Littell's Living Age/Volume 129/Issue 1665/Lord Macaulay's Memory

From The Spectator.

LORD MACAULAY'S MEMORY.

Macaulay, rather than Rogers, ought to have written "The Pleasures of Memory," if those pleasures were to have been so illustrated that the rest of the world could understand what under the most favourable circumstances they really might be. For probably no man who ever lived got such a lasting and inexhaustible fund of delight out of his memory as Lord Macaulay. He began early, and the delight it gave him hardly died before him. Mr. Trevelyan records, in the "Life and Letters" which we elsewhere review, that at eight years of age he got hold of Scott's "Lay" during a call somewhere with his father, and that from that one reading, he was familiar enough with it to repeat canto after canto to his mother when he returned home. And perhaps such feats of memory as the following are even more remarkable, though we will not say that the last of them belongs to the class which, taken individually, produces very exquisite pleasure:—

At one period of his life he was known to say that, if by some miracle of vandalism all copies of "Paradise Lost" and the "Pilgrim's Progress" were destroyed off the face of the earth, he would undertake to reproduce them both from recollection whenever a revival of learning came. In 1813, while waiting in a Cambridge coffee-room for a post-chaise which was to take him to his school, he picked up a county newspaper containing two such specimens of provincial poetical talent as in those days might be read in the corner of any weekly journal. One piece was headed "Reflections of an Exile," while the other was a trumpery parody on the Welsh ballad "Ar hyd y nos," referring to some local anecdote of an ostler whose nose had been bitten off by a filly. He looked them once through, and never gave them a thought for forty years, at the end of which time he repeated them both without missing, or, as far as he knew, changing a single word.

But though such instances of retentiveness as this last cannot in themselves have been the cause of any great individual satisfaction to Lord Macaulay, it seems likely enough that it was the strange power to which this feat of memory points, of remembering the physical collections of words, without any special interest in their meaning,—of remembering them, that is, in great measure from their look, as well as from their sound or sense,—that some of his most pleasurable intellectual efforts proceeded. For instance, this power probably made all the difference to the strain on his memory. If you can remember the words of anything as a picture—just as you remember the pictures on the walls—you have not got to translate, as it were, from one medium (printed words) into another (spoken words) before either catching their drift or, of course, retaining it. Probably this was one of the chief reasons why Lord Macaulay was so rapid as well as rate a reader. According to Mr. Trevelyan, "'he seemed to read through the skin,' said one who had often watched the operation." He skimmed and yet remembered books as fast as any one else could turn the leaves. And if he really both read and remembered through his eyes, as pictures are seen and remembered, this would be, to a certain extent, intelligible. Most people think, even if they do not utter inaudibly, of the sound of at least a large number of the less familiar words before they catch their meaning. For instance, to the present writer it is not the vision of the word "perfunctory," but the conception of its sound which conveys the meaning of the word. Any man who should be able to catch instantaneously the meaning of all the words in a book from the mere shape of its printed letters, would read a great deal faster and remember with a great deal less effort than the man who had to translate the external aspect of a great many words into the notion of their sounds before catching their meaning, and who then remembered them of course, through their sound or their meaning, and not through the photographic impression of the words left on the retina. We suspect that Lord Macaulay's wonderfully rapid reading and amazingly powerful memory were due in great degree to the omission of one of these usually essential links in the process of reading and recalling what has been read. And clearly any such power would be an immense advantage to the memory, as it would give any one who possessed it a fresh hold on the treasures of his memory,—the hold through sight, as well as the hold through sound and meaning. And the account which Lord Macaulay gave his sister Margaret of the causes which made his memory so accurate, looks very much as if it was through visual impressions that his memory kept its chief hold. "I said "—this is the record of her own words in her diary—"that I was surprised at the great accuracy of his information, considering how desultory his reading had been. 'My accuracy as to facts,' he said, 'I owe to a cause which many men would not confess. It is due to my love of castle-building. The past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance.' He then went on to describe the way in which, from his childhood, his imagination had been filled by the study of history. 'With a person of my turn,' he said, 'the minute touches are of as great interest, and perhaps greater, than the most important events. Spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted in gazing vacantly at the shop-windows. As it is, I am no sooner in the streets than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French Revolution. Precision in dating the day or hour in which a man was born or died becomes absolutely necessary. A slight fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance. Pepys' "Diary" formed almost inexhaustible food for my fancy. I seem to know every inch of Whitehall. I go in at Hans Holbein's Gate, and come out through the matted gallery. The conversations which I compose between the great people of the time are long and sufficiently animated; in the style, if not with the merits, of Sir Walter Scott's. The old parts of London which you are sometimes surprised at my knowing so well, those old gates and houses down by the river, have ail played their part in my stories.'" In other words, the hunger of his imagination for accurate data, both as to place and time, made his memory fix on the smallest details of what he read,—it was his imaginative needs, he thought, which gave precision to his memory, even more than his memory to his imagination. That looks very much as if it were through his eyes that his memory worked most powerfully, and if so, the very look of the page and type of the books he read were perhaps as sharply printed on his memory as the real events which the words brought up before him. The extraordinary importance which he seems to have attached to the physique of printed books rather supports the same view.

