"The gleams, the shadows, and the peace profound,"
and get your mind informed with quietness and beauty, and fed with
thoughts of other years, and of her whose story, like Helen of Troy's,
will continue to move the hearts of men as long as the gray hills stand
round about that gentle lake, and are mirrored at evening in its depths.
You may do and enjoy all this, and be in Princes Street by nine P.M.;
and we wish we were as sure of many things as of your saying, "Yes, this
_is_ a pleasure that has pleased, and will please again; this was
something expected which did not disappoint."
* * * * *
There is another garden of Queen Mary's, which may still be seen, and
which has been left to itself like that in the Isle of Rest. It is in
the grounds at Chatsworth, and is moated, walled round, and raised about
fifteen feet above the park. Here the Queen, when a prisoner under the
charge of "Old Bess of Hardwake," was allowed to walk without any guard.
How different the two! and how different she who took her pleasure in
them!
Lines written on the steps of a small moated garden at
Chatsworth, called
"QUEEN MARY'S BOWER.
"The moated bower is wild and drear,
And sad the dark yew's shade;
The flowers which bloom in silence here,
In silence also fade.
"The woodbine and the light wild rose
Float o'er the broken wall;
And here the mournful nightshade blows,
To note the garden's fall.
"Where once a princess wept her woes,
The bird of night complains;
And sighing trees the tale disclose
They learnt from Mary's strains.
"A. H."
_PRESENCE OF MIND, AND HAPPY GUESSING._
"_Depend upon it a lucky guess is never merely luck--there is
always some talent in it._"--MISS AUSTEN, _in Emma._
Dr. Chalmers used to say that in the dynamics of human affairs, two
qualities were essential to greatness--Power and Promptitude. One man
might have both, another power without promptitude, another promptitude
without power. We must all feel the common sense of this, and can
readily see how it applies to a general in the field, to a pilot in a
storm, to a sportsman, to a fencer, to a debater. It is the same with an
operating surgeon at all times, and may be at any time with the
practitioner of the art of healing. He must be ready for what are called
emergencies--cases which rise up at your feet, and must be dealt with on
the instant,--he must have power and promptitude.
It is a curious condition of mind that this requires: it is like
sleeping with your pistol under your pillow, and it on full cock; a
moment lost and all may be lost. There is the very nick of time. This is
what we mean by presence of mind; by a man having such a subject at his
finger ends; that part of the mind lying nearest the outer world, and
having to act on it through the bodily organs, through the will--the
outposts must be always awake. It is of course, so to speak, only a
portion of the mind that is thus needed and thus available; if the whole
mind were forever at the advanced posts, it would soon lose itself in
this endeavor to keep it. Now, though the thing needed to be done may be
simple enough, what goes to the doing of it, and to the being at once
ready and able to do it, involves much: the wedge would not be a wedge,
or do a wedge's work, without the width behind as well as the edge in
front. Your men of promptitude without genius or power, including
knowledge and will, are those who present the wedge the wrong way. Thus
your extremely prompt people are often doing the wrong thing, which is
almost always worse than nothing. Our vague friend who bit "Yarrow's"
tail instead of "the Chicken's," was full of promptitude; as was also
that other man, probably a relative, who barred the door with a boiled
carrot; each knew what was needed--the biting the tail, the barring the
door; both erred as to the means--the one by want of presence of mind,
the other by lack of mind itself. We must have just enough of the right
knowledge and no more; we must have the habit of using this; we must
have self-reliance, and the consentaneousness of the entire mind; and
what our hand finds to do, we must do with our might as well as with it.
