The long road of woman's memory

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO
THE LONG ROAD OF WOMAN’S MEMORY
BY JANE ADDAMS Author of “Twenty Years at Hull House” “The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets,” Etc.
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1916 All rights reserved
Copyright, 1916, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1916.
Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
TO MY DEAR FRIEND MARY H. WILMARTH WHOSE MEMORY STORED WITH THE BEST IN LITERATURE AND WHOSE FINE PUBLIC SPIRIT ARE DAILY PLACED AT THE SERVICE OF HER FRIENDS AND OF HER CITY, WITH A GALLANT AND GENTLE COURTESY
For many years at Hull-House I have at intervals detected in certain old people, when they spoke of their past experiences, a tendency to an idealization, almost to a romanticism suggestive of the ardent dreams and groundless ambitions we have all observed in the young when they recklessly lay their plans for the future.
I have, moreover, been frequently impressed by the fact that these romantic revelations were made by old people who had really suffered much hardship and sorrow, and that the transmutation of their experiences was not the result of ignoring actuality, but was apparently due to a power inherent in memory itself.
It was therefore a great pleasure when I found this aspect of memory delightfully portrayed by Sir Gilbert Murray in his life of Euripides. He writes that the aged poet, when he was officially made one of the old men of Athens, declared that he could transmute into song traditional tales of sorrow and wrong-doing because, being long past, they had already become part mystery and part music: “Memory, that Memory who is the Mother of the Muses, having done her work upon them.”
Here was an explanation which I might have anticipated; it was the Muses again at their old tricks,—the very mother of them this time,—thrusting their ghostly fingers into the delicate fabric of human experience to the extreme end of life. I had known before that the Muses foregathered with the Spirit of Youth and I had even made a feeble attempt to portray that companionship, but I was stupid indeed not to see that they are equally at home with the aged whose prosaic lives sadly need such interference.