However this may be, it can be hardly doubted that Lord Macaulay's wonderful memory was at the basis of a great part of his power. There is no more absurd notion than the notion that a vast memory implies a want of balance of mind, and probably an ill-ordered and poor understanding. In Lord Macaulay it certainly was a direct source, not merely of sound judgment, but of humorous resource. His great faculty of vivid generalization, which was so marked that it almost suggests a semi-mechanical process,—appearing to bear to the like judgments of other men the same relation which machine-made lace bears to hand-made lace, so much more rapidly and unerringly are generalizations of a particular class made and registered in his writings,—was obviously due to his wonderful memory and the inferences it suggested. He seemed to contain in himself, in relation to particular departments of knowledge at least, as we have elsewhere noted, something like the standard of a public opinion; and this was, no doubt, because his memory contained, as regarded those departments of knowledge, the accumulation of the chief experiences which form public opinion.

Again, his wonderful memory was a great feeder of his humour, not in the sense of the orator who said that his opponent had trusted to his memory for his wit and to his imagination for his facts, but in a much more legitimate sense. The readers of Lord Macaulay's letters will be struck by the abundance of humour in them. Students of his "History" and his "Essays" would recognize that humxmr as a quality which was always latent, though not always active, in him"; but the somewhat set style into which his eloquence and his arguments fall, and especially the painstaking exhaustiveness of his exposition, give the impression of a much tamer man,—of a man of less impulse and more conventional modes of thought, of a man who cared less to flash his meaning on his readers, and cared more to indoctrinate them,—than Macaulay actually was. In fact, he was, as a young man, full of fun. The fun is not in itself of a very high order. One or two jokes recorded here are indeed excellent. When the Cambridge electioneerer discharged a dead cat full in his face, and then apologizing, said that it was not meant for him, it was intended for Mr. Adeane, Macaulay's reply, "I wish you had intended it for me, and hit Mr. Adeane," was full of that presence of mind and good-natured malice which is of the essence of the best humour. Again, there is true fun in a rhyme which one of his sisters quotes. When they were making up verses on all sorts of extempore themes, and some one had given the subject of an acquaintance who had gone out to the West Indies hoping to make money, but had returned with no change in his fortunes except that the complexions of his daughters had been ruined,—Macaulay struck off this:—

Mr. Walker was sent to Berbice,
By the greatest of statesmen and earls;
He went to bring back yellow boys,
But he only brought back yellow girls.

