Memory and Forgetfulness.
by C. D. Olive, M.A.
Volume 11, 1900, pgs. 149-159
". . . in twenty-four years' teaching I have not had more than two such children, but there are many--very many--who develop quite early a fondness for a sort of infantile Nervana,--a condition of bodily and intellectual quiescence, in which the subject sits happily still in school, with never so interesting lesson going on, dreaming peacefully of things altogether irrelevant, or of nothing at all."
All of you, I think, must have noticed how much more retentive the memory is in childhood than at any later age: how quickly mere infants learn poetry, for example, and enjoy the learning of it; but how difficult it is for most of us who are grown up to remember perfectly even a few verses.
It has been said that the reason is that in childhood the brain is like a clean piece of blotting paper, unmarked by any impressions, and the first impressions are without difficulty reproduced; as, by holding the blotting paper up to the light, we can read the first letter or other writing that has been blotted. But each fresh use of the blotting paper makes it more difficult to read the message of the ink absorbed by it, and similarly, each fresh series of impressions printed on the brain makes it more difficult to recall previous impressions in their order accurately. [This is not, of course, a scientific explanation of Memory--it is perhaps no more than an analogy.]
And, for this reason, it is so important that the child's mind should be stored with good and profitable and pleasurable recollections: that the child's brain, while most impressionable and as yet unimpressed, should receive, in so far as may be possible, only such impressions as are healthy and will be useful and productive of happiness in later life.
And here at the outset, as we observe the very dawn of thought, we are struck by one phase of Memory--its capriciousness. Some things that a child learns in infancy, it never forgets; others seem to pass away completely, as though the impressions on the brain were absolutely effaced so soon as the exciting cause has disappeared. For example, how quickly a child forgets a language, learnt in infancy and spoken glibly perhaps in childhood for years, if he passes to another country or loses the companions who have spoken this particular language. I have sometimes had boys come to my school who have been brought up in France, or among French-speaking people--up to the age of five or six bi-lingual, or perhaps more voluble in French--and their parents have told me triumphantly, "You will find him very good at French; he spoke it better than English till he was five or six": and strange to say, more often than not, I have found such boys, if they have ceased to talk French for six months before coming to school, have forgotten it all, and are not one whit more quick to learn it again than boys beginning for the first time. (Perhaps this is sometimes as well, considering the accent of some nurses, French-speaking, but not French.)
And on the other hand, how often we find children whose lives are made miserable by the memory of silly tales told them in their infancy! Such children are afraid to pass through a field of harmless cows through terror of their horns; or afraid to enter a dark room because of ghosts; or have other sinister fears, which are sometimes no doubt congenital and inherited, but which may more often, I believe, be traced to the influence of some silly timorous adult who communicates his or her own fears to the little one who should have protected from such unnecessary terrors. I myself remember well and vividly spending day after day in miserable apprehension during the hot summer of 1858, when Donati's comet was flaming across one third of the visible sky, because some thoughtless student of the stars had told me that the world would very likely be destroyed by a comet.
