Читать книгу Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton, James Stourton - Страница 13

‘Blessed are those who have taste,’ said Nietzsche, ‘even although it be bad taste.’

Quoted by KENNETH CLARK in The Gothic Revival 1

Kenneth Clark’s first book, The Gothic Revival, was completed on almost exactly the same day that his first child was born, 13 April 1928. Jane had been taken to hospital the night before, and at first all seemed well. However, it turned out to be a difficult birth on account of the baby’s enormous head, and Jane suffered accordingly. Clark made light of the matter when he wrote to Mary Berenson: ‘I believe she is much better today, though still stiff & weak. As for the baby, no one seems to bother about it, so I presume it is perfectly normal. It seemed to me abnormally ugly, but people with more experience assure me that it’s beautiful. School of Baldovinetti, anyway, and very close to the one in the André picture.’2

The baby was christened Alan Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, and to everyone’s amusement ‘hiccoughed gently while we gave solemn promises that he would shun the flesh’.3 Alan certainly never heeded this undertaking. His godparents were two of Clark’s Oxford friends, Bobby Longden and Tom Boase,4 the latter a curious choice who does not even rate an entry in Clark’s autobiography. He and Boase had met at Sligger Urquhart’s chalet, and perhaps Boase’s mild, uncompetitive character – Maurice Bowra later ridiculed him as ‘a man who has no public virtue and no private parts’ – made him an acceptable choice of godfather to Jane, who may have been alarmed by the alternatives.

The boy was taken back to St Ermin’s Hotel. It was not until the following year that the Clarks bought their first house, at 56 Tufton Street in Westminster. This joyless dwelling, paid for by Clark’s father, was furnished with many of the heavy left-over pieces of furniture and pictures from Sudbourne. Clark wrote with his usual breeziness to the Berensons: ‘This house is very much to my taste. The decorations are quite unadventurous, and of a kind most unpopular just now – mahogany furniture & large gold picture frames of the kind called Edwardian. But I grew up among such surroundings & would not be comfortable in the shiny rooms now fashionable … Jane is very well, despite a great deal of work and worry … Our first experiment in servants was a failure, the cook refusing to attempt an omelette, owing to the complicated nature of the dish.’5 Jane had their bedroom redecorated with William Morris wallpaper – this was to become a feature of all their future houses – and Kenneth commissioned the then comparatively unknown Bernard Leach to make tiles for a fireplace. He hung his drawings in the study and bragged to the Berensons, ‘They include an enchanting Correggio & a ravishing Beccafumi which I managed to snatch out of the teeth of the dealers here. Soon I shall believe I own Leonardos & Michelangelos.’6 Despite having a setting for their things, neither of the Clarks liked what he later referred to as ‘a nasty little house in Westminster’, and within a year it was sold.

The Gothic Revival was published the following year by Constable, a firm recommended by Logan Pearsall Smith.7 Its genesis was the result of C.F. Bell compiling material on the subject for a study of the ethics of the Revival. He had a habit of collecting notes which he would sometimes hand over to a favoured pupil, and had offered the idea, along with his notes, to Clark for presentation as a B.Litt. to enable him to spend a fourth year at Oxford. The university was still overcrowded owing to the after-effects of the war, and the board of studies required reassurance that Clark would stay the course. Bell, who had volunteered to act as his supervisor, duly told the board that Clark was a serious student and would not default.8 Part of his later bitterness about Clark arose from the feeling that he had cavalierly tossed the B.Litt. to one side, thus causing him embarrassment with the board and ‘concealing the circumstances in which [the book] was in the first instance undertaken’.9 Bell’s weariness with Clark is well expressed in a letter to Berenson: ‘I have my own causes of complaint against K; but I am quite sure that my genuine admiration for him – the sort of admiration which can only be felt by an elderly mediocrity for a young being from whom so much is to be hoped – and his gratitude to me (as exaggerated as it is) for suggesting lines of thought … I have lost more friends through marriage than through death.’* Despite Bell’s spiky possessiveness, Clark tried to maintain a cordial relationship and dedicated the book to Bell, who made an unsuccessful request to the publisher to have the dedication removed from later editions.

