CHAPTER I

"OUT OF OFFICE"--LITERARY WORK (1872-1874) I am glad that you have given up drudgery for public offices.... The position which you held was always a precarious one, because dependent on "temples of friendship" and the goodwill of the Minister. I am glad that you have a straightforward work to do now in which you are dependent on yourself.... I want you to have a new life and interest. The way of influencing mankind by ideas is the more excellent way.--BENJAMIN JOWETT (_Letters to Miss Nightingale, 1871, 1872_). "Something which you said to me on Sunday has rather disquieted me, and I hope that you will allow me to remonstrate with you about it. You said that you were going to ask admission as a Patient to St. Thomas's Hospital. Do not do this. (1) Because it is eccentric and we cannot strengthen our lives by eccentricity. (2) Because you will not be a Patient but a kind of Directress to the institution, viewed with great alarm by the doctors. (3) When a person is engaged in a great work I do not think the expense of living is much to be considered; the only thing is that you should live in such a way that you can do your work best. (4) I would not oppose you living at less expense if you wish, though I think that a matter of no moment; but I would live independently. (5) Do you mean really to live as a Patient? it will kill you. I do not add the annoyance to your father of a step which he can never be made to understand; I look at the matter solely from the point of view of your own work. I have cared about you for many years; and though I have little hope of prevailing with you, I would ask you not to set aside these reasons without consideration." So Mr. Jowett wrote to Miss Nightingale on June 22, 1872. "I am flattered to hear," he wrote a little later (July 11), "that you have disregarded duty and conscience for my sake. I hope that you will never in future obey a conscience which tells you to kill yourself. Will you try to hope and be at peace; and just ask of God time to complete your work? You who have done so much for others ought sometimes to reflect that you have had a great blessing and happiness." The intention which Miss Nightingale had formed and from which Mr. Jowett dissuaded her was not a passing fancy. It was in accord with a deep-seated conviction, as may be seen from a document already quoted (p. 103). Nor, though she listened to Mr. Jowett's advice, did she entirely abandon her purpose. Later in the year, she still thought of giving up her pleasant house in South Street, and she set various friends to report upon furnished apartments in the immediate neighbourhood of St. Thomas's Hospital. They could not find anything that seemed suitable, and she gave up the idea; but as she could not go to St. Thomas's, she contrived, as we shall hear in a later chapter, that St. Thomas's should come to her. She devoted herself from this time more largely than heretofore to the detailed supervision of the Nightingale School. Both in what she did, and in what she now left undone, the year 1872 marks a new departure in her life. It is explained by a summary entry in her diary: "This year I go out of office." Miss Nightingale had been "in office," as she called it, continuously since her departure for Scutari in October 1854. She had been closely employed, that is to say, sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially, upon the administrative work of various Departments in matters pertaining to her special interests. With the advent of Mr. Gladstone to power in 1868, her work in this sort had much diminished. Her friend, Captain Galton, had gone from the War Office. She occasionally intervened in minor matters, as on one occasion when her friend, Mr. Lowe, agreed with Mr. Cardwell to accept her view about a certain pension to the widow of an officer, and there were other cases of the kind: as when she obtained an attentive hearing from Mr. Bruce (Home Secretary) for a memorandum which she submitted on the working of the Contagious Diseases Act. But her constant employment in connection with the War Office was over. She had argued with herself, in some meditations during 1871, whether she ought to make a bid, as it were, for "office" again. She could still exercise a certain official influence, she thought, if she chose to seek out Ministers and ask them to call upon her. But the political times were out of joint, she argued on the other side, so far as her special aptitudes were concerned. The strength of Mr. Gladstone's Government was thrown into political reform, not into administration; the administration of the departments, as she was not alone in thinking, was defective. There are many letters of this period in which she contrasts the days of Peel and Sidney Herbert with those of Gladstone or Disraeli. "But I must stop," she says in one of them, "or you will say that I am aping Southey who said, you know, that the last Ministry was so bad that nothing could be worse except the present; but Coleridge differed from him, for he thought the present Ministry so bad that nothing could be worse except the last."