And because the Memory is so much more retentive in childhood than at any later period, it is all-important that children should be taught young certain arts which, at a later age, are acquired slowly and not without pain and grief, perhaps never perfectly. And first and foremost, I believe very strongly that children should be taught, when quite young, the art of reading. It has become the fashion of late years to defer teaching a child to read until the age of seven, eight, or even nine, instead of beginning at three, four, or five as was the custom a generation ago. And the delay I believe to be a most serious mistake. Sometimes the reason given for it is health. "The child," it is said, "is not strong enough to learn." Sometimes the child seems strong enough, but his parents wish him to be stronger still--or the very strongest--to live out of doors entirely till he goes to school, and then, they say, "with a body bursting with healthiness--with an unclouded brain, an untaxed memory--he will learn fast enough!" My experience, which is not a very narrow one, is that such boys, when they do begin, do not learn fast enough--that, indeed, they find it very hard to learn anything at all; and never, so far as my experience goes, do they succeed in making up the time that has been lost. And, meanwhile, it too often happens that the brain has not remained unused or unclouded: for the brain is a self-acting machine that in childhood, at any rate, loves to work; and, too often, those who are taught nothing while young, in order that they may save their memories and grow so strong in mind and body, do learn, unconsciously perhaps, and certainly unknown to parents and guardians, things which they had better not have learnt; if nothing worse, they are apt, like the late Laureate, when he lost his train at Coventry, to have "with grooms and porters on the bridge," and learn to loaf. [from Godiva, by Tennyson]
Of children who are certified by doctors as too delicate to learn anything at all, I speak with some diffidence through fear of seeming to be disrespectful to members of perhaps the noblest profession. But a closer and more constant intimacy with children than doctors, as a rule, enjoy, has led me to the belief in every case of this kind that has come under my notice, and they are not a few, that the not teaching anything has been a great mistake. Delicate boys are perhaps better looked after than the strong boys, who learn nothing that they may become physically stronger: they may not run the same risks of learning what should not be learnt too soon, but they too often hear their parents descant (with a kind of special pride) on their own extraordinary delicacy, and this they invariably remember; they learn their own symptoms: they learn at an abnormally early age the meaning of those dread words "thermometer" and "temperature," which does them more harm than the exertion of learning to read would do; and they become miserable from lack of healthy occupation, morbid from self-consciousness and introspection.
It used to be the custom to teach children when quite young (1) to count and say the multiplication tables; (2) to know certain dates in history, on the supposition, as before, that these arts are necessary and that they are acquired with less effort and retained by the memory with more accuracy when they are acquired in quite early youth. The custom was a very good one, and the supposition on which it rested quite correct. But, for some years past, a dead sot has been made by new educationists against the poor old multiplication table and all historical dates; a dead sot that is rather curious and amusing (when it does not irritate). It is based apparently on the assumption that dates and tables are not only unnecessary but positively harmful to the child's general intelligence, if not to the special faculty of Memory--while if you are bent on having dates and tables, you can pick them up with perfect ease in later life.
It is only, I imagine, a pure idealist who believes, in spite of much evidence to the contrary, that the millennium with the disappearance of all need for money is already close upon us, who would deny that a sound working knowledge of the multiplication tables is absolutely necessary for safe conduct through the intricacies of life along the high-ways and by-ways of housekeeping, to say nothing of home and foreign travel. Well, my experience is, that if a boy does not know his multiplication table till he is eight or nine (and many boys now do not) he learns it afterwards with great difficulty; if he does not know it by the time he is ten or eleven (and some boys now do not), it is doubtful whether he will ever know it accurately, and use it automatically without effort. Between six and eight a child can learn his multiplication table without any serious effort. He will begin, of course, in the concrete with an abacus, or better still, with toy bricks, beans, or shells, and then, when he can write (which he ought to be able to do by seven), he can build up his tables one by one on slate or paper. To know them accurately and usefully will require much practice and some conscious effort, but, at this early age, not much effort, far less than if the learning be delayed two years or more.
As to dates, they are not so important from a utilitarian point of view; but for the full or complete enjoyment of some of the greatest pleasures of life, how useful, how indispensable! We cannot properly enjoy old buildings, pictures, or most books that are worth reading, without some knowledge of history, and history without dates is like a picture without perspective, or worse--it is a veritable chaos.
This 'never-learn-a-date' fashion came in when I was a boy at Clifton College, and I well remember how the then headmaster--now the Bishop of Hereford--a man who has been in the forefront of reform of every kind all through his life, set his face, with the grim smile peculiar to him, against the fashion. "Learn your dates, man!" he would say, "learn your dates! they are invaluable pegs to hang your facts upon." And experience certainly tends to show that, if children do not begin by learning the most important dates of the world's history when they are quite young, they do not, as a rule, pick them up accurately afterwards, that is, they do not possess a well-defined outline of things as they have happened, with the chief corners and turning-points marked as they should be, each in its proper place, with the indelible ink of a good memory.
