An act by the aesthetician of the universe in a Bayswater garden
I.mt he glory of my library in 'Bayswater are the ten-foot-high windows at the north and south ends, which open into nature in . all her moods and seasons. She seems to enter the room, and glitters and shines on the books, perfumes their cloth and leather jackets and makes the sunlight and shadows dance on the ceiling. So fond have I become of this rusticated room that I now use my study only for paying bills, doing VAT returns and other disagreeable activities. I write at an old oak table immediately underneath the collected works of Lamb, Hazlitt and Carlyle and a precious set of Farington's Diaries.
Looking north, what strikes me first at this time of year is the sheer mass of fresh foliage that reaches to the skies in quiet Newton Road, almost obscuring the angular shape of Denys Lasdun's earliest domestic exercise in the International Modern Style (1938), which is immediately opposite my house. It replaced a delightful pair of 1840s villas, ruthlessly pulled down in that low, dishonest decade', as Auden called it (and who better than he to know?). Sometimes American enthusiasts ring our bell and ask, 'Excuse me, sir, but may we use your front yard to take video shots of that great architectural masterpiece across the street?' I bow my consent and then watch from my library window as they perform their humble genuflections to the spirit of modernism.
As I say, in late spring the trees and the huge barrier of ivy and climbing roses that thrusts itself over the entrance of my gates leaves visible only a few square feet of old Lasdun's magnum opus. But what catches my eye still more and delights my soul is a delicate shrub that flowers in May just outside the kitchen window. It is called a weigela, I believe, and must have been put in the ground a year or two ago because it has only now begun to reveal its beauty and capture my attention. The magic of this epicurean and nectareous plant is not only the soft pink and white flowers, which look as though they are made of icing sugar to decorate a sylvan wedding cake, but also the way in which their subdued colours fit perfectly the leaves in their two ravishing shades of pale green. It is a piece of exterior decoration, taken as a whole, which shows the master-designer of the universe at His (or Her) most sublime. A passerby in this unfrequented street might scarcely notice it, but I study it daily in season and feel that its perfect harmony and gossamer taste exhibit as much art as the tremendous baroque design of the abbatial church at Melk, which I revisited earlier this month.
So who was the artist? The debate between the evolutionists and the creationists will never he resolved so long as men remain obstinate and singleminded. I have always thought that both are right (and wrong), for evolution plainly occurs in many cases, but its principle and its law were laid down in the first act of creation. Their ultimate consequences, continuing into the indefinite future, were foreseen and ordained, and their beauties — and terrors — planned by the being who imparted that initial impulse to life. God willed a world of delight and mysteries, and in time willed a race of creatures who could share his pleasure in them. He willed Darwin and Huxley as well as Bishop Wilberforce, and Richard Dawkins and Professor Pinker as well as the Pope. He willed the process whereby my much-relished weigela came into existence, after countless aeons of vegetable permutations, so he can be said to have created it just as surely as Melk was created by the architect Jakob Prandtauer and by the masterful abbot Berthold Dietmayr, who found the colossal sums of money, and driving energy, to make it possible. We distinguish between nature and art but, ultimately, the distinction is false, for art sprang from nature, as anyone who has studied the evolution of ancient Egyptian architecture will testify; and the virtue of art declines the further it strays from its natural inspiration. When I say that the colour scheme of my weigela resembles a piece of Meissen I saw recently, what I really mean is that the skilled craftsman got his idea from a shrubbery.
The art of the ultimate creator or masterevolutionist is seen at its most subtle and yet spectacular in natural chaos. Unlike the Greeks who rejected the chaos which surrounded the orderly oikoumene they created, I delight in chaos in an ecumenical setting. I can see a vigorous example if I turn my eyes to the south window of my library, which looks out over the garden. It is, as I write, a swaying sea of glittery green in strong sunlight, which filters through the leafy vaults and canopies on to the trim lawn, all symmetrical and Apollonian. Yet this year, in a stupendous explosion of growth, a white clematis has asserted a temporary paramountcy over almost the entire garden. Not content with its wall, it has wriggled its way out of the lower order of plants — the entresol of the garden — and through a powerful veneer of velvety red roses, whose thorny tree reaches high into the sky. Thence it has colonised a beech tree 20 feet up, spread all over it, leapt on to our winter-flowering prenus, and is now clambering over a noble old pear tree, It is as high as the vine which swarms right up the south side of the house. It stretches all over the roof of my studio. Its interpenetration of the leaves of its captive trees has created umbrageous awnings under which repose my marble replica of Donatello's David, made in Florence 200 years ago, and the two bronzes by Rodin, presented to me by Taki in a gesture of prodigal generosity bounteous even by his standards. Seen from the top of the house the thousands of wistaria stars form an enveloping nebula of light, a kind of chaotic oikoumene in itself, which gives a large part of the garden a rampageous unity, as though designed by conscious art, and painted by Fragonard in one of his frenzied bursts of activity when he covered a large canvas in a single hour. Almost overnight, in short, the garden, unplanned, without any effort on our part, driven forward and cultivated by no human hand, has become a celestial, etiolated masterpiece.
But was it unplanned? I have been reading lately the works of that majestic sage Jonathan Edwards, whom many Americans believe to be their greatest philosopher. He learnt as a child, by studying the flying spider, to see God as the source of all beauty and excellence in nature, and to apprehend the world as an 'emanation of God's infinite fullness, created to express His glory', The very evolutionaty process, and the way in which its products interact to create new natural processes and combinations, are part of an infinite aesthetic scheme whose colossal and minute effects reflect God's own beauty with which he governs the universe. There is something of Aquinas in this (his Fourth Proof) and something of Kant, his transcendentalism, and something of Edwards himself reacting to the sublime physical features of a continent then still largely unexplored. I feel that Edwards could have preached a fine sermon on the way in which the clematis has made a beautiful little empire of my garden. It is fragile, delicate, fugitive, as ephemeral as a dance or a sunset or the smile on the face of a splendid woman. But for the week or two that it lasts it is an act of God I shall remember to my dying day.
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