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PUBLICATIONS OF
THE HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA
No. 100
[Illustration: ZAMORA ON THE DOURO]
GEORGE EDMUND STREET
UNPUBLISHED NOTES
AND
REPRINTED PAPERS
_WITH AN ESSAY_
BY
GEORGIANA GODDARD KING
QUAM DILECTA TABERNACULA TUA DOMINE VIRTUTUM
[Illustration]
THE HISPANIC SOCIETY
OF AMERICA
1916
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
THE HISPANIC SOCIETY
OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I. 1
II. NOTES OF A TOUR IN CENTRAL ITALY 59
III. NOTES ON FRENCH CHURCHES 97
SOME FRENCH CHURCHES CHIEFLY IN THE ROYAL DOMAIN 99
ARCHITECTURAL NOTES IN FRANCE 127
SOME CHURCHES OF LE PUY EN VELAY AND AUVERGNE 201
APPENDIX 253
S. MARY’S STONE 255
CHURCHES IN NORTHERN GERMANY 270
INDEX 333
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Zamora on the Douro _Frontispiece_
PAGE
George Street at about twenty-five 8
In Leon Cathedral 29
The Old Cathedral of Salamanca 46
George Edmund Street in 1877 57
Master Matthew’s Porch at Santiago 92
The Ambulatory, Cathedral of Tours 127
The South Transept at Soissons 162
Nave and Transept, Salamanca 196
The Templars’ Church at Segovia 227
The Western Porch, Saumur 249
Rood-screen in Lübeck Cathedral 271
The Great S. Martin, Cologne 307
GEORGE EDMUND STREET
_I have to thank Arthur Edmund Street, Esq., of London, for the
generous loan of some notebooks and drawings, and through these for a
more intimate knowledge of his great father’s fine temper and manly
art._
Bryn Mawr, _Epiphany_, 1915
I
“_And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city,
and the gates thereof and the walls thereof. And the city lieth
foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth. And the
building of the wall of it was of jasper; every several gate
was of one pearl._”
GEORGE EDMUND STREET
I
I have written the memorial, brief enough and all inadequate, of a
man who died more than thirty years ago, who lived a Tory and a High
Churchman, who worked to revive Gothic architecture in England. His
books are out of print, his occasional papers and pamphlets so entirely
dispersed and forgotten that not even a bibliography can be recovered.
His name goes unrecognized in general talk; his party is wasted to a
wraith or transformed beyond recognition; his Church is menaced by
Disestablishment in Wales, and Modernism on the Continent; his strong
and sincere architecture is superseded by steel and concrete; yet no
man ever less fought a losing fight, no figure ever less evoked regret
or toleration. He prospered, but his personality made that a kind of
happy consequence; he served God, but his genius made that a kind
of crowning grace; he was an Englishman, but was that in no mean or
halfway fashion. Rather, George Street embodied and expressed in his
own temper the very genius of the northern kind.
His people were substantial, of the strong British stock which is
good for grafting on. In the sixteenth century they were respected
in and about Worcester; one of the name went to Parliament in 1563,
and another had been Mayor in 1535. In the eighteenth century some of
them went to Surrey, and early in the nineteenth Thomas Street was a
solicitor in London. He had moved into the suburbs, however, before his
youngest son, George Edmund Street, was born. This was in 1824. The boy
did well enough at school, but at fifteen he was taken away, when his
father removed from Camberwell to Crediton. No school was at hand, and
a solicitor would not send his son to Eton and Oxford. Instead, he sent
him to the London office. This was in 1840. After the father’s death,
in that year, young Street was anxious to go to college and to prepare
for Holy Orders, but want of money made the hope impossible, and the
strong vocation proved to be for the Third Order--a layman’s part in
building up the house of the Lord and making fair the ministry therein.
