No More Learning

'

Then Manning threw out a bold suggestion. 'A successful medium,' he
said, 'might well pass himself off by his preternatural endowments as
the promised Messiahs. '

Manning went on to discuss the course of events which would lead to the
final catastrophe. But this subject, he confessed,

'deals with agencies so transcendent and mysterious, that all I shall
venture to do will be to sketch in outline what the broad and luminous
prophecies, especially of the Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse, set
forth without attempting to enter into minute details, which can only be
interpreted by the event'.

While applauding his modesty, we need follow Manning no further in his
commentary upon those broad and luminous works; except to observe that
'the apostasy of the City of Rome from the Vicar of Christ and its
destruction by the Antichrist' was, in his opinion, certain. Nor was he
without authority for this belief. For it was held by 'Malvenda, who
writes expressly on the subject', and who, besides, 'states as the
opinion of Ribera, Gaspar Melus, Viegas, Suarez, Bellarmine, and Bosius
that Rome shall apostatise from the faith'.


IX

THE death of Pius IX brought to Manning a last flattering testimony of
the confidence with which he was regarded at the Court of Rome. In one
of the private consultations preceding the Conclave, a Cardinal
suggested that Manning should succeed to the Papacy. He replied that he
was unfit for the position, because it was essential for the interests
of the Holy See that the next Pope should be an Italian. The suggestion
was pressed, but Manning held firm. Thus it happened that the Triple
Tiara seemed to come, for a moment, within the grasp of the late
Archdeacon of Chichester; and the cautious hand refrained.

Leo XIII was elected, and there was a great change in the policy of the
Vatican. Liberalism became the order of the day. And now at last the
opportunity seemed ripe for an act which, in the opinion of the majority
of English Catholics, had long been due--the bestowal of some mark of
recognition from the Holy See upon the labours and the sanctity of
Father Newman. It was felt that a Cardinal's hat was the one fitting
reward for such a life, and accordingly the Duke of Norfolk,
representing the Catholic laity of England, visited Manning, and
suggested that he should forward the proposal to the Vatican. Manning
agreed, and then there followed a curious series of incidents--the last
encounter in the jarring lives of those two men. A letter was drawn up
by Manning for the eye of the Pope, embodying the Duke of Norfolk's
proposal; but there was an unaccountable delay in the transmission of
this letter; months passed, and it had not reached the Holy Father. The
whole matter would, perhaps, have dropped out of sight and been
forgotten, in a way which had become customary when honours for Newman
were concerned, had not the Duke of Norfolk himself, when he was next in
Rome, ventured to recommend to Leo XIII that Dr. Newman should be made a
Cardinal. His Holiness welcomed the proposal; but, he said, he could do
nothing until he knew the views of Cardinal Manning. Thereupon, the Duke
of Norfolk wrote to Manning, explaining what had occurred; shortly
afterwards, Manning's letter of recommendation, after a delay of six
months, reached the Pope, and the offer of a Cardinalate was immediately
dispatched to Newman.

But the affair was not yet over. The offer had been made; would it be
accepted? There was one difficulty in the way. Newman was now an infirm
old man of seventy-eight; and it is a rule that all Cardinals who are
not also diocesan Bishops or Archbishops reside, as a matter of course,
at Rome. The change would have been impossible for one of his years--for
one, too, whose whole life was now bound up with the Oratory at
Birmingham. But, of course, there was nothing to prevent His Holiness
from making an exception in Newman's case, and allowing him to end his
days in England. Yet how was Newman himself to suggest this? The offer
of the Hat had come to him as an almost miraculous token of renewed
confidence, of ultimate reconciliation. The old, long, bitter
estrangement was ended at last. 'The cloud is lifted from me for ever! '
he exclaimed when the news reached him. It would be melancholy indeed if
the cup were now to be once more dashed from his lips and he was obliged
to refuse the signal honour. In his perplexity he went to the Bishop of
Birmingham and explained the whole situation. The Bishop assured him
that all would be well; that he himself would communicate with the
authorities, and put the facts of the case before them. Accordingly,
while Newman wrote formally refusing the Hat, on the ground of his
unwillingness to leave the Oratory, the Bishop wrote two letters to
Manning, one official and one private, in which the following passages
occurred:

