Part 7

For intellect weighs light as punk against the gold of character. Should God give us to choose between goodness and genius, we may well say, "Give genius to Lucifer, let mine be the better part." Intellect is cold as the ice-palace in Quebec. Heart-broken and weary-worn by life's battle, men draw near to some great-hearted men, as pilgrims crowd close to the winter's fire. Men neither draw their chairs close around a block of ice, nor about a brilliant intellect. Our quarrel with the foolish scientist is that he makes God out as infinite brain. We rejoice at the revelation of Christ, because He portrays God as heart and not genius.

God be thanked for great thoughts, but a thousand times more, God be praised for good thoughts! They are fuel for the fires of enthusiasm. They are rudders that guide us heavenward. They are seeds for great harvests of joy. They fulfill the tale of the fairies who in the night while men slept bridged chasms, builded palaces, laid out streets and lined them with homes, built the city around with walls. For every thought is a builder, every purpose a mansion, and every affection a carpenter. As the builders of the Cologne Cathedral were guided by the plan and pattern of Von Rile, so man's thoughts are builded after that matchless model, Jesus Christ. And while our thoughts work, His thoughts work, also adding beauty to the soul's strength. In the olden tale the artist pupil through very weariness fell asleep before the picture that disappointed him. While he slept his master stole into the room, and with a few swift touches corrected the errors and brought out the lines of lustrous beauty, kindling new hope within the boy's heart. And there are unexpected providences in life, strange influences, interventions and voices in the night. These events over which we have no control, these thoughts of the Master above, shape us not less than the thoughts that build from within. It seems that not one, but two are working upon the soul's structure. As one day in the presence of his master Michael Angelo pulled down the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, and the workmen cleared away the ropes and plaster and litter, and looking up men saw the faces of angels and seraphs, with their lustrous and immortal beauty, so some glad day will that angel named Death pull down life's scaffolding and set forever in the sunlight that structure built of thoughts, the stately mansion reared in the mind, the building not made with hands, the character, eternal in the heavens.

THE MORAL USES OF MEMORY

"Without memory, man is a perpetual infant."--Locke.

"The memory plays a great part in ranking men. Quintilian reckoned it the measure of genius. The poets represented the muses as the daughters of memory."--Emerson.

"Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out."--Richter.

"A land of promise, a land of memory, A land of promise flowing with the milk And honey of delicious memories." --Tennyson.

"I have a room wherein no one enters save I myself alone; There sits a blessed memory on a throne. There my life centers." --C.G. Rosetti.

THE MORAL USES OF MEMORY

The soul is a monarch whose rule includes three realms. Its throne is in the present, but its scepter extends backward over yesterday and forward over to-morrow. The divinity that presides over the past is memory; to-day is ruled by reason, to-morrow is under the regency of hope. In every age memory has been an unpopular goddess. The poet Byron pictures this divinity as sitting sorrowing midst mouldering ruins and withering leaves. But the orators unveil the future as a tropic realm, magical, mysterious and surpassingly rich. The temple where hope is worshiped is always crowded; her shrines are never without gifts of flowers and sweet songs.

But at length has come a day when man perceives that the vast treasure to which the present has fallen heir was bequeathed by that friend called yesterday. The soul increases in knowledge and culture, because as it passes through life's rich fields memory plucks the ripe treasure on either hand, leaving behind no golden sheaf. Philosophy, therefore, opposes that form of poetry that portrays yesterday by the falling tower, the yellow leaf, the setting sun. Memory is a gallery holding pictures of the past. Memory is a library holding wisdom for to-morrow's emergencies. Memory is a banqueting-hall on whose walls are the shields of vanquished enemies. Memory is a granary holding bread for to-morrow's hunger, seed for to-morrow's sowing. That man alone has a great to-morrow who has back of him a multitude of great yesterdays.

Aristotle used memory as a measure of genius. He believed that every great man was possessed of a great memory in his own department. He was the great artist whose mind searched out and whose memory retained the beauty of each sweet child, the loveliness of each maiden and mother. He was the great scientist who remembered all the facts, forgot no exception, and grouped all under laws. The great orator was he whose memory stood ready to furnish all truths gleaned from books and conversation, from travel and experience--weapons these with which the orator faces his hearers in a noble cause, controls and conquers them.

After driving through Windsor Park, Doré, the artist, recognized his debt to memory by observing that he could recall every tree he had passed, and draw each shrub from memory. We are indebted to the mechanical genius of Watt for the steam engine; but, before beginning his work, the inventive faculty asked memory to bring forward all objects, forces and facts suggested by and relating to that steaming tea kettle. Genius cannot create without material upon which to work. It is given to the eye and the ear and the reason to obtain the facts; memory stores these treasures away until they are needed; and, selecting therefrom, the inventive faculty fashions physical things into tools, beautiful things into pictures, ideas into intellectual philosophies, morals into ethical systems. The architect is helpless unless he remembers where are the quarries and what their kinds; where the marbles and what their colors; where the forests and what their trees.

Thus all the creative minds, from Phidias to Shakespeare, have united strength of memory with fertility of invention. As the Gobelin tapestry, depicting the siege of Troy, is woven out of myriads of tinted threads, so each Hamlet and each "In Memoriam" is an intellectual texture woven out of ideas and aspirations furnished by memory. Indeed, without this faculty there could be no knowledge or culture. Destroy memory and man would remain a perpetual infant. Because the mind carries forward each new idea and experience, there comes a day when the youth stands forth a master in his chosen craft or profession. It is memory that unifies man's life and thought, and binds all his experiences into one bundle.

In a large sense civilization itself is a kind of racial memory. Moving backward toward the dawn of history, we come to a time when man stood forth as a savage, his house a cave, his clothes a leather girdle, his food locusts and berries. But to-day he is surrounded by home, and books and pictures, by looms and trains and ships. Now yesterday was the friend that gave man all this rich treasure. We pluck clusters from vines other generations planted. We ride in trains and ships other thinkers invented. We admire pictures and statues other hands painted and carved. Our happiness is through laws and institutions for which other multitudes died. We sing songs that the past did write, and speak a language that generations long dead did fashion.

When De Tocqueville visited our country, he journeyed westward until he stood upon the very frontier of civilization. Before him lay the forests and prairies, stretching for thousands of miles toward the setting sun. But what impressed him most deeply was the civilization behind him, reaching to the Atlantic--a civilization including towns and villages, with free institutions, with schoolroom and church and library. With joy he reflected that the mental and moral harvests behind him were sufficient to sow the vast unconquered land with treasure. Thus each to-day is a frontier line upon which the soul stands. It is the necessity of life for man to journey backward into the past for food and seed with which to sow the unconquered future. For each individual yesterday holds the beginnings of art and architecture. Yesterday holds the beginnings of reform and philanthropy. Yesterday contains the rise and victory of freedom. Yesterday holds the first schoolroom and college and library. Yesterday holds the cross and all its victories over ignorance and sin. Yesterday is a river pouring its rich floods forward, lending majesty and momentum to all man's enterprises. Yesterday is a temple whose high domes and wide walls and flaming altars other hands and hearts have built. For the individual, memory is a granary for mental treasure; and, for the race, civilization is a kind of social memory.

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.