WE often read of wonderful manifestations of memory, but they are always instances of the faculty working in some special direction. It is memory playing, like Paganini, on one string.
No doubt the persons performing the phenome-nal feats ascribed to them have forgotten more than they remember. To be able to repeat a hundred lines of verse after a single reading is no proof of a retentive mind, excepting so far as the hundred lines go. A man might easily fail under such a test, and yet have a good memory;by which I mean a catholic one, and that I
imagine to be nearly the rarest of gifts. I have never met more than four or five persons pos-sessing it. The small boy who defined memory as "the thing you forget with" described the faculty as it exists and works in the majority of men and women.
THE survival in publishers of the imitative in-stinct is a strong argument in support of Mr.
Darwin's theory of the descent of man. One publisher no sooner brings out a new style of book-cover than half a dozen other publishers fall to duplicating it.
THE cavalry sabre hung over the chimney-place with a knot of violets tied to the dinted guard, there being no known grave to decorate. For many a year, on each Decoration Day, a sorrow-ful woman had come and fastened these flowers there. The first time she brought her offering she was a slender girl, as fresh as her own vio-lets. It is a slender figure still, but there are threads of silver in the black hair.
FORTUNATE was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who in early youth was taught "to abstain from rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing"--espe-cially the fine writing. Simplicity is art's last word.
The man is clearly an adventurer. In the seven-teenth century he would have worn huge flint-lock pistols stuck into a wide leather belt, and been something in the seafaring line. The fel-low is always smartly dressed, but where he lives and how he lives are as unknown as "what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women." He is a man who apparently has no appointment with his breakfast and whose din-ner is a chance acquaintance. His probable banker is the next person. A great city like this is the only geography for such a character.
He would be impossible in a small country town, where everybody knows everybody and what everybody has for lunch.
I HAVE been seeking, thus far in vain, for the proprietor of the saying that "Economy is sec-ond or third cousin to Avarice." I went rather confidently to Rochefoucauld, but it is not among that gentleman's light luggage of cynical maxims.
THERE is a popular vague impression that butch-ers are not allowed to serve as jurors on mur-der trials. This is not really the case, but it logically might be. To a man daily familiar with the lurid incidents of the abattoir, the summary extinction of a fellow creature (whe-ther the victim or the criminal) can scarcely seem a circumstance of so serious moment as to another man engaged in less strenuous pursuits.
WE do not, and cannot, read many of the novels that most delighted our ancestors. Some of our popular fiction is doubtless as poor, but poor with a difference. There is always a heavy de-mand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.
There is ragtime literature as well as ragtime music for the many.
G----- is a man who had rather fail in a great purpose than not accomplish it in precisely his own way. He has the courage of his conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is op-posed to the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have any one electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject.
I HAVE thought of an essay to be called "On the Art of Short-Story Writing," but have given it up as smacking too much of the shop. It would be too intime, since I should have to deal chiefly with my own ways, and so give myself the false air of seeming to consider them of im-portance. It would interest nobody to know that I always write the last paragraph first, and then work directly up to that, avoiding all di-gressions and side issues. Then who on earth would care to be told about the trouble my characters cause me by talking too much?
They will talk, and I have to let them; but when the story is finished, I go over the dia-logue and strike out four fifths of the long speeches. I fancy that makes my characters pretty mad.
THIS is the golden age of the inventor. He is no longer looked upon as a madman or a wiz-ard, incontinently to be made away with. Two or three centuries ago Marconi would not have escaped a ropeless end with his wireless telegra-phy. Even so late as 1800, the friends of one Robert Fulton seriously entertained the lumi-nous idea of hustling the poor man into an asy-lum for the unsound before he had a chance to fire up the boiler of his tiny steamboat on the Hudson river. In olden times the pillory and the whipping-post were among the gentler forms of encouragement awaiting the inventor. If a man devised an especially practical apple-peeler he was in imminent danger of being peeled with it by an incensed populace. To-day we hail with enthusiasm a scientific or a mechanical discovery, and stand ready to make a stock company of it.
A MAN is known by the company his mind keeps. To live continually with noble books, with "high-erected thoughts seated in the heart of courtesy," teaches the soul good manners.
THE unconventional has ever a morbid attrac-tion for a certain class of mind. There is always a small coterie of highly intellectual men and women eager to give welcome to whatever is eccentric, obscure, or chaotic. Worshipers at the shrine of the Unpopular, they tingle with a sense of tolerant superiority when they say:
"Of course this is not the kind of thing you
would like." Sometimes these impressionable souls almost seem to make a sort of reputation for their fetish.
