The Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 2 of 2 — John Shaqi
The Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 2 of 2Cook, Edward Tyas, Sir
History
The Life of Florence Nightingale, vol. 2 of 2
Cook, Edward Tyas, Sir
Nightingale, Florence, 1820-1910
Miss Nightingale's work in connection with the Canadian expedition was
done in the midst of a personal sorrow of her own, second only in
poignancy, if second at all, to that caused by the death of Sidney
Herbert. This was the death of Arthur Hugh Clough. He had broken down in
health and been ordered abroad in April 1861, and she had urged him to
go. He died, however, at Florence on November 12. They had been close
friends since her return to England from the Crimea. His sweetness of
disposition, his humour, his lofty moral feeling, alike attracted her.
He on his side had deep admiration for her, and he devoted such
strength--alas! but little--as remained to him from work in the Privy
Council Office to her service. He fetched and carried for her. He made
arrangements for her journeys, as we have heard, and escorted her. He
saw her printers, he corrected her proofs. He became, at a modest
salary, secretary to the Nightingale Fund. It was poor work to set a
poet to, but he did it with cheerful modesty. He was intent, he told
Miss Nightingale, upon "doing plain work"; he had "studied and taught,"
he said, "too much for a man's own moral good." In 1860 his health began
to fail. Miss Nightingale was sometimes a little impatient. His loyalty
and zeal she could never have doubted; but she was inclined to think him
lacking in initiative and energy. She was always inclined to drive
willing horses a little hardly. In the case of Clough, as in that of
Sidney Herbert, she sometimes attributed to infirmity of will what was
in fact due to infirmity of body. And in each case her grief, when the
end came, was not free, I think, from some element of self-reproach. "I
have always felt," she had written to her uncle (Dec. 7, 1860), "that I
have been a great drag on Arthur's health and spirits, a much greater
one than I should have chosen to be, if I had not promised him to die
sooner." "She saw my father," wrote her cousin Beatrice to
Mr. Nightingale (Dec. 4), "to speak only of Arthur, as only she can
speak. She was quite natural, very affectionate, very, very much moved."
But in her state of loneliness and nervous exhaustion her feeling for
lost friends was sometimes morbid. She said that for months after the
death of Sidney Herbert, and again after that of Clough, she could not
bear to open a newspaper for dread of seeing some mention of a beloved
name. Some years later she was sent a book by Mrs. Clough. "I like very
much," she replied (Nov. 13, 1865)--"how much I cannot say--to receive
that book from you. But it would be impossible to me to read it or look
at it, not from want of time or strength, but from too much of both
spent on his memory, from thinking, not too little, but too much on him.
But I don't say this for others. I believe it is a morbid peculiarity of
long illness, of the loss of power of resistance to morbid thoughts. I
cannot bear to see a portrait of those who are gone." The depth of her
grief at the death of Mr.
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