Century
By STRIX FACTS are wonderful things. I wish my mind held a larger store of them. I should like, occasionally, to be able to correct or even con- trovert statements made by other people, to lean forward and to say quietly : 'But surely you mean eighteen ninety five? The exact date, if I remember rightly, was the 26th of April,' or 'No, no, my dear fellow. Cubic metres, not cubic yards. You forget that they were relying on Portuguese statistics.' I cannot recall ever making an inter- vention of this kind.
People like me, people with empty heads, have a wistful regard for facts. But, human nature being what it is, those who present facts to us are often aware, as they warm to their theme, of a certain abstraction in our manner which may develop into something not far removed from sullenness. If you were to watch us being (say) taken round a factory you would observe a pro- gressive deterioration in our attitude. The alert, intelligent exclamations of 'Is it really?', 'How many tons did you say?' and 'Astonishing!' with which we began the tour, give way to more per- functory comments, like 'Oh, I see' or even 'Oh.' By the end we are barely grunting, and as. we take our departure a minor executive comes run- ning after us with the illustrated brochure, the last annual report, and the three recent issues of the house magazine which we thought we had unobtrusively jettisoned under a huge leather armchair in the managing director's office. We thank him with a glazed, guilty smile.
This unenlightened attitude is due in most cases, and certainly in mine, to a feeling of hope- lessness. I know that the facts are going in at one ear and out at the other, that none of them will stick in my head, that it is simply no good my trying to remember what they said about the rela- tion between the number of revolutions per minute registered on the dial of the Hartley- Gilmour counterstabilising unit and the over-all throughput per man-shift.
But apart from this well-justified defeatism there is a baser element, the element of envy; to me these facts, flowing so copiously, marshalled with such precision, are in effect sour grapes. I do not envy them as possessions, but I envy the power to possess them.
There is, however, one type of fact-monger whom I admire unreservedly. A representative of this subspecies is to be found, surrounded by works of reference, in a garret under the roof of the building from which the Spectator is edited. His counterpart exists on every newspaper.
The man who takes you round a factory, or explains the political situation in Siam or the problem connected with the licensing of whelk- stalls, is like a heron feeding its young; he is regurgitating. Charles Seaton in his garret is quite different. He is like a well-trained hawk. You fly him at facts as you fly a hawk at game. He knows a great many facts already; but no one in his position can have at his finger-tips the answers to all the questions he is liable to be asked by his colleagues, or even a rough idea of the fields of knowledge which the questions are liable to cover. His duty is not to parade facts which are already on the strength, but to go out into no man's land and bring back a prisoner.
Beings of this kind are the only true masters of facts. The expert, the specialist, the scholar is really their slave. He may, indeed he generally does, enjoy his slavery. When a new book on his subject appears, or a great wad of new statistics, he swoops on it as avidly as a pigeon on a crop of peas; his erudition steadily grows. But he is like a ringmaster in a circus. At the crack of his whip the facts circulate obediently, tossing their manes, raising their trunks in salute. Although, however, ponies and elephants can exist without a ringmaster, a ringmaster cannot exist without ponies and elephants. It is rather the same with facts; the greater your dominance over them, the more you depend on them.
In Charles Seaton's field facts are a quarry to be hunted down, captured and given away : not an ever-expanding menagerie to be tended. The greatest Master of Fact-Hounds that I know is J. S. Maywood, who has served The Times for fifty years, the last forty-four of them as head of their Intellig'ence Department. When you con- front him with some hideously recondite question his meditative 'Let me see . . .' is like a distant view-halloo, and as he strides swiftly off into a labyrinth of shelves and filing cabinets, gazetteers and Greek lexicons, you have vaguely the impres- sion that he is tightening his girths and ramming his hat down more firmly on his head.
A bright, predatory gleam comes into the eyes of such men when you ask them apologetically on which day of the week the Battle of Bannock- burn was fought, whence the Isle of Purbeck got its title to insularity, or in what year the Martini- Henry was taken into service in the British Army. They are outfitters in omniscience, purveyors of the authoritative touch. Occasionally one can recognise the fruits of their backroom labours in such expressions as 'of course' ('it was not, of .course, until the following year that Paraguay decided to adhere to the Convention), 'incidentally' ('the Regional Committees, inciden- tally, do not seem to have been asked for their views at this stage') and 'it is too often forgotten/ sometimes overlooked/ not generally realised' ('that the frontier agreement of 1902 was never ratified by either signatory). When I read sen- tences of this kind in serious newspapers, I salute, with gratitude and respect, the hidden hand of the fact-master.
It was not about the fact-master, but about one particular fact, that I intended to write this article; for it is the hundredth of its kind that I have contributed to the Spectator since, just over two years ago, the mantle of Sir Harold Nicolson and Sir Compton Mackenzie descended on me, like a rich bandanna dislodged from the still-room shelf upon a transient mouse.
But weekly journalism has few affinities with cricket. To lean negligently on one's pen And to raise one's cap in acknowledgement of the tumultuous applause is, I suppose, possible: per- haps even seemly. But then one would have to supply the tumultuous applause oneself, and the more I examined the project the more arch and otiose it appeared. So, since I should not have known that I had notched a hundred if Charles Seaton had not told me, it seemed fairer, and more agreeable, to write an article about him.
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