WONDERS OF MEMORY.
If ‘all great people have great memories,’ as Sir Arthur Helps declares in his delightful book entitled Social Pressure, it by no means follows that all those who are possessed of great memories are ‘great people.’ Many an instance might be cited to show that men of very moderate intellectual capacity may be endowed with a power of memory which is truly prodigious. In addition to this, there are plenty of well-authenticated examples of the extraordinary power of memory displayed even by idiots. In the Memoirs of Mrs Somerville there is a curious account of a most extraordinary verbal memory. ‘There was an idiot in Edinburgh,’ she tells us, ‘of a respectable family who had a remarkable memory. He never failed to go to the kirk on Sunday; and on returning home, could repeat the sermon, saying: “Here the minister coughed; here he stopped to blow his nose.”—During the tour we made in the Highlands,’ she adds, ‘we met with another idiot who knew the Bible so perfectly, that if you asked him where such a verse was to be found, he could tell without hesitation and repeat the chapter.’ These examples are sufficiently remarkable; but what shall be said of the case cited by Archdeacon Fearon in his valuable pamphlet on Mental Vigour? ‘There was in my father’s parish,’ says the archdeacon, ‘a man who could remember the day when every person had been buried in the parish for thirty-five years, and could repeat with unvarying accuracy the name and age of the deceased, with the mourners at the funeral. But he was a complete fool. Out of the line of burials, he had but one idea, and could not give an intelligible reply to a single question, nor be trusted to feed himself.’
These phenomenal instances may be matched by the Sussex farm-labourer George Watson, as we find recorded in Hone’s Table Book. Watson could neither read nor write, yet he was wont to perform wondrous feats of mental calculation, and his memory for events seemed to be almost faultless. ‘But the most extraordinary circumstance,’ says Hone, ‘is the power he possesses of recollecting the events of every day from an early period of his life. Upon being asked what day of the week a given day of the month occurred, he immediately names it, and also mentions where he was and what was the state of the weather. A gentleman who had kept a diary put many questions to him, and his answers were invariably correct.’
Of a similar kind is the memory for which Daniel M‘Cartney has become famous in the United States. The strange story of this man’s achievements is told by Mr Henkle in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. M‘Cartney, in 1869, declared that he could remember the day of the week for any date from January 1827, that is, from the time when he was nine years and four months old—forty-two and a half years. He has often been tested, and, so far as Mr Henkle’s account goes, had not failed to tell his questioner ‘what day it was,’ and to give some information about the weather, and about his own whereabouts and doings on any one of the fifteen thousand or more dates that might be named. When Mr Henkle first met this man of marvellous memory, he was employed in the office of the Honourable T. K. Rukenbrod, editor of the Salem Republican, where nothing better could be found for M‘Cartney to do than ‘turn the wheel of the printing-press on two days of each week.’ On the first formal examination this man underwent, his answers were tested by reference to the file of a newspaper which gave the day of the week along with the date. In one case his statement was disputed, for the day he named was not the same as that given by the paper; but on further inquiry, it was found that the newspaper was wrong, for the printer had made a mistake. Short-hand notes of the conversation were taken at subsequent interviews. The report of these is very curious reading. Take the following as a sample. ‘Question. October 8, 1828? Answer (in two seconds), Wednesday. It was cloudy and drizzled rain. I carried dinner to my father where he was getting out coal.—Question. February 21, 1829? Answer (in two seconds), Saturday. It was cloudy in the morning, and clear in the afternoon; there was a little snow on the ground. An uncle who lived near sold a horse-beast that day for thirty-five dollars.’ And so the conversation ran on for hours, ranging over forty years of M‘Cartney’s personal history. Mr Henkle tells us that if he went over some of the dates again, after a few days’ interval, the answers, although given in different terms, were essentially the same, ‘showing distinctly that he remembered the facts, and not the words previously used.’ M‘Cartney’s memory is not confined to dates and events; he is a rare calculator, can give the cube root of such numbers as 59, 319; or 571, 787, &c.; can repeat some two hundred and fifty hymns, and start about two hundred tunes; has a singularly extensive and accurate knowledge of geography, and never forgets the name of a person he has once seen or read of. With all this singular power of memory, however, he is not a man whose general grasp of mind is at all noteworthy.
The same may be said of scores of men whose one rich gift of memory has brought them into prominence. No one has claimed any high intellectual rank for the renowned ‘Memory Corner Thompson,’ who drew from actual memory, in twenty-two hours, at two sittings, in the presence of two well-known gentlemen, a correct plan of the parish of St James, Westminster, with parts of the parishes of St Marylebone, St Ann, and St Martin; which plan contained every square, street, lane, court, alley, market, church, chapel, and all public buildings, with all stable and other yards, also every public-house in the parish, and the corners of all streets, with all minutiæ, as pumps, posts, trees, houses that project and inject, bow-windows, Carlton House, St James’s Palace, and the interior of the markets, without scale or reference to any plan, book, or paper whatever; who undertook to do the same for the parishes of St Andrew, Holborn, St Giles-in-the-Fields, St Paul’s, Covent Garden, St Mary-le-Strand, St Clement’s, and St George’s; who could tell the corner of any great leading thoroughfare from Hyde Park corner or Oxford Street to St Paul’s; who could ‘take an inventory of a gentleman’s house from attic to ground-floor and write it out afterwards. He did this at Lord Nelson’s at Merton, and at the Duke of Kent’s, in the presence of two noblemen.’