[129] At any rate what Miss Nightingale cared for and was fitted for, she said to herself, was only administration; in the years when she was "in office" she had not only written Reports, she had been able to organize the mechanism for carrying them out. Now that administration was going, as she thought, to the dogs, it was time for her to be out of office. That such was the lot appointed to her, was borne in by something that happened early in 1872. In February Lord Mayo was assassinated--a personal grief to Miss Nightingale and "a great blow," she said, to her cause; and Lord Northbrook was appointed to succeed him as Governor-General. Miss Nightingale was personally acquainted with Lord Northbrook, who had been a friend (as also for a time a colleague) of Sidney Herbert, but he left for India without coming to see her. "You have worked for eternity," wrote Mr. Jowett (April 3), to whom she had reported the new Viceroy's neglect; "why should you be troubled at the Governor-General not coming to see you (as he most certainly ought to have done)? Put not your trust in princes or in princesses or in the War Office or in the India Office; all that sort of thing necessarily rests on a sandy foundation. I wonder that you have been able to carry on so long with them." Lord Northbrook was friendly nevertheless, as appears from his reply when she wrote and asked him to see Mr. Clark, the sanitary and civil engineer:-- (_Lord Northbrook to Miss Nightingale._) CALCUTTA, _Jan._ 3 [1873]. I had great pleasure in seeing Mr. Clark, for I had seen his works at Barrachpore and knew of the great results which, so far as the statistics up to the present time can be said to prove them, have followed from the supply of pure water to Calcutta. I hope soon to see his drainage works at the Salt Lakes, and I have got the particulars of his plan for catch-water roofs for military buildings, which I will look at carefully as soon as I can. At present I am a little overwhelmed with business which has been accumulating during my tour. You may be assured of two things, that I fully understand the importance of pure water for the soldiers, and that I shall always receive with pleasure and consider with attention any suggestions, which you may kindly give me, both on your own account and because you were so much associated on these matters with my old master, Lord Herbert. Yours very sincerely, NORTHBROOK. [129] Letter to Sir Bartle Frere, July 2, 1872. She did not, however, at the time follow up this opening. She had taken Lord Northbrook's neglect to call upon her as a further indication that she was meant to go out of office. II The question had become instant thereupon, What was she to do next? Mr. Jowett's letters to her at this time, as also her own private notes, show that she was in a mood of great depression; due in part to much physical weakness and suffering, but in part also to unsettlement in her plan of life. She knew not exactly what to be at. She saw before her, as she wrote, "no consecutive path growing out of one's own deeds, but only a succession of disjointed lives and unconnected events." "Never," she wrote again, "has God let me feel weariness of active life, but only anxiety to get on. Now in old age I never wish to be relieved from new work, but only to have it to do." With what zeal she threw herself into fuller work for the Nightingale School at St. Thomas's, we shall hear; but that was not enough. She could not see nurses and write to nurses all day long--though indeed she devoted to such duties as many hours as some people would consider a sufficient day's work, and besides she was now spending a large part of the year with her father or mother in the country. She needed some recreation, and the only recreation she ever found was in change of work. She sought no "glory-crown" over folded hands. Mr. Jowett seized the occasion to repeat his advice that she should find recreation in literary work. Now that she meant to free herself from official drudgery, let her gain permanent influence by writing books or essays. "I think," he said, "that you seem to me to have more ideas than any one whom I know." And again (Dec. 14, 1871): "You have many original thoughts, but you either insert them in Blue-books or cast them before swine--that is me, and I sometimes insert them in sermons. You should have a more consecutive way of going on." She recalled, too, advice and remonstrances which she had received from Mr. Mill. In 1867 the "National Society for Woman's Suffrage" was founded. Mill had asked her to join it and she had at first refused:-- (_John Stuart Mill to Miss Nightingale._) BLACKHEATH PARK, _August_ 9 [1867]. As I know how fully you appreciate a great many of the evil effects produced upon the character of women (and operating to the destruction of their own and others' happiness) by the existing state of opinion, and as you have done me the honour to express some regard for my opinion on these subjects, I should not like to abstain from mentioning the formation of a Society aimed in my opinion at the very root of all the evils you deplore and have passed your life in combating. There are a great number of people, particularly women, who, from want of the habit of reflecting on politics, are quite incapable of realizing the enormous power of politics, that is to say, of legislation, to confer happiness and also to influence the opinion and the moral nature of the governed. As I am convinced that this power is by far the greatest that