'Dr. Newman has far too humble and delicate a mind to dream of thinking
or saying anything which would look like hinting at any kind of terms
with the Sovereign Pontiff. . . . I think, however, that I ought to express
my own sense of what Dr. Newman's dispositions are, and that it will be
expected of me . . . I am thoroughly confident that nothing stands in the
way of his most grateful acceptance, except what he tells me greatly
distresses him--namely, the having to leave the Oratory at a critical
period of its existence, and the impossibility of his beginning a new
life at his advanced age. '

And in his private letter the Bishop said:

'Dr. Newman is very much aged, and softened with age and the trials he
has had, especially the loss of his two brethren, St. John and Caswall;
he can never refer to these losses without weeping and becoming
speechless for a time. He is very much affected by the Pope's kindness
and would, I know, like to receive the great honour offered him, but
feels the whole difficulty at his age of changing his life or having to
leave the Oratory--which I am sure he could not do. If the Holy Father
thinks well to confer on him the dignity, leaving him where he is, I
know how immensely he would be gratified, and you will know how
generally the conferring on him the Cardinalate will be applauded. '

These two letters, together with Newman's refusal, reached Manning as he
was on the point of starting for Rome. After he had left England, the
following statement appeared in "The Times":

'Pope Leo XIII has intimated his desire to raise Dr. Newman to the rank
of Cardinal, but with expressions of deep respect for the Holy See, Dr.
Newman has excused himself from accepting the Purple. '

When Newman's eyes fell upon the announcement, he realised at once that
a secret and powerful force was working against him. He trembled, as he
had so often trembled before; and certainly the danger was not
imaginary. In the ordinary course of things, how could such a paragraph
have been inserted without his authority? And consequently, did it not
convey to the world, not only an absolute refusal which he had never
intended, but a wish on his part to emphasise publicly his rejection of
the proffered honour? Did it not imply that he had lightly declined a
proposal for which in reality he was deeply thankful? And when the fatal
paragraph was read in Rome, might it not actually lead to the offer of
the Cardinalate being finally withheld?

In great agitation, Newman appealed to the Duke of Norfolk.

'As to the statement,' he wrote, 'of my refusing a Cardinal's Hat, which
is in the papers, you must not believe it, for this reason:

'Of course, it implies that an offer has been made me, and I have sent
an answer to it. Now I have ever understood that it is a point of
propriety and honour to consider such communications sacred. This
statement, therefore, cannot come from me. Nor could it come from Rome,
for it was made public before my answer got to Rome.

'It could only come, then, from someone who not only read my letter,
but, instead of leaving to the Pope to interpret it, took upon himself
to put an interpretation upon it, and published that interpretation to
the world.

'A private letter, addressed to Roman Authorities, is interpreted on its
way and published in the English papers. How is it possible that anyone
can have done this? '

The crushing indictment pointed straight at Manning. And it was true.
Manning had done the impossible deed. Knowing what he did, with the
Bishop of Birmingham's two letters in his pocket, he had put it about
that Newman had refused the Hat. But a change had come over the spirit
of the Holy See. Things were not as they had once been: Monsignor Talbot
was at Passy, and Pio Nono was--where? The Duke of Norfolk intervened
once again; Manning was profuse in his apologies for having
misunderstood Newman's intentions, and hurried to the Pope to rectify
the error. Without hesitation, the Sovereign Pontiff relaxed the rule of
Roman residence, and Newman became a Cardinal.

He lived to enjoy his glory for more than ten years. Since he rarely
left the Oratory, and since Manning never visited Birmingham, the two
Cardinals met only once or twice. After one of these occasions, on
returning to the Oratory, Cardinal Newman said, 'What do you think
Cardinal Manning did to me? He kissed me! '

On Newman's death, Manning delivered a funeral oration, which opened
thus:

'We have lost our greatest witness for the Faith, and we are all poorer
and lower by the loss.

