Paddy at 110, the Peak Park at 63, On Foot at 82
Today is my father's 110th birthday (and I've been trying to cross-post this from Dreamwidth since 8.30 this morning, but LJ has only just let me do it!)
As many of you know, I've posted some of his writing or portraits in previous years.
I was already thinking it might be the moment for an extract from On Foot in the Peak, which Paddy wrote in 1932. And then Google reminded us that yesterday was the 63rd birthday of the Peak National Park - I hadn't realised that it came into being on the eve of Paddy's own birthday, but that must have been very pleasing to him - he was one of the first members of the Peak Park Planning Board, and served there for many years.
So I am posting the conclusion to Paddy's book, which in part discusses the philosophy underlying his emotional response to the landscape of the Peak, but whose closing paragraphs also look forward, in effect, to the establishment of the first National Parks, including the Peak, in 1951, within twenty years of his writing.
On Foot in the Peak: Conclusion
Reading back through this book, I am grieved to find it fall so far short of what I had meant it to be. There are so many things, which one believes that one knows a good deal about, until one tries to set it down. There are many others, about which I always knew that I knew nothing; but I did not know that to leave them out would leave so ugly a gap. There is next to nothing here about the great houses - Chatsworth and Haddon and Hardwick and Swythamley. The number of people who walk with an eye to mansions has greatly fallen off. But the great houses were a part of the land. They should have gone in, if I could have got them in. It is the same with the churches, though church spires do not dominate the Peak as they do the midland county landscapes. I feel less shame for saying nothing of the Spas. People to whom this book is going to be of any use do not need medicinal waters.
There is - if I may forestall the critics - another criticism which I feel bound to pass upon myself. A good deal of this book is taken up with attempts to describe scenery; not merely to indicate that Black Hill is on the right and Brown Hill is on the left, but to say something which means something, which adds to or explains or appraises the scene described. It is difficult to do, for lack of technical terms. We think the less of a critic of painting or of music if he is always falling back on a literary analogy, and shuns writing about music (say) in terms of music. What are the right terms for a criticism or discussion of scenery? I know none - unless one is drily to confine oneself to an exposition of the geological factors. Geology envisaged as landscape can be extraordinarily interesting. I have tried, in an earlier chapter of this book, to give an intelligible account of the way the Peak came into being. But I could not keep within these bounds. I had to fall back on what are called 'literary' analogies. In order to make landscape mean anything, I had to make it mean something human.
This seems to me a flaw. But perhaps it is inherent in the scheme of things. If one is to write seriously about scenery, is it possible to avoid tingeing hills and rivers with human emotions - anger and calm and benignity and gaiety? I don't mean that one can't help falling into the 'pathetic fallacy' - the illusion, which divers races of men have had at divers times, that things without life do really feel in the same way as human beings. That is to make the hills the mirror of man's egotism. The truth seems to me to be just the other way round.
You cannot, if you are at all sensitive, walk in country like this, without taking into yourself something from the hills and woods and streams. Not the 'moods' of the hills, for they have no moods; but something in them which can be transmuted into human consciousness only as a mood. We are conscious only of our own thoughts. Some of these we may, as they say, project and wrongly impute to the hills. But is that true of all of them? May not the process work both ways?
I must try to steer clear of the jargon of the metaphysicians, with which I was once middling familiar, but which would sound nonsense to most ears. (Or if I may speak, aside, to philosophers for a moment - I am on Kant's path; I say that the perception of the quality of hills, like all perception, is subject to categories which are essentially tinged with moral values.) Now, to put it more clumsily, the eyes and the mind with which we apprehend a mountain or a valley are so fashioned that they will take in those shapes and colours only through a kind of refracting glass - a glass coloured with the same colours that tinge our daily living. These colours are not themselves anger and pride and love and liking; they are nothing unless the light shines through them. And when it is a mountain that we see, it passes through just such a glass into our minds. There is that in a mountain which can only mean anger to us, and that which can only mean peace. What that is, independent of our minds, we can never know. It comes to us only through the transmuting glass of humanity.