Very little had appeared on the subject since Charles Eastlake’s The History of the Gothic Revival in 1872, and Clark thought that this was because the movement ‘produced so little on which our eyes can rest without pain’.10 His Introduction was an apologia for writing about the topic at all, and this ambivalence runs throughout the book. When he set out to write The Gothic Revival he was infected by what he called ‘Stracheyan irony’, and his approach to the subject was one of amused tolerance. It should be pointed out that he had no architectural training of either a practical or a historical kind. The truth is that he knew so little when he started, and learned so much in the course of writing, that he was ‘unconsciously persuaded by what [he] set out to deride’.11 Unfortunately, at the very moment that he began to see real merit in the buildings of the movement, he lost his nerve. Yet the book is not so much about architecture as what he called the ‘ideals and motives’ of the Gothic Revival – it is subtitled An Essay in the History of Taste. Clark set out to explain in literary and psychological terms the source of the movement and its development towards an ethical and moral purpose. The book was conceived as a literary work, which Clark believed suited the subject, pointing out that ‘every change in form [is] accompanied by a change in literature which helps the writer in his difficult task of translating shapes into words’.12

The Gothic Revival opens with chapters on literary and antiquarian influences on the eighteenth century: ruins and Rococo from the capricious Strawberry Hill to the fallen legend of Fonthill Abbey. Clark later judged these chapters dull, as he had not yet shaken off the B.Litt. thesis manner. The second, more complex, half of the book deals with the battle of styles and the polemical controversies that followed. It was in his unravelling of the complexities of ‘Ecclesiology’,13 and his account of the two towering apologists of the Revival, Ruskin and Pugin, that everybody agreed that the book was brilliant. Clark had started out with a baleful view of Pugin. In the course of his researches he asked the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the V&A about some Pugin drawings: ‘I am ashamed to trouble you over works so devoid of merit. But Pugin, whatever he was as an artist, is an overwhelmingly important figure in the history of taste. He is, as it were, a Haydon who succeeded – unfortunately for us. We mayn’t like the Gothic revival churches which confront us at every bend in the road. But it is worth trying to find out why our fathers did.’14 But he gradually came under Pugin’s spell, and realised that even if his works were sometimes disappointing he was a genius of sorts. Later he was to write: ‘There are lots of errors in the Gothic Revival, and even more omissions, but … the real point of the book is the discovery of Pugin.’*

Anybody who looks at Clark’s book for a description of the movement’s great buildings – Barry and Pugin’s Houses of Parliament apart – or for an account of its great architects will be disappointed. Gilbert Scott features as a rather cynical, commercial figure whose merits Clark did not at that time sufficiently recognise.* As for Butterfield, Waterhouse, Burges and Street, they are barely mentioned. It was only as he was completing the book that the quality of their work dawned on Clark, as he later admitted when it was republished: ‘I was not sufficiently sure of my ground. I felt fairly certain that Street was a great architect but could not say why.’15

As mentioned earlier, Clark had been much influenced by Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism, a then fashionable book which attempted to expose Victorian architectural fallacies under the headings ‘Romantic’, ‘Mechanical’, ‘Ethical’ and ‘Biological’.16 Clark applied Scott’s fallacies to the interpretation of his own subject, and posited a false antithesis between Pugin and Scott. This was pointed out in an otherwise admiring review by the architect Harry Goodhart-Rendel, the most sensitive and knowledgeable contemporary interpreter of Victorian architecture. His 1924 lecture at the RIBA had been a stepping stone towards understanding the movement, and Clark referred to him as ‘the father of us all’. He gently took Clark to task for believing that there is a rule of taste.17

Despite its limitations, The Gothic Revival was a successful, pioneering and much-admired book, not least for the elegance of its prose, and is still read with pleasure today. The brilliant young critic John Summerson described it as ‘a small, exquisite and entirely delightful book’,18 and the architect Stephen Dykes Bower called it ‘a very good book’, but regretted its failure to deal with the main architects: ‘the missing quarter is the most important. Mr Clark has gained the ramparts; and had his courage mounted with the occasion, he might have stormed the citadel’.19 The TLS was equally admiring: ‘Mr Clark’s insistence on the scenic value of the Revival is one of the acutest points in the book. It allows him to try in the court of the picturesque works that would suffer if brought before a strictly architectural tribunal.’20 What these reviews reveal is how timely the book was. Today it can be seen as part of the neo-Victorianism of the 1920s: John Betjeman, Osbert Lancaster, and Christopher Hussey’s important book on The Picturesque published in 1927, and perhaps even a distant relative of the whimsical Victorian revival of Harold Acton and Evelyn Waugh.

When the publisher Michael Sadleir21 proposed a new edition of The Gothic Revival in 1949, Clark reopened the book after a twenty-year interval and responded, ‘I expected to find the history inaccurate, the entertainment out of date, the criticism relatively sound. But it is the criticism which has worn least well.’22 It was republished in 1950, and the TLS ran a leader welcoming it, but pointing out its inherent contradictions. Clark did not change the text, which he felt was a period piece, but added some self-lacerating footnotes, two of which will give a flavour:

Text: King’s College Chapel is not completely successful and would be less so if it were a church and stood alone.

