her is like turning the pages of an ill.u.s.trated newspaper half-a-century old. Again we see the men with long and pointed whiskers, the women with ballooning skirts, bag nets for the hair, and little bonnets or porkpie hats, a feather raking fore and aft. Those were the years when Gladstone was still a subordinate statesman, earning credit for finance, d.i.c.kens was writing _Hard Times_, Carlyle was beginning his _Frederick_, Ruskin was at work on _Modern Painters_, Browning composing his _Men and Women_, Thackeray publis.h.i.+ng _The Newcomes_, George Eliot wondering whether she was capable of imagination. It all seems very long ago since that October night when that woman sailed for Boulogne with her thirty-eight chosen nurses on the way to Scutari. I suppose that never in the world's history has the change in thought and manners been so rapid and far-reaching as in the two generations that have arisen in our country since that night. And it is certain that Florence Nightingale, when she embarked without fuss in the packet, was quite unconscious how much she was contributing to so vast a transformation.

One memory almost alone still keeps a familiar air, suggesting something that lies perhaps permanently at the basis of man's nature.

The present-day detractors of all things new, of every step in advance, every breach in routine, every promise of emanc.i.p.ation, and every departure from the commonplace, would feel themselves quite at home among the evil tongues that spewed their venom upon a courageous and n.o.ble-hearted woman. They would recognise as akin to themselves the calumny, scandal, ridicule, and malignity with which their natural predecessors pursued her from the moment that she took up her heroic task to the time when her glory stilled their filthy breath. She went under Government direction; the Queen mentioned her with interest in a letter; even the _Times_ supported her, for in those days the _Times_ frequently stood as champion for some n.o.ble cause, and its own correspondent, William Russell, had himself first made the suggestion that led to her departure. But neither the Queen, the Government, nor the _Times_ could silence the born backbiters of greatness. Cowards, startled at the sight of courage, were alert with jealousy.

Pleasure-seekers, stung in the midst of comfort, sniffed with depreciation. Culture, in pursuit of prettiness, pa.s.sed by with artistic indifference. The narrow mind attributed motives and designs. The snake of disguised concupiscence sounded its rattle. That refined and respectable women should go on such an errand--how could propriety endure it? No lady could thus expose herself without the loss of feminine bloom. If decent women took to this kind of service, where would the charm of womanhood be fled? "They are impelled by vanity, and seek the notoriety of scandal," said the envious. "None of them will stand the mere labour of it for a month, if we know anything," said the physiologists. "They will run at the first rat," said masculine wit.

"Let them stay at home and nurse babies," cried the suburbs. "These Nightingales will in due time become ringdoves," sneered _Punch_.

With all that sort of thing we are familiar, and every age has known it.

The s.h.i.+fts to which the _Times_ was driven in defence show the nature of the a.s.saults:

"Young," it wrote of Florence Nightingale, "young (about the age of our Queen), graceful, feminine, rich, popular, she holds a singularly gentle and persuasive influence over all with whom she comes in contact. Her friends and acquaintance are of all cla.s.ses and persuasions, but her happiest place is at home, in the centre of a very large band of accomplished relatives, and in simplest obedience to her admiring parents."

"About the age of our Queen," "rich," "feminine," "happiest at home,"

"with accomplished relatives," and "simply obedient to her parents," she being then thirty-five--those were the points that the _Times_ knew would weigh most in answer to her accusers. With all that sort of thing, as I said, we are familiar still; but there was one additional line of abuse that has at last become obsolete. For weeks after her arrival at Scutari, the papers rang with controversy over her religious beliefs.

She had taken Romish Sisters with her; she had been partly trained in a convent. She was a Papist in disguise, they cried; her purpose was to clutch the dying soldier's spirit and send it to a non-existent Purgatory, instead of to the h.e.l.l it probably deserved. She was the incarnation of the Scarlet Woman; she was worse, she was a Puseyite, a traitor in the camp of England's decent Church. "No," cried the others, "she is worse even than a Puseyite. She is a Unitarian; it is doubtful whether her father's belief in the Athanasian Creed is intelligent and sincere." Finally, the climax in her iniquities of mind and conduct reached its height and she was publicly denounced as a Supralapsarian. I doubt whether, at the present day, the coward's horror at the sight of courage, the politician's alarm at the sound of principle, or envy's utmost malignity would go so far as to call a woman that.