'When these tidings came to me, my first thought was this, in what way
can I, once more, show my love and veneration for my brother and friend
of more than sixty years? '

In private, however, the surviving Cardinal's tone was apt to be more
. . . direct. 'Poor Newman! ' he once exclaimed in a moment of genial
expansion. 'Poor Newman! He was a great hater! '


X

IN that gaunt and gloomy building--more like a barracks than an
Episcopal palace--Archbishop's House, Westminster, Manning's existence
stretched itself out into an extreme old age. As his years increased,
his activities, if that were possible, increased too. Meetings,
missions, lectures, sermons, articles, interviews, letters--such things
came upon him in redoubled multitudes, and were dispatched with an
unrelenting zeal. But this was not all; with age, he seemed to acquire
what was almost a new fervour, an unaccustomed, unexpected, freeing of
the spirit, filling him with preoccupations which he had hardly felt
before. 'They say I am ambitious,' he noted in his Diary, 'but do I rest
in my ambition? '

No, assuredly he did not rest; but he worked now with no arriere pensee
for the greater glory of God. A kind of frenzy fell upon him. Poverty,
drunkenness, vice, all the horrors and terrors of our civilisation
seized upon his mind, and urged him forward to new fields of action and
new fields of thought. The temper of his soul assumed almost a
revolutionary cast. 'I am a Mosaic Radical,' he exclaimed; and, indeed,
in the exaltation of his energies, the incoherence of his conceptions,
the democratic urgency of his desires, combined with his awe-inspiring
aspect and his venerable age, it was easy enough to trace the mingled
qualities of the patriarch, the prophet, and the demagogue. As, in his
soiled and shabby garments, the old man harangued the crowds of
Bermondsey or Peckham upon the virtues of Temperance, assuring them,
with all the passion of conviction, as a final argument, that the
majority of the Apostles were total abstainers, this Prince of the
Church might have passed as a leader of the Salvation Army. His
popularity was immense, reaching its height during the great Dock
Strikes of 1889, when, after the victory of the men was assured, Manning
was able, by his persuasive eloquence and the weight of his character,
to prevent its being carried to excess. After other conciliators--among
whom was the Bishop of London--had given up the task in disgust, the
octogenarian Cardinal worked on with indefatigable resolution. At last,
late at night, in the schools in Kirby Street, Bermondsey, he rose to
address the strikers. An enthusiastic eye-witness has described the
scene:

'Unaccustomed tears glistened in the eyes of his rough and work-stained
hearers as the Cardinal raised his hand and solemnly urged them not to
prolong one moment more than they could help the perilous uncertainty
and the sufferings of their wives and children. Just above his uplifted
hand was a figure of the Madonna and Child; and some among the men tell
how a sudden light seemed to swim around it as the speaker pleaded for
the women and children. When he sat down all in the room knew that he
had won the day, and that, so far as the Strike Committee was concerned,
the matter was at an end. '

In those days, there were strange visitors at the Archbishop's House.
Careful priests and conscientious secretaries wondered what the world
was coming to when they saw labour leaders like Mr. John Burns and Mr.
Ben Tillett, and land-reformers like Mr. Henry George, being ushered
into the presence of his Eminence. Even the notorious Mr. Stead
appeared, and his scandalous paper with its unspeakable revelations lay
upon the Cardinal's table. This proved too much for one of the faithful
tonsured dependents of the place, and he ventured to expostulate with
his master. But he never did so again.

When the guests were gone, and the great room was empty, the old man
would draw himself nearer to the enormous fire, and review once more,
for the thousandth time, the long adventure of his life. He would bring
out his diaries and his memoranda, he would rearrange his notes, he
would turn over again the yellow leaves of faded correspondences;
seizing his pen, he would pour out his comments and reflections, and
fill, with an extraordinary solicitude, page after page with
elucidations, explanations, justifications, of the vanished incidents of
a remote past. He would snip with scissors the pages of ancient
journals, and with delicate ecclesiastical fingers, drop unknown
mysteries into the flames.