Clark 1949 footnote: I forget now why I thought it grand to be so critical of King’s College chapel.

Text: The result is a series of erosions and excrescences, breaking the line of our streets, wasting valuable ground space, and totally disregarding the chief problem of modern civil architecture.

Clark 1949 footnote: This is the stupidest and most pretentious sentence in the book. I knew little enough about ‘modern civil architecture’, but if I had stopped to think for a second would have realised that the beauty of all towns depends on the ‘waste of valuable ground space’; and I had not to go further than Oxford High Street to see what beauty a street can derive from its line being broken by erosions and excrescences.

Clark’s autobiography states that ‘having delivered the book to a publisher … I was free to turn back to my true centre, Italian art’, and implies that he went straight to Leonardo da Vinci.23 But in fact he contemplated and toyed with a number of very ambitious projects which reflect his continuing admiration for Austrian and German art history and his desire to emulate Riegl and Wölfflin. He described one to his mother: ‘My imagination is fired by the great subject which I have long been starting and I now definitely approach – The Classical Revival.’24 He was still nominally collecting material for Berenson, and tried out one suggestion on his mentor: ‘Of course work for the Florentine Drawings cannot consume all my time … Many plans have occurred to me, the most ambitious and the one which seems to me most worth doing is some study of the conflict between classicism & baroque which seems to have absorbed the Italian spirit during the late 16th & early 17th century. I should like to put Raphael & Michelangelo into two slots at the top and see them come out Poussin and Rubens at the bottom … Do you think it is worth attempting?’25

The project he outlined never developed, although he was later to show a parallel interest in the conflict between Neoclassicism and the Romantic Movement. However, there was another idea that was to tease Clark for the next fifty years. A notebook in his archive, dated 1928, reveals the beginning of a lifelong obsession with what he believed would be his ‘great book’, to which he frequently returned: Motives. The cryptic note reads: ‘write a Study in the History of Ornament tracing the change of character in various well known motives. By taking the history of one motive, one is able to concentrate on changes of form. The ornaments must have had at least three incarnations – Classical, Medieval & Renaissance … & Oriental, Baroque & Modern. Collect subjects beginning with: 1. Mermaids 2. Greek masters [?] 3. Horses & chariots etc.’26 The project, which owed much to Riegl, was an attempt to interpret design as a revelation of a state of mind, and changes of style, as for example that from the Classical to the early medieval, not as a decadence but as a change of will.27 By examining a recurrent theme he hoped it would be possible to express the unity of form and subject – the essence of a work of art. Clark returned to Motives at various points of his life, notably when he was Slade Professor, but confessed in his autobiography that ‘I had neither the intelligence nor the staying power to achieve such an ambition, but it has haunted me ever since, and although I have not written my “great book” I know what kind of book it ought to have been.’28 Motives was even to become one of his principal arguments against making Civilisation.29

In May 1929 Berenson finally decided to drop any pretence about his relations with Clark. He wrote from Baalbek in Lebanon: ‘I think I must let you know after having thought it over as well as I know how, I have decided that we had better give up our plan of collaborating on the new edition of the Florentine Drawings … I shall need not a collaborator but an assistant … It would be absurd to expect you to leave house and wife and child and friends to devil for a cantankerous old man … I want you to believe, dear Kenneth, that it is to save our friendship that I am giving up our working together.’30 Once he had recovered from the initial upset, Clark would have realised that Berenson was right. Besides, he was about to embark on a great adventure in the London art world, and one of which BB would not approve.

* Letter from C.F. Bell to Mary Berenson, 2 June 1927 (I Tatti). An undated letter (c.1927) to Berenson provides Bell’s view of Jane Clark: ‘I wish he had made a better marriage. I do not like his wife, she is sly and insincere.’ He did, however, like to emphasise Jane’s role in saving, typing and reading The Gothic Revival, perhaps as a way of underlining her husband’s fickleness.

* Letter to G.M. Young, 29 June 1949 (Tate 8812/1/2/7235). Clark erroneously believed that Pugin was entirely forgotten, and was unaware that Hermann Muthesius had written about him in Die neuere Kirchliche Baukunst in England (1900).

* ‘One great difference between Gilbert Scott and ourselves: he believed that he built very good Gothic, we that he built very bad.’ (Clark, The Gothic Revival, p.182.)