LETTER X.
TO A STUDENT WHO LAMENTED HIS DEFECTIVE MEMORY.
The author rather inclined to congratulation than to condolence—Value of a selecting memory—Studies of the young Goethe—His great faculty of assimilation—A good literary memory like a well-edited periodical—The selecting memory in art—Treacherous memories—Cures suggested for them—The mnemotechnic art contrary to the true discipline of the mind—Two instances—The memory safely aided only by right association.
So far from writing, as you seem to expect me to do, a letter of condolence on the subject of what you are pleased to call your “miserable memory,” I feel disposed rather to indite a letter of congratulation. It is possible that you may be blessed with a selecting memory, which is not only useful for what it retains but for what it rejects. In the immense mass of facts which come before you in literature and in life, it is well that you should suffer from as little bewilderment as possible. The nature of your memory saves you from this by unconsciously selecting what has interested you, and letting the rest go by. What interests you is what concerns you.
In saying this I speak simply from the intellectual point of view, and suppose you to be an intellectual man by the natural organization of your brain, to begin with. In saying that what interests you is what concerns you, I mean intellectually, not materially. It may concern you, in the pecuniary sense, to take an interest in the law; yet your mind, left to itself, would take little or no interest in law, but an absorbing interest in botany. The passionate studies of the young Goethe, in many different directions, always in obedience to the predominant interests of the moment, are the best example of the way in which a great intellect, with remarkable powers of acquisition and liberty to grow in free luxuriance, sends its roots into various soils and draws from them the constituents of its sap. As a student of law, as a university student even, he was not of the type which parents and professors consider satisfactory. He neglected jurisprudence, he neglected even his college studies, but took an interest in so many other pursuits that his mind became rich indeed. Yet the wealth which his mind acquired seems to have been due to that liberty of ranging by which it was permitted to him to seek his own everywhere, according to the maxim of French law, chacun prend son bien où il le trouve. Had he been a poor student, bound down to the exclusively legal studies, which did not greatly interest him, it is likely that no one would ever have suspected his immense faculty of assimilation. In this way men who are set by others to load their memories with what is not their proper intellectual food, never get the credit of having any memory at all, and end by themselves believing that they have none. These bad memories are often the best, they are often the selecting memories. They seldom win distinction in examinations, but in literature and art. They are quite incomparably superior to the miscellaneous memories that receive only as boxes and drawers receive what is put into them. A good literary or artistic memory is not like a post-office that takes in everything, but like a very well-edited periodical which prints nothing that does not harmonize with its intellectual life. A well-known author gave me this piece of advice: “Take as many notes as you like, but when you write do not look at them—what you remember is what you must write, and you ought to give things exactly the degree of relative importance that they have in your memory. If you forget much, it is well, it will only save beforehand the labor of erasure.” This advice would not be suitable to every author; an author who dealt much in minute facts ought to be allowed to refer to his memoranda; but from the artistic point of view in literature the advice was wise indeed. In painting, our preferences select whilst we are in the presence of nature, and our memory selects when we are away from nature. The most beautiful compositions are produced by the selecting office of the memory, which retains some features, and even greatly exaggerates them, whilst it diminishes others and often altogether omits them. An artist who blamed himself for these exaggerations and omissions would blame himself for being an artist.
Let me add a protest against the common methods of curing what are called treacherous memories. They are generally founded upon the association of ideas, which is so far rational, but then the sort of association which they have recourse to is unnatural, and produces precisely the sort of disorder which would be produced in dress if a man were insane enough to tie, let us say, a frying-pan to one of his coat-tails and a child’s kite to the other. The true discipline of the mind is to be effected only by associating those things together which have a real relation of some kind, and the profounder the relation, the more it is based upon the natural constitution of things, and the less it concerns trifling external details, the better will be the order of the intellect. The mnemotechnic art wholly disregards this, and is therefore unsuited for intellectual persons, though it may be of some practical use in ordinary life. A little book on memory, of which many editions have been sold, suggests to men who forget their umbrellas that they ought always to associate the image of an umbrella with that of an open door, so that they could never leave any house without thinking of one. But would it not be preferable to lose two or three guineas annually rather than see a spectral umbrella in every doorway? The same writer suggests an idea which appears even more objectionable. Because we are apt to lose time, we ought, he says, to imagine a skeleton clock-face on the visage of every man we talk with; that is to say, we ought systematically to set about producing in our brains an absurd association of ideas, which is quite closely allied to one of the most common forms of insanity. It is better to forget umbrellas and lose hours than fill our minds with associations of a kind which every disciplined intellect does all it can to get rid of. The rational art of memory is that used in natural science. We remember anatomy and botany because, although the facts they teach are infinitely numerous, they are arranged according to the constructive order of nature. Unless there were a clear relation between the anatomy of one animal and that of others, the memory would refuse to burden itself with the details of their structure. So in the study of languages we learn several languages by perceiving their true structural relations, and remembering these. Association of this kind, and the maintenance of order in the mind, are the only arts of memory compatible with the right government of the intellect. Incongruous, and even superficial associations ought to be systematically discouraged, and we ought to value the negative or rejecting power of the memory. The finest intellects are as remarkable for the ease with which they resist and throw off what does not concern them as for the permanence with which their own truths engrave themselves. They are like clear glass, which fluoric acid etches indelibly, but which comes out of vitriol intact.