Sometimes he would turn to the four red folio scrapbooks with their
collection of newspaper cuttings, concerning himself, over a period of
thirty years. Then the pale cheeks would flush and the close-drawn lips
would grow even more menacing than before. 'Stupid, mulish malice,' he
would note. 'Pure lying--conscious, deliberate and designed. '
'Suggestive lying. Personal animosity is at the bottom of this. '

And then he would suddenly begin to doubt. After all, where was he? What
had he accomplished? Had any of it been worthwhile? Had he not been out
of the world all his life! Out of the world!

'Croker's "Life and Letters", and Hayward's "Letters",' he notes, 'are
so full of politics, literature, action, events, collision of mind with
mind, and that with such a multitude of men in every state of life, that
when I look back, it seems as if I had been simply useless. '

And again, 'The complete isolation and exclusion from the official life
of England in which I have lived, makes me feel as if I had done
nothing'. He struggled to console himself with the reflexion that all
this was only 'the natural order'. 'If the natural order is moved by the
supernatural order, then I may not have done nothing. Fifty years of
witness for God and His Truth, I hope, has not been in vain. ' But the
same thoughts recurred. 'In reading Macaulay's life I had a haunting
feeling that his had been a life of public utility and mine a vita
umbratilis, a life in the shade. ' Ah! it was God's will. 'Mine has been
a life of fifty years out of the world as Gladstone's has been in it.
The work of his life in this world is manifest. I hope mine may be in
the next. I suppose our Lord called me out of the world because He saw
that I should lose my soul in it. ' Clearly, that was the explanation.

And yet he remained sufficiently in the world to discharge with absolute
efficiency the complex government of his diocese almost up to the last
moment of his existence. Though his bodily strength gradually ebbed, the
vigour of his mind was undismayed. At last, supported by cushions, he
continued, by means of a dictated correspondence, to exert his
accustomed rule. Only occasionally would he lay aside his work to plunge
into the yet more necessary duties of devotion. Never again would he
preach; never again would he put into practice those three salutary
rules of his in choosing a subject for a sermon: '(1) asking God to
guide the choice; (2) applying the matter to myself; (3) making the sign
of the cross on my head and heart and lips in honour of the Sacred
Mouth;' but he could still pray; he could turn especially to the Holy
Ghost.

'A very simple but devout person,' he wrote in one of his latest
memoranda, 'asked me why in my first volume of sermons I said so little
about the Holy Ghost. I was not aware of it; but I found it to be true.
I at once resolved that I would make a reparation every day of my life
to the Holy Ghost. This I have never failed to do to this day. To this I
owe the light and faith which brought me into the truefold. I bought all
the books I could about the Holy Ghost. I worked out the truths about
His personality, His presence, and His office. This made me understand
the last paragraph in the Apostles' Creed, and made me a Catholic
Christian. '

So, though Death came slowly, struggling step by step with that bold and
tenacious spirit, when he did come at last the Cardinal was ready. Robed
in his archiepiscopal vestments, his rochet, his girdle, and his
mozzetta, with the scarlet biretta on his head, and the pectoral cross
upon his breast, he made his solemn Profession of Faith in the Holy
Roman Church. A crowd of lesser dignitaries, each in the garments of his
office, attended the ceremonial. The Bishop of Salford held up the
Pontificale and the Bishop of Amycla bore the wax taper. The provost of
Westminster, on his knees, read aloud the Profession of Faith,
surrounded by the Canons of the Diocese. Towards those who gathered
about him, the dying man was still able to show some signs of
recognition, and even, perhaps, of affection; yet it seemed that his
chief preoccupation, up to the very end, was with his obedience to the
rules prescribed by the Divine Authority. 'I am glad to have been able
to do everything in due order', were among his last words. 'Si fort
qu'on soit,' says one of the profoundest of the observers of the human
heart, 'on peut eprouver le besoin de s'incliner devant quelqu'un ou
quelque chose. S'incliner devant Dieu, c'est toujours le moins
humiliant. '

