FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.* SIB EDWARD Coca knows what a biography ought

to be and has given us here a capital example of the art. it is written to the scale of the importance of the various events in Florence Nightingale's life, and never wanders into his- torical matters not strictly relevant to her career. It would be so easy to say, "A history of Florence Nightingale is a history

of the Crimean war " or " of the Royal Army Medical Corps." Sir Edward Cook is never in danger from such a literary trap. And as he has had all the papers left by Florence Nightingale put at his disposal—many of which reveal parts of her secluded life not known before to the public—this book can never be displaced as the authoritative memoir of a great national heroine.

As Sir Edward Cook says, a legendary figure of Florence Nightingale grew up which was very far from being a true One :— " The popular imagination of Miss Nightingale is of a girl of high degree who, moved by a wave of pity, forsook the pleasures of fashionable life for the horrors of the Crimean war; who went about the hospitals of Scutari with a lamp, scattering flowers of comfort and ministration ; who retired at the close of the war into private life, and lived thenceforth in the seclusion of an invalid's room—a seclusion varied only by good deeds to hospitals and nurses, and by gracious and sentimental pieties. I do not mean, of course, that this was all that anybody knew or wrote about her. Any such suggestion would be far from the truth. But the popular idea of Florence Nightingale's life has been based on some such lines as I have indicated, and the general con- ception of her character is to this day founded upon them. The legend was fixed by Longfellow's poem and Miss Yonge's Golden Deeds. Its growth was favoured by the fact of Miss Nightingale's seclusion, by the hidden, almost the secretive, manner in which she worked, by her shrinking from publicity, by her extreme reticence about herself. It is only now, when her papers are accessible, that her real life can be known. There are some elements of truth in the popular legend, but it is so remote from • Tltd MP of Florence Nightingale. By Sir Edward Cook. 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co. [30a. net.)

the whole truth as to convey in general impression everything but the truth.

It is flattering to the popular love of heroic impulse to believe that Florence Nightingale suddenly left the joys of an affluent life to work and stiffer in the Crimea. But true and lasting work is not done in that way, at all events when it is work requiring professional knowledge. The fact is that Florence Nightingale had bad a passion for medical nursing for years before the Crimean war, and had carefully and deliberately trained herself. When the great opportunity of the Crimean war came she was earnestly urged to go out and organize a. hospital, because she was obviously the right person for the task. And when the Crimean war was over she withdrew herself from the public gaze, it is true, but she never ceased to labour for the organisation of nursing—indeed she founded, the modern art of nursing—for the improvement of hospitals.

throughout the world, and for• a better• sanitary administration, whether at home or in India. Her work for India was her disappointment and in a sense her failure. The Crimean war was in fine only a resounding incident in her life ; she laboured both before it and after it to the same purpose; and she would no doubt have placed the sum of her achieve- ments for humanity after the Crimean war far higher than the results of those crowded and dramatic two years with the- army at the front.

Florence Nightingale had to overcome many obstacles and much prejudice before she could adopt the occupation on which she had set her heart. Nowadays if a girl were fretting• her heart out to become a hospital nurse few parents would prevent her; they would let her enthusiasm stand• the test of the work. Either way the solution would be satisfactory. But

the year 1845 was not as to-day. In that year Florence Nightingale, being disappointed of a scheme which she had

revolved much in her mind for going through a training at Salisbury Hospital, wrote to a cousin :—

"But there have been difficulties about my very first step, which terrified Mama. I do not mean the physically revolting parts of a hospital, but things about the surgeons and nurses which you- may guess. Even Mrs. Fowler threw cold water upon it; and nothing will be done this year at all events, and I do not believe— ever; and no advantage that I see comes of my living on, excepting that one becomes less and less of a young lady every year, which, is only a negative one. You will laugh, dear, at the whole plan, I daresay ; but no one but the mother of it knows how precious an infant idea becomes ; nor how the soul dies between the destruc- tion of one and the taking up of another. I shall never do anything, and am worse than dust and nothing. I wonder if our Saviour were to walk the earth again, and I were to go to Him and ask, whether He would send me back to live this life again„ which crushes me into vanity and deceit. Oh for some strong thing to sweep this loathsome life into the past."

