Musa, Mihi Causas Memora

—In a recent richly suggestive paper on the Romance of Memory, appearing in The Atlantic, it seems to me that the writer but sparingly touched upon one important province in this great principality of the past. May I, therefore, briefly adventure over its border ? A word on the memory of the emotions.

In the Asphodel Country, before the transient sojourner there (be it for some thousand years, more or less !) is ordered back to earth, he is given a draught from certain forgetful waters. In Dante’s Vision, the newly arrived in Purgatory drink Lethe, but afterwards are refreshed with the live crystal of Eunoë, which yields them back all that is comforting in their recollections of earth. I know a modern spirit who affirms a conviction that perfect spiritual repose would be impossible without the extinction of memory : as, once let in memory, all the passions are potentially present, the joyous and the painful, the exalting and the humiliating alike, amid the stir and antagonism of all which, rest would of necessity be precluded. But this view of the subject ignores the fact that the memories of most human beings readily undergo mutation, or rather transmutation, into something else than their former substance and shape. What they now feel, they easily antedate, and convince themselves and others that they have always maintained the likings or dislikings, the advocacy or the objection, of the present moment. They will even refute, or so juggle, their previous words to the contrary that it becomes of no use to attempt to cite to them their own past opinions. Now, I freely confess that I am not so fortunate in the metamorphose of memory (if this protean facility be regarded as fortunate). I deplorably forget chronological orders, verbal collocations of wit and poesy, localities and landscapes, ways and landmarks, hut not subjective sensations and emotions, either mv own, or, so far as I can obtain a record of it, the tremolo of emotion in other human creatures of my near association. If my attitude toward any individual has suffered a change with the years, I am aware of the change. If my saints are no longer aureoled, I do not forget that they once wore the nimbus ; and per contra, if some now most cherished person did, on first sight and acquaintance, produce an unfavorable impression upon my mind, I am still able to recall that unsparing initial glimpse of demerits either real or fancied. In a world of easy forgetting and of convenient fluctuation of sentiment, these are hard lines ; but I am consoled by the thought that here and there must be others whose temperaments are touched by a like merciless permanence of impression. To these I make my appeal. " Yesterday, ToDay, and Forever,” repeated in a sort of monotonous burden of constancy, might be taken as the cognizance of this order of memory. Those who are its repositories would perhaps maintain, the more retrospect, the less prospect. To them the vitality of a once living past must ever be more vividly felt than the life of a non-existent future. In brief words, there are the natures that are built upon hope, and the natures that find their foundations in memory.

My personal friends sometimes humorously cite me as an instance of one whose face is set to look backwards. I cheerfully acknowledge the defect in mental anatomy; but I as cheerfully assure them that if I continue to look that way, and to look far and keenly enough, I shall doubtless yet see into the future, on the principle that the periplus of the globe brings you to the starting-point again, and also that the symbol of eternity is a circle. How is it that the eldest past and the remotest future seem, to the fancy, to have some meetingpoint, or place of tryst, on that enormous annular stretch ? But truce to these flippant surmisings.

Physicists tell us — and the poets closely follow— that no sound once communicated to the unresting wave of the air, “ no idlest word thou speakest,”no tone of the voice, no merest whisper, ever ceases its wandering. I can believe this, with little stress of the imagination. The phonograph, with all its possibilities of recovering longsilent tones and long-forgotten words, is nothing to the sensitive, hoarding jealousy, to the sharp-relimning power, of this kind of memory ! And not only are tones of voice and words reproduced at will, but also faces, the features, the soul in the eyes, a look,— nay, less than a look, the attempted suppression of meaning, — all, as in an animate picture, flashed upon the marveling eyes of the mind ! Back to the nerve flutters the sense of a touch, of a caress, the motion of the air displaced by the passing of a person ! All these vital details return not merely when summoned as pleasant minor witnesses of a passage long since happily incorporated into the story of life ; they come not only at will, but against the will in instances where friendship has cooled, and neither the name nor the substance thereof is retained. The doors of amity are closed, but they enter, as i Locksley Hall.

Even when all tragedy is absent from the situation ; when, if former friends (now mutual aliens) should meet, there would not be aroused even the interest of mild feud, — even then, in one’s brief solitary revision of the past, this touch of “ ancient kindness ” contrives to lend a sharp even though momentary pang. The power of exercising forgiveness may depend more directly upon the faculty and quality of memory than is commonly supposed : some persons may more easily forgive, because they more readily forget.

Among the tyrannies of memory, there is one which particularly puzzles me. I cannot understand why certain slight incidents, certain unimportant traits of person or manner, should in the after time become as a shorthand symbol, gathering up the whole situation, the entire image and “atmosphere ” of the person remembered. The most distinct representation I am able to form of a friend of mine (no longer living) is upon this wise : hooded and cloaked for a winter walk, I see her at a certain point upon the path ; she is in the act of taking a step forward. When the one step is completed, this mental portrait vanishes instantly, and can he reproduced only in the way I have described, and only to fade again at the same juncture. I have even come to dread this edged incisiveness, this scrupulous circumstantiality of memory ; and I often fall to speculating as to what now happening will be in future recalled with special poignancy. Sometimes such forecast acquires almost the mournful quality of retrospect. I very well know (though I do not know why) that, when a friend of mine turns the leaf of a newspaper and folds it carefully back between thumb and finger, this act will be among the characteristic memories I shall treasure regarding him, and will be fraught with unaccountable and disproportionate pathos, should Memory and I survive him.

Some one of the ancients observes that he has forgotten the things he should like to remember, while he remembers the things he would forget. Some of us have no right to complain of a “ bad memory.” If we have greatly desired to forget some painful phase of experience, and, to this end, have so blinded and drugged the traveler into the past that she can bring us no certain word from beyond the forbidden bourne, what must we expect but that Memory will he equally listless and unfaithful when sent by us to other quarters of her proper ranging-ground? In our manœuvring to forget what we do not wish to remember, discipline overreaches itself, and we are betrayed into forgetting what we should like to remember. And so we are able to confer sympathetically with the ancient just cited.

Speaking of the ancients, of the Asphodel Country, and of Lethe, may I not give a Neo-Greek view of that region and of memory as a perpetuity ?

I SHALL REMEMBER.

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