I have ventured thus far into the doubtful land of the philosopher, for two reasons; first, in order to justify myself, if possible, for the recurrent use of human analogies in the description of hills; and second, because my belief that country seen pours into us something which comes out, as it were, as human mood, is the root of the conviction that one should seek out noble and beautiful country as often as possible. The beauty passes into us.
Enough of this. There remains one thing to be said. There has never been a time when more people were conscious of the beauty of hills and dales, or when more people thought it a matter of public importance that beauty should remain beautiful. There has never been a century like the last, for the graceless, thoughtless, needless expanding of an urban civilisation based on motives to which natural beauty is an irrelevance. That development has partly, but not wholly, spent its force. The urge has weakened, the thoughtlessness remains.
But the one thing certain is the way in which popular opinion, in these last ten years, has swung round from indifference to an ever increasing interest in the preservation of natural amenities. The 'town and country planning' movement is one manifestation of this spirit. The great expansion of the activities of the National Trust is another. Yet another is the work of such bodies as the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, in rousing opinion against acts, not of development - for the C.P.R.E. does not wish to sterilise or make barren the country it would preserve - but of ugly, careless, haphazard and ill-suited development. Most ugly buildings are put up by mistake. 'Trouble is wrought,' as Tom Hood put it, 'by want of thought, more than by want of heart.' It is the work of the C.P.R.E. to see that somebody thinks in time.
There is a branch of the C.P.R.E. with its headquarters at Sheffield, and with a special care for the Peak. It published last summer a book called The Threat to the Peak, in which both the quality of the country, and the risk that quality ran, were eloquently set forth. I do not think I could end this chapter better than by quoting the words with which Professor G. M. Trevelyan prefaced that book.
'The tide of public opinion,' he wrote, 'is moving with great rapidity in the direction of a new demand for the preservation of natural beauty. The young, on the average, feel it more than the old. Outrages cheerfully perpetrated twenty years ago, "and nothing said," would be impossible to-day. Outrages possible to-day will be impossible twenty years hence. The future is on our side in no small degree, if we can hold the fort for another generation.'
It is in the faith that this fort is overwhelmingly worth holding, that I have written On Foot in the Peak.
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.
As many of you know, I've posted some of his writing or portraits in previous years.
I was already thinking it might be the moment for an extract from On Foot in the Peak, which Paddy wrote in 1932. And then Google reminded us that yesterday was the 63rd birthday of the Peak National Park - I hadn't realised that it came into being on the eve of Paddy's own birthday, but that must have been very pleasing to him - he was one of the first members of the Peak Park Planning Board, and served there for many years.
So I am posting the conclusion to Paddy's book, which in part discusses the philosophy underlying his emotional response to the landscape of the Peak, but whose closing paragraphs also look forward, in effect, to the establishment of the first National Parks, including the Peak, in 1951, within twenty years of his writing.
On Foot in the Peak: Conclusion
Reading back through this book, I am grieved to find it fall so far short of what I had meant it to be. There are so many things, which one believes that one knows a good deal about, until one tries to set it down. There are many others, about which I always knew that I knew nothing; but I did not know that to leave them out would leave so ugly a gap. There is next to nothing here about the great houses - Chatsworth and Haddon and Hardwick and Swythamley. The number of people who walk with an eye to mansions has greatly fallen off. But the great houses were a part of the land. They should have gone in, if I could have got them in. It is the same with the churches, though church spires do not dominate the Peak as they do the midland county landscapes. I feel less shame for saying nothing of the Spas. People to whom this book is going to be of any use do not need medicinal waters.
There is - if I may forestall the critics - another criticism which I feel bound to pass upon myself. A good deal of this book is taken up with attempts to describe scenery; not merely to indicate that Black Hill is on the right and Brown Hill is on the left, but to say something which means something, which adds to or explains or appraises the scene described. It is difficult to do, for lack of technical terms. We think the less of a critic of painting or of music if he is always falling back on a literary analogy, and shuns writing about music (say) in terms of music. What are the right terms for a criticism or discussion of scenery? I know none - unless one is drily to confine oneself to an exposition of the geological factors. Geology envisaged as landscape can be extraordinarily interesting. I have tried, in an earlier chapter of this book, to give an intelligible account of the way the Peak came into being. But I could not keep within these bounds. I had to fall back on what are called 'literary' analogies. In order to make landscape mean anything, I had to make it mean something human.
