[00:00.00]Lesson Six
[00:03.50]Text The Beauty of Britain J .B .Priestley
[00:12.15]The beauty of our country—or at least all of its south of North Scotland
[00:21.08] —is as hard to define as it is easy to enjoy.
[00:28.73]Remembering other and larger countries,
[00:33.59]we see at once that one of its charmsis
[00:39.24]that it is immensely varied within a small range.
[00:47.31]We have here no vast mountain ranges,
[00:54.15]no boundless plains,no miles of forest,
[00:59.61]and are deprived of the grandeur that may accompany these things.
[01:06.38]But we have superb variety.
[01:12.33]A great deal of everything is packed into little space.
[01:20.09]I suspect that we are always faintly conscious
[01:26.75]of the fact that this is a smallish island,
[01:33.10]with the sea always round the corner.
[01:38.09]We know that everything has to be neatly packed into a small space.
[01:45.64]Nature, we feel, has carefully adjusted things
[01:52.20]—mountains,plains, rivers,lakes
[01:59.04]— to the scale of the island itself.
[02:03.79]A mountain 12,000 feet high would be a horrible monster here,
[02:13.04]as wrong as a plain 400 miles long,
[02:19.57]a river as broad as the Mississippi.
[02:24.93]In America the whole scale is too big, except for aviators.
[02:33.47]There is always too much of everything.
[02:38.22]There you find yourself in a region that is all mountains,
[02:45.49]then in another region that is merely part of one immense plain.
[02:54.03]You can spend a long,hard day in the Rockies
[02:59.10]simply travelling up or down one valley.
[03:05.26]You can wander across prairie country
[03:09.94]that has the desolating immensity of the ocean
[03:15.50]Everything is too big; there is too much of it.
[03:22.55]Though the geographical features of this island are comparatively small,
[03:29.50]and there is astonishing variety almost everywhere,
[03:34.86]that does not mean that our mountains are not mountains,our plains not plains.
[03:34.93]Consider that piece of luck of ours, the Lake District.
[03:41.49]You can climb with ease — as I have done many a time
[03:48.04]—several of its mountains in one day.
[03:52.90]Nevertheless, you feel that they are mountains and not mere hills
[04:01.05]—as a correspondent pointed out in the Times recently.
[04:07.09]This same correspondent told a story that proves my point.
[04:14.03]A party of climbers imported a Swiss guide into the Lake District,
[04:21.79]and on the first morning,surveying the misty peaks before him.
[04:29.24]he pointed to a ledge about two thirds of the way up one of them
[04:36.50]and suggested that the party should spend the night there.
[04:42.38]He did not know that that ledge was only an hour or two's climb away
[04:51.13]and that before the light went
[04:54.97]they would probably have conquered two or three of these peaks.
[05:01.81]He had not realised the scale of the country.
[05:07.17]He did not know that he was looking at mountains in miniature.
[05:13.65]What he did know was that he was certainly looking at mountains,
[05:20.31]and he was right,for these peaks,some of them less than 3,000 feet high,
[05:29.66]have all the air of great mountains.
[05:35.22]With variety goes surprise.
[05:39.98]Ours is the country of happy surprises.
[05:44.65]You have never to travel long without being pleasantly astonished.
[05:50.61]It would not be difficult to compile a list of such surprises
[05:56.36]that would fill the next fifty pages,
[06:00.93]but I will content myself with suggesting the first few that occur to me.
[06:08.09]If you go down into the West Country,
[06:12.63]among rounded hills and soft pastures,
[06:17.67]you suddenly arrive at the bleak tablelands
[06:23.71]as if the North had left a piece of itself down there.
[06:29.87]But before you have reached them you have already been surprised
[06:36.22]by the queer bit of marshland,
[06:40.89]as if a former inhabitant had been sent to Cambridge
[06:47.14]and had brought his favourite marshland walk
[06:51.89]back from college with him into the West.
[06:57.77]The Weald is another of them.
[07:01.90]East Anglia has a kind of rough heath country of its own
[07:08.53]that I for one never expect to find there and I'm always delighted to see.
[07:17.07]Then,after the easy rolling Midlands,the dramatic Peak District,
[07:25.62]with its genuine steep slopes,never fails to astonish me,
[07:31.36]for I feel that it has no business to be there.