Manning died on January 14th, 1892, in the eighty-fifth year of his age.
A few days later Mr. Gladstone took occasion, in a letter to a friend,
to refer to his relations with the late Cardinal. Manning's conversion
was, he said,

'altogether the severest blow that ever befell me. In a late letter the
Cardinal termed it a quarrel, but in my reply I told him it was not a
quarrel, but a death; and that was the truth. Since then there have been
vicissitudes. But I am quite certain that to the last his personal
feelings never changed; and I believe also that he kept a promise made
in 1851, to remember me before God at the most solemn moments; a promise
which I greatly valued. The whole subject is to me at once of extreme
interest and of considerable restraint. '

'His reluctance to die,' concluded Mr. Gladstone, 'may be explained by
an intense anxiety to complete unfulfilled service. '

The funeral was the occasion of a popular demonstration such as has
rarely been witnessed in the streets of London. The route of the
procession was lined by vast crowds of working people, whose
imaginations, in some instinctive manner, had been touched. Many who had
hardly seen him declared that in Cardinal Manning they had lost their
best friend. Was it the magnetic vigour of the dead man's spirit that
moved them? Or was it his valiant disregard of common custom and those
conventional reserves and poor punctilios which are wont to hem about
the great? Or was it something untameable in his glances and in his
gestures? Or was it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about
him, of the antique organisation of Rome? For whatever cause, the mind
of the people had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was
more acute than lasting. The Cardinal's memory is a dim thing today. And
he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning never
lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the sepulchral
monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the
almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent
tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten
trophy--the Hat.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

E. S. Purcell. Life of Cardinal Manning.
A. W. Hutton. Cardinal Manning.
J. E. C. Bodley.
Cardinal Manning and Other Essays.
F. W. Cornish. The English Church in the Nineteenth Century.
Dean Church. The Oxford Movement.
Sir J. T. Coleridge. Memoir of the Rev. John Keble.
Hurrell Froude. Remains.
Cardinal Newman. Letters and Correspondence in the English
Church.
Apologia pro Vita Sua.
Wilfrid Ward. Life of Cardinal Newman. W. G. Ward and the Oxford
Movement. W. G. Ward and the Catholic Revival. Life of Cardinal
Wiseman.
H. P. Liddon. Life of E. B. Pusey.
Tracts for the Times, by Members of the University of Oxford.
Lord Morley. Life of Gladstone.
Lives of the Saints, edited by J. H. Newman.
Herbert Paul. Life of J. A. Froude.
Mark Pattison. Autobiography.
T. Mozley. Letters from Rome on the Occasion of the Oecumenical
Council.
Lord Acton. Letters.
H. L. Smith and V. Nash. The Story of the Dockers' Strike.




Florence Nightingale


EVERY one knows the popular conception of Florence Nightingale. The
saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high degree who
threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succour the afflicted;
the Lady with the Lamp, gliding through the horrors of the hospital at
Scutari, and consecrating with the radiance of her goodness the dying
soldier's couch. The vision is familiar to all--but the truth was
different. The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile as fancy
painted her. She worked in another fashion and towards another end; she
moved under the stress of an impetus which finds no place in the popular
imagination. A Demon possessed her. Now demons, whatever else they may
be, are full of interest. And so it happens that in the real Miss
Nightingale there was more that was interesting than in the legendary
one; there was also less that was agreeable.

Her family was extremely well-to-do, and connected by marriage with a
spreading circle of other well-to-do families. There was a large country
house in Derbyshire; there was another in the New Forest; there were
Mayfair rooms for the London season and all its finest parties; there
were tours on the Continent with even more than the usual number of
Italian operas and of glimpses at the celebrities of Paris. Brought up
among such advantages, it was only natural to suppose that Florence
would show a proper appreciation of them by doing her duty in that state
of life unto which it had pleased God to call her--in other words, by
marrying, after a fitting number of dances and dinner-parties, an
eligible gentleman, and living happily ever afterwards. Her sister, her
cousins, all the young ladies of her acquaintance, were either getting
ready to do this or had already done it.

