Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/390

382 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