But my atlas goes even farther than this, though I
for one do not follow it. It gives diagrams of
exports and imports; it tells you where things are
manufactured or where grown; it gives pictures of
sheep—an immense sheep representing New
Zealand and a mere insect representing Russia, and
alas! no sheep at all for Canada and Germany and China.
Then there are large cigars for America and small mild
cigars for France and Germany; pictures in colour of
such unfamiliar objects as spindles and raw silk and
miners and Mongolians and iron ore; statistics of
traffic receipts and diamonds. I say that I don’t
follow my atlas here, because information of this sort
does not seem to belong properly to an atlas.
This is not my idea of geography at all. When
I open my atlas I open it to look at maps—to
find out where Tripoli is—not to acquire
information about flax and things; yet I cannot forego
the boast that if I wanted I could even speak at length
about flax.
And lastly there is the index. Running my eye
down it, I can tell you in less than a minute where
such different places as Jorobado, Kabba, Hidegkut,
Paloo, and Pago Pago are to be found. Could you,
even after your first-class honours in the Geography
Tripos, be as certain as I am? Of Hidegkut, perhaps,
or Jorobado, but not of Pago Pago.
On the other hand, you might possibly have known where
Tripoli was.
Children’s Plays
At the beginning of every pantomime season, we are
brought up against two original discoveries.
The first is that Mr. Arthur Collins has undoubtedly
surpassed himself; the other, that “the children’s
pantomime” is not really a pantomime for children
at all. Mr. Collins, in fact, has again surpassed
himself in providing an entertainment for men and
women of the world.
One has to ask oneself, then, what sort of pantomime
children really like. I ought to know, because
I once tried to write one, and some kind critic was
found to say (as generally happens on these occasions)
that I showed “a wonderful insight into the child’s
mind.” Perhaps he was thinking of the elephant.
The manager had a property elephant left over from
some other play which he had produced lately.
There it was, lying in the wings and getting in everybody’s
way. I think he had left it about in the hope
that I might be inspired by it. At one of the
final rehearsals, after I had fallen over this elephant
several times, he said, “It’s a pity we
aren’t going to use the elephant. Couldn’t
you get it in somewhere?” I said that I thought
I could. After all, getting an elephant into
a play is merely a question of stagecraft. If
you cannot get an elephant on and off the stage in
a natural way, your technique is simply hopeless,
and you had better give up writing plays altogether.
I need hardly say that my technique was quite up to
the work. At the critical moment the boy-hero
said, “Look, there’s an elephant,”