[07:37.01]A car will take you all round the Peak District in a morning.
[07:42.36]It is nothing but a crumpled green pocket handkerchief.
[07:48.42]Again,there has always been something surprising to me
[07:54.17]about those cone-shaped hills that suddenly pop up
[08:00.05]in Shropshire and along the Welsh border
[08:05.19]I have never explored this region properly,
[08:10.55]and so it remains to me a country of mystery,
[08:17.91]with a delightful fairy-tale quality about its cone-shaped hills.
[08:25.67]Nevertheless,we hear of search parties going out there to find lost travellers
[08:35.65]I could go on with this list of surprises
[08:41.40]but perhaps you had better make your own.
[08:47.17]Another characteristic of our landscape is its exquisite moderation.
[08:55.53]It looks like the result of one of those happy compromises
[09:01.88]that make our social and political plans so irrational and yet so successful.
[09:11.26]It has been born of a compromise
[09:15.70]between wildness and tameness,between Nature and Man.
[09:24.34]In many countries you pass straight from regions
[09:30.12]where men have left their mark in every inch of ground
[09:36.46]to other regions that are desolate wilderness.
[09:42.73]Abroad, we have all noticed how abruptly most of the cities seem to begin;
[09:51.67]here,no city; there, the city.
[09:58.12]With us the cities pretend they are not really there
[10:04.78]until we are well inside them.
[10:09.22]They almost insinuate themselves into the countryside.
[10:15.39]This comes from another compromise of ours,the suburb.
[10:22.05]There is a great deal to be said for the suburb.
[10:27.01]To people of moderate means,
[10:31.09]compelled to live fairly near their work in a city,
[10:37.02]the suburb offers the most civilised way of life.
[10:42.87]Nearly all Englishmen are at heart country gentlemen.
[10:49.03]The suburban villa enables the salesman or the clerk,
[10:55.80] out of hours,to be a country gentleman.
[11:01.73](Let us admit that it offers his wife and children more solid advantages. )
[11:07.68]A man in a newish suburb
[11:11.84]feels that he has one foot in the city and one in the country.
[11:19.60]As this is the kind of compromise he likes,he is happy.
[11:27.14]We must return,however, to the landscape,
[11:31.82]which I suggest is the result of a compromise
[11:38.17]between wilderness and cultivation,Nature and Man.
[11:46.50]One reason for this
[11:50.26]is that it contains that exquisite balance between Nature and Man.
[11:57.92]We see a cornfield and a cottage,both solid evidences of man's presence.
[12:06.69]But notice how these things, in the middle of the scene,
[12:12.44]are surrounded by witnesses to that ancient England
[12:19.52]that was nearly all forest and heath.
[12:24.48]The fence and the gate are man-made,
[12:29.05]but are not severely regular and trim
[12:34.31]—as they would be in some other countries.
[12:38.77]The trees and hedges,the grass and wild flowers in the foreground,
[12:46.03]all suggest that Nature has not been forced into obedience.
[12:53.77]Even the cottage,which has an irregularity and colouring
[13:01.50]that make it fit snugly into the landscape
[13:06.67](as all good cottages should do) ,
[13:10.82]looks nearly as much a piece of natural history as the trees:
[13:17.36]you feel it might have grown there.
[13:23.00]In some countries,that cottage would have been an uncompromising cube
[13:31.64]of brick,which would have declared,
[13:36.92]"No nonsense now Man,the drainer,the tiller,the builder, has settled here.
[13:44.68]"In this English scene there is no such direct opposition.
[13:51.45]Men and trees and flowers,we feel,have all settled down comfortably together.
[14:00.69]The motto is, "Live and let live. "
[14:06.26]This exquisite harmony between Nature and Man
[14:12.19]explains in part the enchantment of the older Britain,
[14:17.75]in which whole towns fitted snugly into the landscape,
[14:24.10]as if they were no more than bits of woodland;
[14:29.98]and roads went winding the easiest way as naturally as rivers;
[14:38.31]and it was impossible to say where cultivation ended and wild life began.
[14:46.04]It was a country rich in trees,birds,and wild flowers,
[14:54.01]as we can see to this day. |