Therefore it is that this master act of the man, under some sudden and
great unexpected crisis, is in a great measure performed unconsciously
as to its mental means. The man is so _totus in illo_, that there is no
bit of the mind left to watch and record the acts of the rest; therefore
men, when they have done some signal feat of presence of mind, if asked
how they did it, generally don't very well know--they just did it; it
was, in fact, done and then thought of, not thought of and then done, in
which case it would likely never have been done. Not that the act was
uncaused by mind; it is one of the highest powers of mind thus to act;
but it is done, if I may use the phrase, by an acquired instinct. You
will find all this in that wonderful old Greek who was Alexander the
Great's and the old world's schoolmaster, and ours if we were
wise,--whose truthfulness and clear insight one wonders at the longer he
lives. He seems to have seen the human mind as a bird or an engineer
does the earth--he knew the plan of it. We now-a-days see it as one sees
a country, athwart and in perspective, and from the side; he saw it from
above and from below. There are therefore no shadows, no
foreshortenings, no clear-obscure, indeed no disturbing medium; it is as
if he examined everything _in vacuo_. I refer my readers to what he says
on {Anchinoia} and {Eustochia}.[8]
[8] As I am now, to my sorrow and shame, too much of a mediate
Grecian, I give a Balliol friend's note on these two
words:--"What you have called 'presence of mind' and 'happy
guessing' may, I think, be identified respectively with
Aristotle's {anchinoia} and {eustochia}. The latter of
these, {eustochia}, Aristotle mentions incidentally when
treating of {euboulia}, or good deliberation. _Eth. Nic._
bk. vi. ch. 9. Good deliberation, he says, is not
{eustochia}, for the former is a slow process, whereas the
latter is not guided by reason, and is rapid. In the same
passage he tells us that {anchinoia} is a sort of
{eustochia}. But he speaks of {anchinoia} more fully in
_Ana. Post._ i. 34:--'{Anchinoia} is a sort of happy
guessing at the intermediate, when there is not time for
consideration: as when a man, seeing that the bright side of
the moon is always turned towards the sun, comprehends that
her light is borrowed from the sun; or concludes, from
seeing one conversing with a capitalist that he wants to
borrow money; or infers that people are friends from the
fact of their having common enemies.'" And then he goes on
to make these simple observations confused and perplexing by
reducing them to his logical formula.
"The derivation of the words will confirm this view.
{Eustochia} is a hitting the _mark_ successfully, a reaching
to the end, the rapid and, as it were, intuitive perception
of the truth. This is what Whewell means by saying, 'all
induction is a happy conjecture.' But when Aristotle says
that this faculty is not guided by reason ({aneu te gar
logou}), he does not mean to imply that it grows up
altogether independent of reason, any more than Whewell
means to say that all the discoveries in the inductive
sciences have been made by men taking 'shots' at them, as
boys at school do at hard passages in their Latin lessons.
On the contrary, no faculty is so absolutely the child of
reason as this faculty of happy guessing. It only attains to
perfection after the reason has been long and painfully
trained in the sphere in which the guesses are to be made.
What Aristotle does mean is, that when it has attained
perfection, we are not conscious of the share which reason
has in its operation--it is so rapid that by no analysis can
we detect the presence of reason in its action. Sir Isaac
Newton seeing the apple fall, and thence 'guessing' at the
law of gravitation, is a good instance of {eustochia}.
"{Anchinoia}, on the other hand, is a _nearness of mind_;
not a reaching to the end, but an apprehension of the best
means; not a perception of the truth, but a perception of
how the truth is to be supported. It is sometimes translated
'sagacity,' but readiness or presence of mind is better, as
sagacity rather involves the idea of consideration. In
matters purely intellectual it is ready wit. It is a sort of
shorter or more limited {eustochia}. It is more of a natural
gift than {eustochia}, because the latter is a far higher
and nobler faculty, and therefore more dependent for its
perfection on cultivation, as all our highest faculties are.
{Eustochia} is more akin to genius, {anchinoia} to practical
common sense."
My object in what I have now written and am going to write, is to
impress upon medical students the value of power and promptitude in
combination, for their professional purposes; the uses to them of
nearness of the {Nous}, and of happy guessing; and how you may see the
sense, and neatness, and pith of that excellent thinker, as well as best
of all story-tellers, Miss Austen, when she says in _Emma_, "Depend upon
it, a lucky guess is never merely luck, there is always some talent in
it." Talent here denoting intelligence and will in action. In all
sciences except those called exact, this happy guessing plays a large
part, and in none more than in medicine, which is truly a tentative art,
founded upon likelihood, and is therefore what we call contingent.
Instead of this view of the healing art discouraging us from making our
ultimate principles as precise, as we should make our observations, it
should urge us the more to this; for, depend upon it, that guess as we
may often have to do, he will guess best, most happily for himself and
his patient, who has the greatest amount of true knowledge, and the most
serviceable amount of what we may call mental cash, ready money, and
ready weapons.
We must not only have wisdom, which is knowledge assimilated and made
our own, but we must, as the Lancashire men say and do, _have wit to use
it_. We may carry a nugget of gold in our pocket, or a L100 bank-note,
but unless we can get it _changed_, it is of little use, and we must
moreover have the coin of the country we are in. This want of presence
of mind, and having your wits about you, is as fatal to a surgeon as to
a general.
That wise little man, Dr. Henry Marshall, little in body but not little
in mind, in brain, and in worth, used to give an instance of this. A
young, well-educated surgeon, attached to a regiment quartered at
Musselburgh, went out professionally with two officers who were in
search of "satisfaction." One fell shot in the thigh, and in half an
hour after he was found dead, the surgeon kneeling pale and grim over
him, with his two thumbs sunk in his thigh _below_ the wound, the grass
steeped in blood. If he had put them two inches higher, or extemporized
a tourniquet with his sash and the pistol's ramrod and a stone, he might
have saved his friend's life and his own--for he shot himself that
night.