It was inconceivable that Florence should dream of anything else; yet
dream she did. Ah! To do her duty in that state of life unto which it
had pleased God to call her! Assuredly, she would not be behindhand in
doing her duty; but unto what state of life HAD it pleased God to call
her? That was the question. God's calls are many, and they are strange.
Unto what state of life had it pleased Him to call Charlotte Corday, or
Elizabeth of Hungary? What was that secret voice in her ear, if it was
not a call? Why had she felt, from her earliest years, those mysterious
promptings towards . . . she hardly knew what, but certainly towards
something very different from anything around her? Why, as a child in
the nursery, when her sister had shown a healthy pleasure in tearing her
dolls to pieces, had SHE shown an almost morbid one in sewing them up
again? Why was she driven now to minister to the poor in their cottages,
to watch by sick-beds, to put her dog's wounded paw into elaborate
splints as if it was a human being? Why was her head filled with queer
imaginations of the country house at Embley turned, by some enchantment,
into a hospital, with herself as matron moving about among the beds? Why
was even her vision of heaven itself filled with suffering patients to
whom she was being useful? So she dreamed and wondered, and, taking out
her diary, she poured into it the agitations of her soul. And then the
bell rang, and it was time to go and dress for dinner.

As the years passed, a restlessness began to grow upon her. She was
unhappy, and at last she knew it. Mrs. Nightingale, too, began to notice
that there was something wrong. It was very odd--what could be the
matter with dear Flo? Mr. Nightingale suggested that a husband might be
advisable; but the curious thing was that she seemed to take no interest
in husbands. And with her attractions, and her accomplishments, too!
There was nothing in the world to prevent her making a really brilliant
match. But no! She would think of nothing but how to satisfy that
singular craving of hers to be DOING something. As if there was not
plenty to do in any case, in the ordinary way, at home. There was the
china to look after, and there was her father to be read to after
dinner. Mrs. Nightingale could not understand it; and then one day her
perplexity was changed to consternation and alarm. Florence announced an
extreme desire to go to Salisbury Hospital for several months as a
nurse; and she confessed to some visionary plan of eventually setting up
in a house of her own in a neighbouring village, and there founding
'something like a Protestant Sisterhood, without vows, for women of
educated feelings'. The whole scheme was summarily brushed aside as
preposterous; and Mrs. Nightingale, after the first shock of terror, was
able to settle down again more or less comfortably to her embroidery.
But Florence, who was now twenty-five and felt that the dream of her
life had been shattered, came near to desperation.

And, indeed, the difficulties in her path were great. For not only was
it an almost unimaginable thing in those days for a woman of means to
make her own way in the world and to live in independence, but the
particular profession for which Florence was clearly marked out both by
her instincts and her capacities was at that time a peculiarly
disreputable one. A 'nurse' meant then a coarse old woman, always
ignorant, usually dirty, often brutal, a Mrs. Gamp, in bunched-up sordid
garments, tippling at the brandy bottle or indulging in worse
irregularities. The nurses in the hospitals were especially notorious
for immoral conduct; sobriety was almost unknown among them; and they
could hardly be trusted to carry out the simplest medical duties.

Certainly, things HAVE changed since those days; and that they have
changed is due, far more than to any other human being, to Miss
Nightingale herself. It is not to be wondered at that her parents should
have shuddered at the notion of their daughter devoting her life to such
an occupation. 'It was as if,' she herself said afterwards, 'I had
wanted to be a kitchen-maid. ' Yet the want, absurd and impracticable as
it was, not only remained fixed immovably in her heart, but grew in
intensity day by day. Her wretchedness deepened into a morbid
melancholy. Everything about her was vile, and she herself, it was
clear, to have deserved such misery, was even viler than her
surroundings. Yes, she had sinned--'standing before God's judgment
seat'. 'No one,' she declared, 'has so grieved the Holy Spirit'; of that
she was quite certain. It was in vain that she prayed to be delivered
from vanity and hypocrisy, and she could not bear to smile or to be gay,
'because she hated God to hear her laugh, as if she had not repented of
her sin'.