It seems to have mattered not at all, in the event, that Street was
not a University man. In reading the correspondence of Keats, we must
deplore that he had not had certain conventions of good taste and good
feeling sharply imposed upon him at a great public school; in reading
the poetry of Browning we must regret that he missed the tradition of
self-criticism and academic stability which would have saved him from
the fantasticality of his Greek names and the dullness of his longer
_Parleyings_; but Street seems to have got out of his profession and
his associates all that Oxford would have given, and escaped whatever
harm it could have done. He saved, meanwhile, nearly ten years of
life, and spent these on churches, chiefly old. He has not the marks
of the University man, but for that he is none the worse. No more in
truth has Morris. Instead of culture he has energy, instead of urbanity
he has self-control, instead of classical he has professional reading
behind him. It is only in a very special sense, after all, that he did
without what we call culture and what we call urbanity; in the sense
of Newman’s rather malicious definition of a gentleman as a University
man who is too indifferent for enthusiasms and too sceptical for
prejudices. If young Street never went to school after he was fifteen,
and no record remains of his reading regularly or under direction, yet
he read irregularly all his life; by middle age he had read everything
that a man must have read. Beyond this, in the subjects that he had
at heart he had gone wide and deep. He must have mastered and spoken,
besides French and German, both Italian and Spanish, and he carried
on his research into Latin documents, it seems, with ease and speed.
After meals and on journeys the busy man found his opportunity; he
took up and took in a vast deal of contemporary thinking; finished
the newspaper quickly, and reviews and the graver sort of periodical
literature almost as fast. In his case, as rarely happens, another
art could give what most men seek in literature if they ever seek it,
and the taste was refined and the spirit inspired not so much by fine
poetry as by pure Gothic. The churches of England and the cathedrals
of France taught him that perfect measure, that economy of force, that
high seriousness, that austerity of beauty, for which others are sent
to the _Iliad_ and the _Divine Comedy_. Barring _belles-lettres_
and biology, there is little indeed, whether in science or in
mathematics, that the University can offer, which the arts do not
exact. If architecture is on the one side an art, it is on the other a
profession, and partakes as little of the tradesman’s mean-mindedness
as of the artist’s irresponsibility. It is probable, moreover, that his
passion for landscape had as much to do in forming the character as
Wordsworth’s. By the living rock and the ancient wall, by the perfect
fabric of Notre Dame and S. Marco, by the worship in chanted psalm and
antiphonal prayer, his spirit was forged and tempered.
At school he had sketched and scrawled, and when after his father’s
death in 1840 he was recalled to live with his mother and sister at
Exeter, he studied painting for a while as painting was taught in
the provinces, learning the management of oils and the science of
perspective. No harm could come from this except that in landscape
sketching later he was shy of strong colour, and set down Spain and
Italy more pallid than he liked; but already the current of his life
was running by church walls. In the year before, his brother, who was
eight years his senior and was brim-full of mediaevalism, had taken him
on a short walking trip for what they called ecclesiologizing. For a
while he lived near Exeter cathedral, drawn to it at that time by every
sentiment: grief for his father--since his domestic affections were
stable--and anxiety for the future, strong religious feeling, aesthetic
feeling as strong, the beauty of the service and the beauty of the
building. Thence he made another trip with this same brother, Thomas,
around about through the West of England to Barnstaple, Bideford,
Torrington and Clovelly. The diary of that tour, written shortly
after his sixteenth birthday, is simply the first of the always happy
notebooks which record his many journeys in the interest of landscape
and art. It sets down the lay of the land and the aspect of the streets
where they passed; it notes that he got up at six to sketch out of
his bedroom window; and it preserves more fact than comment, and less
of the trivial than of the significant. Within another year he was
articled to an architect in Winchester, studying the cathedral from
every point and at every hour. The two brothers tramped the country
for twenty miles about, and as they could pushed further, for the most
part on foot still. In the spring of 1843 they walked to Chichester; in
the autumn into Lincolnshire; the next year into Sussex. In 1845 they
reached Northampton, returning thither in 1846 and again in 1850. The
same autumn he went to the Lake Country and thence across to Durham and
home by the Yorkshire dales and abbeys. Jervaulx, however, he missed at
this time, nor does it appear among the sketches of other abbeys in a
notebook of 1875. In the spring of 1847 the two brothers were among the
churches of the fen-land in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. Meanwhile in
1844 Thomas, who was the eldest of the brothers, and had succeeded to
his father’s practice, took a house near London and fetched his mother
and sister to live with him there.