it is possible to wield for human happiness, I can neither approve of women who decline the responsibility of wielding it, nor of men who would shut out women from the right to wield it. Until women do wield it to the best of their ability, little or great, and that in a direct open manner, I am convinced that the evils of which I know you to be peculiarly aware can never be satisfactorily dealt with. And this conviction must be my apology for troubling you. [Illustration: Handwritten notes] (_Miss Nightingale to John Stuart Mill._) 35 SOUTH STREET, _August_ 11 [1867]. I can't tell you how much pleased I was nor how grateful I feel that you should take the trouble to write to me. And if I ill-naturedly answer your question by asking one, it is because I have scarcely any one who can give me (as my dear friend, Mr. Clough, long since dead, said) a "considered opinion." That women should have the suffrage, I think no one can be more deeply convinced than I. It is so important for a woman to be a "person," as you say. And I think I see this most strongly in married life. If the woman is not a "person," it does almost infinite harm even to her husband. And the harm is greatest when the man is a very clever man and the woman a very clever woman. But it will be years before you obtain the suffrage for women. And in the meantime there are evils which press much more hardly on women than the want of the suffrage. And will not this when obtained put women in opposition to those who withhold these rights from them, so as to retard still further the legislation which is necessary to put them in possession of their rights? I ask humbly, and I am afraid you will laugh at me. Could not the existing disabilities as to property and influence of women be swept away by the legislature as it stands at present? and equal responsibilities be given, as they ought to be, to both men and women? I do not like to take up your time with giving instances, redressible by legislation, in which my experience tells me that women, and especially poor and married women, are most hardly pressed upon now. No matron, serving on a large scale as I have done, and with the smallest care for her Nurses, can be unaware of these. Till a married woman can be in possession of her own property, there can be no love or justice. But there are many other evils, as I need not tell you. Is it possible that, if woman suffrage is agitated as a means of removing these evils, the effect may be to prolong their existence? Is it not the case that at present there is no opposition between the two elements of the nation, but that, if both had equal political power, there is a probability that the social reforms required might become matter of political partizanship, and so the weaker go to the wall? I can scarcely expect that you will have time to answer my humble questions. As to my being on the Society you mention, you know there is scarcely anything which, if you were to tell me that it is right politically, I would not do. But I have no time. It is 14 years this very day that I entered upon work which has never left me ten minutes' leisure, not even to be ill. And I am obliged never to give my name where I cannot give my work. If you will not think me egotistical, I will say why I have kept off the stage of these things. In the years that I have passed in Government offices, I have never felt the want of a vote--because, if I had been a Borough returning two members to Parliament, I should have had less administrative influence. And I have thought that I could work better for others off the stage than on it. Added to which, I am an incurable invalid, entirely a prisoner to my room. But I entirely agree, if I may be allowed to agree with so great an authority, that women's "political power" should be "direct and open," not indirect. And I ought to ask your pardon for occupying you for one single moment with my own personal situation. As you have had the kindness to let me address you, I cannot help putting in one more word on a subject very near my heart--the India Sanitary Service. I have worked very hard at this for six years. And during all those years, my great wish has been: would it be possible to ask Mr. Mill for his help and influence? But you were so busy. Pray believe me, dear Sir, ever your faithful servant, FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. Mr. Mill found time for a "considered opinion," of great elaboration and weight; it has been printed elsewhere.[130] With his reply to Miss Nightingale's humble but argumentative questions, we are not here concerned. Though she never took any prominent part in the movement for female suffrage, she joined the Society in 1868, allowed her name to be placed on the General Committee in 1871, was an annual subscriber to its funds, and in 1878 sent an expression of her opinion on the subject for publication.