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INTRODUCTORY

Among Miss Nightingale's memoranda on books and reading, there is this injunction: “The preface of a book ought to set forth the importance of what it is going to treat of, so that the reader may understand what he is reading for.” The saying is typical of the methodical and positive spirit which, as we shall learn, was one of the dominant strains in Miss Nightingale's work and character. She wanted to know at every stage precisely what a person, or a book, or an institution was driving at. “Of all human sounds,” she said, “I think the words I don't know are the saddest.” Unless a book had something of definite importance to say, it had better, she thought, not be written; and in order to save the reader's time and fix his attention, he should be told at once wherein the significance of the book consists. This, though it may be a hard saying, is perhaps not unwholesome even to biographers. At any rate, as Miss Nightingale's biographer, I am moved to obey her injunction. I propose, therefore, in this Introductory chapter to state wherein, as I conceive, the significance and importance of Miss Nightingale's life consists, and what the work was that she did in the world.

I

“In the course of a life's experience such as scarcely any one has ever had, I have always found,” said Miss Nightingale,[1] “that no one ever deserves his or her character. Be it better or worse than the real one, it is always unlike the real one.” Of no one is this saying more true than of herself. “It has been your fate,” said Mr. Jowett to her once, “to become a Legend in your lifetime.” Now, nothing is more persistent than a legend; and the legend of Florence Nightingale became fixed early in her life—at a time, indeed, antecedent to that at which her best work in the world, as she thought, had begun. 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 conception 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 the whole truth as to convey in general impression everything but the truth. The real Florence Nightingale was very different from the legendary, but also greater. Her life was built on larger lines, her work had more importance, than belong to the legend.

The Crimean War was not the first thing, and still less was it the last, that is significant in Miss Nightingale's life. The story of her earlier years is that of the building up of a character. It shows us a girl of high natural ability and of considerable attractions feeling her way to an ideal alike in practice and in speculation. Having found it, she was thrown into revolt against the environment of her home. We shall see her pursuing her ideal with consistent, though with self-torturing, tenacity against alike the obstacles and the temptations of circumstance. She had already served an apprenticeship when the call to the Crimea came. It was a call not to “sacrifice,” but to the fulfilment of her dearest wishes for a life of active usefulness. Such is the theme of the First Part, which I have called “Aspiration.”

Many other women have passed through similar experiences. But there is special significance in them in the case of Florence Nightingale—a significance both historic and personal. The glamour that surrounded her service in the Crimea, the wide-world publicity that was given to her name and deeds, invested with peculiar importance her fight for freedom. To do “as Florence Nightingale did” became an object of imitation which the well-to-do world was henceforth readier to condone, or even to approve; and thus the story of Miss Nightingale's earlier years is the history of a pioneer, on one side, in the emancipation of women.

For the understanding of her own later life, the earlier years are all-important. They give the clue to her character, and explain much that would otherwise be puzzling or confused. Through great difficulties and at a heavy price she had purchased her birthright—her ideal of self-expression in work. On her return from the Crimea she was placed, on the one hand, owing to her fame, in a position of special opportunity; on the other hand, owing to illness, in a position of special disability. She shaped her life henceforward so as to make these two factors conform to the continued fulfilment of her ideal. I need not here forestall what subsequent chapters will abundantly illustrate. I will only say that the resultant effect was a manner of life and work, both extraordinary, and, to me at least, of the greatest interest.

The Second Part of the Memoir is devoted to the Crimean War. The popular conception with regard to Miss Nightingale's work during this episode in her life is not untrue so far as it goes, but it is amazingly short of the whole truth as now ascertainable from her Papers. The popular imagination pictures Florence Nightingale at Scutari and in the Crimea as “the ministering angel.” And such in very truth she was. But