Later her tenacity wore down all opposition and she was trained both in Germany and in France. All this was before the Crimean war. In August 1858 she was appointed ' superintendent of an "Establishment for Gentlewomen in

Illness " in London. Still her relations raised difficulties. "The superintendent of a nursing-home ought to be present when the doctors went their rounds and when operations were performed. But would it be seemly 1' " It was from this

establishment for gentlewomen that Florence Nightingale departed for the Crimea. The nurses under her went off in a cloud of enthusiasm with Sidney Herbert's kindly exhor- tations ringing in their ears. It was not long before grievances

eclipsed some of the enthusiasm. Florence Nightingale reports one nurse as saying :- " I came out, Ma'am, prepared to submit to everything; to be put upon in every way. But there are some things, Ma'am, one can't submit to. There is the Caps, Ma'am, that suits one face, and some that suits another. And if I'd known, Ma'am, about the Caps, great as was my desire to come out to nurse at Scutari, I wouldn't have come, Ma'am."

Then there was the jealousy of some of the Army doctors. The jealous ones were the minority, it is true, and Florence Nightingale was able to write with the tempered optimism of the following passage :—

" We are very lucky in our Medical Heads. Two of them are brutes, and four are angels—for this is a work which makes either • angels or devils of men and of women too. As for the assistants, they are all Cubs, and will,-while a man is breathing his last breath under the knife, lament the 'annoyance of being called up from their dinners by such a. fresh influx of wounded' ! But imlicked, Cubs grow up into good old Bears, tho' I don't know how ; for certain it is the old Bears are good, We have now four pram of Beds, and not eighteen inches apart.'

A much worse trouble for her than jealousy was the sudden

arrival of a fresh party of nurses from England. who were mostly quite untrained, and who would have been a hindrance rather than a help to her. She received the nurses, who were headed by Miss Mary Stanley, in a manner which Miss Stanley never forgave, and she trounced Sidney Herbert roundly in a letter. Sir Edward Cook convinces us that Florence Nightingale was in the right—this has often been denied in books about the Crimean war — though her vehemence against persons who were presumably moved by respectable motives may well have been unnecessary, and was certainly not likeable. As Sir Edward Cook says in his final estimate of Florence Nightingale's character :—

" There followed from all this a certain severity in Miss Nightingale's dealings with her friends; a certain inability to show tolerance or understanding for other points of view than her own. There was a lady, once a fellow-worker, who accused Miss Nightingale roundly of having `no idea of friendship.' The accusation was not true, but one can see what the lady meant. Miss Nightingale was apt to be a little over-exacting. and to drive her friends rather hard. Also she did not relish independence or opposition. I like being under obedience to you,' wrote one of her nursing friends, always very dear to her, Not indeed that Miss Nightingale had any weakness for gush—no one had less; but if a friend was otherwise admirable to her—by good sense and zeal, and so forth, the fact of the 'obedience' was not other than an additional recommendation. She was inclined to resent any diversion on the part of her friends to other interests as desertion."

This is of course tantamount to saying that there was a strain of arrogance in Florence Nightingale's bearing. It was the defect of her splendid quality of determination. Her spirit was a positive spirit. If she had been less positive she would probably have accomplished less on the whole, though there were occasions when she might—in dealings with Government departments, for example—have won her point if she bad been more conciliatory and accommodating. As for friend-

ship, we cannot escape the conclusion that she was intimate with few persons. Among men, Sidney Herbert was probably the only one. She knew Jowett very well, however, and corresponded indefatigably with him for many years. She helped him to revise his Plato, and he acknowledged that he

benefited by her suggestions.

Of the overbearing side of Florence Nightingale's character the poor fellows in the hospital, however, knew nothing. To them she was a vision of tenderness. It was Mr. MacDonald,

the Commissioner of the Times fund (be wrote his name in this way, and not with a small " d," as Sir Edward Cook gives it), who sent home the words from which the "legendary figure" of Florence Nightingale sprang. Here is the passage:- " Wherever there is disease in its most dangerous form and the hand of the despoiler distressingly nigh, there is that incompar- able woman sure to be seen. Her benignant presence is an influence for good comfort, even amid the struggles of expiring nature. She is a 'ministering angel' without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds."