I dwell on the opposition and abuse that beset Florence Nightingale's undertaking, because they are pleasanter and more instructive than the sentimentality into which her detractors converted their abuse when her achievement was publicly glorified. It is significant that, in its minute account of the Crimean War, the _Annual Register_ of the time appears to have made no mention of her till the war was over and she had received a jewel from the Queen. Then it uttered its little complaint that "the gentler s.e.x seems altogether excluded from public reward."

Well, it is matter for small regret that a great woman should not be offered such t.i.tles as are bestowed upon the failures in Cabinets, the contributors to party funds, and the party traitors whom it is hoped to restrain from treachery. But whether a peerage would have honoured her or not, there is no question of the disservice done to the truth of her character by those whose sentimental t.i.tles of "Lady with the Lamp,"

"Leader of the Angel Band," "Queen of the Gracious Dynasty,"

"Ministering angel, thou!" and all the rest of it have created an ideal as false as it is mawkish. Did the sentimentalists, at first so horrified at her action, really suppose that the service which in the end they were compelled to admire could ever have been accomplished by a soft and maudlin being such as their imagination created, all br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes and heartfelt sighs, angelic draperies and white-winged shadows that hairy soldiers turned to kiss?

To those who have read her books and the letters written to her by one of the sanest and least ecstatic men of her day, or have conversed with people who knew her well, it is evident that Florence Nightingale was at no point like that. Her temptations led to love of mastery and impatience with fools. Like all great organisers, quick and practical in determination, she found extreme difficulty in suffering fools gladly.

To relieve her irritation at their folly, she used to write her private opinions of their value on the blotting-paper while they chattered. It was not for angelic sympathy or enthusiasm that Sidney Herbert chose her in his famous invitation, but for "administrative capacity and experience." Those were the real secrets of her great accomplishment, and one remembers her own scorn of "the commonly received idea that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse." It was a practical and organising power for getting things done that distinguished the remarkable women of the last century, and perhaps of all ages, far more than the soft and sugary qualities which sentimentality has delighted to plaster on its ideal of womanhood, while it talks its pretty nonsense about chivalry and the weakness of woman being her strength. As instances, one could recall Elizabeth Fry, Sister Dora, Josephine Butler, Mary Kingsley, Octavia Hill, Dr. Garrett Anderson, Mrs. F.G.

Hogg (whose labour secured the Employment of Children Act and the Children's Courts), and a crowd more in education, medicine, natural science, and political life. But, indeed, we need only point to Queen Victoria herself, her strong but narrow nature torn by the false ideal which made her protest that no good woman was fit to reign, while all the time she was reigning with a persistent industry, a mastery of detail, and a truthfulness of dealing rare among any rulers, and at intervals illuminated by sudden glory.

"Woman is the practical s.e.x," said George Meredith, almost with over-emphasis, and certainly the saying was true of Florence Nightingale. In far the best appreciation of her that has appeared--an appreciation written by Harriet Martineau, who herself died about forty years ago--that distinguished woman says: "She effected two great things--a mighty reform in the cure of the sick, and an opening for her s.e.x into the region of serious business." The reform of hospital life and sick nursing, whether military or civil, is near fulfilment now, and it is hard to imagine such a scene as those Scutari wards where, in William Russell's words, the sick were tended by the sick and the dying by the dying, while rats fed upon the corpses and the filth could not be described. But though her other and much greater service is, owing to its very magnitude, still far from fulfilment, it is perhaps even harder for us to imagine the network of custom, prejudice, and sentiment through which she forced the opening of which Harriet Martineau speaks.

XXVI

THE PENALTY OF VIRTUE

His crime was that he actually married the girl. It had always been the fas.h.i.+on for an Austrian Archduke to keep an opera-dancer, whether he liked it or not, just as he always kept a racehorse, even though he cared nothing about racing. For any scion of the Imperial House she was a necessary part of the surroundings, an item in the entourage of Court.

He maintained her just as our Royal Family pay subscriptions to charities, or lay the foundation-stone of a church. It was expected of him. _n.o.blesse oblige_. Descent from the House of Hapsburg involves its duties as well as its rights. The opera-dancer was as essential to Archducal existence as the seventy-seventh quartering on the Hapsburg arms. She was the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual Imperialness. She justified the t.i.tle of "Transparency." She was the mark of true heredity, like the Hapsburg lip. As the advertis.e.m.e.nts say, no Archduke should be without one.

