The Heart of Nature; or, The Quest for Natural Beauty — John Shaqi
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)
What we await, then, is an Artist with a soul worthy of being
wedded to Nature. Puny, shallow artists will not be able to see much
more of Nature than a midge sees of a man. What we want is a man
with the physique, the abounding health and spirits, the fine intellect,
the poetic power and imagination, the love of animals and his
fellow-men, the skill, fitness, and gay courage of a Julian Grenfell.
We want a man with the opportunities he had of mixing from
childhood in London and in country houses with every grade and
condition of men, with statesmen, soldiers, men of art, hunting men,
racing men, schoolboys, undergraduates, literary men, gamekeepers,
old family retainers--every kind and sort of human being. We want a
man of such qualifications combined with the qualifications of a
Darwin--with his love of natural history, his power of close and
accurate observation, his genius for drawing right inferences from
what he observed, his wide knowledge of Nature in her many
manifestations, his sympathetic touch with every plant and animal,
and his warm, affectionate nature in all human intercourse.
We want, in fact, a Naturalist-Artist--a combination of Julian
Grenfell and Darwin. And this is no outrageously impossible, but a
very likely and fitting combination. For Julian Grenfell wrote great
poetry even in the trenches in Flanders between the two battles of
Ypres. And with his love of country life, shooting, fishing, and
hunting, his inclination might very easily have been directed
towards natural history. If it had been and the opportunity had
offered, we might have had the very type of Naturalist-Artist we are
now awaiting. He would have had the physical fitness and capacity
to endure hardships which are required for travel in parts of the
Earth where the Natural Beauty is finest, and he would have had, too,
the sensitiveness of soul to receive impressions and the power of
expressing himself so that others might share with him the
impressions he had felt. If after passing through the earlier stages of
shooting and hunting birds and animals he had come to the more
profitable stage of observing them, and had devoted to the
observation of their habits and ways of life the same skill and
acumen which he had shown in hunting them, he might, with his
innate and genuine love of animals, very well have become a great
naturalist as well as what he was--a great sportsman and a writer of
great poetry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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