And there should be less hesitation in accepting the latter half of this conclusion when we note that Natural Beauty affects the movements of man, and that man is having an increasing effect upon Natural Beauty—spoiling it in too many cases, improving it in many others, but certainly having an effect upon it. There is thus a quite definite relation between man and Natural Beauty, and it should therefore be within the scope of Geography to take note of this relationship. To an increasing degree man now moves about in search of new Natural Beauty or to enjoy it where it has been already found. From all over the world men flock to Switzerland, drawn there by its beauty. Here at home they go to the Thames Valley, or Dartmoor, or the coast of Cornwall, or North Wales, or the Highlands, simply to enjoy the Natural Beauty. And railway companies and the Governments of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand think it worth while to spend large sums of money in publishing pictures of the beauty of the countries in which they are interested in order to attract holiday-makers or home-seekers to them.
And here, as in other cases, man now is not content to be an impassive spectator and to be entirely controlled by his surroundings. He does not allow the "crustal relief" to have the upper hand in the matter. He will not admit that all he has to do is to adapt himself to his surroundings. That servile view of our position in the Universe is fast departing. We are determined to have the ascendancy. And much as we admire the Beauty of the Earth we set about improving it. We fail disastrously at times, I allow. But sometimes unconsciously, and sometimes deliberately, we succeed. We have in places made the Earth more beautiful than it was before we came, and we have certainly shown the possibility of this being done. From what I have seen in uninhabited countries I can realise what the river-valleys of England must have been like before the arrival of man—beautiful, certainly; but not so beautiful as now. They must have been an unrelieved mass of forest and marsh. Now the marshes are drained and turned into golden meadows. The woods are cleared in part and well-kept parks take their place, with trees specially selected, pruned, and trim, and made to stand out well by themselves so that their umbrageous forms may be properly seen. Gardens are laid out, the famous lawns of England are created, and flowering and variegated shrubs from many lands are planted round them. And homes are built—the simple homes of the poor and the stately homes of the rich—which in the setting of trees and lawns and gardens add unquestionably to the natural beauty of the land. St. James's Park, with its lake, its well-tended trees, its daisy-covered lawns, its flowerbeds, its may and lilac, laburnum and horse-chestnut, and with the towers of Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament rising behind it, is certainly more beautiful than the same piece of land was two thousand years ago in its natural condition.
What has been done in this respect in England is only typical of what is done in every country and of what has been done for ages past. The Moghul emperors, by the planting of gardens on the borders of the Dal Lake in Kashmir, added greatly to its beauty. And the Japanese are famous for the choice of beautiful surroundings for their temples and for the addition which they themselves, by the erection of graceful temples and by properly cared-for trees and gardens, make to the natural beauty of the place.
So man is both affected by the Beauty of the Earth's features and himself affects that Beauty. And this relationship between man and the Natural Beauty of the Earth is one of which Geography should take as much cognisance as it does of the relationship between man and the productivity of the Earth.
But Natural Beauty is manifested in an innumerable variety of forms. The whole Beauty is never manifested in any one particular feature or region, but each has its unique aspect. Each feature has its own peculiar beauty different from the beauty of any other feature. And what men naturally do, and what I would suggest geographers should deliberately do, is to compare the beauty of one region with the beauty of another, so that we may realise the beauty of each with a greater intensity and clearness. We can compare the beauty of Kashmir with the beauty of Switzerland and California. And the comparison will enable us to see more clearly and to appreciate the distinctive elements which make up the peculiar beauty of each of those countries. It has been frequently noticed that people who have always lived in the same place are unable to see its full beauty. The inhabitants of the Gilgit frontier, when I first went among them, had never left their mountains, and were altogether ignorant of the special grandeur of their beauty. They thought all the world was just the same. But men who have seen many varieties of Natural Beauty and have taken pains to compare the varieties with one another become trained to see more Beauty in each feature. Fresh discoveries of Beauty are thus made, and our knowledge of the Beauty of the Earth is thereby increased.
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What I hope, then, is that this Society should definitely recognise that learning to see the Beauty in natural features and comparing the peculiar beauties of the different features with one another is within the scope of Geography, and will indeed become its chief function. I should like to see the tradition established and well known and recognised that we encourage the search for Natural Beauty, and look upon the discovery of a new region which possesses special beauty, and the discovery of a new beauty in a region already well known, as among the most important geographical discoveries to be made. In this matter I trust our Society will take the lead. Englishmen are born lovers of Natural Beauty and born travellers. The search for Natural Beauty ought, therefore, to be a congenial task for this Society. As I have tried to make clear, we cannot really know and understand the Earth—which is the aim of Geography—until we have seen its beauties and compared the varying beauties of the different features with one another and seen how they affect man and man affects them. We are constituted as a Society for the purpose of diffusing geographical knowledge, and I trust that in future we shall regard knowledge of the Beauty of the Earth as the most important form of geographical knowledge that we can diffuse.
When I was Writing out the lecture which I was invited to give before the Society on "The Geographical Results of the Tibet Mission" I could not resist devoting special attention to the natural beauty of Tibet. But as I read the manuscript through I feared that this attention to Beauty would be regarded by our Society as a lapse from the narrow path of pure Geography, and that I should be frowned upon in consequence and not regarded as a serious geographer. I ought, I feared, to have devoted more attention to survey matters, to the exact trend of the mountains, and the source and course of the rivers. But looking back now I see that my natural instinct was a right one—that a knowledge of the beauties of Tibet was not only one geographical result of the Mission, but the chief geographical result; and that, in fact, I ought to have paid not less but more attention, both in Tibet to noting its beauties in all their multitudinous variety, and in writing my lecture to expressing with point and precision what I had seen, so that you might share it with me, and learn what is the most valuable characteristic of Tibet.
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.