George, who was lonely and heartily sick of Winchester, came up to
share it, with a letter for G. G. Scott and drawings of his own to
show. Taken on because work was pressing, he was kept on because his
work was good, and stayed in the office of Scott and Moffatt until
he was ready to set up for himself five years later. Thomas Street
by 1849 was married; the requirements of his profession, if not more
serious, were more exacting. He made fewer tours, but his taste for
architecture, and apparently his taste in architecture, remained sound.
“At this time, they were all living together at Lee, and afterwards at
Peckham,” says the _Memoir_ written in 1888 by George Street’s son. “My
aunt relates how the two young men used to arrive with sketch-books
full and rolls of rubbings of brasses, and would then sit up till the
small hours, in all the excitement of archaeological discussions and
arguments. My uncle [Thomas] was quite untaught. His love for and
appreciation of good architecture were quite spontaneous, and the
proficiency which he attained with his pencil and the knowledge he had
of this subject, more than considerable.”
As the first knowledge of architecture had come through a brother,
so Street’s first commission came through the sister. Miss Street
worked at ecclesiastical embroidery. She heard through another lady
embroiderer of a clergyman who intended building a church in Cornwall.
The story turns prettily on the scrupulous girl’s anxieties. Mr.
Prynne, the clergyman, begins--“Has your brother got much work going
on?” The sister, who wants to make him out as important as possible,
yet cannot bring herself to a fib; and the sorry truth that he is
quite at leisure from affairs of his own, unexpectedly satisfies the
impatient projector. The commission for Biscovey church led to others
in Cornwall. Between restorations and new churches and schools,
commissions accumulated, and Street at this period was in those parts
for several weeks together, three or four times a year, overseeing the
work in progress and finding new work ready always at hand. In 1849
he had chambers in London and was “on his own”: at the end of 1850 he
went to Wantage to be within reach of Cuddesden, being appointed by the
Bishop of Oxford, diocesan architect.
Two main interests mark this time. He was engaged to be married, and
he was at the well-spring of the Oxford Movement. He spent his Sundays
at Maidenhead with Marquita Proctor, on the river, seeing churches and
sketching; he spent his working days at Wantage.
“Mr. Street, having no special ties to any locality, desired to live at
Wantage where daily service and weekly celebration had been established
at a time when such were rare. He took, therefore, in conjunction with
Mr. Stillingfleet--one of the clergy of the parish--a little house in
Wallingford Street. During the time he lived there I saw him almost
daily.” This is Dr. William Butler, later Dean of Lincoln. “When not
called from Wantage on business, he regularly attended my service,
and took his part in the choir. He had, I remember, a baritone voice,
and took a tenor part. He was much interested in the improvement of
services, and, although at this time far from wealthy, he offered a
large annual subscription, I think it was £20, toward the payment of an
organist.... Never was there a man of simpler or less luxurious habits.
In those two years he dined with us and the clergy of the parish, he
drank no wine, and had only the plainest food.”
It was an energetic wholesome life, simple not so much by limitation
as by renunciation, full of interest and expression, keeping a right
line, as always, by the force of the initial impulse. The energetic,
wholesome figure stands firm in a clear sunlight that is hardly dimmed
by the space of sixty-odd years intervening. With nothing of the prig,
as little of the aesthete, he was alien to both types by virtue of
his vitality, his mirth, his essential soundness. A daguerreotype
taken about 1850 shows quiet strength with a sort of sweet gravity.
The hands are strong and flexible, not large, with tapering fingers
and fine modelling on the back. You would have turned in the street
to look after the head, with a big square brow jutting over blue
eyes, brown hair very soft and round chin very firm, a mouth poetic
and self-controlled. If poetry were (as once was rashly said) merely
an affair of genius, and genius the affair of energy, Street would
have been infallibly a poet. Energy and beauty in him were mingled
in unusual measure, and he found expression in active more than in
abstract creation: in loving landscape and sketching it, in hearing
music and singing it, in building Gothic churches and restoring them.
