Adventures and Enthusiasms

by E. V. Lucas

Among the marvels of the human machine, memory is, indeed, strangest. The great bewildering fact of memory at all—of the miracle of the brain—is, of course, as far beyond our finite apprehension as the starry heavens. Of this? I never dare to think. But the minor caprices of memory may, fittingly enough, engage our wonder. The lawlessness of our prehensile apparatus, for example—the absurdly unreasoning system of selection of such things as are to be permanent—how explain these? And why should memory be subject also to that downward tendency in life which forces us always to fight if we would save the best? It would have been just as easy, at the start, when the whole affair was in the making, to have given an upward impulse. That was not done, but the memory, at any rate, being all spirit, might have been exempted from the general law. But no; as we grow older, not only do we remember with less and less accuracy, but of what we retain much is inferior to that which once we had but now have lost.

I, for example, who once had long passages not only from the great poets, but also from the less great but often more intimate poets,—such as Matthew Arnold and William Cory, to mention two favourites,—at the tip of the tongue, now have to recite myself to sleep with a Bab Ballad. That piece of nonsense never fails me, but I cannot at this moment give the right sequence of any two of the quatrains of the "Rubáiyát" of Omar Khayyám, although once, and for years, I had the whole poem complete too. I would rather have been left the wistful Persian than Gilbert's "Etiquette," but the jade Memory had other views.

Any prose that I might once have learned naturally faded first, because there was no rhyme or metre to assist retention; but why is it that there is one sentence which, never wholly mine, flits so often before the inward eye? It is in that story of Mr. Kipling's of the mutinous elephant who refused to work because his master was too long absent. This master, one Dheesa (you will remember), having obtained leave for a jaunt, exceeded his term; and the sentence which recurs to me, hazily and hauntingly, often twice a day and usually once, with no apparent reason or provocation, is this: "Dheesa had vagabonded along the roads till he met a marriage procession of his own caste, and drinking, dancing, and tippling, had drifted past all knowledge of the lapse of time." Now, surely, out of all the thousands of books which I have read and more or less dimly remember, it is very strange that this should be almost the only sentence that is photographed on the mind.

Once I knew many psalms: I know them no longer, but I have never forgotten a ridiculous piece of dialogue in a book called "The World of Wit and Humour," which I was studying, on weekdays, at the same time, how many years ago:

"Father, I have spilt the butter. What shall I do?"

"Rub it briskly with a woollen fabric."

"Why?"

"Because friction generates caloric, which volatises the oleaginous particles of the stearine matter."

—And once I knew many psalms.

One of the odd things about what we call loss of memory is that it is catching. How often when one person forgets a name well known to him does his companion, to whom it is equally well known, forget it too. Why is that? The other day I had an excellent example of this curious epidemic. It was necessary for the name of a certain actor—not a star, but a versatile repertory actor of distinction—to be recalled in order that a letter to him might quickly be despatched. I had forgotten his name, but I described him and his methods with sufficient accuracy for every one (there were about six of us) to recognise him. Some of us could even say in what parts we had seen him and compare notes as to his excellence, and yet his name absolutely eluded one and all. Why? We all knew it; why did we unanimously fail to know it then?