CHAPTER VIII

APPRENTICESHIP AT KAISERSWERTH

(1851)

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.

* * * * *

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."

[54] _Suggestions for Thought_, vol. ii. pp. 236, 237.

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."

II

Such cries from the heart, cries for the food for which she was hungering and which her parents could or would not let her take, filled many a sheet of Florence Nightingale's diaries, letters, and memoranda. "Mountains of difficulties," as she says in one place, were "piled up" around her. Looking forward to a New Year (1851) she could see nothing in front of her but the same unsatisfying routine. "The next three weeks," she said, in one of her written colloquies with herself, "you will have company; then a fortnight alone; then a few weeks of London, then Embley; then perhaps go abroad; then three months of company at Lea Hurst; next the same round of Embley company." And then, with a humorous transition not infrequent in her musings, she asks, "But why can't you get up in the morning? I have nothing I like so much as unconsciousness, but I will try." As the year advanced a more decided spirit of revolt begins to appear in her diaries. One of her perplexities hitherto had been a doubt whether the "mountains of difficulties" were to be taken as occasions for submission to God's will, or whether they were piled up in order to try her patience and her resolve, and were to be surmounted by some initiative of her own. She now began to interpret God's will in the latter sense. "I must _take_ some things," she wrote on Whitsunday (June 8, 1851), "as few as I can, to enable me to live. I must _take_ them, they will not be given me; take them in a true spirit of doing Thy will, not of snatching them for my own will. I must do without some things, as many as I can, which I could not have without causing more suffering than I am obliged to cause any way." She would cease looking for the sympathy and understanding of her mother and sister. "I have been so long treated as a child and have so long allowed myself to be treated as a child." She would submit to such tutelage no longer.

Various plans had at different times found place in her dreams. She would collect funds for founding a sisterhood, an institution, a hospital; but one thing she saw clearly and consistently. If she were ever to have an opportunity of doing good work in nursing or otherwise in service to the poor, she must first learn her business. There is a long letter of 1850 from her to her father in which she argues the point, not specifically with reference to herself, but as a general proposition. Something more than good intention is necessary in order to do good. Philanthropy is a matter of skill, and an apprenticeship in it is necessary. An opportunity occurred sooner than she had dared to hope which enabled her to serve such an apprenticeship. Her sister was still in bad health, and a visit to Carlsbad was again proposed. She insisted on being allowed to start with her mother and her sister, and to spend at Kaiserswerth the time that they would spend upon the cure and subsequent travels.

She reached Kaiserswerth early in July and stayed there as an inmate of the Institution until October 8.

III

Kaiserswerth is an ancient town on the Rhine, on the right bank, six miles below Düsseldorf. In its Church of the twelfth century a reliquary is shown, in which are preserved the bones of St. Suitbertus, who came there from Ireland to preach the Gospel in 710. Eleven centuries later, a Protestant pastor of Kaiserswerth repaid the debt to the British Isles by founding the famous Institution for Deaconesses which was now to give Florence Nightingale an important part of her training. The order of deaconesses, as she was careful to point out in her account of Kaiserswerth, was known in the Primitive Church; and long before St. Vincent de Paul established the Sisters of Mercy in 1633, Protestant communities had in 1457 organized "Presbyterae," since "many women chose a single state, not because they expected thereby to reach a super-eminent degree of holiness, but that they might be better able to care for the sick and young." It was in 1823-24 that the young pastor of Kaiserswerth, Theodor Fliedner, set out on a journey to Holland and England to beg for funds to relieve his parish, which had been ruined by the failure of a silk-mill. In England, the little Princess Victoria headed his list of subscribers. In London he met Mrs. Elizabeth Fry and was greatly impressed with her work in Newgate. Shortly after his return he founded (1826) the Rhenish-Westphalian Prison Association. Presently he met a kindred spirit in Friederike Münster, a woman in comparatively easy circumstances who was devoting herself to reformatory work. They married, and in 1833--in a tiny summer-house in the pastor's garden--a refuge was opened for the reception of a single discharged prisoner. Three years later, they added, on an equally modest scale at first, an Infant School, and a Hospital in which to train volunteer-nurses as deaconesses. From these humble beginnings has grown a great congeries of institutions, the fame of which has spread throughout the philanthropic world. There are thirty branch or daughter houses in various parts of Germany. They are to be found also at Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo, Beirut, Smyrna, and Bucharest. "Not only its own daughter houses, but all independent institutions for deaconesses, owe their existence to Kaiserswerth, for all subsequent work wrought by deaconesses whether in France, Switzerland, or America, whether Lutheran, Methodist, or Episcopalian, has been the fruit of the Kaiserswerth tree."[55]

[55] _History of Nursing_, vol. ii. p. 4.

