Читать книгу The Life of Florence Nightingale (Vol. 1&2) - Edward Tyas Cook - Страница 9

Table of Contents

I found her in her chamber reading Phaedon Platonis in Greek, and that with as much pleasure as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in Bocace. —Roger Ascham.

To the tender sentiment and popular adoration that gathered around the subject of this Memoir, something perhaps was added by the beauty of a name which linked together the City of the Flowers and the music of the birds. Her surname suggested to Longfellow the title of the poem which has carried home to the hearts of thousands in two continents a lesson of her life. The popularity of “Florence”—in the Middle Ages a masculine name—as a Christian name for English girls is noted by the historian of that subject as due to association with the heroine of the Crimea.

* * * * *

Both of her names were the result of circumstance. Her father came of the old Derbyshire family of Shore of Tapton, and changed his name in 1815 from William Edward Shore to William Edward Nightingale on succeeding to the property of his mother's uncle, Peter Nightingale of Lea, in the same county. Mr. William Nightingale was fond of travel, and the close of the French war, shortly before his marriage (1818), had thrown the Continent open to the grand tour. Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale's only children, two daughters, were born during a sojourn in Italy. The elder was born at Naples in 1819, and was named, firstly, Frances, after her mother, and, secondly, after the old Greek settlement on the site of her birthplace, Parthenope. She afterwards became the second wife of Sir Harry Verney.4 The younger daughter, the subject of this Memoir, was also named after her birthplace. She was born at Florence on May 12, 1820, in the Villa Colombaia, near the Porta Romana, as a memorial-tablet now affixed to the house records; and there on the 4th of July she was baptized by Dr. Trevor, Prebendary of Chester. The place-names became in familiar intercourse “Parthe” or “Pop,” and “Flo.”

“The surprises of sainthood,” said a speaker at a Congress on Eugenics, “are no less remarkable than those of genius. St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, and Florence Nightingale could no more have been predicted from their ancestry than Napoleon, Beethoven, Michael Angelo, or Shakespeare.” But the peculiarities of tissue on which some physical characteristics are held to depend can, at any rate, be inherited. Florence Nightingale's mother was one of the eleven children of William Smith of Parndon Hall, Essex, of whom Sir James Stephen said: “When he had nearly completed four score years, he could still gratefully acknowledge that he had no remembrance of any bodily pain or illness, and that of the very numerous family of which he was the head every member still lived to support and gladden his old age.” This statement is not absolutely correct, for one child did not long survive its birth; but of the other sons and daughters of William Smith, none died at an earlier age than 69, two lived to be more than 75, six to be more than 80, and one to be more than 90. This last was Frances, Mrs. Nightingale, who lived to be 92. On the father's side there was longevity also. Mr. Nightingale himself lived to be 80. His mother lived to be 95; he had an aunt who lived to be 90; and “your uncle,” wrote his father, “young at 82, enters into politics of the present moment with all the ardour of 22.” Of the children of Mr. and Mrs. William Nightingale, Parthenope lived to be 75, and Florence, though (or, in part, perhaps, because) she lived for 53 years the life of an invalid, attained the age of 90.

Florence Nightingale, whether saint or not, was certainly conscious of a “call”; but there was nothing in her descent or inheritance which encouraged her parents to allow it to become readily effectual. Because she was a woman, her early life was one long struggle for liberation from circumstance and social prepossessions. Yet there were features in her mental equipment and intellectual outlook which may well have been inherited, and which certainly owed much to environment. Sir James Stephen adds to the remarks quoted above that if William Smith “had gone mourning all his days, he could scarcely have acquired a more tender pity for the miserable, or have laboured more habitually for their relief.” In politics he was a follower of Fox. He was a friend of Wilberforce, with whom he co-operated in the House of Commons in the Abolitionist and other humanitarian movements. Of Wilberforce, as of Thomas Clarkson, “he possessed the almost brotherly love, and of all their fellow-labourers there was none who was more devoted to their cause, or whom they more entirely trusted.”5 In religion a Unitarian, he was a stout defender of liberty of thought and conscience, a persistent opponent of religious tests and disabilities. The liberal opinions, alike in Church and State, which were thus traditional in the family of Florence Nightingale's mother, were shared by that of her father. Her grandfather Shore, in a letter to his son in 1818, referred to “one of the finest pieces of eloquence either in ancient or modern times, given by Sir Samuel Romilly in the Court of Chancery on a motion respecting the right of Jews to the benefit of a charity in Bedford. It does honour to the man and to human nature.” Florence Nightingale's father was also a Unitarian; and in politics he was a Whig. “How I hate Tories,” he wrote to his wife; and in another letter, after the election of 1835, in which the hated ones had gained ground, he explained that they were mighty only “by Beer, Brandy, and Money.” The Whigs, as is well known, were not all lacking in the latter equipment for political success, and Mr. Nightingale was a frequent subscriber to electoral funds on the Whig side. He was an ardent supporter of Parliamentary Reform. He held that “Bentham has taught great moral truth more effectually than all the Christian divines.” At a later time he was a follower of Lord Palmerston, of whom he was also a neighbour in the country. One of the earliest notices which I find of Florence Nightingale's interest in politics is in a letter from her father describing a meeting at Romsey to which he had taken her. “Florence,” he says, “approved very much Palmerston's exposition of his foreign policy.”

Something else Florence Nightingale owed to, or shared with, her father. He, like some other members of his family, was of a reflective temperament, interested in speculative problems. There is a letter written by him to his wife from his father's sick-room (Sept. 1822) which shows the bent of his thoughts:—

I sit by his bedside and look at him as one would at a sleeping man, the idea of death only now and then flashing across my mind. I have been studying Mad. de Staël on the feeling of conviction, which exists more or less in different people and different nations, on the subject of soul as independent of external ideas. My imagination is a dull one, for it certainly required study with me to feel the full force of conviction that soul does and must exist quite separately from, though influenced by, external circumstances. You will say, I know, with a firm belief in Scripture and religion, Leave all philosophical speculation to the wild imaginations of the Germans. Nothing can change your reliance on religion. The perversity of my nature refers me to experience and analogies, though I begin to think that the study of the creation displayed before our faculties will exalt me into a conception of Divinity completely pervading the whole, but particularly that part of man which enables him to feel the difference between right and wrong independently of the ideas which he derives from external circumstances.

Florence Nightingale's mother accepted the religious standpoint of the day without question. Unitarianism was dropped by her and by her elder daughter; by Florence it was, as we shall hear, transcended. The mother's essential bent was practical, though the scope of it was somewhat limited. The mind of her daughter Florence found room in equal measure for practice and for contemplation. She inherited her mother's organising capacity, though she turned it to directions of her own. It was from her father that she inherited the taste for speculative inquiry which absorbed a large part of her life.