A weaker spirit would have been overwhelmed by the load of such
distresses--would have yielded or snapped. But this extraordinary young
woman held firm, and fought her way to victory. With an amazing
persistency, during the eight years that followed her rebuff over
Salisbury Hospital, she struggled and worked and planned. While
superficially she was carrying on the life of a brilliant girl in high
society, while internally she was a prey to the tortures of regret and
of remorse, she yet possessed the energy to collect the knowledge and to
undergo the experience which alone could enable her to do what she had
determined she would do in the end. In secret she devoured the reports
of medical commissions, the pamphlets of sanitary authorities, the
histories of hospitals and homes. She spent the intervals of the London
season in ragged schools and workhouses. When she went abroad with her
family, she used her spare time so well that there was hardly a great
hospital in Europe with which she was not acquainted; hardly a great
city whose slums she had not passed through. She managed to spend some
days in a convent school in Rome, and some weeks as a 'Soeur de Charite'
in Paris. Then, while her mother and sister were taking the waters at
Carlsbad, she succeeded in slipping off to a nursing institution at
Kaiserswerth, where she remained for more than three months. This was
the critical event of her life. The experience which she gained as a
nurse at Kaiserswerth formed the foundation of all her future action and
finally fixed her in her career.

But one other trial awaited her. The allurements of the world she had
brushed aside with disdain and loathing; she had resisted the subtler
temptation which, in her weariness, had sometimes come upon her, of
devoting her baffled energies to art or literature; the last ordeal
appeared in the shape of a desirable young man. Hitherto, her lovers had
been nothing to her but an added burden and a mockery; but now--for a
moment--she wavered. A new feeling swept over her--a feeling which she
had never known before--which she was never to know again. The most
powerful and the profoundest of all the instincts of humanity laid claim
upon her. But it rose before her, that instinct, arrayed--how could it
be otherwise? --in the inevitable habiliments of a Victorian marriage;
and she had the strength to stamp it underfoot.

'I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction,' she noted,
'and that would find it in him. I have a passionate 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. Sometimes I think that I will satisfy my passionate nature at
all events. . . . '

But no, she knew in her heart that it could not be. 'To be nailed to a
continuation and exaggeration of my present life . . . to put it out of my
power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true
and rich life'--that would be a suicide. She made her choice, and
refused what was at least a certain happiness for a visionary good which
might never come to her at all. And so she returned to her old life of
waiting and bitterness.

'The thoughts and feelings that I have now,' she wrote, 'I can remember
since I was six years old. A profession, a trade, a necessary
occupation, something to fill and employ all my faculties, I have always
felt essential to me, I have always longed for. The first thought I can
remember, and the last, was nursing work; and in the absence of this,
education work, but more the education of the bad than of the young . . .
Everything has been tried--foreign travel, kind friends, everything. My
God! What is to become of me? '

A desirable young man? Dust and ashes! What was there desirable in such
a thing as that? 'In my thirty-first year,' she noted in her diary, 'I
see nothing desirable but death. '

Three more years passed, and then at last the pressure of time told; her
family seemed to realise that she was old enough and strong enough to
have her way; and she became the superintendent of a charitable nursing
home in Harley Street. She had gained her independence, though it was in
a meagre sphere enough; and her mother was still not quite resigned:
surely Florence might at least spend the summer in the country. At
times, indeed, among her intimates, Mrs. Nightingale almost wept. 'We
are ducks,' she said with tears in her eyes, 'who have hatched a wild
swan. ' But the poor lady was wrong; it was not a swan that they had
hatched, it was an eagle.


