A Man's Value to Society (10 page)

Consider the task laid upon memory. The activity and fruitfulness of the human mind are immeasurable. Reason does not so much weave thoughts as exhale them. Objects march in caravans through the eye gate and the ear gate, each provoking its own train of thought. And the unconscious processes of the mind are of even greater number. The silent songs that genius hears, the invisible pictures that genius paints, the hidden castles that genius builds--no building of a city without can compare for wonder and beauty and richness with the building processes of the soul within. If some angelic reporter could reduce all man's thoughts to physical volume, how vast the book would be! Thoughts do not go single, but march in armies. Feelings and aspirations move like flocks of caroling songsters. Desires swarm forth from the soul like bees from a hive. The soul is a city through whose gates troop innumerable caravans, bearing treasure within, carrying treasure forth without. No Great Eastern ever carried a cargo that was comparable for vastness and richness with that voyaging forward in the mind.

Now the power and skill of God is nowhere more manifest than in this. He has endowed the mind with full power to carry forward all its joys, its friendships and victories. It is given to man to journey in a single summer over that pathway along which the human race has walked. For happiness and culture the traveler lingers by some Runnymede or Marston Moor; stays by castle or cathedral, remains long in gallery or museum. It is the necessity of his body for the traveler to leave the mountain behind him when he returns to the city in the plain. But it is the privilege of the mind to take up these sights and scenes and carry them away as so much treasure made portable by memory. By a secret process mountains and valleys and palaces are reduced in size, photographed and put away ready to be enlarged to the original proportions.

We have already heard of the inventor who planned an engine that laid its track and took it up again while it journeyed forward. But this mechanical dream is literally fulfilled in memory. Grown old and blind, each Milton may pass before his mind all the panorama of the past, to find the events of childhood more helpful in memory than they were in reality. Looking backward, Longfellow reflected that the paths of childhood had lost their roughness; each way was bordered with flowers; sweet songs were in the air; the old home was more beautiful than king's palaces that had opened to his manhood's touch.

Similarly, Dante, storm-beaten, harassed, weary of selfishness, voyaged and traveled into that foreign land that he called "youth." There he hid himself until the storms were passed. For him memory held so much that was bright and beautiful that it became to him a portfolio of engravings, a gallery of pictures, a palace of many chambers. Hidden therein, earth's troubles became as harmless as hail and snow upon tiled castle roofs. Men wonder oft how statesmen and generals and reformers, oppressed beyond endurance, have borne up under their burdens. This is their secret: they have sheltered themselves in the past, found medicines in memory, bathed themselves in old-time scenes that refreshed and cleansed away life's grime. From the chill of arctic enmity, it is given to the soul through memory to rise above the storm and cold and in a moment to enter the tropic atmosphere of noble friendship, where are fragrance and beauty, perpetual warmth and wealth.

It was a favorite principle with Socrates that the lesser man never comprehends the latent strength in his reason or imagination until he witnesses its skill in the greatest. He implies that the eloquence, art, and skill that crown the children of genius exist in rudimentary form in all men. In order, therefore, to understand memory in its ordinary processes, let us consider its functions in those in whom it is unique. Fortunately scholars in every age have preserved important facts concerning the power of recollection. The classic orators contain repeated reference to traveling singers, who could recite the entire Iliad and Odyssey. In his "Declamations," speaking of the inroads disease had made upon him, Seneca remarks that he could speak two thousand words and names in the order read to him, and that one morning he listened to the reading of two hundred verses of poetry, and in the afternoon recited them in their order and without mistake.

Muretus remarks that the stories of Seneca's memory seemed to him almost incredible, until he witnessed a still more marvelous occurrence. The sum of his statement is that at Padua there dwelt a young Corsican, a brilliant and distinguished student of civil law. Having heard of his marvelous faculty of memory a company of gentlemen requested from him an exhibition of his power. Six Venetian noblemen were judges, though there were many other witnesses of the feat. Muretus dictated words, Latin, Greek, barbaric, disconnected and connected, until he wearied himself and the man who wrote them down, and the audience who were present. Afterward the young man repeated the entire list of words in the same order, then backward, then every other word, then every fifth word, etc., and all without error.

