Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital. Philip Hoare
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Название: Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital
Автор: Philip Hoare
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007394586
isbn:
The railway also brought a new class of admirer to Netley. Picnickers now besported themselves in the ruins, as did their metropolitan counterparts at the Crystal Palace, where Paxton’s gigantic greenhouse enclosed ancient elms growing in Hyde Park, just as mature trees grew up in the abbey’s roofless nave. The Great Exhibition celebrated industry, progress and the future; Netley – with its own aspirations to being a crystal palace, its technologically innovative tracery windows having collapsed into decrepitude – represented the past. Gothic itself was turned from its effete, decadent eighteenth-century incarnation into a more rigorous, muscular nineteenth-century aesthetic. To Augustus Pugin, a Catholic convert, the championing of gothic was nothing less than ‘an answer to current social and cultural crises’. From aesthetic spectacle gothic had returned to utilitarian function, although Pugin’s crusade would culminate in suburban villas and terraces, their scaled-down gothic porches appealing to some atavistic sense of the mythic English past. It was a long way from Strawberry Hill’s Committee of Taste, and even further from Abbot Suger’s opus modernum.
Once more Netley’s ruins would respond to the spirit of the times. Just as gothic changed its meaning, so did the abbey. In 1861, Punch noted that ‘The place has been cleared and cleaned without having been Cockneyfied; it has been furnished with convenient and inconspicuous seats, and rendered permeable throughout.’ At the same time it lamented the fact that when the Lady Chapel had been cleared of ‘rubbish’ and revealed ‘a piece of encaustic tile pavement near the altar … several pieces have been stolen by some robbers who procured admission in the disguise of respectable-looking people’; the magazine called for police patrols of the area. Three years later, William Howitt noted the same reservations which Barham had satirised; the conflicting pressures of popularity and access with art and intellectual demands which the newly-mobile modern world had created:
The visitors and tourists of to-day are just as much charmed with the ruins of Netley as the monks and Walpole were. They crowd there in summer to picnic amongst the ruined walls and lofty trees, and are not always careful to avoid desecrating these delightful spots with their relics of greasy paper, and of shrimps and sardine boxes. But the grounds are carefully kept, and these unsightly objects daily removed, to be only in fine weather daily left again; a strange desecration that one would think every lover of the picturesque would feel instinctively aware of.
These were egalitarian times, and romanticism – like the great unwashed – had to be kept in check. The rigours of Victorian technoculture had settled on the world, and fey imagination took a backseat. Howitt noted that ‘Horace Walpole, in his days of gothic enthusiasm, was enchanted with Netley, and seems to have contemplated restoring at least enough of it for a house. What an escape it had of being Strawberry-hilled!’ Sentimentalised on tinted postcards of picnic scenes and the ordinary people at play, Netley had lost its sense of subversion. Accepting their latest role, the abbey ruins gave up their sensational past and slipped back into sleepy indolence.
The sky looks as though someone has been dropping ink in it. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, rain-dark clouds seem almost to touch the trees around the ruins. Each year, the lowering stratosphere descends a little more, shrouding every horizon with an industrial gothic legacy.
In the 1880s, Ruskin, the champion of the Gothic Revival, lectured on The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century and his ‘obsession with black skies and plague winds’: ‘I believe these swift and mocking clouds and colours are only between storms’, he wrote. ‘They are assuredly new in Heaven, so far as my life reaches. I never saw a single example of them till after 1870.’ Edging nearer to madness – as though those clouds precipitated his insanity – Ruskin had become obsessed by the effect of industrialisation on the climate, writing in his diary, ‘By the plague-winds every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round the world.’ Like Pugin, who, overworked by his final commission to design the ‘medieval court’ for the Great Exhibition, had been admitted to Bedlam, Ruskin too became insane. After attacks of mania which left him remote from the world for his last ten years, Ruskin died in an influenza epidemic in 1900, watching the skies over his Lake District home.
Beauty had become a problem for the modern world. In his prose-poem ‘A Phenomenon of the Future’ – written in 1864, the same year as Howitt’s antiquarian tribute to the abbey – the Decadent poet Stéphane Mallarmé envisaged ‘A pale sky, over a world ending in decrepitude, will perhaps disappear with the clouds: faded purple shreds of sunsets dying in a sleeping river on a horizon submerged in light and water … in an age that has outlived beauty’, ‘une epoque qui survit à la beauté’. Victorian champions of progress like T. H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ and coiner of the term ‘agnostic’, vigorously challenged such decadent romanticism. In 1886 Huxley rebuked the regressive aesthetics of the Wordsworthian ‘Lake District Defence Society’. ‘People’s sense of beauty should be more robust’, snorted the rationalist, ‘I have had apocalyptic visions looking down Oxford Street at a sunset before now.’
Blakean revelation had little place in the reality of the new world, and Netley’s romantic visitors – Walpole, Gray and all who came in their wake – could not have imagined the overcast world of their descendants, threatened by new storm clouds. Heavy rain floods the beach road, making it impassible, as if to revert Netley to the Cistercians’ ‘horrible’ site. Passing the sign that marks the city’s boundaries, you turn into the gateway beyond, where an older metal plate announces that ‘Netley Abbey, the property of the Chamberlayne family, was placed in the guardianship of the Commissioners of Works under the Ancient Monuments Act 1913 by Tankerville Chamberlayne Esq. of Cranbury Park Winchester August 1922’.
The reforming, reconstructing twentieth century had a new use for Netley. It repaired the ruins, mowed the lawns, clipped the trees and imposed strict opening hours. The modern world had come to regard such places as educational, rather than emotional sites. The voice of authority and the lecturing texts of 1950s National Trust handbooks, rather than the florid romanticism of eighteenth-century prose, now dictated Netley’s aesthetic. Clad in his grey suit and tie, the ascetic German émigré Nikolaus Pevsner arrived to survey the abbey in the early Sixties. ‘In 1828 the ruins were embedded in trees’, he noted. ‘It must have been a wonderful site, but the Ministry of Public Works are rightly concerned with making the ruins instructive … At Netley there is too much to learn, and intellectual pleasures have their privileges side by side with visual ones.’
The Buildings of England may have extolled the intellectual pleasures of ruins such as Netley, but few visit it with textbook in hand to be educated by these whalebone arches beached on Netley’s shore. Its lawns are usually quiet and for the most part undisturbed, save for wedding parties using the stones as a photographic backdrop, and theatre companies taking advantage of a ready-made medieval set. Yet on one day each year its sanctity is revived on the Feast of the Assumption, the day the Blessed Virgin Mary ascended to Heaven, the moon and stars at her feet. On a summer’s evening the ghostly procession of white-vestmented priests and altar-boys and the blue incense seem to retrieve the past, and placed on a pillar stump is a statue of its dedicatee, enshrined in flowers like a holy well.
A hundred years ago William Howitt could ignore the sight of discarded sardine cans: ‘The visitor, seated on a fallen stone, still feels a forest silence around him; and the neighbourhood of the Southampton Water seems to complete the feeling of the monastic tranquility which for ages brooded over the spot.’ It is still possible to access that spirit: the Cistercian monk’s austere regime, the aesthete’s rarefied contemplation, the Regency adolescent’s bosom heaving with delighted horror. Arches frame dark yews, crows caw in tall beeches, and an ancient, blowsy oak which survived the Commissioner of Works’ cull might still be modelling for Constable’s sketchbook. In dank chambers, cold clear water runs through the ferny channels which were once monks’ latrines. СКАЧАТЬ