[131] It was, however, Mr. Mill's remarks upon her "personal situation" that now, in 1872, came back to her. "If," he had said, "you prefer to do your work rather by moving the hidden springs than by allowing yourself to be known to the world as doing what you really do, it is not for me to make any observations on this preference (inasmuch as I am bound to presume that you have good reasons for it) other than to say that I much regret that this preference is so very general among women." She ought not, he went on to suggest, to hide her good deeds; and "finally I feel," he wrote, "some hesitation in saying to you what I think of the responsibility that lies upon each one of us to stand steadfastly, and with all the boldness and all the humility that a deep sense of duty can inspire, by what the experience of life and an honest use of our own intelligence has taught us to be the truth." To some of this expostulation she had at the time a conclusive rejoinder. She could not write to the _Times_ and say, "Be it known that I suggested such and such a dispatch to a Secretary of State, and am corresponding in such and such a sense with a Governor-General." But if she were out of office, the plea for seclusion behind the scenes failed; nor was it ever perhaps of much cogency in relation to her views on religious and social matters. Now that she had "gone out of office," was it not her duty to come into the open with her pen? [130] In the _Letters of John Stuart Mill_, 1910, vol. ii. pp. 100-105. [131] Quoted in Bibliography A, No. 93. III The first literary task which Miss Nightingale set herself under this impulse took the form of a series of magazine articles, in which she hoped to embody the leading ideas contained in the voluminous _Suggestions for Thought_ already described (Vol. I. p. 470). "During the ten years and more that I have known you," wrote Mr. Jowett (Oct. 31, 1872), "you have repeated to me the expression 'Character of God' about 1000 times, but I can't say that I have any clear idea of what you mean." Why did she not try and explain? In an earlier letter (Feb. 28, 1871) Mr. Jowett had suggested "the form of short papers or essays." She now wrote three of them (of which the first two were published)--entitled respectively "A 'Note' of Interrogation," "A Sub-Note of Interrogation: What will our Religion be in 1999," and "On what Government night will Mr. Lowe bring out our New Moral Budget? another Sub-Note of Interrogation." In the first Paper, Miss Nightingale in a questioning and allusive style defined her conception of God as a God of Law, whose character may be learnt from social and moral science, and defended such a conception against some current ideas of Christian churches on the one side, and against the too cold and impersonal creed, as she thought, of Positivism on the other. The affinity of her doctrine at some points with the creed of Positivism is obvious; but she held as an axiom that the existence of law implied a law-giver; and "it is a very different thing," she wrote elsewhere,[132] "fighting against evil for our own sakes or fighting for the sake of the Law-Giver who arms us--fighting with or without a Commander." The scope of the second Paper is harder to describe, for it throws out a large number of criticisms and suggestions on life, morals, and philosophy in no very closely related order. The general idea, however, is that the purification of religion requires not destructive criticism but reconstruction and a re-ordering of modern life on the lines of social service; in which latter connection Miss Nightingale paid a glowing tribute to the pioneer of East-end "settlers."[133] These two Papers, though they attempt to cover too much ground in a small space, abound in happy things by the way. We are told, for instance, that Matthew Arnold's _Literature and Dogma_ is "marred by a tendency not to fight like a man but to scratch like a cat." The doctrine of eternal punishment is criticized in the words of the pauper who said to his nurse after seeing the chaplain, "It does seem hard to have suffered so much here, only to go to everlasting torments hereafter." The creed of some contented politicians is hit off by saying that they talk of "the 'masses,' as if they were Silurian strata." The third of Miss Nightingale's Papers is the hardest to describe, because it is the most crowded of the series. Its practical purpose may be said in the language of later politics to be a plea for "social reform." "There must be a Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a Budget, for Morality and Crime, as for Finance." Her conception of social and moral science as an almost statistical study[134] is glanced at, and the controversy between Free Will and Necessity is disposed of by the way. Miss Nightingale sent her Papers successively to Mr. Froude. He was delighted with the first and with the second. "Your second Note," he said, "is even more pregnant than the first. I cannot tell how sanitary, with disordered intellects, the effects of such Papers will be." They appeared in _Fraser's Magazine_ for May and July 1873. Carlyle was not so favourably impressed. Miss Nightingale's second Paper, he said, was like "a lost lamb bleating on the mountain." Mr. Froude's criticism on the third was that it lacked focussing: "the whole art of getting culinary fire out of intellectual sunlight depends on that." The third article, accordingly, was not printed. Miss Nightingale did not relish Carlyle's remark, and her equanimity was perhaps not restored by the domestic assurance that Florence's mistake had been in not submitting the manuscript to her sister's revision. One of the best things in the Paper which was not published was a