Here is another. Robbie Watson, whom I now see walking mildly about the
streets--having taken to coal--was driver of the Dumfries coach by
Biggar. One day he had changed horses, and was starting down a steep
hill, with an acute turn at the foot, when he found his wheelers, two
new horses, utterly ignorant of backing. They got furious, and we
outside got alarmed. Robbie made an attempt to pull up, and then with an
odd smile took his whip, gathered up his reins, and lashed the entire
four into a gallop. If we had not seen his face we would have thought
him a maniac; he kept them well together, and shot down like an arrow,
as far as we could see to certain destruction. Right in front at the
turn was a stout gate into a field, shut; he drove them straight at
that, and through we went, the gate broken into shivers, and we finding
ourselves safe, and the very horses enjoying the joke. I remember we
emptied our pockets into Robbie's hat, which he had taken off to wipe
his head. Now, in a few seconds all this must have passed through his
head--"that horse is not a wheeler, nor that one either; we'll come to
mischief; there's the gate; yes, I'll do it." And he did it; but then he
had to do it with his might; he had to make it impossible for his four
horses to do anything but toss the gate before them.
Here is another case. Dr. Reid of Peebles, long famous in the end of
last and beginning of this century, as the Doctor of Tweeddale; a man of
great force of character, and a true Philip, a lover of horses, saw one
Fair day a black horse, entire, thoroughbred. The groom asked a low
price, and would answer no questions. At the close of the fair the
doctor bought him, amid the derision of his friends. Next morning he
rode him up Tweed, came home after a long round, and had never been
better carried. This went on for some weeks; the fine creature was
without a fault. One Sunday morning, he was posting up by Neidpath at a
great pace, the country people trooping into the town to church.
Opposite the fine old castle, the thorough-bred stood stock still, and
it needed all the doctor's horsemanship to counteract the law of
projectiles; he did, and sat still, and not only gave no sign of urging
the horse, but rather intimated that it was his particular desire that
he should stop. He sat there a full hour, his friends making an
excellent joke of it, and he declining, of course, all interference. At
the end of the hour, the Black Duke, as he was called, turned one ear
forward, then another, looked aside, shook himself, and moved on, his
master intimating that this was exactly what he wished; and from that
day till his death, some fifteen years after, never did these two
friends allude to this little circumstance, and it was never repeated;
though it turned out that he had killed his two men previously. The
doctor must have, when he got him, said to himself, "if he is not stolen
there is a reason for his paltry price," and he would go over all the
possibilities. So that when he stood still, he would say, "Ah, this is
it;" but then he saw this at once, and lost no time, and did nothing.
Had he given the horse one dig with his spurs, or one cut with his whip,
or an impatient jerk with his bit, the case would have failed. When a
colt it had been brutally used, and being nervous, it lost its judgment,
poor thing, and lost its presence of mind.
One more instance of nearness of the {Nous}. A lady was in front of her
lawn with her children, when a mad dog made his appearance, pursued by
the peasants. What did she do? What would you have done? Shut your eyes
and think. She went straight to the dog, received its head in her thick
stuff gown, between her knees, and muffling it up, held it with all her
might till the men came up. No one was hurt. Of course, she fainted
after it was all right.
We all know (but why should we not know again?) the story of the Grecian
mother who saw her child sporting on the edge of the bridge. She knew
that a cry would startle it over into the raging stream--she came gently
near, and opening her bosom allured the little scapegrace.
I once saw a great surgeon, after settling a particular procedure as to
a life-and-death operation, as a general settles his order of battle. He
began his work, and at the second cut altered the entire conduct of the
operation. No one not in the secret could have told this: not a moment's
pause, not a quiver of the face, not a look of doubt. This is the same
master power in man, which makes the difference between Sir John Moore
and Sir John Cope.
Mrs. Major Robertson, a woman of slight make, great beauty, and
remarkable energy, courage, and sense (she told me the story herself),
on going up to her bedroom at night--there being no one in the house but
a servant girl, in the ground floor--saw a portion of a man's foot
projecting from under the bed. She gave no cry of alarm, but shut the
door as usual, set down her candle, and began as if to undress, when she
said aloud to herself, with an impatient tone and gesture, "I've
forgotten that key again, I declare;" and leaving the candle burning,
and the door open, she went down-stairs, got the watchman, and secured
the proprietor of the foot, which had not moved an inch. How many women
or men could have done, or rather been all this!
_MY FATHER'S MEMOIR._
_A LETTER TO JOHN CAIRNS, D. D._
"_I praised the dead which are already dead, more than the
living which are yet alive._"