Читать книгу The Life of Florence Nightingale - Edward Tyas Cook - Страница 41

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The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man, that he cannot work; that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled.—Carlyle.

Foreign travel had, as we have seen, in no way changed Florence Nightingale's resolve to devote herself to a life of nursing. She had turned away deliberately from marriage, and was bent upon finding a new field of usefulness for unmarried women. But ways and means of doing this were not yet apparent. She had no independent fortune of her own. She returned to a family circle which understood her cravings no better than before. The call of domestic duties was the same as before. There were aunts and a grandmother to be visited, company at home to be entertained, a sister to be humoured, a father and mother to be pleased.

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But she could not please them, because she herself could find no pleasure in their life. She did not say to herself that she was better than they. Still less did she thank God that she was not as they were. But she felt with piteous keenness the gulf that separated her alike from her parents and from her sister. She loved her father, and admired his good impulses and amiable character. But she perceived that his contentment in a life of busy idleness made him constitutionally unable to enter fully into her state of mind. She loved her mother, and considered that she was, within her range, a woman of genius. “She has the genius of order,” she wrote in a character-sketch of her mother, “the genius to organize a parish, to form society. She has obtained by her own exertions the best society in England.” What pained the daughter was the inability to please the mother. “When I feel her disappointment in me, it is as if I was becoming insane.” She loved her sister also, and, I think, yet more tenderly. But as the sister once wrote: “The natures God has given us differ as widely as different races.” Florence was deeply sensible of the attractive side of her sister's character. Lady Verney had indeed a most attractive mind; she was very vivacious, inquiring, and highly gifted, both as an artist and as a writer. She was a perfect hostess, and her memory is pleasant to all who knew her. If she lacked some of her sister's stronger English characteristics, she had a light touch which Florence did not possess. And Florence felt the charm of all this. “No one less than I,” she wrote, “wants her to do one single thing different from what she does. She wants no other religion, no other occupation, no other training than what she has. She has never had a difficulty except with me; she knows nothing of struggle in her own unselfish nature.” But for that very reason she could not sympathize with, because she could not understand, her sister's difficulties. In a passage which is doubtless autobiographical, Florence wrote: “Very few people can sympathise with each other in any pursuit or thought of any importance. If people do not give you thought for thought, receive yours, digest it, and give it back with the impression of their own character upon it, then give you one for you to do likewise, it is best to know what one is about, and not to attempt more than kindly, cheerful outward intercourse. Some find amusement in the outward, do not suffer inwardly, because the attention is turned elsewhere.”54 Meanwhile Florence felt that everything she said or did was a subject of vexation to her sister, a disappointment to her mother, a worry to her father. “I have never known a happy time,” she exclaimed to herself, “except at Rome and that fortnight at Kaiserswerth. It is not the unhappiness I mind, it is not indeed; but people can't be unhappy without making those about them so.”

She strove to attain happiness. She tried to submit her will to what her spiritual confidantes told her must be taken to be the will of God; to trust that in His own good time He would make her vocation sure; in such confidence to find relief, and to throw herself meanwhile into the round of immediate duties. But the more she struggled, the more she failed. She could not subdue the imperious longing to be up and doing which surged within her. “The thoughts and feelings that I have now,” she wrote, “I can remember since I was six years old. It was not that I made them. 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, consciously or not. During a middle part of my life, college education, acquirement, I longed for, but that was temporary. 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. But for this I had had no education myself.” Finding no outlet in active reality, she lived more than ever in a land of dreams. “Everything has been tried,” she exclaimed to herself; “foreign travel, kind friends, everything.” And again, “My God! what is to become of me?” Eighteen months before she had resolved on a great effort to crucify her old self, “to break through the habits, entailed upon me by an idle life, of living, not in the present world of action, but in a future one of dreams. Since then nations have passed before me, but have brought no new life to me. In my 31st year I see nothing desirable but death.” She was perishing, as she put it, for want of food; and she could find no impulse to activity. Her habit of late rising grew upon her; for what had she to wake for? “Starvation does not lead a man to exertion, it only weakens him. O weary days, O evenings that seem never to end! For how many long years, I have watched that drawing-room clock and thought it would never reach the ten! And for 20 or 30 more years to do this!” And again, “Oh, how I am to get through this day, to talk through all this day, is the thought of every morning. … This is the sting of death. Why do I wish to leave this world? God knows I do not expect a heaven beyond, but that He would set me down in St. Giles's, at a Kaiserswerth, there to find my work and my salvation in my work.”