Sir William Hamilton says that the librarian for the Grand Duke of Tuscany read every book and pamphlet in his master's library and took a mental photograph of each page. When asked where a certain passage was to be found, he would name the alcove, shelf, book, page containing the passage in question. Scaliger, the scholar, who has been called the most learned man that ever lived, committed the Iliad to memory in three weeks and mastered all the Greek poets in four months. Ben Jonson could repeat all he had ever written and many volumes he had read, as could Niebuhr, the historian. Macaulay believed that he had never forgotten anything he had ever read, seen, or thought. Coleridge tells of an ignorant family servant, who in moments of unconsciousness through fever, recited passages of Greek and Hebrew. The explanation was that the servant had been long in the family of an old clergyman whose habit it was to read aloud the Bible in the originals.

Physicians have noted instances where a foreigner coming to this country at the age of four or five has completely forgotten his native tongue. Grown old and gray, in moments of unconsciousness through fever, the aged man has talked in the forgotten language of infancy. Our best students of mental philosophy believe that no thought or feeling, no enmity or aspiration, is ever forgotten. The sentiments written on clay harden into granite. Dormant memories are not dead. At a touch they return in their old-time power and vigor. Science tells us that the flight of a bird, the falling of a leaf, the laughter of a child, the vibration of song, changes the whole universe. The boy shying a stone from one tree to another alters the center of gravity for the earth. And if the movements of dead leaves and stones are events unchangeably written down in nature, how much more are living hopes and thoughts. The soul is more sensitive than the thermometer, more delicate than the barometer, and all its processes are registered. Thoughts are events that stain the mind through in fast colors. Did man but know it, no event falls through memory's net.

It helps us to understand the immortality of memory to notice the provision made in nature for revealing hidden facts and forces. To-day chemistry shows us how events done in darkness shall be revealed in light, and the deeds of the closet be proclaimed from the housetop. In olden times princes communicated with each other by messengers. Then it was necessary to guard against the dispatch falling into the hands of the enemy, so between the lines of the apparent message was a dispatch traced in letters as colorless as water. But when the sheet was held before the blazing fire, the secret writing appeared. Thus in the kingdom of the soul, nature has provided for causing events to stand forth from the past. Under stimulus the memory performs the most astonishing feats. Excitement is a fire that causes the dim record to stand forth in clearness.

A distinguished lawyer of an Eastern city relates that while engaged in an argument upon which vast issues depended he suddenly realized that he had forgotten to guard a most important point. In that hour of excitement his faculties became greatly stimulated. Decisions, authorities and precedents long since forgotten began to return to his mind. Dimly outlined at first, they slowly grew plain, until at length he read them with perfect distinctness. Mr. Beecher had a similar experience when he fronted the mob in Liverpool. He said that all events, arguments and appeals that he had ever heard or read or written passed before his mind as oratorical weapons, and standing there he had but to reach forth his hand and seize the weapons as they went smoking by. All public men have had similar experiences--witness the testimony of Pitt, Burke and Wendell Phillips. But what event has such power to restore the records of memory as that secret excitement when the soul is like an ambassador returned home from a foreign mission to report before the throne of God? Thus, giving in its account, what sacred stimulus will fall upon memory!

In every age poets and philosophers have made much of associations as a restorer of dim memories. Porter has a story of a dinner party in which a reference to Benedict Arnold was immediately followed by someone asking the value of the Roman denarius. Reflection shows that the question was directly suggested by the topic under discussion. Benedict Arnold suggested Judas Iscariot and the thirty pieces of silver given him, and therefore the value of the coin which he received as reward. Similarly there is a tradition that Peter's face was clouded with sorrow whenever he heard the crowing of a cock. Bulwer Lytton represents Eugene Aram as scarcely able to restrain a scream of agony when a friend chanced to drive in near the spot where in murderous hate he had struck a fatal blow.

