Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. James Stourton
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