But really to love an opera-dancer was a scandal for derision, moving all the Courts of the Empire to scorn. Actually to marry her was a crime beyond forgiveness. It shook the Throne. It came very near the sin of treason, for which the penalties prescribed may hardly be whispered in polite ears. To mingle the Imperial blood with a creature born without a t.i.tle, and to demand human and divine sanction for the deed! It brought a blush to the cheek of heraldry. What of the possible results of a union with a being from the stage? Only if illegitimate, could such results legitimately be recognised; only if ign.o.ble in the eyes of morality, could they be received without censure among the n.o.bility. It was not fair to put all one's Imperial relations, to say nothing of the Court officials, the Lord High Chamberlain, the Keepers of the Pedigree, the Diamond Sticks in Waiting, the Grooms of the Bedchamber, and the Valets Extraordinary--it was not fair to put their poor brains into such a quandary of contradiction and perplexity. And who shall tell the divine wrath of that august figure, obscurely visible in the recesses of ancestral homes, upon whose brow had descended the diadem of Roman Emperors, the crown of Christ's Vicar in things terrestrial, and who, when he was not actually wearing the symbol of Imperial supremacy, enjoyed the absolute right to a.s.sume the regalia of eight kingdoms in turn, including the sacred kingdom of Jerusalem, and possessed forty-three other t.i.tles to pre-eminent n.o.bility, not counting the etceteras with which each separate string of t.i.tles was concluded? Who, without profanity, shall tell his wrath?

It was the Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria, head of the Tuscan branch of the House of Hapsburg, who confronted in his own person that Imperial wrath, and committed the inexpiable crime of marriage. It is true that he was not entirely to blame. He did not succ.u.mb without a struggle, and his efforts to resist the temptation to legality appear to have been sincere. Indeed, as has so often happened since the days of Eve, it was chiefly the woman's fault. He honestly endeavoured to make her his mistress, in accordance with all Archducal precedent, but she persistently, nay, obstinately, refused the honour of Imperial shame.

With a rigidity that in other circ.u.mstances might, perhaps, have been commended, but, in relation to an Archduke, can only be described as designing, she insisted upon marriage. She was but Fraulein Milli Stubel, light-skirted dancer at the Court Opera-House, but, with unexampled hardihood, she maintained her headlong course along the criminal path of virtue. What could a man do when exposed to temptation so severe?

The Archduke was in love, and love is an incalculable force, driving all of us at times irresistibly to deeds of civil and ecclesiastical wedlock. He was a soldier, a good soldier, in itself an unusual and suspicious characteristic in one of the Hapsburg blood. He was a musician and a man of culture--qualities that, in a prince, must be taken as dangerous indications of an unbalanced mind. He was an intimate friend of the Crown Prince Rudolph, that bewildering personality, whose own fate was so unhappy, so obscure. Skill in war, intelligence, knowledge, friends.h.i.+p all marked him out as a man only too likely to bring discredit on Archducal tradition. His peers in birth shook their heads, and muttered the German synonym for "crank." Worse than all, he was in love--in love with a woman of dangerous virtue. What could such a man do against temptation? Struggle as he might, he could not long repel the seductive advances of honourable action. He loved, he fell, he married.

In London, of all places, this crime against all the natural dictates of Society was ultimately perpetrated. We do not know what church lent itself to the deed, or what hotel gave shelter to the culprits' shame.

By hunting up the marriage register of Johann Orth (to such s.h.i.+fts may an Archduke be reduced in the pursuit of virtue), one might, perhaps, discover the name of the officiating clergyman, and we can confidently a.s.sume he will not be found upon the bench of Bishops. But it is all many years ago now, and directly after the marriage, as though in the vain hope of concealing every trace of his offence, Johann Orth purchased a little German s.h.i.+p, which he called by the symbolic name of _Santa Margherita_--for St. Margaret suffered martyrdom for the sin of rejecting a ruler's dishonourable proposals--and so they sailed for South America. By what means the wedded fugitives purposed there to support their guiltless pa.s.sion, is uncertain. But we know that they arrived, that the captain gave himself out as ill, and left the s.h.i.+p, together with most of the crew, no doubt in apprehension of divine vengeance, if they should seem any longer to partic.i.p.ate in the breach of royal etiquette. We further know that, in July 1890, the legal lovers sailed from Buenos Ayres, with a fresh crew, the Archduke himself in command, and were never heard of more.