Thus, no sin is ever buried, save as a murderer buries his victim under a layer of thin sand. But let him pass that way, and a skeleton arm starts up and points to heaven and to the evil doer. The philosopher affirms that the "memory of the past can never perish until the tree or the river or the sea" with which the dark memory is associated has been blotted out of existence. Thus, the law of association ever works to bring back the ghastly phantom, to chill the blood and sear the brain. Nothing is ever forgotten. One touch, one sight, one sound, the murmur of the stream, the sound of a distant bell, the barking of a dog in the still evening, the green path in the wood with the sunlight glinting on it, the way of the moon upon the waters, the candlestick of the Bishop for Jean Valjean, the passing of a convict for Dean Maitland, the drop of blood for Donatello--these may, through the events associated therewith, turn the heart to stone and fill the life with a dumb agony of remorse.

Moreover, Shakespeare indicates how conscience in its magisterial aspects has skill for reviving forgotten deeds. In the laboratory scientists take two glasses, each containing a liquid colorless as water and pour them together, when lo! they unite and form a substance blacker than the blackest ink. As the chemical bath brings out the picture that was latent in the photographic plate, so in its higher moods events half-remembered and half-forgotten rise into perfect recollection. History tells us of the Oriental despot who in an hour of revelry commanded his butler to slay a prophet whom he had imprisoned and bring the pale head in upon a charger. Long afterward there came a day when, sitting in the seclusion of his palace, a soldier told those around the banqueting-table the story of a wonder-worker whom he had seen upon his journey. When the banqueters were wondering who this man was, suddenly the king arose pale and trembling and cried out. "I know! It is John the Baptist whom I have beheaded; he is risen from the dead!"

This old-time story tells us that dormant memories are not dead, but are like hibernating serpents that with warmth lift their heads to strike. It fulfills, as has been said, the old-time story of the man groping along the wall until his fingers hit upon a hidden spring, when the concealed door flew open and revealed the hidden skeleton. It tells us that much may be forgotten in the sense of being out of mind, but nothing is forgotten in the sense that it cannot be recalled. Every thought the mind thinks moves forward in character, even as foods long forgotten report themselves in flesh and blood. Memory is a canvas above and the man works beneath it. Every faculty is a brush with which man thinks out his portrait. Here and now, deceived by siren's song, each Macbeth thinks himself better than he is. But the time comes at last when memory cleanses the portrait and causes his face to stand forth ineffaceable in full revelation.

But memory also hath aspects gracious and most inspiring. "I have lived well yesterday," said the poet; "let to-morrow do its worst." To this sentiment the statesman added: "I have done what I could for my fellows, and my memories thereof are more precious than gold and pearls." Thus all they who have loved wisdom and goodness will find their treasures safe in memory's care. Perhaps some precious things do perish out of life. The melody trembling on the chords after the song is sung sinks away into silence. The light lingering in the clouds after the day is done at last dies out in darkness. But as the soul is consciously immortal through personality, it has an unconscious immortality through its tool or teaching, through its example or influence. Time avails not for destroying. God and the soul never forget.

Wisdom comes to all young hearts who as yet have no past, before whose feet lies the stream of life, waiting to bear them into the future, and bids them reflect that maturity, full of successes, is only the place where the tides of youth have emptied their rich treasures. He whose yesterday is full of industry and ambition, full of books and conversation and culture, will find his to-morrow full of worth, happiness and friendship. But he who gives his memory no treasure to be garnered, will find his hopes to be only the mirage in the desert, where burning sands take on the aspect of lake and river. Wisdom comes also to those who in their maturity realize that the morrow is veiled in uncertainty, and their tomb is not far distant. It bids them reflect that their yesterdays are safe, that nothing is forgotten; that no worthy deed has fallen out of life; that yesterday is a refuge from conflict, anxiety and fear.