LADY AND LEGEND Florence Nightingale. By Margaret Goldsmith. (Hodder and
Stoughton. 15s.) THE common sense of women has often prevailed against the whole-hearted incompetence of men, but never more victori- ously, more hugely, than in the case of Miss Nightingale. TO the cheerful idiocy of mere departments, or the defects of an
administration that was almost frivolously criminal, Miss Nightingale opposed a glorious and irresistible impatience.
Humbug has become less digestible in recent years, and our conception of the heroic, in this age of disgrace, is more re- stricted than it used to be ; but there must be few who are not prepared to recognise, in Florence Nightingale, one of the few unassailably heroic figures of modern history.
Her whole career was one of splendid opposition. She fought with unusual success one of the grimmest of all battlei : the battle against the rule and restraint of a highly respectable family. She fought, in undaunted simplicity and honesty of purpose, the blunders and horrors of a miraculously incapable War Office ; a War Office nearly unique in the unending annals of stupidity. She fought against cruel and intimidating forms of death, in circumstances which might have reduced any ordinary hero to blank despair. And she did all this with a lofty singleness of intention in which the trite concerns of the ordinary life were sternly obliterated. It is well that we should remind ourselves of the brave and implacable nature which led a Victorian woman, finely bred in the substantial comfort of a Victorian home, to write such reverberating indictments as these :
" Our General Hospitals have always been shambles for Mt.. sick. And men have come to recommend that none be ever formed again at the base of operations . . . the murderous Sanitary defects of these Hospitals remained untouched ; and Death did his work well. . . . In the Hospital at Portsmouth . . . the cubic space is about half what it should be, yet the Director-General says that `it is a new and splendid Hospital.' . . . But, although in the Military Medical Service, the evils of an exclusively Regimental organisation are, if possible, more evident than in any other branch of the Military Service, in, this aloae nothing has yet been done to change the System."
I have quoted here from Miss Nightingale's work on Matters Affecting the Health of the Army (1858), because I want to emphasise the essentially unsentimental and vigorous character of Florence Nightingale, a character which is well understood
by her latest biographer, Miss Margaret Goldsmith. For even if Miss Goldsmith's book is not in every respect an adequate biography of Florence Nightingale, it is at any rate a bio-
graphy on the right lines, and it is written with a shrewd womanly sense of the true greatness and achievement cf this magnificent lady. It is quite clear that a really adequate biography of Miss Nightingale can only be written by a woman, for the victories of Miss Nightingale and they were many— were the victories of one whose methods of attack and whose unselfish pursuit of purpose were essentially feminine. Men are often restrained by paltry scruples about convention or compromise, but Miss Nightingale was never restrained in the drastic ardour of her work, her mission, her writing. Other women have attempted the biographical task, but without any high measure of success. Miss Goldsmith has produced what
is certainly the best biography of Florence Nightingale which has yet been written ; and if I say that it is possible to conceive an even better biography, I do not wish to detract from the
unquestionable merits of her performance. There are, how- ever, some unexpected lacunae. For example, although she is evidently acquainted with them, it is odd that Miss Goldsmith does not make fuller use of what are really the most intensely characteristic of Florence Nightingale's writings—her Notes on Matters Affecting the Health of the British Army (1858) and her introductory remarks in the pamphlet on The Sanitary History of the British Army (1859) ; nor are these works*included in the bibliography. Yet it was in the latter of these that Miss Nightingale wrote those memorable words : " The destruction of life was in itself so awful, that men forgot for the time the loss
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