STRAWBERRY HILLS FOREVER

The moon stood still on Strawberry Hill. Through dark and fetid dungeon passages, past amorous phantoms and shrieking monks, the Gothic novel led its trembling readers to a creaking door. What lay behind? Some would say the subconscious of a century.

''Characters are often nuns, priests, or medieval royalty; the story may imitate or draw from a fairy or folk tale; and the style may imitate a medieval form such as the popular ballad.''

''Characters are often nuns, priests, or medieval royalty; the story may imitate or draw from a fairy or folk tale; and the style may imitate a medieval form such as the popular ballad.''

In 1717, Alexander Pope, then only twenty-none years old but already famous as the author of ”The Rape of the Lock”  and ”Windsor Forest” decided to issue his collected works. Among the contents were two new poems, both written in the course of the last twelve months and both composed under the influence of a new and revolutionary mode of feeling. Although the poet was a keen classicist and a leader of the eighteenth century Palladian school, he had chosen a Romantic, that is to say, a Gothic background, and sought to evoke a pervasive atmosphere of mystery, melancholy and supernatural dread. In his ”Elegy to the Memory of the Unfortunate Lady” his heroine is a disembodied spirit whom he encounters wandering through a lonely garden:

Alexander Pope, Michael Dahl

Alexander Pope, Michael Dahl

”What beck’ning ghost, along the moonlight shade/ Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?/ ‘Tis she!-but why that bleeding bosom gored,/Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?”

In ”Eloisa to Aberhard,” on the other hand, his passionate protagonists; the ill-used philosopher and the unhappy nun; are made of solid flesh and blood, but Pope’s setting of the drama is strongly colored by his own fancy. Abelhard himself had built the Paraclete, where after her brother’s brutal castration, Eloisa was condemned to pass the remainder of her days. Pope surrounds it, nevertheless, with an air of grim antiquity and equips the convent with ”moss-grown domes,” ”awful arches”, and a ring of rugged mountains:


Walpole. Ted Turton illustration

Walpole. Ted Turton illustration

The wand’ring streams that shine between the hills,
The grots that echo to the tinkling rills,
The dying gales that pant upon the trees,
The lakes that quiver to the curling breeze;
No more these scenes my meditation aid,
Or lull to rest the visionary maid.
But o’er the twilight groves and dusky caves,
Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves,
Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws
A death-like silence, and a dread repose:
Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,
Shades ev’ry flow’r, and darkens ev’ry green,
Deepens the murmur of the falling floods,
And breathes a browner horror on the woods.

''The prototype of centuries of bestsellers to come, it’s pretty much all plot and breathless confusion. And after a brilliantly bizarre opening in which a worthless prince gets smashed by a giant helmet on his wedding day, the supernatural elements pretty much move to the margins in favor of a scheming count’s romantic machinations. Still, it’s a brisk read and clearly an important one, too, since it foreshadows every spooky castle darkest reaches of the dark ages story to come. It also, at base, seems like it might have been meant not to be taken too seriously, though I didn’t find myself marveling at its wit.''

''The prototype of centuries of bestsellers to come, it’s pretty much all plot and breathless confusion. And after a brilliantly bizarre opening in which a worthless prince gets smashed by a giant helmet on his wedding day, the supernatural elements pretty much move to the margins in favor of a scheming count’s romantic machinations. Still, it’s a brisk read and clearly an important one, too, since it foreshadows every spooky castle darkest reaches of the dark ages story to come. It also, at base, seems like it might have been meant not to be taken too seriously, though I didn’t find myself marveling at its wit.''

When he describes the effect of her miserable solitude upon his heroine’s imagination, Pope might also be describing the advance of the Romantic Spirit across the English literary landscape. One of the chief functions of creative art is constantly to reinterpret nature; and henceforward the whole universe, seen through the eyes of poets and storytellers, began to undergo subtle change. Its colors deepened, and its shadows darkened. Mountains, hither


egarded as exasperating natural obstacles, were now pregnant with ideas of ”religion and poetry” .

Gothic ruins, formerly dismissed as so much architectural rubbish attractive only to the antiquarian, were voted ”inexpressibly awful” and sublime. ”Horrid” became a poetic key word, fear a favorite literary emotion. Every ancient building must have its ghost, just as every gentleman’s park demanded a tame hermit.

Horace Walpole

Horace Walpole

A bizarre by-product of the Romantic movement was the so called Gothic novel, which, perhaps because it appealed to all that was most irrational in the human mind, retained its tremendous popular vogue right into the 1830′s. Pope, a lover of Gothic architecture to he last, had died in 1744. In 1749 Horace Walpole bought a modest house beside the Thames and announced he was refashioning it as ”a little Gothick castle.” Form many years he continued to enlarge and embellish it, until Strawberry Hill, with its ”pie-crust battlements” and paste-board vaulting, developed into a marvelous architectural fantasy.

There, during the early summer of 1764, Walpole tells us that he was visited by a peculiarly impressive dream. At the time he was feeling gloomy and anxious. His handsome selfish cousin, Henry Seymour Conway, had recently fallen foul of court and government, and Walpole had been struggling to prepare his defense in the form of bellicose political pamphlet. It was not an easy task; he was evidently overtired. And that night, he related, he had had a dream, ”of which all I could recover was, that i had thought myself in an ancient castle… and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say…”

Henry Fuseli. The Nightmare. 1781

Henry Fuseli. The Nightmare. 1781

For the next two months, as he covered sheet after sheet, he lived through a period of intense excitement, during which he deliberately cut himself off from all his usual friends and pastimes. Out of this trance emerged ”The Castle of Otranto” , the only book of his, he assured his old confidante Madame du Deffland, in which he had taken any real pleasure. Published anonymously toward the end of 1764, it enjoyed an immediate popular success, and a second edition, with the author’s name, appeared in April, 1765.

To explain the impression it made on contemporary readers is nowadays a little difficult. Walpole’s personages are all of them decorative dummies; a haughty tyrant, a brace of innocent maidens, a mysterious knight, and an unacknowledged heir. ”Perhaps the dream-like inconsequence of the story,” suggests Walpole’s biographer R.W. Ketton-Cremer, ”constitutes its main charm…” It sprang from a dream, and retains something of the mysterious attraction that certain vivid dreams exert. Walpole’s fantastic stage properties leave a particularly deep impression; a sighing portrait that steps from the canvas; the armored hand; a gigantic sculptural leg; and the prodigious helmet: ” a hundred times more large than any casque ever made for human being, and shaded with a proportionable quantity of black feathers”- that crashes down into the castle courtyard.

Francisco Goya (1724-1806): "Two Old People Eating Soup",1820-1821 (One of the "black paintings" from the Quinta del Sordo).

Francisco Goya (1724-1806): "Two Old People Eating Soup",1820-1821 (One of the "black paintings" from the Quinta del Sordo).

The symbolism of the tale and of its background seems to have been the product of Walpole,s unconscious memory. Huge stone-built Otranto is an immensely magnified version of his own small and flimsy Thames-side house; and he also drew on his dormant recollections of a once familiar Camebridge college. Here Walpole was setting a pattern that many of the later Gothic novelists followed. They too, drew up their images from the darkest recesses of their own subconscious; and they, too, would often write at breakneck speed, under the pressure of some violent secret emotion. Thus William Beckford’s brilliant ”Vathek” was a story, he declared, ”so horrid that I tremble whilst relating it and have not a nerve in my frame but vibrates like an aspen.”

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