THE RELATION OF MEMORY TO WILL.

AMID all the varied general interest of the great cause celebre of our day—the Tiehborne Trial—perhaps the most dis- tinct and important was the light thrown by it on people's different ideas of what it was possible to remember and to forget. When the trial was under general discussion, the contrast, or possibly the resemblance, between the powers of oblivion de- manded for the Claimant, and those which A and B were con- scious of possessing, were matters of frequent mention, and most of us gained sourie knowledge of the different distance to which the past recedes in different lives. Hardly any knowledge can be more interesting or more fruitful, whether we consider its bearing on the moral atmosphere of the persons thus differently affected, or on the suggestion so expressively conveyed in the German name for memory,—Eriencrung (the inward faculty). Plutarch, in an attempt to vindicate the possible knowledge of the future, by showing the mysterious element in our knowledge of the past, calls memory "the sight of the things that are invisible, and the hearing of the things that are silent ;" and a thinker, whose great metaphysical achievement was almost avowedly the obliteration from our mental inventory of all those powers which are supposed to deal with the invisible, recalls this description, in his confession that the analysis which reduced every other source of apparently ultimate knowledge to a trick of association was checked when we came to that within us which bore witness to a real past ; and the concession that in this case we do know what we cannot prove, seems to us a pregnant one. lbw we know that these dim pictures on our walls—at once faint and indelible—are the work of another artist than imagination, must, J. S. Mill allows, be a question as vain as how we know that the things around us are real. But it is under its personal aspect that we would speak of memory to-day.

Apart from some such test as the Ticliborne Trial, we are curiously ignorant of the different aspects of the past to different minds. One would have expected, perhaps, that we should discern any idiosyncraey in this region clearly enough. A good memory may be avowed without vanity, and a bad one confessed without shame, while the exigencies of practical life are continually confuting or confirming the claim or the confession. But as for the test at all events, and we suspect as to the self- revelation, it belongs exclusively to the recent past, and concerns rather what we should call the materials for memory than memory. A man would say he had a bad memory if he forgot to call for an important letter at the post-office, but there is nothing in such a fact as this to throw any light on his relation to the past. While he is chafing at his forgetfulness, the words —even the insignificant words—of those who have been for more than a generation unseen among men, may be distinct in his inward ear ; he may see the flower-beds whence he plucked nose- gays with tiny fingers, and feel again the push of a door that taxed his childish strength, on the threshold of a house whose very bricks and mortar have long since been mingled with the dust. And on the other hand, the most unique and one of the longest lives we ever knew—the life richest in material of the knowledge that would have found an eager listener—was obscured by the profusion of detail in the near past ; far off, moved figures known to the historian, but close at hand there were so many of the doings and arrangements of contemporaries, remembered with a really surprising accuracy, that a glimpse at the giants who moved on our sphere when the century was young was hardly discernible through the cobwebs. Of this memory for the distant, we may almost say, in the exaggeration permissible to any short utterance on such a subject, that it differs, with different persons, as a window by day differs from a window

by night. To some persons, hardly anything within the room is so distinct as its prospect. Those far-off hills, that winding road,

that distant indication of busy life attracts their eye from open book, or pressing letter, or picture of some far fairer scene within.

To others, the past is much what the outlook becomes when the candles are lit. A hasty glance in that direction reveals nothing but the reflection of the observer on the window-pane, and if he opens the window, and makes an effort to look out, still nothing is visible but the dim outline of things close at hand. Yet it is likely enough that for all practical exigencies one of the last class may have a good memory, and one of the first a bad one.

In this region our very silence is misleading. We are silent about what we have forgotten. We are silent also about what we remember most profoundly. " Rien ne se ressemble comma le 'leant et la profondeur." We are apt to make mistakes both ways. Sometimes we take the silence of oblivion for the silence of pro- found and overpowering recollection, sometimes our mistake is in the opposite direction ; and it is impossible to say which error is the commonest, for the one occurs when the deep mind judges the shallow, and the other when the shallow mind judges the deep. At all events, this misconception is one of the many causes which hide from us the meaning of memory in one mind and in another, and thus curtain off from us the moral background of every life.

