The case of the soldier in the Keighley Hospital who has lost his memory in
the war and has been identified by rival families as a Scotchman, a
Yorkshireman, and so on is one of the most singular personal incidents of
the war. On the face of it it would seem impossible that a mother should
not know her own son, or a brother his brother. Yet in this case it is
clear that some of the claimants are mistaken. The incident is not, of
course, without precedent. The most notorious case of the sort was that of
Arthur Orton, the impudent Tichborne claimant, whose strongest card in his
imposture was that Lady Tichborne believed him to be her long-lost son. In
that case, no doubt, the maternal passion was the source of a credulity
that blinded the old lady to the flagrant evidence of the fraud.
But, generally speaking, our memory of other faces is extremely vague and
elusive. I have just come in from a walk with a friend of mine whom I have
known intimately for many years. Yet for the life of me I could not at this
moment tell you the colour of his eyes, nor could I give a reasonable
account of his nose or of the shape of his face. I have a general sense of
his appearance, but no absolute knowledge of the details, and if he were to
meet me to-morrow with a blank stare and a shaven upper lip I should pass
him without a thought of recognition.
Memory, in fact, is largely reciprocal, and when one of the parties has
lost his power of response the key is gone. If the lock won't yield to the
key, you are satisfied that the key is the wrong one, no matter how much it
looks like the right one. I think I could tell my dog from a thousand other
dogs; but if the creature were to lose his memory and to pass me in the
street without answering my call, I should pass on, simply observing that
he bore a remarkable likeness to my animal.
Most of us, I suppose, have experienced in a momentary and partial degree a
sudden stoppage of the apparatus of memory. You are asked, let us say, to
spell "parallelogram." In an ordinary way you could do it on your head or
in your sleep; but the sudden demand gives you a mental jerk that makes the
wretched word a hopeless chaos of r's and l's, and the more you try to sort
them out the less convincing do they seem. Or walking with a friend you
meet at a turn in the street that excellent woman, Mrs. Orpington-Smith.
You know her as well as you know your own mother, but the fact that you
have got to introduce her by her name forthwith sends her name flying into
space. The passionate attempt to capture it before it escapes only makes
its escape more certain, and you are reduced to the pitiful expedient of
mumbling something that is inaudible.
The worst experience of a lapse of memory that ever came to me was in the
midst of a speech which I had to make before a large gathering in a London
hall. I had got to the middle of what I had to say when it seemed to me
that the whole machine of the mind suddenly ceased to work. It was as
though an immense loneliness descended on me. I saw the audience before me,
but apart from vision I seemed bereft of all my faculties. If I had in that
instant been asked for my name I am doubtful whether I could have got
anywhere near it. Happily some one in a front row, thinking I was pausing
for a word, threw out a suggestion. It was like magic. I felt the machine
of memory start again with an almost audible "puff, puff," and I went on to
the end quite comfortably. The pause had seemed terribly long to me, but I
was surprised afterwards to find that it had been so brief as to be
generally unnoticed or regarded as an artful way of emphasising a point. I
let it go at that, but I knew myself that in that moment I had lost my
memory.
Even distinguished and expert orators have been known to suffer from this
absolute lapse of memory. The Rosebery incident--was it in the Chesterfield
speech?--is perhaps the best known, but I once heard Mr. Redmond, the
calmest and most assured of speakers, come to an _impasse_ in the House of
Commons that held him up literally for minutes.
We are creatures of memory, and when, as in the Keighley case, memory is
gone personality itself has gone. Nothing is left but the empty envelope.
The more fundamental functions of memory, the habits of respiration, of
walking and physical movement, of mastication, and so on, remain. The
Keighley man still eats and walks with all the knowledge of a lifetime. He
probably preserves his taste for tobacco. But these things have nothing to
do with personality. That is the product of the myriad mental impressions
that you have stored up in your pilgrimage. There is not a moment in your
life that is not charged with the significance of memory. You cannot hear
the blackbird singing in the low bough in the evening without the secret
music of summer eves long past being stirred within you. It is that
response of the inner harp of memory that gives the song its beauty. And so
everything we do and see and hear is touched with a thousand influences
which we cannot catalogue, but which constitute our veritable selves. An
old hymn tune, or an old song, a turn of phrase, a scent in the garden, a
tone of voice, a curve in the path--everything comes to us weighted with
its own treasures of memory, bitter or sweet, but always significant.
It is a mistake to suppose that memory is merely a capacity to remember
facts. In that respect there is the widest diversity of experience.
Macaulay could recite _Paradise Lost_, while Rossetti was a little doubtful
whether the sun went round the earth or the earth round the sun. I once met
an American elocutionist who could recite ten of Shakespeare's plays, and
he showed me the wonderful system of mnemonics by which he achieved the
miracle. But he was a mere recording machine--a dull fellow. The true
argosy of memory is not facts, but a perfume compounded of all the sunsets
we have ever seen, all the joys and friendships, pleasures and sorrows we
have ever known, all the emotions we have felt, all the brave and mean
things we have done, all the broken hopes we have suffered. To have lost
that argosy is to be dead, no matter how healthy an appetite we retain.