MARGINAL COMMENT
NICOLSON Hy HAROLD
those memories, and especially those sensations, which are unsullied by discomfort or neglect. The idea was well expressed : - " Homesick we are, and always, for another And different world. And so the traveller * * * *
Inevitably at such a time the mind of man turns away from The actual January garden of 1945 and. indulges in recollections, which are in fact day-dreams, of these other gardens which, in the days when travel was a privilege rather than an ordeal, appear to the memory to have been trimmed with ideal perfection and to bask for ever under cloudless skies. At such moments he hears the water tinkle in the terraced garden of the Generalife and recalls the dark rounded pools under the ilex of the Villa d'Este, those caverns of cool sound opening suddenly upon the glare and glitter of the Campagna and the distant view of Rome. More intimately he may recall the smell of niignonette around some tattered statue of Velleda:—
" Or he may see the great Escorial Barrack fanatical, and smell the box Hot in the August sun. . . ."
et toujours l'odeur penetratue des buffs. But if he be a wise man he will- dash these day-dreams from his mind, go round to the tool- shed for his rake and barrow, scrape the dead leaves of 1944 away from the young primroses and rejoice with singing heart in his own compost heap, drawing comfort from the fact that here (as so rarely in our ineffectual life) the useless is rendered valuable. Since happiness, as the sage remarked, is to be found, not in escape, but in activity. Down the long avenue of memory Sees in perfection that was never theirs Gardens he knew, and takes his steps of thought Down paths that, half-imagined and half-real, Are wholly lovely with a loveliness Suffering neither fault, neglect, nor flaw. . . ."
Such is not the view which any gardener, especially in wartime, .takes of his own garden paths. If they be of gravel, he is all too conscious of the layer of moss which has overspread them ; if they be of brick, he sighs to notice how many of the bricks have been chipped by frost or disintegrated under the passing load of barrows ; if they be of stone, he winces away from the contemplation of the celandine which, even in mid-January, sticks its pert leaf along the cracks ; and if they be of grass he is saddened-by the sight of mudded foot- prints among the thistles and the plantains. Nor can any gardener, especially those who have designed and laid out their own gardens, be unaware of the faults and flaws which, so irretrievably, they have committed in the past. Fed are the amateur gardeners who have had the sense or patience or humility to follow the advice of experts and to design paths of sufficient width or to plant their yews, their roses and their lilac sufficiently far apart. The years succeed each other, and the garden, which in its third year seemed the perfection of symmetry, becomes in its seventh year a tangled wilderness in which the moss roses hunch and bunch themselves above the brown and scrannel box. And at the thought of neglect a fog of war- weariness descends like a Scotch mist upon the land.
'* * * * This memory problem remains none the less. Is it a fact that our conscious memory invariably discards the unpleasant or the uninteresting, and that the agreeable is recollected in shapes and colours which are in fact selective or at least idealised? Is our memory, that is, eternally instribed with the motto which the Vic- torians would so lavishly carve upon their sun-dials : —" I only count the sunlit hours." A distinction must be made, of course, between sensation and experience. In so far as the rough texture of practical experience is concerned, memory does not adopt this sisterly attitude, nor is it in the least anxious always to comfort and assuage. Most elderly people, having had their average share of failure and success, would agree that such words of praise as they may have received in life recede into the mists of distance, whereas each word of justified abuse, each act of ineptitude on their part, remains close and vivid, as ever-present thorns which prick and sting. Few men in later age remember their triumphs : few men can ever forget their defeats. But in the realm of sensation, a different process seems to operate. We forget the bugs and exhaustion of Eastern voyages and remember only, as the flap of the tent is opened, the sight and sound of caravans moving to the faint echo of camel bells across the dawn. We forget the prick and tingle of sand-fly fever and recall only the gigantic shadows thrown at sunset across the sand. We forget the broken saddle-girth, the blistered feet, the aching ankle, and remember only the tulips among the cold hard rocks, the purple curtain of the Mediterranean as first seen from the Lebanon, the snout of a hippopotamus pro- truding, like a log of wood, from the very sources of the Nile. At such moments our memory does in fact stray and lead us along paths " half-imagined and half-real."
* * * A friend of mine,—a most gifted man, being both an artist and a musician,—once described to me a trick of memory which is both curious and instructive. He used, when a child, to spend every Christmas with his grandmother, who owned a large house in the north. In his night nursery, and in fact protecting his bed from draughts, there was one of those paper screens so dear to the early Victorians, upon which had been glued little coloured pictures or engravings cut out from the annuals and magazines of the time. He conceived a passion for this screen, which indeed appeared to him to depict in lovely form all that was most entrancing and adventurous in human life. Great tropical flowers, as he remembered it, were intertwined with every variety of coloured bird : orchids and golden pheasants, lotus lilies and birds of paradise, formed a continuous frame enclosing views of Italy and Switzerland, opening out upon wide landscapes of sea and mountain, of snowy peaks and little clustering bays. He was convinced that this screen had exercised a determinant effect upon the whole future trend of his tastes and predilections. His life, in fact, had been moulded by this 'early aesthetic experience ; he spent many years in Italy, he always retained a liking for exotic flowers, and he once kept a bird of paradise which squawked and flaunted in a glass aviary in his house in Chesham Place. After thirty years had passed an uncle died, and he inherited the great house in the north together with its contents. He gave instructions that the screen should be sent to him immediately. He opened the packing-case with some excitement and was enraged to discover that they had sent him the wrong screen. In place of the exotic marvels which he remem- bered, the screen which had been sent to him was almost entirely covered with hunting pictures or with cold portraits of the famous boxers and jockeys of the time. But as he examined it more closely, he- observed that in one corner there was, in fact, a small view of the Bay of Naples enclosed in a little frame of crocuses and gentians ; and that in another corner was a large, but crudely coloured, portrait of a Moluccan duck. It was then that he realised that memory, perhaps fortunately, is a most selective instrument.
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It is a commonplace, of course, that we remember only those things which interested us. We do not realise sufficiently that young people, so far from being formed by chance experience, select un- consciously those experiences by which they are fcil-med. I spent hours, as a boy, in studying Old Testament history ; not one single word of what I learnt has remained in my mind ; yet I car} still recite those few poems that I was taught when I was twelve. It is sad to reflect upon the hours which we wasted in applying our- selves to subjects to which we were temperamentally ill-attuned. In these days of intelligence tests and child psychology such wastage may be avoided ; but the fact remains that human beings remember only what they like.
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