INTRODUCTION
For many years at Hull-House I have at intervals detected in certain old people, when they spoke of their past experiences, a tendency to an idealization, almost to a romanticism suggestive of the ardent dreams and groundless ambitions we have all observed in the young when they recklessly lay their plans for the future.
I have, moreover, been frequently impressed by the fact that these romantic revelations were made by old people who had really suffered much hardship and sorrow, and that the transmutation of their experiences was not the result of ignoring actuality, but was apparently due to a power inherent in memory itself.
It was therefore a great pleasure when I found this aspect of memory delightfully portrayed by Sir Gilbert Murray in his life of Euripides. He writes that the aged poet, when he was officially made one of the old men of Athens, declared that he could transmuteinto song traditional tales of sorrow and wrong-doing because, being long past, they had already become part mystery and part music: “Memory, that Memory who is the Mother of the Muses, having done her work upon them.”
Here was an explanation which I might have anticipated; it was the Muses again at their old tricks,—the very mother of them this time,—thrusting their ghostly fingers into the delicate fabric of human experience to the extreme end of life. I had known before that the Muses foregathered with the Spirit of Youth and I had even made a feeble attempt to portray that companionship, but I was stupid indeed not to see that they are equally at home with the aged whose prosaic lives sadly need such interference.
Even with this clue in my hands, so preoccupied are we all with our own practical affairs, I probably should never have followed it, had it not been for the visit of a mythical Devil Baby who so completely filled Hull-House with old women coming to see him, that for a period of six weeks I could perforce do little but give them my attention.
When this excitement had subsided and I had written down the corroboration afforded by their eager recitals in the first two chapters of this book, I might have supposed myself to be rid of the matter, incidentally having been taught once more that, while I may receive valuable suggestions from classic literature, when I really want to learn about life, I must depend upon my neighbors, for, as William James insists, the most instructive human documents lie along the beaten pathway.
The subject, however, was not so easily disposed of, for certain elderly women among these selfsame neighbors disconcertingly took quite another line from that indicated by Euripides. To my amazement, their reminiscences revealed an additional function of memory, so aggressive and withal so modern, that it was quite impossible, living as I was in a Settlement with sociological tendencies, to ignore it.
It was gradually forced upon my attention that these reminiscences of the aged, even while softening the harsh realities of the past, exercise a vital power of selection which often necessitates an onset against the very traditionsand conventions commonly believed to find their stronghold in the minds of elderly people. Such reminiscences suggested an analogy to the dreams of youth which, while covering the future with a shifting rose-colored mist, contain within themselves the inchoate substance from which the tough-fibred forces of coming social struggles are composed.
In the light of this later knowledge, I was impelled to write the next two chapters of this book, basing them upon conversations held with various women of my acquaintance whose experience in family relationships or in the labor market had so forced their conduct to a variation from the accepted type that there emerged an indication of a selective groping toward another standard. They inevitably suggested that a sufficient number of similar variations might even, in Memory’s leisurely fashion of upbuilding tradition, in the end establish a new norm.
Some of these women, under the domination of that mysterious autobiographical impulse which makes it more difficult to conceal the truth than to avow it, purged their souls in all sincerity and unconsciously made plain the partborne in their hard lives by monstrous social injustices.
These conversations proved to be so illustrative of my second thesis that it seemed scarcely necessary to do more than record them. The deduction was obvious that mutual reminiscences perform a valuable function in determining analogous conduct for large bodies of people who have no other basis for like-mindedness.
So gradual is this process, so unconsciously are these converts under Memory’s gentle coercion brought into a spiritual fellowship, that the social changes thus inaugurated, at least until the reformers begin to formulate them and to accelerate the process through propaganda, take on the aspect of beneficent natural phenomena. And yet, curiously enough, I found that the two functions of Memory—first, its important rôle in interpreting and appeasing life for the individual, and second its activity as a selective agency in social reorganization—were not mutually exclusive, and at moments seemed to support each other. Certain conversations even suggested that the selective process itself might be held responsible for thesoftened outlines of the past to one looking back, by the natural blurring of nonessentials and the consequent throwing into high relief of common human experiences.
The insistence of Memory upon the great essentials, even to the complete sacrifice of its inherent power to appease, was most poignantly brought to my attention during two months I spent in Europe in the summer of 1915. Desolated women, stripped by war of all their warm domestic interests and of children long cherished in affectionate solicitude, sat shelterless in the devastating glare of Memory. Because by its pitiless light they were forced to look into the black depths of primitive human nature, occasionally one of these heart-broken women would ignore the strident claims of the present and would insist that the war was cutting at the very taproots of the basic human relations so vitally necessary to the survival of civilization. I cannot hope to have adequately reproduced in Chapter V those conversations which themselves partook of the grim aspect of war.
It was during this cataclysmic summer in Europe that I sometimes sought for a solace,or at least for a source of sanity, by resting my mind on the immemorial monuments of ancient Egypt, from which I had once received an almost mystic assurance of the essential unity of man’s age-long spiritual effort. But because such guarding of continuity as Egypt had afforded me had been associated with an unexpected revival of childish recollections, I found that Memory was a chief factor also in this situation. Therefore, in spite of the fact that these reminiscences of my childhood were vividly resuscitated in Egypt by a process which postulates a reversal of the one described in the first two chapters of this book, I venture to incorporate my personal experience in the last chapter. It may suggest one more of our obligations to Memory, that Protean Mother, who first differentiated primitive man from the brute; who makes possible our complicated modern life so daily dependent on the experiences of the past; and upon whom at the present moment is thrust the sole responsibility of guarding, for future generations, our common heritage of mutual good-will.