What is Life? a fighting In heart and in brain with trolls. Poetry? that means writing Doomsday-accounts of our souls.[48]
[48] _Lyrics and Poems from Ibsen_, translated by F. E. Garrett.
She held in great suspicion and dislike what she called the "artist-like way of looking upon life." It reduces all religions, she said, and most inward and spiritual feelings "into a sort of magic-lantern, with which to make play for the amusement of the company." Her mother used to praise her "beautiful letters," was proud of the "European reputation" she had won among learned men, and wanted to know why she could not be happy in cultivating at home the gifts which God had given her. To Florence Nightingale these things were not gifts to be cultivated, but rather temptations to be subdued. She read with some attention in 1846 a book called _Passages from the Life of a Daughter at Home_, a religious work containing counsels of submission for women dissatisfied with their home life. "Piling up miscellaneous instruction for oneself," she wrote in one place in the margin; "the most unsatisfactory of all pursuits!" She strove to say to God, as she wrote in another place, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord! _not_ Behold the handmaid of correspondence, or of music, or of metaphysics!" "That power of always writing a good letter whenever one likes," she said in one of her pages of self-examination, "is a great temptation"--a temptation, if such it be, to which, it must be confessed, she continually succumbed. But she wished to win no repute from her fall. In 1854 her sister printed the "beautiful letters" from Egypt,[49] and issued a few copies for private circulation. Florence was not pleased, but acquiesced, and corrected the proofs.
Any dreams, then, which she may have harboured of literary distinction, she had put resolutely away from her. "Oh God," she had written in her diary at Cairo, "thou puttest into my heart this great desire to devote myself to the sick and sorrowful. I offer it to thee. Do with it what is for thy service." But there was still one other temptation to be subdued.
The craving for sympathy, which exists between two who are to form one indivisible and perfect whole, is in most cases between man and woman, in some between man and God. This the Roman Catholics have understood and expressed under the simile, Christ the bridegroom, the Nun married to Him, the Monk married to the Church; or as St. Francis to poverty, or as St. Ignatius Loyola to the divine mistress of his thoughts, the Virgin. This sort of tie between man and God seems alone able to fill the want of the other, the permanent exclusive tie between the one man and the one woman.--FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: _Suggestions for Thought_.