MEMMI
174
MEMORY
princesses. He endows them with slender figures,
white and graceful necks, sweet and long profiles,
long drooping eyelashes, pure brows and clear tem-
ples, with that immaterial something which tolerates
in its vicinity only virginal dreams and chaste
thoughts. Whatsoever is too worldly in their grace
he corrects by an ideal but natural atmosphere, by
the familiar and serene charm of his landscapes. A
delicate symmetry lends a mysterious rhj'thm to these
peaceful compositions and dominates them with the
liarmony of unheard music. Angel lute players with
blue and rose-coloured wings seem the expression of
this unutt^red song, the personified voice of the
choir. Grace of figures, nobility and richness of deco-
ration, serenity of landscapes, balancing of groups,
melody of colours, lines, and sentiment all unite to
produce a masterpiece of mystical poetry, pious
romance, and supernatural beauty.
But all these things, it must be repeated, are al- most inexplicalile in the Flemish school, at once the most natural and the most commonplace. These characteristics have their origin elsewhere, and the very legend concerning Memling, the story of a man coming as a stranger to art by a special vocation, is an unhistorical attempt to account for this singular- ity. Mr. James Weale had already conjectured that Memling's name contained the key to the enigma and concealed the clew to the painter's origin; he thought that it was according to a frequent custom of the Middle Ages, the name of a country. As a mat- ter of fact there was a borough called Memelynck near Alkmaar in Holland, and in the neighbourhood of Aschaffenburg in Ciermany there was another called Mumling or Jliimling. For a time it was difficult to decide which of these two was the painter's birthplace, but Pere Dusart's discovery has definitely cut short all uncertainty. The solution of the jjroblem is that Memling was a German from Mainz, as is shown by his exclusively German Christian name, Hans. Before taking up his residence at Bruges he studied art. at Cologne, for northern Europe the home and fatherland of Christian art. Vasari and Guicciardini relate that Memling was the pupil of Roger Van der Weyden, but the only work of Memling's with a trace of Roger's influence is after a Pietii in a church of Cologne. His " Reliquary of St. Ursula " again proves that he lived a long time in that city; the \iews of Basle and Rome are fancifully depicted, whereas in those of Cologne the slightest details of the cathedral then in cour.se of construction, the steeples of the churches of St. Martin and St. Pantaleon are reproduced with a fidelity winch shows that the author had grown up in the familiar shadow of these monuments. Memling's whole work breathes a spirit of poetry rarely found in the fifteenth century save in a few painters of Cologne and Sienna. His favourite themes are the devotions honoured in Cologne, the city of the Magi and of the Eleven Thousand Virgins. The mystical peace and beauty which surrounds his figures, those calm brows and clear temples are not met with prior to him save in certain works of the Rhenish school such as the "Adoration of the Magi" of the great Stephen Lochner or in his "Virgin of the rosebush". This alliance of German spirituality with Flemish technic, this in- fusion of soul, of the spiritual, the immaterial, into the school best able to paint the real, constituted the genius and the role of Memling. Through him the Flemish school was rescued from the shallow natural- ism where for fifty years it had grown barren. Mem- ling's influence was as great as it was beneficial. When we compare the early works of Gerard David, so harsh and brutal, such as the "Justice of Otto" and the "Marriage of Cana" of the Louvre, with those which were later executed under Memling's influence, we can estimate the service which the stranger, the "duitscher Hans", rendered to the country of his adoption. There is no doubt that he owes to it a
Eractical skill which he would not otherwise have had,
ut in return he brought it the spirit which revivified
it. The works of the next generation show this more
clearly; the "Mystical Marriage" of the Museum of
Brussels and the "Deposition " of Antwerp by (Juentin
Metzys. And when we remember that of all the
masters of his country it was Metzys whom Rubens
esteemed most, we can understanfl the importance
of the role played in the destinies of the Flemish school
by the young painter from Aschaffenburg who taught
it poetry and idealism.
Caeiel van .Mandeb. Livre des Prinir,- (!i;(Hi. ,1 fTvivNs (Paris, 1884); Descamps, Vies des !>■ r ' . . , < : 1 7 ; I ; Crowe AND Cavalcaselle, Lesancifti: , ,,iih
nate.s and additions by Ruelens and I'i . . h m, i - l -ir : ■ , \ i i i, r. Etudes d' Art. Ill (1864): Weale, Ha,i.^ M.,„l,,,„ il.-.t,.,,, 1 ku- MENTiN, Les Maftres d'aulrejois (1876J; Kligleh, Handbook of Painting, ed. Crowe (1879); Conway, Early Flemish Artists (1887); Kammerer, MemHns (Bielefeld, 1899); James Weale, Hans Mmnlinc (London, 1901); Wyzewa, Pcintres de jadis el d'aujourd'hui (1903).
Louis Gillbt. Memini, Simone. See Martini, Simone.
Memory (Lat., memoria), is the capability of the mind, to store up conscious processes, and reproduce them later with some degree of fidelity. Strictly speaking, however, a revived conscious process is not remembered, unless it is, at the same time, recognized as something which occurred before. Memory, there- fore, involves a process of recognition. Voluntary reproduction of mental processes is frequently spoken of as recollection, and involuntary, as recall.
Divisions of Memory. — St. Thomas distinguishes two kinds of memory, sensory and intellectual. He excludes, however, from the former the function of merely storing up the mental image; this he assigns to imagination. Sensory memory preserves that which can not be received by the special senses and yet is in- dividual, and therefore does not belong to the intellec- tual memory, which takes cognizance of nothing but the imiversal. For instance, the utility of an oliject and its setting in past time ; by the utility of an object mu-st not be understood any abstract concept of its purpose, but only the sensory experience which all animals acquire, that certain things are beneficial or harmful. Sensory memory is located by St. Thomas in the bodily organism (I, Ixxviii, a. 4). The intel- lectual memory receives and stores up the abstract and universal. Its seat is the passive intellect, a division, or perhaps only an aspect of the faculty of understanding. The complement of the passive in- tellect is the intellectiis agens, which is conceived of as actively working over the data of sense, abstracting from them the universal {species intelligihilis) which they contain and impressing it on the passive intel- lect. St. Thomas argues that there must be an in- tellectual memory, because that which is acted upon must retain the effect of the agent all the more per- fectly in proportion to its own stability. Since the impressions of sense leave lasting traces on the bodily organism, which is subject to decay, — a fortiori the universal must, in some way, be stored up in the passive intellect, which is a spiritual faculty, perma- nent as the soul itself (I, Q., Ixxix, a, 6-7).
This argument assumes that there are cognitive processes specifically different from those of sensation, a doctrine which has received scant recognition in modern psychology until quite recently. The tacit or expressed assumption of many experimental psy- chologists has been the very opposite, viz.: that all our cognitive processes are sensations or sensory com- plexes. Recently, however, the attempt has been made to demonstrate experimentally the existence of abstract thought, totally distinct from mental ima- gery (phantasms). Along with this admission of a difference between sensation and thought, experi- mental psychology is beginning to emphasize the dis- tinction between sensory and intellectual memory.