There are three kinds of memory--to quote Miss Rossi, whom some of you may have had the pleasure of hearing here, in Wimbledon: "The memory of the eye, the memory of the ear, and the memory of the understanding." Things are naturally best remembered by all three working together, or at any rate, by a combination of the last working with either of the other two. The objectors to dates and multiplication tables sometimes base their objections on the assertion that both always have been and are still always taught without the understanding, simply and entirely by rote. This may have been sometimes the case in past years, it may sometimes be the case now, but that it is a general truth or even half truth, is an assertion that is incorrect and inadmissible.
And even if it were quite true? The risk of injury to the intelligence by making a child learn by heart what he does not understand, is less than the risk of loss, not only of knowledge but of brain power, by never setting him to learn anything unless it be certain that he understands it. The modern educational war-cry of "no learning by rote," has produced a wide-spread crop of inaccuracy and want of thoroughness that is much to be deplored. For example: I not very long ago questioned a class of about ten boys on a proposition of Euclid, that had been lately learnt. The proposition had evidently been well explained to them, and most of them seemed quite to follow and understand the chain of reasoning, when once started; but not only could no boy in the whole class begin at the beginning with a clean black-board and go through the proposition correctly, but not one boy could give the correct answer to the question, "What are you going to prove?" because the young and enthusiastic master, who had taught them, in his eagerness and determination to avoid the sin of teaching Euclid by rote, had of set purpose and deliberately neglected the precaution of making the whole class learn the enuntiation of the proposition by heart. I would not make a fetich of verbal accuracy, but verbal accuracy--like symbolism in other spheres of thought--does no harm to the intellectually strong, and is of immense help to the memory and the understanding of the weak.
So that in anything like the enuntiations of Euclid or grammar rules, that are, after explanation and illustration, set to be learned, "nailed down" Percival used to say, I do aim at, and sometimes insist on, verbal accuracy, pointing out: "There are other ways of saying the same thing right, but this is probably the best and shortest way: it is just as easy for most of you to say it as it was written; for some of you (no need to mention names), it is at present the only way."
Of course, the older boys become, the more their individuality asserts itself, and the less need is there for bands and leading-strings of this kind.
As all children do not learn by heart at the same rate, so all children do not understand at the same rate. The natural and proper order is, of course, to understand a thing first, and then commit it to memory. But there are often cases when the process not only may, but must, if good work is to be done, be reversed. Really obstinate children, who set their faces and say aloud or to themselves, "I won't," are not so common as they once were, or were supposed to be. I think in twenty-four years' teaching I have not had more than two such children, but there are many--very many--who develop quite early a fondness for a sort of infantile Nervana,--a condition of bodily and intellectual quiescence, in which the subject sits happily still in school, with never so interesting lesson going on, dreaming peacefully of things altogether irrelevant, or of nothing at all. For such young Buddhists, who have not understood, because (unconsciously to themselves, perhaps) they have not tried to understand, it is perhaps the best discipline to make them commit to memory what they do not fully understand, and the understanding soon comes afterwards.
Some people, even when grown up, find that the most easy and most pleasant way to get at the meaning of anything difficult--for example, and obscure piece of poetry--is to commit it first to memory; the full meaning dawns with constant repetition. For my own part I am quite sure that I never understood Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," or grasped half the beauties in Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," and several of Shakespeare's sonnets, till I had committed them to memory--after I was grown up and for my own pleasure.
When I hear people insisting that nothing should be learnt by anybody which is not first understood, I feel quite inclined to fly to the opposite extreme, and argue gravely, in spite of reason, for the absolute truth of Lewis Carrol's parody of the old economic proverb: "Take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself."
Although it undoubtedly is, from some points of view, the proper and natural order to understand first and then to remember, yet it is not the way in which nature always works herself. How much does a child really understand of all the words and phrases which it so glibly utters when it has once begun to talk? Yet I have never heard of any new educationist so cruelly consistent, as to forbid the child to use any word or phrase which it could not explain. Would any child ever read for amusement if it had to wait till it knew the meaning of all the words?
