If one has lived with them in former years, it is only after great trouble that the past can be brought to their mind. In such cases one is surely justified in saying that such a person is ungifted, or at least in not considering him conspicuously able.
The request for an autobiography would put most men into a most painful position; they could scarcely tell if they were asked what they had done the day before. Memory with most people is quite spasmodic and purely associative. In the case of the man of genius every impression that he has received endures; he is always under the influence of impressions; and so nearly all men of genius tend to suffer from fixed ideas. The psychical condition of men’s minds may be compared with a set of bells close together, and so arranged that in the ordinary man a bell rings only when one beside it sounds, and the vibration lasts only a moment. In the genius, when a bell sounds it vibrates so strongly that it sets in action the whole series, and remains in action throughout life. The latter kind of movement often gives rise to extraordinary conditions and absurd impulses, that may last for weeks together and that form the basis of the supposed kinship of genius with insanity.
For similar reasons gratitude is apparently the rarest human virtue. People are often very conscious of how much they have borrowed, but they neither can nor will try to remember the necessity in which they stood, nor the freedom which that help brought them. Even if want of memory were really the cause of ingratitude, it would not be sufficient for a man to possess a marvellous memory to have a like spirit of gratitude. A special condition is also necessary, but its description cannot be undertaken here.
From the connection between giftedness and memory which is so often mistaken and denied because it is not sought where it is to be found, from the power of self recollection, a further fact is to be deduced. The poet who feels urged to write without premeditation, without reflection, without having willingly pressed the pedal; the musician to whom the desire to compose has come, so that he must create whether he will or no, even if he feels more inclined to sleep or to rest; these, in such moments, will simply reproduce thoughts they have carried in their heads all their lives. A composer who can remember none of his songs or subjects by heart, or a poet who cannot recollect any of his poems--without having carefully learned them--such men are in no sense really great.