An Austrian cruiser was sent to search the coasts, in vain. No letters came; no s.h.i.+p has ever hailed the vessel of their iniquity. The insurance companies have long paid the claims upon the Archduke's premiums for his life, and that fact alone is almost as desirable an evidence as a death-certificate to his heir. But one Sunday in July 1910, the Imperial Court of Austria also issued an edict to appear simultaneously in the chief official gazettes of the habitable globe, declaring that, unless within six months further particulars were supplied concerning one, namely, the Archduke Johann Salvator, of the House of Austria and Tuscany, otherwise and hereinafter known as Johann Orth, master mariner, and concerning his alleged decease, together with that of one Milli Orth, _nee_ Stubel, his reputed accomplice in matrimony, the property, estates, effects, t.i.tles, jewels, family vaults, and other goods of the aforesaid Johann Orth, should forthwith and therewithal pa.s.s into the possession of the Archduke Joseph Ferdinand, nephew and presumptive heir of the aforesaid Johann Orth, to the estimated value of 150,000 sterling, in excess or defect thereof as the case might be, it being thereafter presumed that the aforesaid Johann Orth, together with the aforesaid Milli Orth, his reputed accomplice in matrimony, did meet or encounter their death upon the high seas by the act or other intervention of G.o.d.

Oh, never believe it! There is an unsuspected island in untravelled seas. Like the island of Tirnanog, which is the Irish land of eternal youth, it lies below the sunset, brighter than the island-valley of Avilion:

"Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea."

To that island have those star-like lovers fared, since they gave the world and all its Imperial Courts the slip. There they have discovered an innocent and lovely race, adorned only with sh.e.l.ls and the flowers of hibiscus; and, intermingled with that race, in accordance with indigenous marriage ceremonies, the crew of the _Santa Margherita_ now rear a dusky brood. In her last extant letter, addressed to the leader of the _corps de ballet_ at the Ring Theatre in Vienna, Madame Milli Orth herself hinted at a No-Man's Land, which they were seeking as the home of their future happiness. They have found it now, having trodden the golden path of rays. There palls not wealth, or state, or any rank, nor ever Court snores loudly, but men and women meet each evening to discuss the next day's occupation, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer collects the unearned increment in the form of the sh.e.l.l called Venus'

ear. For a time, indeed, Johann Orth attempted to maintain a kind of kings.h.i.+p, on the strength of his superior pedigree. But when a democratic cabin-boy one day turned and told him to stow his Hapsburg lip, the beautiful ex-opera-dancer burst out laughing, and Johann agreed in future to be called Archduke only on Sundays. With their eldest son, now a fine young man coming to maturity, the t.i.tle is expected to expire.

XXVII

"THE DAILY ROUND, THE COMMON TASK"

Mr. Clarkson, of the Education Office, was enjoying his breakfast with his accustomed equanimity and leisure. Having skimmed the Literary Supplement of the _Times_, and recalled a phrase from a symphony on his piano, he began opening his letters. But at the third he paused in sudden perplexity, holding his coffee-cup half raised. After a while the brightness of adventurous decision came into his eyes, and he set the cup down, almost too violently, on the saucer.

"I'll do it!" he cried, with the resolute air of an explorer contemplating the Antarctic. "The world is too much with me. I will recover my true personality in the wilderness. I will commune with my own heart and be still!"

He rang the bell hurriedly, lest his purpose should weaken.

"Oh, Mrs. Wilson," he said carelessly, "I am going away for a few days."

"Visiting at some gentleman's seat to shoot the gamebirds, I make no doubt," answered the landlady.

"Why, no; not precisely that," said Mr. Clarkson. "The fact is, Mr.

Davies, a literary friend of mine--quite the best authority on Jacobean verse--offers me his house, just by way of a joke. The house will be empty, and he says he only wants me to defend his notes on the _History of the Masque_ from burglary. I shall take him at his word."

"You alone in a house, sir? There's a thing!" exclaimed the landlady.

"A thing to be thankful for," Mr. Clarkson replied. "George Sand always longed to inhabit an empty house."

"Mr. Sand's neither here nor there," answered the landlady firmly. "But you're not fit, sir, begging your pardon. Unless a person comes in the morning to do for you."

"I shall prefer complete solitude," said Mr. Clarkson. "The calm of the uninterrupted morning has for me the greatest attraction."

"You'll excuse me mentioning such things," she continued, "but there's the was.h.i.+ng-up and bed-making."