Postscript. The first article had been widely noticed in the pulpit and the press, and had brought to the author many letters--some sympathetic, as from Mr. Edward Maitland,[135] others sorrowfully critical. There were those who promised to pray for her conversion daily, and invited her to join them in that exercise. They had not read the article, it seemed, but only a review of it; and among the printed critiques was one which began: "My knowledge of the scope of this Paper is derived from the report of a discourse upon it." In her proposed Postscript Miss Nightingale took "this opportunity of thanking unknown friends for their sympathy and suggestions, and, still more, unknown friend-enemies for their criticisms; but yet more should I have thanked the latter, had their criticisms been on my poor little Article in its rough state--the 'Original Cow and Snuffers'--and not on seeing the _Extract_ of a _Criticism_ of an _Extract_ of my Article. Certainly a new Art must have arisen in my elderly age:--out-magazining magazining. And I hereby confidentially inform the shade of Mr. Fraser that he may, on application to me, see columns, closely-printed columns, of small (but cruel) print upon a Paper which the writers state that they have not read.--What! read a Paper which we are going to review!--Yes, Mr. Fraser, this is what magazine-ing has come to. Articles are not even written on original works, even if that work be only an Article, but on a Review of an Article; and not even upon that, but upon a Review of a Review of an Extract of an Article, or sometimes upon an Extract of a Sermon upon an Extract of a Review of an Article. I ought to feel flattered: I try to feel flattered. But, Mr. Fraser, is life long enough for this? is this the way to 'human progress'? And ... but as this will not be read by my unknown critics, I come to a stop." The practice which Miss Nightingale thus satirised has not become less frequent in later days when the newspapers supply their readers not with political speeches but with opinions based on summaries of them, and when what are called "educational handbooks" aim at giving the student the power of passing a critical judgment upon authors without the necessity of reading them. [132] In some marginalia on the _Fioretti_ of St. Francis. [133] Edward Denison, who had died in 1870 at the age of 30. [134] See Vol. I. p. 480. [135] Mystical writer; author of _The Pilgrim and the Shrine_. IV A few days after the appearance of Miss Nightingale's first Paper in _Fraser_, Mr. Mill died of a "local endemic disease" at his house near Avignon. She was profoundly moved:-- (_Miss Nightingale to Julius Mohl._) _May_ 20 [1873]. John Stuart Mill's death was a great shock to me. Mr. Grote used to say of him "Talk of Mill's Logic! why he is thrilling with emotion to the very finger-ends." That is just what he was. Now, speaker and subject are both gone. He said at Mr. Grote's funeral, with an agony of tears, "We might have kept him 10 years longer." And now we say of himself with tears "We might have kept him for 10 years longer." He was only 67. He was always urging me to publish. He used to say, with the passion which he put into everything he did say: "I have no patience with people who will not publish because they think the world is not ripe enough for their ideas: that is only conceit or cowardice. If anybody has thought out any thing which he conceives to be truth, in Heaven's name, let him say it!" I did not answer that letter. I thought that this year (I have left much of the India and War Office work, and much of it has left me) I would resume with John Stuart Mill and do as he told me. I put the article in _Fraser's Magazine_ (which I now send you) to please him. And now he is dead, and will never know that I intended to do what he wished. He used to say, "Tell the world what you think--your experience. It will probably strike the world more than anything that could be told it." He quoted my "Stuff" in his book, which he ought not to have done.[136] I published my book on Socrates' mother[137] partly to please him. It was a very odd thing: it was a subject he had taken up: he was President of a Society for _that_. When he was in England (till a fortnight before his death) I could not find his address: I was so overwhelmed with business and illness. I did not know he was going away. And I did not send him this book. And now he is dead, and will never know. But I scarcely regret his death. He was not a happy man. He was a man who was so sure to develop very much in a future life. He had queer religious notions: did not believe in a God or in a future life: but believed in a sort of conflict between two Powers of Good and Evil. I remember showing you one of his letters. And you said it was just like Zoroaster. But he was the most _truly_ "Liberal" man I ever knew. If it were for the cause of Truth that he should be defeated, he would have _liked_ to have been defeated. And now he is dead. And we shall never see his like again. [136] See Vol. I. p. 471, _n._ [137] _Notes on Lying-in Institutions_; see above, p. 197. It was characteristic of Miss Nightingale that she entered into correspondence with Mr. Chadwick on the sanitary state of Mr. Mill's house and the climatic conditions of Provence in May. Mr. Chadwick had to put