We could be far more nearly just to each other, if we realised that with some persons the past years remain, and with others they depart. Take, for instance, the new light thus thrown on the sin of which, perhaps, we can least bear to believe ourselves guilty. Ingratitude, in the sense of an oppor- tunity deliberately neglected to repay a great benefit, we should hope was a crime as rare as it is repulsive, but in the sense of a half-voluntary oblivion of small benefits, of the importance of which it is possible to take very different views, we do not think it is at all uncommon. Now look at it in the light of this intellectual difference between man and man. You are surprised that So-and-so shows no recollection of the kindly dealings which, having happened at a time when he was nobody, and you were somebody, surely deserved to be remembered. No intellectual explanation can exonerate one who has forgotten a kindness ; still it makes a great difference, surely, if the ungrateful person has forgotten everything else that happened at the same time, wrongs to himself included. To him, the long-ago means something ills an effort to see. To you, it may mean something it is an effort not to see. You, perhaps, are imagining him to see these past actions of yours, and choose to ignore them, while it needs as great an effort on his part to recall them (to return to our first figure) as to look out from a lighted room. And his loss is not pure loss. His short memory may improve his relations with his fellow-men as often as it injures them ;—indeed, men and women being what they are, it is to be feared rather more often. A generous person dismisses the slight of yesterday to oblivion and recalls the kindnesses that enriched his far-off youth, whatever be the medium through which he habitually views the past. But we shall never know the difficulty in either action without some reference to this medium, and by the same principle, we cannot, without such a reference to it, rightly judge him who forgets what he ought to remember, or who remembers what he ought to forget.

Nevertheless, the " ought " remains. The very illustrations which bring home to us the difficulty of discarding or retaining the past, impress on us also its aspect as a part of duty, and while we shall best understand other lives by realising its difficulty, it is a constant sense of its possibility which we

need in order to mould our own. That any one ought

to remember, indeed, and that recollection therefore is, to some extent, a matter of will, we admit every time we blame a child or a servant for forgetting a message, whatever difficulty we may find in carrying out our own view consistently. But can we say that the possibility of remembering at will involves the possi- bility of forgetting at will ? Because we may make a successful effort to resist sleep, does it follow that we may make a successful effort to resist wakefulness ? There is a natural fitness in effort to produce recollection, is there not also a natural fitness in effort to prevent oblivion ? Does not the very desire to forget, imply that we are doomed vividly and permanently to remember ? This question was, in fact, one of the great points of in- terest in the famous trial to which we have alluded. The possibility of obliterating a painful past from the mind was the plea put forward on the part of the person who had, it

was asserted, voluntarily reduced certain parts of his life to a blank. "This possibility," said the Chief Justice, in that

masterly summing-up, which most of its readers must have wished they had made their exclusive source of knowledge of the history, "will not be confirmed by the experience of most people." How many, indeed, must have wondered that any other suggestion had not been made in preference to one that defied all their most vivid experience,—that any one should for- get a part of his youth because it was painfuL You might as well suggest that a speech had been unheard by him because of the loud voice of the speaker. And what is surprising is that, however ardently we may wish that such and such things had not been, it is wonderfully difficult even to desire that they should be forgotten. Whilst the past seems a part of oneself, that clinging to life which belongs to our whole being makes itself manifest in the recoil from oblivion, even with regard to what we would so gladly have avoided altogether.

Oblivion is near enough ; we approach that time, to borrow the fine, though rather confused, image of Locke, when our memory is to resemble the tombs to which we are hastening, in which, though the marble and brass remain, "yet the inscriptions are effaced, and the imagery withers away." We will not go half-way to meet the chill shadow ; even pain is less an object of dread than the loss of something that has become a part of our intellectual being.

It is true, there is in the effort to forget, something that seems a sort of intellectual suicide. Nevertheless, there is a sense in which forgetting, we believe, is as much of a duty as re- membering. There is such a mental attitude, however

,difficult it be to describe, and though it be impossible to give it a single name, as turning our back on the past, or

on part of the past. Duty has no more despotic claim on any part of our being than on that faculty which surrenders its possessions to oblivion. Doubtless it is impossible to put into words the kind of effort a man makes when he wills to do some- thing which will, apparently, has no tendency to achieve. Or rather, perhaps, the effort to move the will is a thing indescribable in words. How can I make myself cease to wish what I do wish?

—It must be possible, for it is sometimes the demand of con- science. The past must remain, but we may open the door to some- thing that hides it. The well-known and often repeated con- demnation of the Bourbons,—that they had learnt nothing and forgotten nothing, commemorates the general impression, which we believe to be a profoundly true one, that a man must forget in order to remember. There are some things in the history of every man which he must cease to contemplate, in order to see any- thing else. We remember hearing the biography of one eminent lawyer by another criticised by a third as rendered nugatory by the -constant reminder, "I have been very much ill-used by him." The biographer needed to forget one fact about his hero, in order to state clearly anything else about him. The necessity is seen most clearly in the lives of the great, but it is common to them and their humblest fellow-men.

We believe that hardly anything would do more to open springs of sympathy, and close those of bitterness, than the recognition of our responsibility for what we remember. That it should cease to be true that,—

" Each day brings its petty dust,

Our soon-choked hearts to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will ;"

—this, we believe, would bring about such a transformation of the moral nature as would resemble, or rather as would supply, new motives for all strenuous action, new dissuasion from all useless thought. It would be something like choosing from out the whole -circle of our acquaintance the wisest and best to be our daily com- panions, and so occupying our attention with their large and fruitful interests, that all that was small, or futile, or bitter should, under this beneficent encroachment, wither away of itself.