[Illustration: GEORGE EDMUND STREET AT ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE]
His invention was inexhaustible; he designed not only all the mouldings
for his churches, and all delicately various, not only reredos and
pulpit, baldachin and font, and once a whole book of organs, but
equally as a matter of course the windows, the stalls, the ironwork,
the very altar-cloths. About this time he painted the ceilings to some
of his churches after Fra Angelico, and elsewhere from his own designs.
His early work may have been a trifle severe at times, and at times a
trifle daring, but it had always freshness, vitality, one might say
vibration. His capitals ring clearer than glass when it is struck;
his mouldings sound as true a note as a violin when it is tuned. His
building expresses, beyond possibility of mistake, as specific a
sentiment as any composition of Palestrina or Fra Angelico:--viz.,
religious emotion, a combination of reverence and action, a solemn
joy. But with this power to express an emotion from within himself
and furthermore to create it in others, went an indefatigable energy.
He was tall and very ready of movement, thickset and thin-skinned,
blue-eyed and brown-bearded, ruddy, compact of strength and gentleness.
The energy found outlet normal and adequate in three directions--his
work, his affections and his religion. He worked apparently as a young
dog runs, from accumulated motor impulses, from strength that brims
over. You have never the pang of our brother the ass, over-ridden,
over-laden, that agonizes under the goad. You have never the fever
craving for work as anodyne, that drives on desperately at the
straining task as the only escape from the hell-hounds that bay hard
after the sickening soul. The work is never done for work’s sake. It is
a pleasure always, but only by the way. It is done to support some one
he loves and to add to the glory of God.
The affections are close and sweet, those of the hearth. His mother was
a good Christian but even more a Stoic, and Street held her the better
for it. Theirs was a love undemonstrative but recognized, of the most
exacting sort, neither of them accepting from the other anything short
of the very best. After he went to Winchester, being then seventeen,
she treated him like a man, and rarely praised him for doing what he
should. If a pleasure was renounced, she said, “I knew that under
the circumstances you would be Philosopher enough to give it up.” Her
grandson wrote: “It is enough to read the mother’s letters to see
the source of the son’s strength and steadfastness of character. She
was one of those women who, in some indefinable way, have a powerful
influence for good on all those into whose company they are thrown;
who, themselves rather sparing in outward signs of affection, create
in others a warm love and a perfect confidence. Her pride in her son
was unbounded, but was left to be inferred rather than expressed; while
her love was shown more in the demand for sacrifices, in the confidence
with which she appealed to her son’s sense of duty and obedience,
however severe the test.”
Besides a wide and wakeful kindness and untiring interest in others of
his own profession, he had full, warm friendships, but where he could
he took his pleasure with his nearest of kin. The early journeys were
made in his brother’s company, the continental with his wife, and later
with his son. The brothers, George and Thomas, were married to cousins,
and up to the very last the longest and most frequent visits abroad
were made to his son’s grandfather. After his wife’s death he took
for a second wife her close friend, an intimate of the household and
frequent companion.
The relations not of choice, the intimacies sweetened and consecrated
by tender use and wont and all the sanctities of the hearth, the
blind impulses of the blood and yearnings of the flesh toward kindred
flesh and blood, were for him alike inevitable and dear. Here also he
expresses the genius of the English stock. The northern race stood out
long for the righteousness of the married life even in the priesthood,
and the English church has at all times tended toward the family life
as distinguished from the cloistered, and elaborated and adorned those
services and sacraments which celebrate marriage and the birth of
children and their coming to maturity.
