Читать книгу The Life of Florence Nightingale - Edward Tyas Cook - Страница 39

For two or three years Florence Nightingale was in much trouble of mind from an attachment which one of her cousins had formed for her. In no case would she have thought it right to marry him. “Accident or relationship,” she wrote some years later,52 “throw people together in their childhood, and acquaintance has grown up naturally and unconsciously. Accordingly in novels it is generally cousins who marry; and now it seems the only natural thing, the only possible way of making an intimacy. And yet we know that intermarriage between relations is in direct contravention of the laws of nature for the well-being of the race.” It was supposed by some of the family circle at the time that this was the only objection to an engagement; but there were others. Florence was in no mood, then or afterwards, to marry for the sake of marrying. Marriage, she had written to Miss Clarke (p. 66), was not an absolute blessing; and though she liked her cousin, she was in no sense in love with him. She felt relief, intense and unmixed, as she recorded in her private meditations, when she learnt that the young man had at last forgotten her. But though this episode left her heart-whole, it had a great and painful influence upon her mind. “Cleanse all my love from the desire of creating an interest in another's heart” is the burden of many of her meditations.

Among other attachments of which Florence Nightingale was the object, there was one which had a deeper effect and called for a more difficult and searching choice in life. She was asked in marriage by one who continued for some years to press his suit. It was a proposal which seemed to those about her to promise every happiness. The match would by all have been deemed suitable, and by many might have been called brilliant. And Florence herself was strongly drawn to her admirer. She had not come to this state of mind in hasty inclination. She was on her guard against any such temptation. Many years before, in a letter to her “brother Jonathan,” as she called Miss Hilary Bonham Carter, she had written:—

It strikes me that in all the most unworldly poetry (both prose and verse) la passion qu'on appelle inclination is treated in a very extraordinary way. When one finds a comparative stranger becoming all of a sudden more essential to one than one's family (via flattery, in general, of one sort or another), one is content with saying to oneself, “Oh! that's love,” instead of saying, “How unjust and how blind this feeling is.” I wonder whether if people were to examine—for, as Socrates says, the life unexamined is not a living life—they would not find that (whatever it may ripen to afterwards) this feeling at first is generally begun by vanity or jealousy or self-love; and that what is very much to be guarded against, instead of submitted to, is the stranger's admiration (and I suppose everybody has been susceptible at one time of their lives) having more effect upon one than one's own family's.

In this case, however, the stranger's admiration had stood the test. She felt drawn to him, not by vanity or self-love; but because she admired his talents, and because the more she saw of him the greater pleasure did she find in his society. She leaned more and more upon his sympathy. Yet when the proposal first came, she refused it; and when it was renewed, she persisted. Then, it may be said, she cannot have been “in love” with him. And in one sense that is, I suppose, quite true; for love, as the poets tell us, does not reason, and Florence Nightingale reasoned deeply over her case. But it is certain that she felt at least as much affection as suffices to make half the marriages in the world. She turned away from a path to which she was strongly drawn in order to pursue her Ideal.

In one of the many pages of autobiographical notes which she preserved in relation to this episode in her life, Miss Nightingale thus explained her refusal to marry. “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. Voluntarily to put it out of my power ever to be able to seize the chance of forming for myself a true and rich life would seem to me like suicide.”

Florence Nightingale was no vestal ascetic. A true and perfect marriage was, she thought, the perfect state. “Marrying a man of high and good purpose, and following out that purpose with him is the happiest” lot. “The highest, the only true love, is when two persons, a man and a woman, who have an attraction for one another, unite together in some true purpose for mankind and God.”53 The thought of God in instituting marriage was “that these two, when the right two are united, shall throw themselves fearlessly into the universe, and do its work, secure of companionship and sympathy.” Miss Nightingale recognized also that for many women marriage, even though it may fall short of this ideal state, is the proper lot in life. But she held, on the other hand, that there are some women who may be marked out for single life. “I don't agree at all (she wrote in 1846) that a woman has no reason (if she does not care for any one else) for not marrying a good man who asks her, and I don't think Providence does either. I think He has as clearly marked out some to be single women as He has others to be wives, and has organized them accordingly for their vocation. I think some have every reason for not marrying, and that for these it is much better to educate the children who are already in the world and can't be got out of it, than to bring more into it. The Primitive Church clearly thought so too, and provided accordingly; and though no doubt the Primitive Church was in many matters an old woman, yet I think the experience of ages has proved her right in this.” And again: “Ours is a system of Christianity without the Cross”; the single life was the life of Christ. “Has Heaven bestowed everlasting souls on men, and sent them upon earth for no better purpose than to marry and be given in marriage? True, there is in this world much more waiting to be done; but is it the man leading a secular life who will do it? He is apt to see nothing beyond himself and the fair creature he has chosen for his bride.” And, as with men, so with women. There are women of intellectual or actively moral natures for whom marriage (unless it realizes the perfect ideal) means the sacrifice of their higher capacities to the satisfaction of their lower. “Death,” she wrote (again in a note-book of 1846), “is often the gateway to the Garden where we shall no longer hunger and thirst after real satisfaction. Marriage, on the contrary, is often an initiation into the meaning of that inexorable word Never; which does not deprive us, it is true, of what ‘at their festivals the idle and inconsiderate call life,’ but which brings in reality the end of our lives, and the chill of death with it.”

In her own case, Miss Nightingale was conscious of capacities within her for “high purposes for mankind and for God.” She could not feel sure that the marriage which was offered to her would enable her to employ those capacities to their best and fullest power. And so she sacrificed her “passional” nature to her moral ideal. “I am 30,” she wrote on her birthday in her diary of 1850; “the age at which Christ began His mission. Now no more childish things, no more vain things, no more love, no more marriage. Now, Lord, let me only think of Thy will.” And amongst her sayings in another book, I find this: “Strong passions to teach the secrets of the human heart, and a strong will to hold them in subjection, these are the keys of the kingdom in this world and the next.” Florence Nightingale turned away from marriage in order that she might remain entirely free to fulfil her vocation.