II

Miss NIGHTINGALE had been a year in her nursing-home in Harley Street,
when Fate knocked at the door. The Crimean War broke out; the battle of
the Alma was fought; and the terrible condition of our military
hospitals at Scutari began to be known in England. It sometimes happens
that the plans of Providence are a little difficult to follow, but on
this occasion all was plain; there was a perfect coordination of events.
For years Miss Nightingale had been getting ready; at last she was
prepared--experienced, free, mature, yet still young (she was
thirty-four)--desirous to serve, accustomed to command: at that precise
moment the desperate need of a great nation came, and she was there to
satisfy it. If the war had fallen a few years earlier, she would have
lacked the knowledge, perhaps even the power, for such a work; a few
years later and she would, no doubt, have been fixed in the routine of
some absorbing task, and moreover, she would have been growing old.

Nor was it only the coincidence of time that was remarkable. It so fell
out that Sidney Herbert was at the War Office and in the Cabinet; and
Sidney Herbert was an intimate friend of Miss Nightingale's, convinced,
from personal experience in charitable work, of her supreme capacity.
After such premises, it seems hardly more than a matter of course that
her letter, in which she offered her services for the East, and Sidney
Herbert's letter, in which he asked for them, should actually have
crossed in the post. Thus it all happened, without a hitch. The
appointment was made and even Mrs. Nightingale, overawed by the
magnitude of the venture, could only approve. A pair of faithful friends
offered themselves as personal attendants; thirty-eight nurses were
collected; and within a week of the crossing of the letters Miss
Nightingale, amid a great burst of popular enthusiasm, left for
Constantinople.

Among the numerous letters which she received on her departure was one
from Dr. Manning, who at that time was working in comparative obscurity
as a Catholic priest in Bayswater. 'God will keep you,' he wrote, 'and
my prayer for you will be that your one object of worship, Pattern of
Imitation, and source of consolation and strength, may be the Sacred
Heart of our Divine Lord. '

To what extent Dr. Manning's prayer was answered must remain a matter of
doubt; but this much is certain: that if ever a prayer was needed, it
was needed then for Florence Nightingale. For dark as had been the
picture of the state of affairs at Scutari, revealed to the English
public in the dispatches of "The Times Correspondent", and in a
multitude of private letters, yet the reality turned out to be darker
still. What had occurred was, in brief, the complete breakdown of our
medical arrangements at the seat of war. The origins of this awful
failure were complex and manifold; they stretched back through long
years of peace and carelessness in England; they could be traced through
endless ramifications of administrative incapacity--from the inherent
faults of confused systems, to the petty bunglings of minor officials,
from the inevitable ignorance of Cabinet Ministers, to the fatal
exactitudes of narrow routine.

In the inquiries which followed, it was clearly shown that the evil was
in reality that worst of all evils--one which has been caused by nothing
in particular and for which no one in particular is to blame. The whole
organisation of the war machine was incompetent and out of date. The old
Duke had sat for a generation at the Horse Guards repressing innovations
with an iron hand. There was an extraordinary overlapping of authorities
and an almost incredible shifting of responsibilities to and fro. As for
such a notion as the creation and the maintenance of a really adequate
medical service for the army--in that atmosphere of aged chaos, how
could it have entered anybody's head? Before the war, the easygoing
officials at Westminster were naturally persuaded that all was well--or
at least as well as could be expected; when someone, for instance,
actually had the temerity to suggest the formation of a corps of Army
nurses, he was at once laughed out of court. When the war had begun, the
gallant British officers in control of affairs had other things to think
about than the petty details of medical organisation. Who had bothered
with such trifles in the Peninsula? And surely, on that occasion, we had
done pretty well. Thus, the most obvious precautions were neglected, and
the most necessary preparations were put off from day to day. The
principal medical officer of the Army, Dr. Hall, was summoned from India
at a moment's notice, and was unable to visit England before taking up
his duties at the front. And it was not until after the battle of the
Alma, when we had been at war for many months, that we acquired hospital
accommodations at Scutari for more than a thousand men. Errors, follies,
and vices on the part of individuals there doubtless were; but, in the
general reckoning, they were of small account--insignificant symptoms of
the deep disease of the body politic--to the enormous calamity of
administrative collapse.