The Church of England may be in a position undignified, uncomfortable,
or even ridiculous, coupled up with the State as it is; the doctrine
of the great English churchmen may be honeycombed with Erastianism;
but the English church has the virtue of providing for every one of
her children, lay not less than clerical, a daily office in which they
may take an intelligent, a personal, and a common share. The first
characteristic of the primitive church was apparently the fact of
worship done in common, action in some sort not merely simultaneous
but mutual. There are some--the Society of Friends for instance--who
define religion by that collectivity of feeling, and in expectation of
the Holy Ghost assemble themselves together. They draw most profit from
thirty minutes of silent meditation where a hundred people in presence
make up that silence and meditate each one. The monastic life, with its
multiplied choir offices, met in another way this same desire for the
warmth of human contact, this same enhancement of the experience of the
whole far beyond the several experiences. The Roman church, with its
sodalities and confraternities meeting regularly for special services,
its litanies and rosaries recited by tired, troubled women together
after nightfall, has recognized this and is busy recovering hereby
what has been lost out of the Sacrament of the Mass. I remember after
three weeks’ incessant travel finding myself in Siena cathedral, among
women unquestionably devout, who held well-thumbed books, and, having
lost count of the Sundays after Pentecost, as I opened my _Paroissien_
I asked my neighbour on the right what Sunday it was. She shook her
head and questioned her neighbour; I turned to the one on my left, but
there was no one within decent whispering distance who knew what the
priests and the choir were singing that day. Against such a chance,
their church service assures Anglicans. The English Prayer Book may be
a compromise, the office for morning and evening prayer may be patched
up and anomalous, but it is an order of common prayer. The instinct of
kind enhances the personal expression of psalm and antiphon, and daily
service and saints’-day celebration have the sweetness and warmth of
the family life, the dearness of the sacred ritual of the hearth.
Into his religion Street was born, as he was born into his family.
In the dawn of consciousness he found it about him; with adolescence
he felt it an influence and a motive. In the months at Exeter he was
anxious often, but always there was the cathedral. In the last year
at Winchester he was lonely and sick for home, but at hand there was
the cathedral. While in Scott’s office he used to go with his sister
to mattins before walking into town; in the later years in London he
never missed with his wife the early celebration on saints’-days.
Church-going was as natural as eating, and as satisfactory. He loved
God as consciously as he loved his mother and his wife; and said
even less about it. After he gave up the hope of taking Holy Orders
he made a plan for a sort of half-monastic fraternity of artists and
architects, who should be in art what the Templars were, selected, set
apart, and dedicated. It was patterned after his own life unawares.
Younger than any of the great men of the Oxford Movement, he was
born in the Promised Land. What they had hardly won, he inherited
untroubled. Among the many things the average Englishman would rather
go without than talk about, even to himself, may be counted his
religion, but the strain of enthusiasm in the temper of Street, the
genius that leavens his English substance, would not let him rest
without a reason for the faith that was in him. He read and thought
much at this time. In later years, while the phrasing is reticent yet
the architecture is eloquent. In carved stone and hewn timber, in chant
and carol, in the colour and contour of his records of the visible
world, he let loose the strong inward impulse that burned upward like
a flame. His natural element was creation not conflict, and though
he could strike a good blow at “pagan” architecture and services
restricted to the clergy and the seventh day, he seems to have had
small joy in fighting and it, perhaps, killed him at the last. On the
ground, already won, of English Catholicity, he stood firm and built
strong and fair. Webbe and Neale and Wilberforce, and I suppose Keble
and Pusey, were friends and advisers, but his real contemporaries were
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with their allies and admirers who
launched the Aesthetic Movement.
How that was born at Oxford, and was baptized into the English church
with the _Heir of Redclyffe_ for godfather, is hard to keep in mind.
