Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare

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СКАЧАТЬ taste for the sublime and the picturesque, as though England were a panorama spread before them, framed by their own aesthetic. Tiring of ‘improved’ landscapes, they now looked for something more thrilling, and found it in gothic.

      Eighteenth-century art historians believed that gothic architecture was inspired by the tall forests of northern Europe; they saw its sacred arches, crockets, spires and columns as stone versions of ancient woodland – the antiquarian James Hall even built a wicker ‘cathedral’ in his garden to demonstrate the ancient provenance of the style. For the rarefied tastes of the eighteenth-century connoisseur, it was a delicious meeting of art and life to be savoured: this gothic abbey returning to its arboreal inspiration, shaped by the deep, dark, mysterious woods themselves, still surrounded by the very pagan spirits which its Cistercian builders had sought to dispel.

      When it was built, Netley’s abbey must have stood out from the landscape like a piece of ostentatious modern architecture, but it had now been subsumed by the land, made decrepit by Nature and blunted by Time, and in the process had become a place of myth and legend. And within that myth, the abbey found its new identity by reaching back, through its medieval past, and into the dark ages of Europe’s forested depths – perhaps even to their old gods and rituals, their supernatural mysteries. In an era of cool rationality, Netley reacted by becoming a natural artifice, a set-piece of theatrical bravura composed by Man and framed by Nature – a fantastic escape from that rational age.

Southern Gothick

      In fact they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise – Oh! the purple abbots, what a spot had they chosen to slumber in! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively, that they seemed only to have retired into the world …

      HORACE WALPOLE, 1755

      In the summer of 1755, Horace Walpole, dilettante son of Britain’s first prime minister, undertook a tour of Hampshire with his friend, John Chute. Along with their mutual friend, the architect and artist Richard Bentley, this bachelor trio formed a ‘Committee of Taste’ to supervise the creation of Walpole’s house on the banks of the Thames at Strawberry Hill, where he was reinventing gothic in stone and stained glass. With its romantic name, castellated turrets and towers and strange chapel in the woods, Strawberry Hill was a three-dimensional expression of the imagination which would inspire the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, written by Walpole in 1764.

      As a maligned victim of the Renaissance, gothic was ready for a revival. Scathingly coined by Vasari in the sixteenth century to represent the barbarian destroyers of classical Rome and Greece, Walpole’s rehabilitation of a pejorative term was an act of genteel subversion. ‘His taste as expressed in Strawberry Hill was one of a deliberate rebel counter-culture’, wrote Walpole’s biographer, Timothy Mowl. ‘He was delighted by his own identity and concerned, like a public relations expert, to communicate it to us down the years …’ Walpole was, wrote Mowl, ‘one of the most successful deviant infiltrators that the English establishment has ever produced’, and his Committee of Taste both used and hid behind the fantasy of gothic in the same way that later ‘decadents’ used it to both promote and mask their identities.

      The dandyism of Walpole and his successors stood against an age of mass production. It was an individuality symbolised by the romantic figure of the Solitary or the Outsider; the roots of the modern cult of the individual, first discerned in Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard’.* Gray had been Walpole’s Eton intimate, and the aristocrat would employ his Committee of Taste to frame Gray’s work in the gothic arches of Bentley’s ‘exquisitely irreverent’ illustrations, making the poet the personification of their cult, an early media superstar.

      It was the beginning of a new gothic lineage that would merge with a self-conscious sense of decadence, from the macabre costume drama of the Revolutionary incroyables and merveilleuses of France, to Wilde’s Salomé and its Edwardian interpreter Maud Allan posing as a graveside angel cloaked in black chiffon as she danced to Chopin’s Marche funèbre; from the Sitwells as gothic figures on catafalques, to Diana Cooper as the statue of a gothic nun imprisoned in Oliver Messel’s medieval plaster in The Miracle; from Rex Whistler photographed by Cecil Beaton as Thomas Gray from Bentley’s portrait of the poet in the nude, to Stephen Tennant as a dead Romeo in his silver-foil-covered room, to the silver walls of Andy Warhol’s Factory and its Electric Chair, modern icons produced in a 1960s version of Strawberry Hill: a succession of silver walls, like Walpole’s hall of mirrors, reflecting its decadent narcissists.

      Deep-dyed in narcissism, gay and addicted to gossip (although also a serious man of art and letters), Walpole both represented and recorded a frivolity which pervaded English culture – a decadence which gothic, as the extreme expression of romanticism’s counter culture, would embody. Yet this was essentially seen as an unEnglish disease, as the poet Charles Churchill (himself a doomed young hedonist) wrote: ‘With our own island vices not content/ We rob our neighbours on the continent.’ For Walpole, his unhappy Grand Tour of Europe, taken with Gray in tow and in pursuit of his inamorata, the bisexual Lord Lincoln, had served both to encourage his gothic tendency and to import foreign perversions to England.

      That summer of 1755, Walpole and his circle embarked on a new tour which would confirm their deviant identities. To them, gothic – Suger’s opus modernum – represented an indefinable, fantasy past; its pointed arches were a rubric for a romantic rebellion which queried the rational progress of their age. When they discovered its ruins, sleeping unawares on the shores of Southampton Water, Netley Abbey would become a locus for their subversive masquerade. The Cistercians’ ‘horrible’ site became an historical reference for what Walpole and his friends were doing at Strawberry Hill. By the time they had finished with it, it would seem as though Netley itself had been redesigned by their Committee of Taste in a new importation of foreign vice to this English shore.

      Walpole had been alerted to ‘all the beauties of Netley’ by Gray’s visit to the abbey that July. The place had deeply inspired the poet in his taste for the antiquarian and the ‘romantick’. On 6 August 1755 Gray had written, with an idiosyncratic disdain for punctuation and spelling, to another close friend, Dr Wharton. It was the first of a series of descriptions written that year which fixed Netley as a modern gothic site:

      I wished for you often on the Southern Coast, where … the Oaks grow quite down to the Beach, & … the Sea forms a number of Bays little & great, that appear glittering in the midst of thick Groves of them. add to this the Fleet (for I was at Portsmouth two days before it sailed) & the number of Vefsels always pafsing along, or sailing up Southampton-River (wch is the largest of these Bays I mention) and enters about 10 mile into the Land, & you will have a faint Idea of the South. from Fareham to Southampton, where you are upon a level with the coast, you have a thousand such Peeps & delightful Openings … I have been also at Titchfield, at Netly-Abbey, (a most beautiful ruin in as beautiful a situation) at Southampton, at Bevis-Mount, at Winchester &c …

      That mid-century summer was the season of Netley’s invention in the gothic imagination. ‘On the arrival of a few fine days, the first we have had this summer’, wrote Walpole, ‘… Mr Chute persuaded me to take a jaunt to Winchester and Netley Abbey, with the latter of which he is very justly enchanted.’ Having spent the night in Southampton, they set out to explore Netley. Walpole was ecstatic; its ruins seemed to fulfil his dreams. ‘But how shall I describe Netley to you?’ he rhapsodised to Bentley. ‘I can only, by telling you it is the spot in the world for which Mr Chute and I wish’:

      The ruins are vast, and retain fragments of beautiful fretted roofs pendant in the air, with all the variety of Gothic patterns of windows, wrapped round and round with ivy – many trees are sprouted up against the walls, and only want to be increased СКАЧАТЬ