It is just as much worth while, though so much more difficult, to describe what people look like as to set down what they say. And then most people and things are silent to our ears; they speak more to our eyes. Certain shapes, certain groups, speak at times enormously to our eyes. But how record them if we do not describe?
It is in description that the keeper of a diary becomes artist. All description is art, and in describing an event, an action or a being, you enter to some extent into the joy of art. You are more than the mere secretary of life, patiently taking down from dictation, more than life’s mere scribe; you become its singer, the expresser of the glory of it. With a verbal description goes also sketching, the thumb-nail sketch, the vague impression, the pictorial pointer. There is no reason for being afraid of bad drawing in one’s own personal travel diary; the main thing is that it be ours and have some relationship to our eyes and the thing seen.
I have seldom gone on a tramp, or a long vagabondage, without seeing things that made the heart ache with their beauty or pathos, and other things that set the mind a-tingle with intellectual curiosity. I do not refer to great episodes, glimpses of important shows and functions, but to little things, unexpected visions of life! Some were unforgettable in themselves and seemingly needed no tablets other than those of memory, and yet it was a great addition to inner content and happiness to describe them as they occurred in my daybook of travel.
It is good also, after describing something that has specially affected one, to add one’s observations, the one line perhaps that records one’s mind at the time.
For these, and for other reasons, the artist’s notebook, the diary, the common- and uncommonplace book, the daybook of the soul are to be placed as part of the equipment of life, when faring forth, be it on pilgrimage, be it on tramp, or be it merely on the common round of daily life. Every entry is a shade of self-confession, and the whole when duly entered is a passage of self-knowledge.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MAPS
CIVILIZATION is short of maps. It is not familiar with its own ground plan. This is due, no doubt, to the common handicap of commercialism. Maps ought to be free for all. When you ask a man the way, you do not expect him to charge you for it—“the first on the right and the second on the left; sixpence, please.” Maps are almost as cheap to print as wall paper, and could often be used as such. We need to be familiarized with the look of the chart of the world. It is of good advantage, especially to children and to young men and women at the gateway of larger life, to have maps of the world in front of them, in front of them often.
You have inherited a pretty large estate by being born. You might as well know something of the plan of the grounds. Stay-at-home natures are bred by absence of wall maps. An interesting place, the old world, with some curious corners—but the mapless do not believe in it.