But Morris and Burne-Jones knew each other there and knew Street, who
had married in the June of 1852 and taken his wife to a house in
Beaumont Street. To us in another century it seems that in those years,
from 1852 when the two boys from Walthamstow and Birmingham met and
matriculated together at Exeter College, even to 1857 when Rossetti
brought them back to paint the walls of the Union, Oxford must have
been a place of lightnings and splendours. It sheds the same radiance
that a great city just beyond the horizon’s bound throws up at night
against low-hanging clouds. To them it seemed spiritually grey and
dull enough. The Oxford Movement was in a sense ended; some men had
broken away, some had got to cover, and in the rest religious emotion,
having gone past the stage of smoke and flame, glowed clear but very
still. Burne-Jones, according to his wife, “had thought to find the
place still warm from the fervour of the learned and pious men who had
shaken the whole land by their cry of danger within and without the
Church.... But when he got there the whole life seemed to him languid
and indifferent, with scarcely anything left to show the fiery times so
lately past.”
“Oxford is a glorious place,” he wrote home, “Godlike. At night I have
walked round the colleges under the full moon and thought it would be
heaven to live and die here.” He described it later:--
“It was a different Oxford in those days from anything that a visitor
would now dream of. On all sides, except where it touched the railway,
the city ended abruptly, as if a wall had been about it, and you came
suddenly upon the meadows. There was little brick in the city, it was
either grey with stone or yellow with the wash of the pebble-dash in
the poorer streets. It was an endless delight with us to wander about
the streets where were still many old houses with wood-carving and a
little sculpture here and there. The chapel of Merton College had been
lately renovated by Butterfield, and Pollin, a former fellow of Merton,
had painted the roof of it. Indeed, I think the buildings of Merton and
the cloisters of New College were our chief shrines in Oxford.”
These two undergraduates, both alike so young and so typically
English, lived at a high pitch in those years; each strong impetus
pushing hard upon the foregoing. There was, to begin, an intention
to take Orders, with a real and inward sense of dedication in both.
Out of that flowered Burne-Jones’s dream of a Brotherhood very like
that which Street had earlier nursed. “A small conventual society
of cleric and lay members working in the heart of London,” his wife
called it soberly, many years later, but he himself, at the time,
“the Order of Sir Galahad.” To a friend he wrote at the end of a
letter--and the postscript is like one of his own exquisite pencil
drawings, all archaic, and altogether lovely: “You have as yet taken
no vows, therefore you are as yet perfectly at liberty to decide your
own fate. If your decision involve the happiness of another you know
your course, follow nature, and remember the soul is above the mind
and the heart greater than the brain; for it is mind that makes man,
but soul that makes man angel. Man as the seat of mind is isolated in
the universe, for angels that are above him and hearts that are below
him are mindless, but it is soul that links him with higher beings
and distinguishes him from the lower also, therefore develops it to
the full, and if you have one who may serve for a personification of
all humanity, expand your love there, and it will orb from its centre
wider and wider, like circles in water when a stone is thrown therein.
But self-denial and self-disappointment, though I do not urge it, is
even better to the soul than that. If we lose you from the cause of
celibacy, you are no traitor; only do not be hasty. _Pax vobiscum in
æternum_--Edouard.”
That summer they went to France and saw Amiens. Their companion said:
“Morris surveyed it with calm joy and Jones was speechless with
admiration. It did not awe me until it got quite dark, for we stayed
till after seven, but it was so solemn, so human and divine in its
beauty that love cast out fear.” They went to Beauvais, Paris and
Chartres. “There we were for two days, spending all our time in the
church, and thence made northward for Rouen, travelling gently and
stopping at every church we could find. Rouen was still a beautiful
mediaeval city, and we stayed awhile and had our hearts filled. From
there we walked to Caudebec, then by diligence to Havre, on our way to
the churches of the Calvados; and it was while walking on the quay at
Havre at night that we resolved definitely that we would begin a life
of art and put off our decision no longer--he should be an architect
and I a painter. It was a resolve only needing final conclusion; we
were bent on that road for the whole past year and after that night’s
talk we never hesitated more--that was the most memorable night of my
life.”