But the forest began as a tiny acorn. Pastor Fliedner started his work not with grandiose schemes or full-fledged programmes, but with individual cases and personal devotion. This was a point to which Miss Nightingale called particular attention in her account of the place. "It is impossible not to observe," she said, "how different was the beginning from the way in which institutions are generally founded--a list of subscribers with some royal and noble names at the head--a double column of rules and regulations--a collection of great names begin (and end) most new enterprises. The regulations are made without experience. Honorary members abound, but where are the working ones? The scheme is excellent, but what are the results?" Miss Nightingale's intensely practical genius had ever a holy horror of prospectuses. In some notes written on June 15, 1848, I find this passage:--

Eschew Prospectuses; they're the devil, and make one sick. It is like making out a bill of fare when you have not a single pound of meat. What do the cookery books say? First catch your hare. All the instances on the Continent have begun in one of two ways. At Kaiserswerth, a clergyman and his wife have begun, not with a Prospectus, but with a couple of hospital beds, and have offered, not an advertisement, but a home to young women willing to come. At Berne, a Mdlle. Würstenberger, a woman of rank and education, goes to Kaiserswerth to learn, and her friend to Strassburg. They return and open a hospital with two rooms, increase their funds, others join them and are taught by them.... To publish first is as bad a practical bull as is the name of the _Prospective Review_.

A few years were to pass, and Florence Nightingale herself was to begin her work in the world not with a programme, but with a deed.

The institutions of Kaiserswerth, when she was there in 1851, were still on a comparatively modest scale. They comprised, as she enumerates them, a Hospital (with 100 beds), an Infant School, a Penitentiary (with 12 inmates), an Orphan Asylum, and a Normal School for schoolmistresses. There were in all 116 deaconesses, of whom 94 were "consecrated," the remainder being still on probation. The "consecration" consisted only of "a solemn blessing in the Church, without vows of any kind." Of the 116 deaconesses, 67 were on service in other parts of Germany, or abroad; the rest were engaged in working the various institutions at Kaiserswerth itself. After six months' trial they received a modest salary, just enough to provide their clothes. There was no other reward, except that the Mother House stood open to receive those who might fall ill or become infirm in its service. Everything was clean and well ordered, but there was no luxury; the board was simple to the verge of roughness. The place was pervaded by two notes. It was a place of training, and a place of consecrated service. The training was both in practice and by precept. Every week the pastor gave a conversational lecture to the deaconesses, finding out from each the difficulties she might have experienced in her work, and suggesting how they could best be met. The education of the young, the ministration of the sick, the art of district visiting, the yet more difficult work of rescue and reformation, all were taught.

In such a place as this, Florence Nightingale found by actual experience, as already she had learnt to expect from reading the reports, the realization in some degree of her most earnest desires. The training in nursing was, it is true, not particularly good; it fell far short of the professional standard which the Nightingale School was afterwards to set up. She objected strongly in later years to current statements that her own training was confined to Kaiserswerth. "The nursing there," she wrote, "was _nil_. The hygiene horrible. The hospital was certainly the worst part of Kaiserswerth. I took all the training that was to be had--there was none to be had in England, but Kaiserswerth was far from having trained me." On the other hand "the tone was excellent, admirable. And Pastor Fliedner's addresses were the very best I ever heard. The penitentiary out-door work and vegetable gardening under a very capable Sister were excellently adapted to the case. And Pastor Fliedner's solemn and reverential teaching to us of the sad events of hospital life was what I have never heard in England."[56] But here, at Kaiserswerth, Miss Nightingale found "a better life for women," a scope for the exercise of "morally active" powers. And here, though the field was limited, was provided in some sort the training which alone could fit women for larger responsibilities elsewhere. Here was "the service of man" organized as "the service of God"; here was opportunity for the Dedicated Life, as she had found it also in the Trinità de' Monti.

[56] Letter to Mrs. C. S. Roundell, August 4, 1896.

Her manner of life at Kaiserswerth and her joy in it were told in letters to her mother:--

On Sunday I took the sick boys a long walk along the Rhine; two Sisters were with me to help me to keep order. They were all in ecstasies with the beauty of the scenery, and really I thought it very fine too in its way--the broad mass of waters flowing ever on slowly and calmly to their destination, and all that unvarying horizon--so like the slow, calm, earnest, meditative German character.

The world here fills my life with interest, and strengthens me in body and mind. I succeeded directly to an office, and am now in another, so that until yesterday I never had time even to send my things to the wash. We have ten minutes for each of our meals, of which we have four. We get up at 5; breakfast 1/4 before 6. The patients dine at 11; the Sisters at 12. We drink tea (_i.e._ a drink made of ground rye) between 2 and 3, and sup at 7. We have two ryes and two broths--ryes at 6 and 3, broths at 12 and 7; bread at the two former, vegetables at 12. Several evenings in the week we collect in the Great Hall for a Bible lesson. The Pastor sent for me once to give me some of his unexampled instructions; the man's wisdom and knowledge of human nature is wonderful; he has an instinctive acquaintance with every character in his place. Except that once I have only seen him in his rounds.

The operation to which Mrs. Bracebridge alludes was an amputation at which I was present, but which I did not mention to----, knowing that she would see no more in my interest in it than the pleasure dirty boys have in playing in the puddles about a butcher's shop. I find the deepest interest in everything here, and am so well in body and mind. This is Life. Now I know what it is to live and to love life, and really I should be sorry now to leave life. I know you will be glad to hear this, dearest Mum. God has indeed made life rich in interests and blessings, and I wish for no other earth, no other world but this.

