THE IDEAL MEMORY.
THE accounts we have recently published of the late Mr. Bidder's extraordinary power of visualising a memory, so as to obtain an extraordinary amount of extra confidence in the trustworthiness of its asseverations, have drawn out from other sources curious records of power of a closely related kind, and especially from a country contemporary an account of a Roch- dale Dissenting minister of the last century—the Rev. Thomas Threlkeld—who could, as it is stated, on apparently very good authority, at once recite any text in the English Bible, when the book, chapter, and verse were named to him ; and who had a profound and critical knowledge of nine or ten distinct lan- guages, and a fair knowledge of no less than seventeen, without counting distinct dialects. One passage in this account of Mr. Threlkeld is very interesting as illustrating the disadvantages of a great memory. It is said that "the most distinguishing excellence of Mr. Threlkeld's memory lay in biography. He had long collected all the dates he could, not only concerning persons mentioned in history, but of every one of whom he could learn any facts. He had a passion for acquiring dates of events. To know when a person was born or married was a source of gratification to him, apart from the importance or otherwise of the person. He revelled in these small-beer chronicles,' and was always happy in the acquisition of this minute knowledge. :His taste for in- quiries of this sort must sometimes have been mistaken for a desire to pry into family affairs, by those unable to conceive of the pleasure to be derived from a simple knowledge of facts." And again, it is added, "with all his prodigious knowledge, Threlkeld never made any contribution to literature ; his power served no higher purpose than to excite the astonishment and admiration of a small circle of friends." * And no wonder. Mr. Threlkeld's memory, so far from being a memory of the ideally advantageous kind, was one of a kind most likely to overwhelm him with the mere rubble of disconnected incidents. And the somewhat melancholy story of this huge and rather useless faculty,—this megatherion of a memory, which contributed nothing to the intellectual capital of the world,—directly raises the question what an ideal memory should be, what it should assist its owner to remember, and what (if we may be excusedthe paradox) to forget. For though it seems a paradox to speak of a good memory helping you to forget anything whatever, there is no more real paradox in it than in saying that a great imagination helps its owner to ignore those details which do not contribute to the effect he has in view, or that unusually keen sight helps its owner to be absolutely blind to features in the landscape which have no bearing on his purpose in gazing at it. The real use of a great memory,—at least, after the powers of the mind are fully defined and matured,—is to assist in 'the elaboration of those imaginative visions, or those intellectual judgments, or those illustrative evidences, or those mord or spiritual beliefs, or those human affections which will add most to the stock of beauty and truth and intellectual and moral power at the disposal of the rememberer. A great proportion of the fact that comes within every man's obser- • Bolorlof s Journal, for January 25th, 1872.
vation in life is, for his purpose, useless. To be obliged to remember, for instance, what one had had for breakfast and lunch and dinner and tea on every day of one's life, how many mouthfuls one had taken, how the food was dressed, and what sort of dishes it had come up in, would be not an advantage, but a curse to any man. Just conceive a man compelled by the morbid activity of his memory to recall all the puddles he had ever passed in his life, or all the black- beetles and all the centipedes and all the carrion and all the dust-heaps which he had ever beheld, or all the oaths and re- pulsive words which had ever entered his ears, and you would say that such a man would be almost glad to compound for his relief from so oppressive a fate by parting with his memory altogether. And though a man whose memory ranges with harmless satisfac- tion over all the parish registers he had ever examined, is not exactly in such a miserable position as this, yet doubtless he is mentally and morally oppressed by the weight of his own memory; his memory is for most purposes a rubbish-heap, and only for very few purposes indeed, a treasure to his neighbourhood, a sort of walking dictionary of local dates.
An ideal memory should be a memory of which the leading principles, the guiding lines, are to be found in the strongest of the other faculties of the owner's mind, and should be strong in proportion to the strength of those other faculties. Thus a man with a great linguistic faculty should be able to remember all that bears upon the genius of language; one with a great gift for music should have a memory which recalls to him in a moment all the blended tones and expressive melodies which enter into the composition of particular strands of feeling. A great mathe- matician should, like Mr. Bidder, have a memory that enabled him to see at a glance the conditions of a problem which others could study only on paper; or if he were one who could add to the theory of his science, he should have a memory which would help him to range, in a moment, over all the most analogous and all the most contrasted methods of dealing with problems at all approaching in nature to that to which he was directing his powers. Again, all men and women, in proportion to the activity of their affections, should have memories tenacious of the facts which bear in any way on the happiness of those they love. In a word, the ideal memory for any man would be one which was strong in proportion to his other intellectual and spiritual powers, so that it might be guided by ideal clues, and contribute to the culture and satisfaction of the higher nature to which it belonged. A novelist should have a memory which treasured up in the same compart- ment all the traits by which men express the same class of aims and hopes and passions ; and an orator should have a memory which always supplied him with the most persuasive and effective modes of expounding the convictions he had at heart. But nothing can really be much more impeding than a great memory which gathers up all the scraps of mere external detail, in relation to persons of whose inner life and character the owner has no real conception, and whom he could not really serve, perhaps, even if he had. That is like the memory with which we are all plagued at times, when a fragment of rhyme goes round and round like a mill-wheel in one's head, till the interior jingle becomes far more intolerable than the perpetual sound of a baby's rattle, or of the street-organ under one's windows.
Unless memory be to some extent a sieve,—unless it drops its hold of irrelevant facts, while fastening its hold on those which are relevant to the stage of being in which we are,—a great memory is of no more use than a vast power of material acquisition is to a man who had no use for wealth, and no pleasure in it. To a certain extent, no doubt, to a young mind, which does not know the direction of its own power, an omnivorous memory might be of use, as pro- viding a rich general field of experience from which ulti- mately some particular section will be selected for special development. But where no other power of mind of any value ultimately shows itself, or where it shows itself without any special concentration of the activity of memory on that particular field, a great memory is almost as likely to be a mischief as a good. Thus it is conceivable enough that a good man might have a memory which was nothing in the world so much as a source of temptation to him,—a vindictive memory, which insisted on recounting all the details of injuries he desired nothing so much as to forgive and forget,—or a tainting memory, which insisted on bringing back to him the foulest experiences of his life. It certainly seems as if some historians, of otherwise excellent judgment, were oppressed by a memory which overloads their minds and their pages with irrelevant minutire ; and as if some poets of great imaginative power were oppressed by a memory of disturbing associations, over which they tumble at given intervals almost as if they had deliberately piled up obstructions in their own way. An ideal memory is a memory whose principle of life is not in mere ex- perience, but in the selective faculties which so sort experience as to make it contribute to a great intellectual, or moral, or spiritual end. It is a storehouse of illustrations for the higher mind, not a lumber-room of obsolete furniture, nor even a curiosity-shop of antiquarian taste.
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