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

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СКАЧАТЬ small platforms. This little castle is buried from the Abbey in a wood, in the very centre, on the edge of the hill: on each side breaks in the view of the Southampton sea, deep blue, glistening with silver and vessels; on one side terminated by Southampton, on the other by Calshot Castle; and the Isle of Wight rising above the opposite hills. – 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 …

      ‘… Gray has lately been here’, added Walpole, acknowledging the poet’s lyrical and romantic inspiration. Two months later Gray returned, drawn by Netley’s mysterious spirit (and possibly by the area’s ‘lusty’ boatmen). He wrote from Southampton, ‘at Mr. Vining’s, Plumber, in High-Street’ to another friend, Reverend James Brown, with a description that competed with Walpole’s to capture the dark romance of the ruins:

      I received your letter before I left home, & sit down to write to you after the finest walk in the finest day, that ever shone, to Netley-Abbey, my old friend, with whom I long to renew my acquaintance … the sun was all too glaring & too full of gauds [Gray quoted from Shakespeare’s King John] for such a scene, wch ought to be visited only in the dusk of the evening. it stands in a little quiet valley, wch gradually rises behind the ruin into a half-circle crown’d with thick wood, before it on a descent is a thicket of oaks, that serves to veil it from the broad day & from profane eyes, only leaving a peep on both sides, where the sea appears glittering thro’ the shade, & vefsels with their white sails, that glide acrofs & are lost again. concealed behind the thicket stands a little Castle (also in ruins) immediately on the shore, that commands a view over an expanse of sea clear & smooth as glafs (when I saw it) … & in front the deep shades of the New-Forest distinctly seen, because the water is no more than three miles over. the Abbey was never very large. the shell of its church is almost entire, but the pillars of the iles have gone, & the roof has tumbled in, yet some little of it is left in the transept, where the ivy has forced its way thro’, & hangs flaunting down among the fretted ornaments & escutcheons of the Benefactors. much of the lodging & offices are also standing, but all is overgrown with trees & bushes, & mantled here & there with ivy, that mounts over the battlements.

      To Thomas Gray’s romantic imagination, such visits induced an almost trance-like state, the evocative ruins ‘pregnant with poetry … One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits at noon-day’, and he visualised its abbot

      bidding his beads for the souls of his Benefactors, interr’d in that venerable pile, that lies beneath him … Did you not observe how, as that white sail shot by and was lost, he turn’d and cross’d himself, to drive the Tempter from him, that had thrown that distraction in his way. I should tell you that the Ferryman, who row’d me, a lusty young Fellow, told me, that he would not for all the world pass a night at the Abbey, (there were such things seen near it,) tho’ there was a power of money hid there.

      Veiled in its ghost stories – ‘Blind Peter’ was said to guard the abbot’s buried treasure (although such tales were also useful for smugglers using the ruins as a place to land contraband) – the reinvention of Netley was under way. Walpole and Gray’s descriptions, rivalling each other in reverie, distilled the new spirit of the place. Over the next few years their refined taste would percolate through popular culture, spawning a new cult. Such descriptions, apparently private but written quite consciously for public consumption, would summon a host of artists, writers and gothic aficionados to this Hampshire shore, determined to commune with its ghostly spirits.

      In 1761, the newly-rich Thomas Lee Dummer, William Chamberlayne’s friend at Woolston House, acquired Netley Abbey and, fearless of Walter Taylor’s fate, uprooted the entire north transept and transferred it to the grounds of his new home, Cranbury Park, near Winchester, where it was reassembled as an authentic gothic folly. Dummer’s vandalism was a fashionable act of ‘improvement’: seven years later, Fountains Abbey, the great Cistercian foundation in Yorkshire, was bought by the local squire, who surrounded it with smooth lawns, subsuming it into his artificial landscape and ‘providing its owner with an aesthetic object on the scale of the Roman Forum or the Colosseum’.

      Yet despite Dummer’s depradations, his eye for the picturesque was credited with the presentation of Netley’s ruins as a sublime location – as though he himself had been directed by the Committee of Taste. Francis Gosse, the artist who recorded the still intact abbey in 1760 and 1761 for his Antiquities of England and Wales, praised Dummer for having ‘greatly improved the beauty and solemnity of the scene by a judicious management of the trees which have spontaneously sprung up among the mouldering walls’. From its selection by the Cistercians as a wild site, through their civilisation and subsequent dissolution, Netley, recaptured by Nature, was now being subtly relandscaped, both physically and aesthetically, by the romantic imagination, its stones ‘so overgrown with ivy, and interspersed with trees, as to form a scene, inspiring the most pleasing melancholy’. The abbey’s ruins were ‘discovered’ in the same way as were the classical remains of the ancient world. Engulfed by Nature and aged by Time, the abbey was like Rome, ‘an immense garden ruin, a hortus conclusus, in which nature and civilisation had reached a kind of harmony’. It spoke of intangible eternities on an English shore, rising out of the vegetation like the Colosseum, or like an Egyptian temple emerging from the sands, a Hampshire version of the ‘vast desolation’ which greeted Shelley’s traveller as he gazed on the lifeless works of Ozymandias.

       Netley Abbey, 1776

      With Continental unrest curtailing Grand Tours, the English imagination was turned in on itself and its own past. The search for the sublime had to be sated nearer to home, and Netley fulfilled this desire. By 1765 the effect of Thomas Gray’s antiquary elegies was being felt in popular literature, with the publication of the pamphlet/tour guide, THE RUINS OF NETLEY ABBEY A Poem in Blank Verse, prefaced by a quote from Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi:

       I do love these ancient Ruins:

       We never tread upon them, but we set

       Our foot on some reverend History

      And continuing anonymously,

       High on the summit of yon verdant plain,

       Beneath whose falling edge, the pebbled shore,

       Swept by the billows of the Western flood,

       Repels the rage of Neptune; there behold

       The scattered heaps of Netley’s ancient fane

       Through many centuries in record fam’d:

      At length her stately fabric is no more.

      With Thomas Dummer’s death, Netley’s ruins passed, via his widow, to Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland, himself an artist who, acknowledging the growing taste for the picturesque, allowed public access to the ruins. A flattering – if not obsequious – contemporary guide noted: ‘It is fortunate for the lovers of antiquities that these beautiful ruins are now in the possession of a gentleman, whose regard for the arts, elegant taste, and practical as well as theoretic skill in picturesque matters, ensure to the public every care in the preservation of them.’ Thus opened up and extolled, Netley’s fortunes rose like the moon over its ruins by night, casting its medieval stones in a glamorous new light. In 1790, the poet William Sotheby, who lived nearby at Bevis Mount, just up the Itchen, produced his ‘Ode, Netley Abbey; Midnight’:

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