himself right in her eyes by explaining that he had not been consulted by their friend on those subjects and had never been invited by him to Avignon. V Other literary work which occupied Miss Nightingale a good deal at this time was undertaken either to help Mr. Jowett or in accordance with his advice. He had urged her to work out her notion of Divine Perfection, and her theory of the Family in relation to "sisterhoods" and other forms of association. Miss Nightingale wrote Essays accordingly on "What is the Evidence that there is a Perfect God?" on "What is the Character of God?" and on "Christian Fellowship as a Means to Progress." The gist of the latter essay may be given in a letter of an earlier date:-- (_Miss Nightingale to Benjamin Jowett._) _July_ [1870].... I think that Faraday's idea of friendship is very high: "One who will serve his companion next to his God." And when one thinks that most, nay almost all people have no idea of friendship at all except pleasant juxtaposition, it strikes one with admiration. Yet is Faraday's idea not mine. My idea of a friend is one who will and can join you in work the sole purpose of which is to serve God. Two in one, and one in God. It almost exactly answers Jesus Christ's words. And so extraordinarily blessed have I been that I have had three such friends. I can truly say that, during the 5 years that I worked with Sidney Herbert every day and nearly all day, from the moment he came into the room no other idea came in but that of doing the work with the best of our powers in the service of God. (And this tho' he was a man of the most varied and brilliant conversational genius I have ever known--far beyond Macaulay whom I also knew.) This is Heaven; and this is what makes me say "I have had my heaven." The two other friends with whom in former time she had been a fellow-worker were Arthur Clough and her Aunt, Mrs. Smith. Miss Nightingale's other Essays led to much correspondence with Mr. Jowett, but as they failed to come up to his standard they were laid aside. Many of her letters to him were themselves almost Essays. Extracts from one or two consecutive letters will show the kind of discussions into which Miss Nightingale loved to involve her Oxford friend, and upon which he was nothing loath to enter:-- (_Benjamin Jowett to Miss Nightingale._) TORQUAY, _Sept._ 29 [1871].... I must answer your letter by driblets. When you admit that a part of the witness of the character of God is to be sought for in nature, how do you distinguish between the true and false witness of nature? For we cannot deny that physical good is sometimes at variance with moral--_e.g._ in marriage the sole or chief principle ought to be health and strength in the parents whether with or without a marriage ceremony--in other words Plato's Republic: I mean on physical principles. Or again the laws of physical improvement would require that we should get rid of sickly and deformed infants. And if, as Huxley would say, you reconstruct the world on a physical basis, you have to go to war with received principles of morality. I suppose that the answer is you must take man as a whole, and make morality and the mind the limit of physical improvement. But it is not easy to see what this limit is, because men's conceptions of morality vary, and although we may form ideals we have to descend from them in practice. Therefore I do not agree with you in thinking that there are no difficulties, although the old difficulties, about origin of evil &c., are generally a hocus of Theologians. (_Miss Nightingale to Benjamin Jowett._)[138] LEA HURST, _Oct._ 3 [1871]. I am quite scandalized at your materialism. (I shall shut up you and Plato for a hundred years in punishment in another world till you have both obtained clearer views.) Is it for an old maid like me to be preaching to you a Master in Israel that even "on physical principles" there are essential points in marriage (to turn out the best order of children), which, being absent, the perfection of "health and strength" in both parents is of no avail even for the physical part of the children? And might I just ask one small question: whether you consider man has a little soul? If he has ever such a little one, you can scarcely consider him as a simple body, an animal, or even as a twin, the soul being one twin and the body the other, but as all one, the soul and the body making one being (altho' only in this sense). If you _do_, at all events _God_ does not. And consequently He makes a great many more things enter into the "physical" constitution even of the children than the mere "health and strength" of the parents. (My son, really Plato talked nonsense about this.) Take a much more material thing than the producing of a bad or degenerate family or race. Take a railway accident. What are the laws therein concerned? You have by no means only to consider the "physical" laws--the strength of iron, the speed of steam, the smoothness of rails, the friction &c., &c.