They were to start _The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine_, and Burne-Jones
was to meet Rossetti and very heartily worship him but never to be
drawn, even by that blazing, fiery star, out of his own orbit of art
deliberate and devout. Morris meanwhile, as soon as he had taken his
degree, addressed himself to work under Street. Afterwards, as we know,
he tried painting, before he found his happiest outlet in decorative
designing, in dyeing and printing, and surely his finest and most
enduring expression in the writing that came so easily we can only wish
that he had taken it harder. A note of Burne-Jones’s in the year 1856
is so charming and so characteristic that it may well serve as the note
of the whole set when they had really found themselves. “There was a
year in which I think it never rained nor clouded, but was blue summer
from Christmas to Christmas, and London streets glimmered, and it was
always morning, and the air sweet and full of bells.”
Their lives were, however, what could not be called less than intense.
Their emotions were all fervid and their sentiments all impassioned,
their enthusiasms fairly militant, their convictions even intransigent.
Lady Burne-Jones communicates an exquisite sense of their way of being
something better than human nature’s daily food:
“I wish it were possible to explain the impression made upon me as a
young girl.... The only approach I can make to describing it is by
saying that I felt in the presence of a new religion. Their love of
beauty did not seem to me unbalanced, but as if it included the whole
world and raised the point from which they regarded everything.” Again
she quotes from a letter of her husband’s, written long afterwards, an
impression of that first journey into France. “Do you know Beauvais,
which is the most beautiful church in the world? I must see it again
some day--one day I must. It is thirty-seven years since I saw it and
I remember it all--and the processions--and the trombones--and the
ancient singing--more beautiful than anything I had ever heard and I
think I have never heard the like since. And the great organ that made
the air tremble--and the greater organ that pealed out suddenly and
I thought the Day of Judgement had come--and the roof, and the long
lights that are the most graceful thing man has ever made. What a day
it was, and how alive I was, and young--and a blue dragon-fly stood
still in the air so long that I could have painted him. Yes, if I took
account of my life and the days in it that went to make me, the Sunday
at Beauvais would be the first day of creation.”
Emotion exquisite and almost as frail as the dragon-fly, almost as
quick to pass as the Sunday sunlight! It is the impression of a
boy, an aesthete and a poet, who kept to the end of his days the
same sensibility and the same delight in beauty tangible. What he
expresses, however, he felt with his generation; his associates had a
like organization and a like attitude. In that very year Street, who
had gone first to France, at a like age, not so long before, wrote
from recollection, in a paper that was read at Oxford and published at
Cambridge:
“One of the first elements is height. I know of no one thing in which
one is so much astonished, in all one’s visits to foreign churches,
as by the luxury of that art which could afford to be so daringly
grand. From the small chapel, not forty feet long, to the glorious
minster of some four hundred, one feels more and more impressed with
the sense which the old men evidently entertained of its value; and
exaggerated as it often is, even to the most curious extent, it is
never contemptible. It is indeed a glorious element of grandeur, and
not the less to be admired by Englishmen because we seem always to have
preferred length to it; whilst they, so they could have height, cared
little as to the length to which they could draw out a long arcade, and
prolong the infinite perspective of a roof. And there is perhaps this
advantage of height over length, that whilst the one seems entirely
done for the glory of God, the other is always more apparently for use.
So in a church, height in excess seems to typify the excess of their
adoration who so built; whilst the greater length makes one think of
possible calculations as to how many thousands of men and women might
pass through, or how long a procession.... And as I have said so much
about foreign examples I will but observe that the wonderful beauty of
the apsidal east ends abroad ought to be gladly seized upon.... No one
who has stood as I have at the west end of such a cathedral as that
at Chartres, and watched the last rays die out from all other windows
and at last gradually fade away from the eastern crown of light in its
five windows; or who has seen the mounting sun come through all those
openings one after the other, with matchless and continued brilliancy,
would deny that such glorious beauties are catholic of necessity, and
not to be confined by custom or etiquette to one age or one nation.”
There is the expression of the man, mustering his facts, enforcing
his conclusions, weighing his estimates, recording of his pleasure
the least possible part. The comparison is hardly fair to painter
or builder either, but it is none the less significant. His power
of expression, to be sure, is less, and his determination toward
self-control is greater, but all the while the source of delight,
though stiller, is no less deep. Street’s private notebooks are as
reticent as his public papers. Like everything else that he did, they
illustrate the characteristic maxim which opens _The Christian Year_,
that, next to a sound rule of faith, there is nothing of so much
consequence as a sober standard of feeling--strong feeling, but sober.