One of the first books that I read and re-read with delight in my early childhood, was an old copy, very slightly expurgated, of the "Arabian Nights." I read till I knew all the stories, and enjoyed them more each time I read them. But, quite lately, while visiting the house where that old copy of the "Arabian Nights" still exists, I was absolutely aghast to find how full the four volumes were, not only of strange allusions--Eastern and quite inappropriate to modern notions of propriety--which I cannot possibly have understood at all, but full also of long sesquipedalian words, many of which I am sure I cannot have been able then even to pronounce, much less understand.
On exactly the same principle, if we start when we are grown up to read a new language for amusement or instruction, a language of which we may and probably do have some knowledge to begin with, but a very small vocabulary, we do not, if we wish to make rapid progress, laboriously look out in our dictionary every word of which we do not understand the meaning. If we have pursued this method, I fancy that the experience of most of us have been the same; we have looked out the same word again and again, and forgotten it again and again, unless we have added still more to our labour by writing down the meaning on a slip of paper--and then we have often lost the paper; but we choose a book we know will interest us, with a plot or outline easy to follow; and we read boldly on without stopping to look out a single word, inferring at once the meaning of some new words and courageously skipping others which we do not know. It is not a bad plan to lock the dictionary up in a drawer and lose the key for a while. In this way, the number of words and phrases not understood becomes less, and more progress is made in a week than in two months' conscientious work with a dictionary.
I suppose that most of us, who are already grown up, if we do not actually suffer from defective memories, would like our memories better than they are.
Failures of memory may be divided roughly into two classes--(1) Inability to remember forms and faces, (2) Inability to remember facts. Failures of both kinds are mostly due to the same cause--want of observation; and want of observation may be generally traced back to want of interest, or to a divided interest. It is difficult to take an interest in every thing, and perhaps unadvisable; but most of us would have better memories if we could better concentrate our attention and give undivided interest to whatever we may be doing. How irritating it is to be one day introduced to someone fresh, someone perhaps whom we have been eager to meet, and to be quite unable next day to remember what he or she is like, unable to identify him or her again, though we feel sure that we are going to meet again--are even now perhaps in the same room together. We do not remember, because we did not look with sufficient attention and learn the features at the first meeting. Very likely, we were half thinking at the time of something else, thinking, perhaps, that we must get a few words somehow with another friend, whom we caught sight of disappearing through the doorway. It is said that our Royal Family possess the ability to remember faces to a very marked degree. The Prince of Wales is said never to forget a face that has once been presented to him, or a name. But Mr. Pultney Bigelow claims that the present Emperor of Germany carries off the palm in this respect. Perhaps we may bracket them equal--uncle and nephew. I have never mixed with Royalty myself, but I have observed the faculty in people of lesser degree, whose walk in life brings them in contact constantly with new faces. This power to remember faces is generally coupled with the faculty of saying the right thing, if only a few words, to the right person at the right moment. Such a man or woman will talk to you, if only for a few seconds, as if he (or she) and you were the only people in existence--as if this meeting was the one thing they had been longing for, and then they pass on with a happy smile, but hardly a pause, to the next conversation. I have been sometimes struck by the way in which shopkeepers remember faces. I myself am neither a great nor at all a confirmed smoker; I sometimes go a week without a pipe, but when I do buy tobacco it is always "2 oz. of Mayblossom." Not long ago I was in a shop in Wimbledon, where I do not deal often or regularly; and falling into conversation with another customer, I forgot to ask for what I wanted, and should have come away without it; but the young lady in waiting very politely touched my elbow, as talking still I turned to go, and handing me a 2 oz. packet, said smiling, "Here is your Mayblossom, sir." I think that shop ought to pay, and I believe it does.