--but you have to consider the state of mind of Directors, whether they care only for their dividends, so that the railway-servants are underpaid or overworked &c., &c. You quote Huxley. He is undoubtedly one of the prime educators of the age, but he makes a profound mistake when he says to Mankind: objects of sense are more worthy of your attention than your inferences and imaginations. On the contrary, the finest powers man is gifted with are those which enable him to infer from what he sees what he _can't_ see. They lift him into truth of far higher import than that which he learns from the senses alone. I believe that the laws of nature all tend to improve the _whole_ man, moral and physical, that it is absurd to consider man either as a body to be "improved," or as a soul to be "improved," separately. As to the "laws of physical improvement requiring that we should get rid of sickly and deformed infants," they require that we should _prevent_ or improve, not that we should _kill_ them. _That_ would be to get rid of some of the finest intellectual and moral specimens of our human nature that have ever existed. And, even were this not the case, the heroism, the patience, the wisdom of our race have been more called forth by dealing with these and the like forms of evil than by almost anything else. The good of man in its highest sense cannot be attained by neglecting one set of laws or one aspect of man's nature and cultivating another. I entirely therefore agree that "you must take man as a whole." But this seems at variance with a celebrated author's next sentence "and make morality and the mind the _limit_ of physical improvement." If I were writing, I should use a word signifying the exact reverse; not limit, but expansion, enlargement, multiplication, master or informing spirit. As Plato says: the mind informs the body, owns the body, the body is the servant of the mind. How can the owner and the master be the limit? We must really pray for your conversion.... (_Benjamin Jowett to Miss Nightingale._) TORQUAY, _Oct._ 4.... What have I said to deserve such an outburst? I have no wish to shake the foundation of Society. What I think about these matters is feebly expressed in a part of Essay at the end of the introduction to the _Republic_. But when I come to a second edition I will express it better. [138] I have somewhat compressed the argument in this letter. A comparison of the passage in the first and second editions of Mr. Jowett's Introduction respectively[139] shows how largely he profited by the criticisms in the foregoing letter. His _Plato_ first appeared in 1871, and at once he began revising it. In this work Miss Nightingale gave him great help. Her Greek had now grown a little rusty,[140] but her interest in the substance of Plato was intense. She annotated Mr. Jowett's summaries and introductions very closely, and sent him voluminous suggestions for revision. "You are the best critic," he wrote, "whom I ever had." Several of Miss Nightingale's notes are preserved, in rough copy, amongst her Papers, and by means of them her hand may be traced in many a page of Mr. Jowett's revised work. In the first edition of the introduction to the _Republic_ he made some remarks on love as a motive in poetry which excited Miss Nightingale's strong disapproval. She agreed that "the illusion of the feelings commonly called love" was a motive of which too much had been made; but the poets, she thought, had as yet hardly touched the theme of true love--"two in one, and one in God"--as an incentive to heroic action. "The philosopher may be excused," Mr. Jowett had written, "if he imagines an age when poetry and sentiment have disappeared, and truth has taken the place of imagination, and the feelings of love are understood and estimated at their proper value." "Take out that mean calumny, my son," wrote Miss Nightingale; "take it out this minute; blaspheme not against Love." The offending sentence was expunged in the second edition. Mr. Jowett had gone on to "blaspheme" a little against Art, citing the Mahommedans as a case of the state of the human mind in which "all artistic representations are regarded as a false and imperfect expression either of the religious or of the philosophical ideal." Miss Nightingale objected that the Mahommedans had renounced the use of pictures and images, but not of architecture: "Mosques are the highest kind of art: the one true representation of the One God: the Glory of God in the highest: the most high of the Most High: higher than any Christian art or architecture--as you would say if you had seen the mosques of Cairo." Mr. Jowett recast his passage, and used Miss Nightingale's illustration, almost in her words.[141] "I am always stealing from you," he said. On his Introduction to the _Gorgias_, she made an interesting criticism:-- Is not Socrates more ineffably tiresome, and at the same time does he not speak higher truth, in the _Gorgias_ than anywhere else? Why call these higher truths "paradoxes"? Are not your sermons always a sort of apology for talking to them of God? And why should your Introductions be a sort of apology for recognizing that Socrates speaks the highest truth and no paradox? Have guarded statements, whether about God or any particular moral or truth, ever produced enthusiasm of religion or in morality? Is there any Dialogue, not even excepting the _Phaedo_ and _Crito_, where he is so much in earnest? He is so terribly in earnest that towards the end he even throws all his dialectic aside, and makes even Polus in earnest. To me, speaking as one of the stupid and ignorant, it seems that your