Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (romantic novels in english .txt) 📕

twenty years, I have been supported by the belief that I was working with Thee who would bring everyone, even our poor nurses, to perfection”⁠—and yet, after all, what was the result? Had not even she been an unprofitable servant? One night, waking suddenly, she saw, in the dim light of the night-lamp, tenebrous shapes upon the wall. The past rushed back upon her. “Am I she who once stood on that Crimean height?” she wildly asked⁠—“The Lady with a lamp shall stand.⁠ ⁠… The lamp shows me only my utter shipwreck.”

She sought consolation in the writings of the Mystics and in a correspondence with Mr. Jowett. For many years the Master of Balliol acted as her spiritual adviser. He discussed with her in a series of enormous letters the problems of religion and philosophy; he criticised her writings on those subjects with the tactful sympathy of a cleric who was also a man of the world; and he even ventured to attempt at times to instil into her rebellious nature some of his own peculiar suavity. “I sometimes think,” he told her, “that you ought seriously to consider how your work may be carried on, not with less energy, but in a calmer spirit. I am not blaming the past⁠ ⁠… But I want the peace of God to settle on the future.” He recommended her to spend her time no longer in “conflicts with government offices,” and to take up some literary work. He urged her to “work out her notion of Divine Perfection,” in a series of essays for Frazer’s Magazine. She did so; and the result was submitted to Mr. Froude, who pronounced the second essay to be “even more pregnant than the first. I cannot tell,” he said, “how sanitary, with disordered intellects, the effects of such papers will be.”

Mr. Carlyle, indeed, used different language, and some remarks of his about a lost lamb bleating on the mountains, having been unfortunately repeated to Miss Nightingale, required all Mr. Jowett’s suavity to keep the peace. In a letter of fourteen sheets, he turned her attention from this painful topic towards a discussion of Quietism. “I don’t see why,” said the Master of Balliol, “active life might not become a sort of passive life too.” And then, he added, “I sometimes fancy there are possibilities of human character much greater than have been realised.” She found such sentiments helpful, underlining them in blue pencil; and, in return, she assisted her friend with a long series of elaborate comments upon the Dialogues of Plato, most of which he embodied in the second edition of his translation. Gradually her interest became more personal; she told him never to work again after midnight, and he obeyed her. Then she helped him to draw up a special form of daily service for the College Chapel, with selections from the Psalms under the heads of “God the Lord, God the Judge, God the Father, and God the Friend”⁠—though, indeed, this project was never realised; for the Bishop of Oxford disallowed the alterations, exercising his legal powers, on the advice of Sir Travers Twiss.

Their relations became intimate. “The spirit of the Twenty-third Psalm and the spirit of the Nineteenth Psalm should be united in our lives,” Mr. Jowett said. Eventually, she asked him to do her a singular favour. Would he, knowing what he did of her religious views, come to London and administer to her the Holy Sacrament? He did not hesitate, and afterwards declared that he would always regard the occasion as a solemn event in his life. He was devoted to her⁠—though the precise nature of his feelings towards her never quite transpired. Her feelings towards him were more mixed. At first, he was “that great and good man”⁠—“that true saint, Mr. Jowett”; but, as time went on, some gall was mingled with the balm; the acrimony of her nature asserted itself. She felt that she gave more sympathy than she received; she was exhausted, and she was annoyed by his conversation. Her tongue, one day, could not refrain from shooting out at him: “He comes to me, and he talks to me,” she said, “as if I were someone else.”

V

At one time she had almost decided to end her life in retirement as a patient at St. Thomas’s Hospital. But partly owing to the persuasions of Mr. Jowett, she changed her mind; for forty-five years she remained in South Street; and in South Street she died. As old age approached, though her influence with the official world gradually diminished, her activities seemed to remain as intense and widespread as before. When hospitals were to be built, when schemes of sanitary reform were in agitation, when wars broke out, she was still the adviser of all Europe. Still, with a characteristic self-assurance, she watched from her Mayfair bedroom over the welfare of India. Still, with an indefatigable enthusiasm, she pushed forward the work, which, perhaps, was nearer to her heart, more completely her own, than all the rest⁠—the training of nurses. In her moments of deepest depression, when her greatest achievements seemed to lose their lustre, she thought of her nurses, and was comforted. The ways of God, she found, were strange indeed. “How inefficient I was in the Crimea,” she noted. “Yet He has raised up from it trained nursing.”

At other times, she was better satisfied. Looking back, she was amazed by the enormous change which, since her early days, had come over the whole treatment of illness, the whole conception of public and domestic health⁠—a change in which, she knew, she had played her part. One of her Indian admirers, the Aga Khan, came to visit her. She expatiated on the marvellous advances she had lived to see in the management of hospitals⁠—in drainage, in ventilation, in sanitary work of every kind. There was a pause; and then, “Do you think you are improving?” asked the Aga Khan. She was a little taken aback, and said, “What do you mean by ‘improving’?”