More difficult than remembering whole faces is remembering special features. How many of us here, I wonder, after meeting a new acquaintance, could answer all three of these questions: "What coloured eyes has he?" "Big mouth or small?" "What sort of nose?" Artists whose business it is to portray these features, make the careful observance of them one of their special studies. I have heard it said that about the most difficult thing for an artist to remember and reproduce from memory, is the shape of a pair of hands. A short time ago, there was a picture in the Royal Academy called, I think, "A Rubber of Whist," in which one of the most noticeable points was the exquisite delicacy with which the hands holding the cards were painted, and what striking differences there were among the four pairs! I was told at the time by someone who appeared to know, that the artist--Mr. John Collier--makes a special study of hands, and is accustomed and able, after meeting a new acquaintance, to go home and reproduce his hands with all their individuality on paper.
There is a good test of memory and observation of this kind in a pleasant game, which some of you may have played. It requires a fairly large party of which one division goes out of the room, and the players of this division returning unseen one by one to a part of the room cut off by a screen or curtain, exhibit only their two eyes through two small holes cut in a curtain or screen. Or if you like, you can cut the holes larger and exhibit both hands, with or without rings or bracelets, according to agreement. The game is to remember and proclaim whose eyes are looking at you, or whose hands are shown. Very difficult it is to those who have not trained their memory to observe such details. I believe that children and adults can do a great deal to strengthen their memory by games of this kind. I was introduced to a new one not long ago. We all sat round the table: one player left the room and returned shortly with a large tray on which were deposited about fifteen different articles collected in another room, e.g. a corkscrew, a golf-ball, a pipe, a candlestick, a fossil, and so forth. The tray was placed in the centre of the table and left there for fifteen seconds by the tray-master's watch, and then removed from sight. The players round the table were then given one minute in which to enumerate with pencil and paper, previously provided, all the articles seen on the tray. I was surprised to find how difficult it was. I had never played the game before, and was last each time. I never could remember more than nine things out of the fifteen.
There is another very good test of a good memory, but, for most of us, rather too severe to be frequently applied. Take a pack of ordinary playing cards (if there is anyone here who objects to card-playing, I hope he will pardon the illustration)--take a pack of cards and withdraw one card without looking at the face of it. Then deal the remaining 51 cards--tolerably quickly--face upwards, each on the top of the previous card, so that not more than one can be seen at a time. If, at the end of the deal, you can say positively which card has not been dealt, and prove that you are right by triumphantly showing the card originally withdrawn--you may consider that you have an unusually good memory, or, perhaps I should say, good whist memory; for I have heard of good players say that the whist memory is a special faculty. I myself should call it only one form of the face memory--the card face memory. Like the memory of human faces, it is entirely a question of close and careful observation; and to be perfect, there should be no conscious effort of remembering. The good whist player watches intently every card laid on the table and begins at once to draw his inference as to the positions of the remaining cards of the suit being played. But he does not, I think, ever say to himself in so many silent words how many cards of each suit have already been played. To attain to a good whist memory it is a truism, I suppose, to say that you must not try to begin by remembering everything at first. A young player should be quite content at first if he knows whether any and which particular court cards are still left in any particular suit. And he will gradually go on keeping an open eye for the tens and nines; and not attempt to descend to the minutiae of the twos and threes till after many days.
A good whist memory, which I covet but do not possess, always seems to me a wonderful thing, but not so wonderful by a great deal as a good chess memory. Most of us here, I fancy, would find it difficult, if not impossible, to play one game of chess without looking at the board; there have been players who could play thirteen at once. It is done by intense power of concentrating the attention, and above all, by the power to visualize. That is to say, I imagine that the blind-folded chess player, after each and every move, sees in his mind's eye a vivid picture of the board with all the pieces in their true and relative positions.
Strange as it may seem, it does not need a really clever person to play chess blind-folded. As a matter of fact, by way of parenthesis, the "blind-folded" chess player is rarely, if ever, really blind-folded. He sits comfortably in an armchair with his pipe perhaps in is mouth and his back to the board or boards. The only blind-folded opponent that I ever had was, in other respects, by no means an able man. He could never become a clergyman, as he desired to do, through inability to pass examinations, but he could play a good game of chess for an hour and a half without looking at the board--and win.
Proofread by LNL, Jun. 2011