All over the world those words spread, and "the Lady with the Lamp" became a household word and the subject of innumerable pictures. We wonder whether Sir Edward Cook

happens to know (we think he does not mention it) the perfect anagram on Florence Nightingale's name: "Flit on, cheering angel !" Sir Edward Cook describes at some length the wrangles about the "religious question" which hovered over the benign work of the hospitals. It is almost incredible that men at home could have troubled themselves more as to whether a nurse was a Protestant or a Roman Catholic than about the soothing of tortured bodies. Yet so it was. All this botheration was regarded with contempt by Florence Nightingale herself. Her own religious beliefs were peculiar

to herself. She hid thought out a scheme which differed widely from the creeds of Christian orthodoxy, but which, as Sir Edward Cook says, "admitted of accommodation to much of their language and formularies." She was mystical; she

was sometimes morbid in her self-abasement. She held that works were everything, and faith, except as symbolized in works, nothing. She was not a regular churchgoer. She once wrote:— .

"Is there anything higher_ in thinking a one's own salvation than in thinking of one's own dinner? i have always felt that the soldier who gives his life for something which is certainly not himself or hi„ fishilling a day—whether he call it his Queen or his

Country or his Colours—is higher in the scale than the Saints or- the Faquirs or the Evangelicals who (some of them don't) believe that the end of religion is to secure one's own salvation."

In a letter to Jowett about the Scriptures, she said : " The story of Achilles and his horses is far more fit for children than that of Balaam and his ass, which is only fit for asses. The stories of Samson and of Jephthah are only fit for bull- dogs; and the story of Bathsheba to be told to Bathshebas." Yet she was intensely spiritual, and it was in a truly spiritual sense that she argued that one should make an art of life. Aga Khan once asked her, when he had been listening to her recounting how for fifty years she had fought for improved sanitation, "But are your people better P" That pregnant question must be answered according to one's temperament. She, at all events, held on her way with unwavering conviction, and felt differently towards Lord Salisbury ever after he treated her to his teasing sally about the dogs of Constantinople being a very good system of sanitation. It will be seen that the eulogist who said in a funeral oration that her life was a " triumph of simple goodness " offered an explanation of her life almost ridiculous in its inadequacy. She certainly was not simple.

Could anything be less "simple," for example, than her reflections on marriage P When a certain man wished to marry her she thus communed with herself :- " I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a passional nature which requires satisfaction, and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction, and that would not find it in his life. I can hardly find satisfaction for any of my natures. Sometimes I think that I will satisfy my passional nature at all events, because that will at least secure me from the evil of dreaming. But would it ? I could be satisfied to spend a life with him combining our different powers in some great object. I could not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things. . . . To be nailed to a continuation and exaggeration of my present life, without hope of another, would be intolerable to me."

There is much else that we should like to quote, but we must end with Florence Nightingale's very piquant account of an interview with Kinglake, the historian of the Crimean War.

"I had two hours' good conversation with Mr. Kinglake. I found him exceedingly courteous and agreeable ; looking upon the whole idea as a work of art and emotion, and upon me as one of the colours in the picture; upon the Chelsea Board as a safe (or, rather an infallible) authority; upon McNeill and Tulloch as interlopers; upon figures (arithmetical) as worthless ; upon asser- tion as proof. He was utterly and self-sufficiently in the dark as to all the real causes of the Crimean Mortality. And you might as well try to enlighten Sir G. Brown himself. For Lord Raglan he has an enthusiasm which I fully share but which entirely blinds Mr. Kinglake, who besides came home long before the real distress, to the causes of that distress. I put him in possession of some of " the materials. But I do not hope that he will, I am quite sure: that he will not, make use of them."

This reminds us of Delane's saying that Kinglake was bent upon basing his history on the Homeric model, with Lord Raglan for his Achilles and the Russians as the Trojans.