THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE By Sir William Beach Thomas
Defoe wrote : "Whoever has travelled Great Britain before us, and whatever they have written, though they may have had a harvest . . . yet others may come and glean after them by large handfuls." That is still true though the number of books on England has multiplied since Defoe's Tour, and it will be true as long as men 111:ve their individuality. What characterises Sir William Beach Thomas's English Land- scape (Country Life, los. 6d.) is the variousness of his approach. He is the complete countryman—naturalist, geo- logist, agriculturist and historian of the fields. He goes below and behind the landscape to its causes. The presence of limestone or of a little carbon may determine the whole face of a district, as he points out. For him the glory of England belongs "more to the saunterer than the geographer." It is a short book, illustrated with the fine photographs one expects of its publishers. Yet with its brevity it has an air at least of wholeness. It is not a series of glances, a tour at motor speed, but rather the musing of ofte sitting with a map of England before him, to whom • every name and contour bring a scene to mind. The result is an essay in which the use and beauty of the land are justly propor- tioned, and their interrelation explained by one who knows the use and under- stands the beauty: "The rainbow and the cart are in touch" expresses in the fewest words the writer's synthesis of England, its sky, its landscape and its tillage. It is a plea also, mostly implicit, not for preservation but for a right con- tinuity; for something active and creat- ive in building and cultivation.
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