Hazlitt, Margaret Thatcher and the Chinese oak
PAUL JOHNSON
The report in Le Monde began `L'Europe meurt de soir I looked out of the window into my London garden, where the rain was pouring down, as it had been all week. So there was the French equivalent of the old Evening Standard poster: `Fog in the Channel: Continent isolated'. Compared with the thirsty French, Italians and Spanish, we have been extraordinarily fortunate this year plenty of rain in the spring, a flaming June, more rain in July, and now great heat in August — exactly the pattern I remember from my Thirties childhood.
I spent the beginning of this month staying in a delectable house on the Wiltshire Downs, in the blissful midsummer repose of a countryside which has scarcely changed in two centuries, quite untouched by the ravages of our age. The combination of July moisture and August heat had transformed the landscape, so that it appeared in its pristine excellence, like a dingy Old Master brought back to vivid maturity by the expert, delicate and restrained hand of a first-class restorer. (I am thinking of my sister-in-law, Sarah Walden, who rescued Whistler's 'Mother' in the Louvre, and has now described exactly how she did it.)
This Georgian house was embellished before the second world war by that master pasticheur Clough Williams-Ellis, who added a library wing in perfect congruity with the original house. He also refashioned the garden. giving an architectural grandeur and subtlety to the wall-like hedges of varying height and length, and cornposing a series of 'rooms' or small specialist gardens in the manner of Le NOtre, but enclosed and private — almost secret — in the reticent English style. There is an immense and verdant lawn which slopes down from the house to an old lily pond converted into a bathing pool, and if you look back from the waters therein, the red-brick Augustan building appears to float like a rosy ship in a calm green sea. It is an effect also produced in immense houses like Houghton in Norfolk or Kedleston in Derbyshire, but here the scale is more intimate, as though the house were not so much an ocean-going liner as a pleasure yacht on an inland sea I like going behind the scenes, as it were, of a great garden, maintained changed and improved over generations by owners dedicated to the task, served by craftsmen who have spent their entire lives ensuring that the rhythm of the seasons is attended to in all its complexity, and that there is something of beauty and interest displaying its best at almost any point of the year. It is, in a context of nature and the science
of horticulture, the same relationship that the Medici had with Verrocchio and his marvellous studio. In one of the long sheds behind the box hedges are to be seen hanging from the wall scores of fascinating implements, some perhaps from as far back as the 19th century but all in regular use, cleaned, burnished and treasured, like steel weapons in a Renaissance armoury. Outside are all kinds of greenhouses. great and small, besides potting-sheds, and plants being nurtured in squares of earth bordered by wooden planks. and curious or tender or special and spectacular plants which have their individual tubs, and are lovingly shown to me by the owner with a resume of their curricula vitae and ancestry. In a good garden, all the specimens are like persons, especially the trees. In the arboretum, one of the glories of this particular garden, there are trees unique in England for height or rarity, and often with historic connections too. There is a bushy-top tree, to use the army term, which was planted by Stanley Baldwin when he was prime minister in 1936, just as he was steeling himself to deal with Edward VIlfs entanglement with Mrs Wallis Simpson. Again, in one of the 'rooms' there is a Chinese oak, nourished from an acorn found near the Ming Tombs, which was planted by Margaret Thatcher in 1990, not long before her political assassination by a Welsh camarilla led by Michael Heseltine. As I looked at this curious treelet, unique in England, with its immense leaves, I reflected that. if Heseltine had not pursued his vainglorious and futile ambition to be party leader, and Margaret Thatcher had continued to be prime minister, she would have jointly led. with George Bush Sr, the active phase of the first Gulf war, and that, after the success of Desert Storm, she would have insisted on going to Baghdad and removing Saddam Hussein, at a time when it would have been simple and uncontroversial. Bush would certainly have bowed to her fierce insistence. As it was, he and John Major let Saddam off the hook, to go on murdering and torturing hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Iraqis.
Mrs Thatcher almost did not plant the tree. Told it was a rare Chinese specimen. she put her foot down: `I am only planting an English tree.' It was then explained by her host that all Chinese oaks were originally nurtured from trees brought out from England, and so it was as English as the timbers which went into the building of HMS Ham. Thus mollified, she went ahead with the ceremony, and the tree, after some years of natural hesitation, is growing lustily. It is near the kitchen garden, which extends
over numerous `rooms'. What a pleasure it is to inspect the 'garden greens", as Jane Austen referred indiscriminately to cabbages and cucumbers, lettuces and cauliflowers, and all that sort of thing, and to watch the pears and apples, plums and peaches, apricots and damsons — and so many other fruits — beginning to ripen. Here were the last of the raspberries and the first of the blackberries, walnuts (for pickling) and blackcurrants (for pies and puddings). It is the pride of the house that virtually everything cooked in it is bred or grown within a few hundred yards, and much of it picked the same morning. There is a relish in this knowledge, as you bite a tiny, tender carrot or set about dismantling a succulent artichoke. This is a house, to coin a phrase. where the banting has to stop. (As a result, I am now eating maigre.) Usually. I feel ill at ease staying in other people's houses, but this is one of the few in which! am happy. In my own house I can bury myself in books. Here I can do the same, and in addition there are treasures I do not possess. One is the 21-volume complete set of Hazlitt's writings, edited by his best biographer. P.P. Howe, and published in the Thirties. I have been looking for a set for many years and have not found it indeed, the only other person I know who owns one is Michael Foot. So on this visit I have been reading Hazlitt's Conversations of James Nonhcote, in which the wise but fiery old painter held forth on art and letters and virtually everything else, interspersed by lengthy interjections — beginning as questions but developing into statements — by Hazlitt himself. They are the perfect material for country-house reading. Hazlitt, as Lamb said, was a man you could not afford to quarrel with, albeit he made it onlY too easy. For, though often silent 'looking at I is shoes' (as Coleridge put it), he had a gift for not only going right to the heart of a problem under discussion but emerging from it with something entirely new between his teeth. It was the same with Talleyrand. As the Duke of Wellington said, 'He will sit throughout a meal absolutely silent and then suddenly say something you remember all your life.' Such men are rare. The only one in our times I can think of was Michael Oakeshott, the political philosopher, though I suppose Nigel Birch was another. Anyway, Haz'itt was one of this enviable few. And even at his most perverse, as Lamb added, he makes you think. Coosider his observation in a review of Wordsworth's 'Excursion': 'There is nothing good to be had in the country, Dr. if there is, they will not let you have it.' Now vhat on earth did the saturnine fellow mean?
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