ON TRUTH AND THE ADMIRALTY
What a pleasure it will be—a minor pleasure, I admit, but life is complex and it is difficult to establish values—what a pleasure it will be when maps and statistics return!
To-day, in this delightful year of 1922, they are all at sixes and sevens. So is everything else, you may say, especially currency—let alone morals. But still, one regrets maps and statistics most because to lose them is to lose one's moorings. We are all adrift without them.
What fun it used to be before the war to discuss the various "Powers" (as they were called). There was a Power called "Germany," and there was another called "Austria," or sometimes "Austria-Hungary," and there was one called "Russia," and there was "the Anglo-Saxon Race," too, and all sorts of things.
When I was a very little boy there was an enormous green blob over the bottom right-hand corner of the map, marked "Turkey," and I remember a learned man telling me that a bit called "Rumania" did not really count as Turkey, and a bit called "Servia" was really quite separate: and they were marked round with a dotted line. But I thought this man an interfering hair-splitter. I was a human being, though so young, and I liked to stand squarely upon my two feet and to know exactly where I was. So I thought of a country called "Turkey," inhabited by people called "Turks," and I used to see, wandering all over their country, animals called "Turkeys," which, I had been told by some foolish older person, took their name from this district. The young are not yet broken-in to change.
So, on through my early and middle life there was a recognisable Europe. One knew the debatable points (at least, on the map), but there were frontiers. There were powerful centres also, and anomalies to season the dish.
Where is all that to-day?
Thank God, this island at least has a frontier. It is the inviolate sea. I remember a boy at school who used to read the passage "the violet sea," so as to make sense, and I applaud him still. "Surrounded by the violet sea," read this sturdy youth. We all knew what "violet" meant: it was a sort of blue. But what the devil was "inviolate"! Lucidity is the soul of style. Therefore, I say, I applaud that youth.
Anyhow, colour or no, brown, green, or grey, the sea sounds all round England. Those who live in this island know where it begins and where it ends, in spite of the bookish people who say that one frontier is the enemy's coastline. (Heaven have mercy upon them, they are living in the past. Some day I will show them an aeroplane!) North of the Pyrenees nobody on the Continent can say as much to-day: since the war! One country has a frontier expanding outwards, bulging, and another has ceased to be a country; and a third, whilst still a country, has but a theoretical frontier which feels like touchpaper, or like burnt rag; and yet another is a new country, sprung up out of the effect of the war, and with frontiers which are to the old strict frontiers what the chopped-up prose of the new poets is to Pope or Dryden.
I do wish the maps would come back, but I fear they will not come back in my time. I see that, in despair, the people who must sell maps or perish are taking to printing merely physical maps, maps of mountains and rivers and seas. They are returning to Pan and the original gods of this ironic globe. They are (virtually) saying: "Mankind has abandoned its job. Men are no longer political. We yield to you, spirits of the stream and of the hill, the throne we once possessed."