The Heart of Nature; or, The Quest for Natural BeautyYounghusband, Francis Edward, Sir
Philosophy
The Heart of Nature; or, The Quest for Natural Beauty
Younghusband, Francis Edward, Sir
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains; Nature (Aesthetics)
When the new tradition is established, and travellers become aware
that we regard knowledge of Natural Beauty as within the scope of
our activities, the error into which I fell will be avoided. We shall
think travellers barbaric if they continue to concern themselves with
all else about the face of the Earth except its Beauty. We shall no
longer tolerate a geographer who will learn everything about the
utility of a region for military, political, and commercial purposes,
but who will take no trouble to see the beauty it contains. We shall
expect a much higher standard of him. We shall expect him to
cultivate the power of the eye till he has a true eye for country--a
seeing eye; an eye that can see into the very heart and, through all
the thronging details, single out the one essential quality; an eye
which can not only observe but can make discoveries. We shall
require him to have the capacity for discriminating the essential
from the unessential, for bringing that essential into proper relief and
placing upon it the due emphasis. When he thus has true vision and
can really see a country, and when he has acquired the capacity for
expressing either in words or in painting what lie has seen, so that he
can communicate it to us, then he will have reached the standard
which this Society should demand. And this is nothing less than
saying that we expect of him that he should have in him something
of the poet and the painter.
Careless snap-shotting in the field and idle turning on of lantern
slides at our meetings will no longer satisfy us. A traveller if he is
going to photograph must spend the hours which a real artist would
devote to discovering the essential beauty of a scene, and to
composing his picture before he dreams of exposing his plate. But
we want more than photographs: we want pictures to give that
important element in Natural Beauty--the colour. And we want
pictures painted in words as well as on canvas. Not shallow
rhapsodising of the journalese and guide-book type, but true
expression in which each noun exactly fits the object, each epithet is
truly applicable, and each phrase is rightly turned, and in which the
emphasis is placed on the precisely right point, and the whole
composed so as distinctly to bring out that point.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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