author who dealt much in minute facts ought to be
allowed to refer to his memoranda; but from the artistic point of view
in literature the advice was wise indeed. In painting, our preferences
select whilst we are in the presence of nature, and our memory selects
when we are away from nature. The most beautiful compositions are
produced by the selecting office of the memory, which retains some
features, and even greatly exaggerates them, whilst it diminishes others
and often altogether omits them. An artist who blamed himself for these
exaggerations and omissions would blame himself for being an artist.

Let me add a protest against the common methods of curing what are
called treacherous memories. They are generally founded upon the
association of ideas, which is so far rational, but then the sort of
association which they have recourse to is unnatural, and produces
precisely the sort of disorder which would be produced in dress if a man
were insane enough to tie, let us say, a frying-pan to one of his
coat-tails and a child's kite to the other. The true discipline of the
mind is to be effected only by associating those things together which
have a real relation of some kind, and the profounder the relation, the
more it is based upon the natural constitution of things, and the less
it concerns trifling external details, the better will be the order of
the intellect. The mnemotechnic art wholly disregards this, and is
therefore unsuited for intellectual persons, though it may be of some
practical use in ordinary life. A little book on memory, of which many
editions have been sold, suggests to men who forget their umbrellas that
they ought always to associate the image of an umbrella with that of an
open door, so that they could never leave any house without thinking of
one. But would it not be preferable to lose two or three guineas
annually rather than see a spectral umbrella in every doorway? The same
writer suggests an idea which appears even more objectionable. Because
we are apt to lose time, we ought, he says, to imagine a skeleton
clock-face on the visage of every man we talk with; that is to say, we
ought systematically to set about producing in our brains an absurd
association of ideas, which is quite closely allied to one of the most
common forms of insanity. It is better to forget umbrellas and lose
hours than fill our minds with associations of a kind which every
disciplined intellect does all it can to get r