This seems to me a flaw. But perhaps it is inherent in the scheme of things. If one is to write seriously about scenery, is it possible to avoid tingeing hills and rivers with human emotions - anger and calm and benignity and gaiety? I don't mean that one can't help falling into the 'pathetic fallacy' - the illusion, which divers races of men have had at divers times, that things without life do really feel in the same way as human beings. That is to make the hills the mirror of man's egotism. The truth seems to me to be just the other way round.
You cannot, if you are at all sensitive, walk in country like this, without taking into yourself something from the hills and woods and streams. Not the 'moods' of the hills, for they have no moods; but something in them which can be transmuted into human consciousness only as a mood. We are conscious only of our own thoughts. Some of these we may, as they say, project and wrongly impute to the hills. But is that true of all of them? May not the process work both ways?
I must try to steer clear of the jargon of the metaphysicians, with which I was once middling familiar, but which would sound nonsense to most ears. (Or if I may speak, aside, to philosophers for a moment - I am on Kant's path; I say that the perception of the quality of hills, like all perception, is subject to categories which are essentially tinged with moral values.) Now, to put it more clumsily, the eyes and the mind with which we apprehend a mountain or a valley are so fashioned that they will take in those shapes and colours only through a kind of refracting glass - a glass coloured with the same colours that tinge our daily living. These colours are not themselves anger and pride and love and liking; they are nothing unless the light shines through them. And when it is a mountain that we see, it passes through just such a glass into our minds. There is that in a mountain which can only mean anger to us, and that which can only mean peace. What that is, independent of our minds, we can never know. It comes to us only through the transmuting glass of humanity.
I have ventured thus far into the doubtful land of the philosopher, for two reasons; first, in order to justify myself, if possible, for the recurrent use of human analogies in the description of hills; and second, because my belief that country seen pours into us something which comes out, as it were, as human mood, is the root of the conviction that one should seek out noble and beautiful country as often as possible. The beauty passes into us.
Enough of this. There remains one thing to be said. There has never been a time when more people were conscious of the beauty of hills and dales, or when more people thought it a matter of public importance that beauty should remain beautiful. There has never been a century like the last, for the graceless, thoughtless, needless expanding of an urban civilisation based on motives to which natural beauty is an irrelevance. That development has partly, but not wholly, spent its force. The urge has weakened, the thoughtlessness remains.
But the one thing certain is the way in which popular opinion, in these last ten years, has swung round from indifference to an ever increasing interest in the preservation of natural amenities. The 'town and country planning' movement is one manifestation of this spirit. The great expansion of the activities of the National Trust is another. Yet another is the work of such bodies as the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, in rousing opinion against acts, not of development - for the C.P.R.E. does not wish to sterilise or make barren the country it would preserve - but of ugly, careless, haphazard and ill-suited development. Most ugly buildings are put up by mistake. 'Trouble is wrought,' as Tom Hood put it, 'by want of thought, more than by want of heart.' It is the work of the C.P.R.E. to see that somebody thinks in time.
There is a branch of the C.P.R.E. with its headquarters at Sheffield, and with a special care for the Peak. It published last summer a book called The Threat to the Peak, in which both the quality of the country, and the risk that quality ran, were eloquently set forth. I do not think I could end this chapter better than by quoting the words with which Professor G. M. Trevelyan prefaced that book.
'The tide of public opinion,' he wrote, 'is moving with great rapidity in the direction of a new demand for the preservation of natural beauty. The young, on the average, feel it more than the old. Outrages cheerfully perpetrated twenty years ago, "and nothing said," would be impossible to-day. Outrages possible to-day will be impossible twenty years hence. The future is on our side in no small degree, if we can hold the fort for another generation.'
It is in the faith that this fort is overwhelmingly worth holding, that I have written On Foot in the Peak.
Also posted on Dreamwidth, with
comments.