Gothic Revival

I

You may call me Van Helsing, for that is my business. Or something like it. Exact equivalents are not, perhaps, on offer.
We are bodies in rooms, suffering diseases of the blood; revenants all, among the spires and pointed arches.
Plunderers, cannibals, look to the skull for counsel, in these days of crooked art.
Walpole stalks through the papier mâché Wunderkammer of Strawberry Hill, arranging his medieval curios with whitegloved hands, setting mousetraps of the soul. On an escritoire lies his medieval manuscript, not quite finished.
Stumbling from level to level, through the labyrinths and secret passages of the Internet, I piece together felicitous discoveries and cannily arrange my texts.

II

Satan will have his say, one voice or another.Who would deny him a little fun?
Man’s joy is in transgression; he can but build dark castles of desire and debate varieties of ruin.
Here come the barbarians, over the Alps, to sack Rome and plunder the world of metaphors-terror and vice write another chapter in the illuminated Book of Infamy.Call me a pessimist, but the accumulated evidence would seem to indicate that heaven on earth will never be.
Suits me fine.Now charge the crystal goblets with Raven’s Blood.

III

Dominate me, mutilate me, invert me: you and I, we scarcely know our power. We can entertain ourselves with perverse genius, and turn terror into the sublime. The world is out to kill us, however you dress it up.
It is the age of Pugin and Kent, designing stage-sets for the anguished soul.
Another costume change and the opera enters its final act.

IV

Let us take a modest tour of Hell, beginning in Naples.
Salvator Rosa, novice monk, abandons his cell and takes to the Calabrian hills like a bandit; to do black magic with blasted trees and weird rocks.
Carlo de’Rossi, showing guests round his private gallery, comes to the climax of the tour: with a melodramatic flourish, he draws aside the curtain and reveals Rosa’s Scene of Witchcraft, vicious burlesque of the withered and wicked, not easy to exorcise.
At the captured Bastille, a scullery boy, a little carried away with the day’s proceedings, cuts off the governor’s head with a clasp-knife, and parades it on a pike.
At the Royal Academy, students practise Crucifiixion scenes, their model the preserved corpse of a murderer,-first dissected by anatomists, then sewn back together,-nailed to a wooden cross.