CHAPTER XXIII.A brief summing up.
A brief summing up.
Those who write of Florence Nightingale sentimentally, as though she spent herself in a blind, caressing tenderness, would have earned her secret scorn, not unflavoured by a jest; for she stood always at the opposite pole from the sentimentalists, and perhaps had a little of her father in her—that father who, when he wasgivingright and left, would say to some plausible beggar of society who came to him for wholesale subscriptions, “You see, I was not born generous,” well knowing that his ideas of generosity and theirs differed by a whole heaven, and that his were the wider and the more generous of the two.
She had a will of iron. That is what one of her greatest admirers has more than once said to me—and he knew her well. No doubt it wastrue. Only a will of iron could have enabled a delicate woman to serve, for twenty hours at a time, with unwearying tenderness and courage among the wounded and the dying. Even her iron resolution and absolute fearlessness could not prevent her from taking Crimean fever when she insisted on visiting a second time the lonely typhus patient outside Balaclava, at a moment when she was worn out with six months of nursing and administration combined. But it did enable her to go back to her post when barely recovered, and, later in life, even when a prisoner within four walls, who seldom left her bed, that will of iron did enable her to go on labouring till the age of ninety, and to fulfil for the good of mankind the dearest purpose of her heart. Nothing is harder than iron, and that which is made of it after it has been through the furnace has long been the very symbol of loyalty and uprightness when we say of a man that he is “true as steel.”
Yes, iron is hard and makes a pillar of strength in time of need. But he who forges out of it weapons and tools that are at once delicateand resistless, knows that it will humbly shoe the feet of horses, and cut the household bread, and will make for others besides Lombardy a kingly crown. And when iron is truly on fire, nothing commoner or softer nor anything more yielding—not even gold itself—can glow with a more steadfast and fervent heat to warm the hands and hearts of men.
The picture of Miss Nightingale that dwells in the popular mind no doubt owes its outline to the memories of the men she nursed with such tenderness and skill. And it is a true picture. Like all good workmen, she loved her work, and nursing was her chosen work so long as her strength remained. None can read her writing, and especially herNursing Notesand her pamphlet on nursing among the sick poor, without feeling how much she cared for every minutest detail, and how sensitively she felt with, and for, her patients.
But such a picture, as will have been made clear by this time, shows only one aspect of her life-work. One of her nearest intimates writes to me of her difficulties in reforming militaryhospitals, and her determination therefore to give herself later in life to the reform of civilian nursing; but in reality she did both, for through the one she indirectly influenced the other, and began what has been widening and unfolding in every direction ever since.
Those who knew her best speak almost with awe of her constructive and organizing power. She was indeed a pioneer and a leader, and girt about with the modesty of all true greatness.
Like Joan of Arc, she heeded not the outward voices, but, through all faults and sorrows, sought to follow always and only the voice of the Divine One. This gave her life unity and power. And when she passed on into the life beyond, the door opened and closed again very quietly, leaving the whole world the better for her ninety years in our midst. “When I have done with this old suit,” says George Meredith, “so much in need of mending;” but hers, like his, was a very charming suit to the last, and even to the end of her ninety years the colouring was clear and fresh as a girl’s.
Like all strong, true, disinterested people, shemade enemies—where is there any sanitary reformer who does not?—yet seldom indeed has any one, man or woman, won deeper and more world-wide love. But that was not her aim; her aim was to do the will of her Commander and leave the world better than she found it.
Seldom has there been a moment when women have more needed the counsel given in one of the letters here published for the first time, when she begs of a dear friend that her name may be that “of one who obeys authority, however unreasonable, in the name of Him who is above all, and who is Reason itself.”
And as we think of the debt the world owes to Florence Nightingale and of all she did for England, for India, and not only for the British Empire, but for the world, we may well pause for a moment on the words that closed our opening chapter, in which she begs her fellow-workers to give up considering their actions in any light of rivalry as between men and women, and ends with an entreaty:—
“It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad, which would have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman.“Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God’s work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.”
“It does not make a thing good, that it is remarkable that a woman should have been able to do it. Neither does it make a thing bad, which would have been good had a man done it, that it has been done by a woman.
“Oh, leave these jargons, and go your way straight to God’s work, in simplicity and singleness of heart.”
The well-remembered words of Ruskin’s appeal to girls in “Sesame and Lilies,” published but a few years earlier, were evidently in Miss Nightingale’s mind when she wrote the closing sentences of her tribute to Agnes Jones—sentences which set their seal upon this volume, and will echo long after it is forgotten.
“Let us,” she writes, “add living flowers to her grave, ‘lilies with full hands,’ not fleeting primroses, nor dying flowers. Let us bring the work of our hands and our heads and our hearts to finish her work which God has so blessed. Let us not merely rest in peace, but let hers be the life which stirs up to fight the good fight against vice and sin and misery and wretchedness,as she did—the call to arms which she was ever obeying:—‘The Son of God goes forth to war—Who follows in His train?’“O daughters of God, are there so few to answer?”
“Let us,” she writes, “add living flowers to her grave, ‘lilies with full hands,’ not fleeting primroses, nor dying flowers. Let us bring the work of our hands and our heads and our hearts to finish her work which God has so blessed. Let us not merely rest in peace, but let hers be the life which stirs up to fight the good fight against vice and sin and misery and wretchedness,as she did—the call to arms which she was ever obeying:—
‘The Son of God goes forth to war—Who follows in His train?’
‘The Son of God goes forth to war—Who follows in His train?’
‘The Son of God goes forth to war—Who follows in His train?’
‘The Son of God goes forth to war—
Who follows in His train?’
“O daughters of God, are there so few to answer?”