Still, on the whole, we believe that Macaulay would never have had any unusual fund of humour in him, but for his wonderful memory. The squibs of which he was fond as a young man are not, on the whole, very good. The account of the noPopery expedition of the country clergymen to Cambridge, to vote against some supposed step in the direction of Popery, is as good, perhaps, as any of them, but it is not all like the squibs of Canning or Frere. The following extract from the anti-Papal manifesto which roused the sleepy clergy to the sense of their dangers, with the account of the conventional politeness to individuals by which it was accompanied, is the best part of it:—

"Dear sir, as I know you desire
That the Church should receive due protection,
I humbly presume to require
Your aid at the Cambridge election.

"It has lately been brought to my knowledge,
That the ministers fully design
To suppress each cathedral and college,
And eject every learned divine.
To assist this detestable scheme
Three nuncios from Rome are come over;
They left Calais on Monday by steam,
And landed to dinner at Dover.

"An army of grim Cordeliers,
Well furnished with relics and vermin,
Will follow, Lord Westmoreland fears,
To effect what their chiefs may determine.
Lollard's bower, good authorities say,
Is again fitting up for a prison;
And a wood-merchant told me to-day
'Tis a wonder how faggots have risen.

"The finance scheme of Canning contains
A new Easter-offering tax;
And he means to devote all the gains
To a bounty on thumb-screws and racks.
Your living, so neat and compact—
Pray, don't let the news give you pain!—
Is promised, I know for a fact,
To an olive-faced padre from Spain."

I read, and I felt my heart bleed,
Sore wounded with horror and pity;
So I flew, with all possible speed,
To our Protestant champion's committee.
True gentlemen, kind and well-bred!
No fleering! no distance! no scorn!
They asked after my wife who is dead,
And my children who never were born.

But though that is very fair rattle, it would not have gained Macaulay the reputation for humour which we think he will gain among the ordinary readers of his letters. And we suspect that will be attributable chiefly to the great resources which such humour as he had commanded in consequence of his great memory. Mr. Trevelyan gives a striking account of the crowd of humorous associations which Macaulay and his sisters had accumulated round the quaintnesses of the pedantic, old-fashioned novels of the Grandisonian days, and the delightful irony of Miss Austen's evermemorable stories. The younger members of the family, he says, had partially entered into that life, but somehow, when those who had, as it were, initiated the family into it, disappeared, the charm of it disappeared too, and it no longer became possible to recover the attitude of mind in which the old reminiscences appeared so quaint and so delightfully ludicrous. The truth is, no doubt, that in the enjoyment derived by Macaulay and his sisters from the admirable stiffnesses and pedantries of a bygone day, full and vivid memory was everything. Macaulay could chronicle the number of fainting-fits recorded of each particular person in the silly old novels of the romantic-gallant period. He had calculated, in relation to "Sir Charles Grandison," that Miss Byron's letters must have brought to the post-office of Ashby Canons, and consequently cost her Uncle Selby, a revenue exceeding the annual interest of her fifteen thousand pounds; every little bow and scrape in the book was evidently impressed on his mind, and when he refers in his letters to "the venerable circle" who so much delighted in Miss Byron's epistles, you feel that in fact, though he was not one of it, he was completely Piaster of all the details of its old-fashioned punctiliousness; and this, or something like this, is necessary to give to these quaint reminiscences their full fascination as humour. These reminiscences had, too, evidently become a special tradition in the Macaulay family. They had acquired all sorts of additional flavour from the references to family acquaintances and newer scenes with which the old manners had been associated. It was no longer the mere quaintness of the old books, it was the charm of the association between the old books and the youthful merriment, which threw so much life into this tradition. And all this was due originally, of course, to the wonderful accuracy, tenacity, and faithfulness of the memory which was at the root of all this enjoyment. No one can read Macaulay's life without feeling that a great memory, so far from overbalancing an ordinary mind, supplies it with all kinds of new life, strengthens the judgment, quickens the imagination, and feeds with a hundred streamlets of rich and delightful association any sense of humour which the owner of that memory may boast.