Turning, now, from examples like the foregoing, which have been given to show that a great memory does not argue in all cases any unusual mental power in other directions, let us look at some of the ‘great people’ whose ‘great memories’ illustrate the correctness of Sir Arthur Helps’s dictum. Running over a long list of examples, which the writer has prepared for his own use in the study of this subject, he has been struck with the fact, that the last three or four centuries appear to much greater advantage in this review than any similar period which preceded them. This, after all, is not surprising, when the circumstances of modern life are carefully considered; but it is not in accordance with common opinion. There is a notion abroad that the power of memory has declined since the invention of writing, and especially since the invention of printing and the universal spread of cheap books and newspapers. Nothing could be more mistaken than such a supposition. If we do not nowadays use the memory as the only registry of facts within our reach, we do use the memory even more than the ancients, for the simple reason that our knowledge travels over an immeasurably wider area, we have more to remember, and, as civilisation and culture advance, a good memory becomes more and more needful for the work of life; the general level of intelligence is being raised, and mental power is developed from age to age. In this general advancement and growth, memory has its share.
The verbal memory displayed by the old Greek rhapsodists and bards, or the Icelandic scalds, was undoubtedly remarkable, and is often held up to the envy of these degenerate days. Yet the modern Shah-nama-Khans, Koran Khans, and other singers and reciters of Persia, who ‘will recite for hours together without stammering,’ and the Calmuck national bards, whose songs and recitations ‘sometimes last a whole day,’ cannot surely be a whit behind, if indeed they do not far surpass the prodigies of early ages. We are often reminded of Greek gentlemen who knew their Homer by heart, in the days when Homer occupied the field almost alone and there was little else to learn. But what are their exploits by the side of men like Joseph Justus Scaliger, who ‘committed Homer to memory in twenty-one days, and the whole Greek poets in three months?’ Casaubon says of Scaliger: ‘There was no subject on which any one could desire instruction which he was not capable of giving. He had read nothing which he did not forthwith remember. So extensive and accurate was his acquaintance with languages, that if during his lifetime he had made but this single acquisition, it would have appeared miraculous.’
Since the revival of learning in Europe, there have been scores, yea, hundreds of scholars who have known ‘their Homer’ by heart and a thousand other things besides. Bishop Saunderson, old Isaac Walton tells us, could repeat all the odes of Horace, all Tully’s Offices, and the best part of Juvenal and Persius. Euler the mathematician and Leibnitz the philosopher could recite the Æneid from beginning to end. In their day, Porson, Elmsley, Parr, and Wakefield, held the foremost place as scholars, and all, of course, had rare memories; but the palm must be given to Porson, of whom endless stories are told. Before he went to Eton, he was able to repeat almost the whole of Horace, Virgil, Homer, Cicero, and Livy. When, as a practical joke, a school-fellow slipped the wrong book into Porson’s hand, just as he was about to read and translate, the boy was not disconcerted, but went on to read from his memory, as if nothing had occurred. In later life, his performances approached the miraculous. It would require all our space to give any fair idea of them; for he not only knew all the great Greek poets and prose writers pretty well by heart, but could recite whole plays of Shakspeare, or complete books from Paradise Lost, Pope’s Rape of the Lock, Barrow’s sermons, scenes from Foote, Edgeworth’s Essay on Irish Bulls, scores of pages from Gibbon or Rapin. He is also said to have been able to repeat the whole of the Moral Tale of the Dean of Badajoz, and Smollett’s Roderick Random from the first page to the last.
Gilbert Wakefield’s memory was also of the gigantic order, but it will not bear comparison with Porson’s. There were few passages in Homer or Pindar which he could not recite at a moment’s notice; Virgil and Horace he knew perfectly; and he could recite entire books from the Old and New Testaments without halting or failing in a single verse. There was also John Wyndham Bruce, whose leisure time was devoted to classical studies. His chief favourite was Æschylus, the whole of whose plays he had learnt by heart, including the twelve hundred lines of the Agamemnon collated by Robertellus. He knew his Horace in the same way, and was quite content, until one day he met with an old fellow-student at Bonn, who, when he made a quotation, would mention book, ode, and verse, remarking, that he did not regard any one as knowing Horace properly unless he could do that. Mr Bruce accordingly set to work at Horace again, and was not long before he could name the exact place occupied by a line in any of the famous odes. It would be hard to believe that Athenian lads could beat the English lads of fourteen years and under, of whom Archdeacon Fearon tells us in the pamphlet referred to above. It was the custom in the school to which he went for the boys to repeat at the end of one of the terms all the Latin and Greek poetry they had learnt during the year. The usual quantity for a boy to go in with was from eight to ten thousand lines, and it took about a week to hear them. ‘One boy in my year,’ he says, ‘repeated the enormous quantity of fourteen thousand lines of Homer, Horace, and Virgil. I heard him say it.’
Ease in learning foreign languages is sometimes regarded as a mere matter of memory; while, however, this is not exactly true, it must be allowed, of course, that skilful linguists are endowed with powers of memory beyond the average. Here, also, we find that there are no examples in ancient times that will stand comparison with our great modern linguists. Our modern facilities for travel and study place us at an immense advantage. Crassus, when prætor in Asia, was so familiar with the dialects of Greek, that he was able to try cases and pronounce judgment in any dialect that might chance to be spoken in his presence. ‘Mithridates, king of twenty-two nations, administered their laws in as many languages,’ and could harangue each division of his motley array of soldiers in its own language or dialect.