The room in which Miss Nightingale slept during her residence at Kaiserswerth was in the Orphan Asylum. She took her meals with the Deaconesses. The Spartan severity, but no less the beautiful spirit of the place, were clear in her recollection nearly half a century later. In 1897 the authorities of the British Museum applied to her for a copy of the pamphlet on Kaiserswerth which she had printed in 1851. The pencilled note which she sent with a torn copy of the pamphlet, the only one she could find, is preserved in the Museum Library. "I was twice in training there myself," she wrote (September 24, 1897). "Of course since then, Hospital and District nursing have made giant strides. Indeed District nursing has been invented. But never have I met with a higher tone, a purer devotion, than there. There was no neglect. It was the more remarkable because many of the Deaconesses had been only peasants--none were gentlewomen (when I was there). The food was poor. No coffee but bean-coffee. No luxury; but cleanliness." Pastor Fliedner told a visitor to Kaiserswerth that "no person had ever passed so distinguished an examination, or shown herself so thoroughly mistress of all she had to learn, as Miss Nightingale."[57]

[57] Mr. Sidney Herbert's speech at the Nightingale Fund Meeting, Nov. 29, 1855.

IV

Happy as Miss Nightingale was at Kaiserswerth, there was yet one thing lacking. She wished, it is true, for no other earth; she had found her pictured heaven; her life was full and rich. Yet with all her self-reliance, and even in the moment of first victory in her long struggle for self-expression, she yearned, woman-like, for sympathy. Nay, and not only woman-like. "Not till we can think," said Carlyle, "that here and there one is thinking of us, one is loving us, does this waste earth become a peopled garden." It was not enough to Florence that she should have had her way and that her parents should have acquiesced. Her loving heart craved for their positive sympathy; her mind, half leaning for all its masterfulness, demanded that what she had decided should be accepted by those dear to her as their choice also. "I should be as happy here," she wrote to her mother (August 31), "as the day is long, if I could hope that I had your smile, your blessing, your sympathy upon it; without which I cannot be quite happy. My beloved people, I cannot bear to grieve you. Life and everything in it that charms you, you would sacrifice for me; but unknown to you is my thirst, unseen by you are waters which would save me. To save me, I know would be to bless yourselves, whose love for me passes the love of women. Oh how shall I show you love and gratitude in return, yet not so perish that you chiefly would mourn! Give me time, give me faith. Trust me, help me. I feel within me that I could gladden your loving hearts which now I wound. Say to me, 'Follow the dictates of that spirit within thee.' Oh my beloved people, that spirit shall never lead me to anything unworthy of one who is yours in love."[58] But her mother and her sister, though they loved and admired her, or perhaps from their point of view because they did so, were unable to give any such active sympathy as that for which she craved. Her sister hoped that the visit to Kaiserswerth would be only an episode. It was a good thing, she had written to her mother, for Florence to go there, "as we can get her back sooner to Lea Hurst." To Florence herself she wrote affectionately, but yet with gentle irony. She sent a lively letter describing in detail the birth of a friend's twins: "I tell you, as you are going to be a _sage femme_, I suppose." Mrs. Nightingale, for her part, had acquiesced in the visit to Kaiserswerth, but was already wondering what people would think of her daughter's escapade. "I have not mentioned to any one," wrote Florence (July 16), "where I am, and should also be very sorry that the old ladies should know. With regard, however, to your fear of what people will say, the people whose opinion you most care about, it has been their earnest wish for years that I should come here. The Bunsens (I know he wishes one of his own daughters would come), the Bracebridges, the Sam Smiths, Lady Inglis, the Sidney Herberts, the Plunketts, all wish it; and I know that others--Lady Byron, Caroline Bathurst, Mr. Tremenheere, Mr. Rich (whose opinions however I have not asked)--would think it a very desirable thing for everybody.... With regard to telling people the fact (afterwards) of my having been here, I can see no difficulty. The Herberts, as you know, even commissioned me to do something for them here. The fact itself will pain none of them." Mr. and Mrs. Herbert, who were at Homburg, presently paid her a visit at Kaiserswerth.

[58] Much of this appeal was suggested to Florence, in almost identical words (as an extant letter shows), by her Aunt Mai.

Mrs. Nightingale and her elder daughter reached Cologne on their way home in October 1851, and there Florence rejoined them. "Our dear child Florence," wrote the mother to Madame Mohl (October 9), "came to us yesterday, and is gone this morning to visit certain Deaconesses and others. I long to be at home and among our people. Daily and hourly I congratulate myself that our home is where it is. Oh what a land of justice and freedom and all good things it is, compared to what we have seen, and how surprising that with all our advantages and our freedom won we should not be so much better than other people. Well, I hope Florence will be able to apply all the fine things she has been learning, to do a little to make us better. Parthe and I are much too idle to help and too apt to be satisfied with things as they are."