THE LEGEND OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

All biographies consist of prevarications and all autobiographies of fiction.  That summing up of a mass of literature over which industrious students have ruined their eyes, held good until after the War, when things changed.  Then Mr. Lytton Strachey, at one fell blow, and with one magnificent masterpiece, hurdled the old idols and established a new standard of deliberate accuracy in print.  In his “Eminent Victorians” he set the pace for the host of those who have been stimulated by his good example, like Lady Margot Asquith.

Of the four Victorian respectable worthies Strachey has dissected as ruthlessly as the anatomist a post-mortem, his portrait of Florence Nightingale, the founder of the modern science and art of nursing, is most interesting because it provides data of the utmost value to the student of the endocrine basis of human personality.  In the conventional two-volume biography of this superwoman, she is pictured as an intellectual saint, stepped from a stained glass window upon her wonderful visit to a clay-smeared earth.  The biographer, presenting all the ins and outs of her body and soul as he has, makes her live before us with a fresh vitality that is startling.

The species of life Florence Nightingale lived, involving as it did struggle with a masculine world, and conquest of it, implies the existence in her of certain masculine traits and marks, for the normal feminine psyche is submissive rather than aggressive toward its environment, human and otherwise.  Belonging to a family in the highest circles, it was upon the table d’hote of her destiny that she should become a regulation debutante, careeristina, and successful wife and mother.  Instead, she chose to question the whole routine of the life of her class, and in her diary she records her doubts and cravings, and her revolt against what is assumed by her family and friends to be the normal course of existence for her.  The attitudes and questionings in these passages, the religious feeling displayed, are distinctly masculine.  Most easily could the following, for instance, pass as having been written by a man:  “I desire for a considerable time only to lead a life of obscurity and toil, for the purpose of allowing whatever I may have received of God to ripen, and turning it some day to the glory of His Name.  Nowadays people are too much in a hurry both to produce and consume themselves.  It is only in retirement, in silence, in meditation that are formed the men who are called to exercise an influence upon society.”  In a note-book she puts May 7, 1852, as the date upon which she was conscious of a call from God to be a saviour.  Now the vast majority of women who have remained spinsters at 32, in spite of considerable personal attractions and high natural ability, are visited by waves of emotional fervor for a de-personalization of the self.