A better notion of his response to beauty could be formed from some
personal letters that he wrote in 1845, being then twenty-one years of
age.
“I got out at Milton station and trudged off for Lanercost Abbey,
an enthusiastic ecclesiologist, with everything upon earth to make
my enthusiasm higher than usual--a glorious autumn day, a beautiful
walk and an abbey in prospect, in ruins it is true, but so lovely and
admirable in its ruin that in my admiration of it, the day, and the
scenery, I had almost forgotten to be enraged with its iconoclastic
destroyers; but it was not in mortal temper, after having seen and
sketched it and studied it carefully and lovingly as I did, to ascend
the hill away from it, to look at the river still rushing along as
beautiful and as swift as when holy men planned its bridge of yore,
to look at the sunny fields first cultivated by them, and not to feel
sorrow and indignation at the thought that avarice and sin could
so far have transported men as to lead them to the destruction of
so fair a scene.” “O that the abusers of the monastic system would
trouble themselves to examine this once happy valley, and watch the
soothing influence of the lovely building and landscape, and would ask
themselves whether they did not, in looking, feel more of reverence,
more of awe and of love for the religions and for the men than they
have heretofore felt.”
Street was twenty-six before he crossed the Channel. A foreigner may be
pardoned for feeling it a piece of his good luck that he should have
learned and loved the English Gothic before seeing the larger beauties
and the grander styles of France, lest otherwise his own should have
seemed to him fair but pallid, pure but cold, bearing much the same
relation to the continental that the English service bears to the
Roman use. It was not in him, however, to withdraw the affection once
given for due cause, nor yet to withhold that just devotion the larger
excellence could command. For him the greater glory would not dim the
less. Both shared henceforth in his life.
The foreign journey was omitted only twice, in the year 1855, when his
son was born in October, and in 1870, when the Germans had invaded
France. In the latter year Street went to Scotland; in the former he
stayed at home on the Thames with Mrs. Street’s people, bringing out
his Italian book and working on the buildings for the Bishop of Oxford
at Cuddesden. Towards the end of the year he moved to London and took
a house in Montague Place. The plans which he submitted in competition
for a new cathedral at Lille won a second prize, and the Frenchman to
whom the actual building was given in the end had been rated originally
below him. He had by this time at least three assistants working under
him regularly, Edmund Sedding, Philip Webbe, and William Morris. He was
perpetually occupied with parishes and private persons--on schools,
chapels, restorations, residences even, country churches fitted to a
village community, town churches designed for the artisan populace and
their employers. He had finished Cuddesden College and carried work far
already on the whole important cluster of diocesan buildings; he had
begun building for the Anglican sisterhood at East Grinstead; he had
been praised not a little in the competition at Lille; he was to take a
second place, the next year, with his design for the Crimean Memorial
and in the end to build the church; and shortly thereafter he sent in
plans for new Government Offices. About this last he reasoned, with the
spendthrift logic of youth, that while he could hardly expect to win
the commission with a Gothic design, the premium offered to him among
others of the best was a hundred pounds and would give him another trip
to Italy, while he would gain, furthermore, from the public exhibition
of the drawings.
The undertaking cost, to be sure, time and strength, but of these he
was never stingy. He seems to have known how to be at once thrifty
and generous of himself--generous perhaps because thrifty. All his
life he seems to have done three men’s work in a day and all work in a
third of the time that other men would take. He mentions once, being
on a journey, that “it rained, so we read, wrote, and occupied the
many hours in the rumbling diligence as best we might.” The notes were
written often in diligence or train, as the firm clear writing betrays,
while it remains characteristic and legible. He worked habitually till
half-past twelve at night, yet with all the incessant occupation of the
most exacting sort, in large measure creative labour, you never think
of him, as he never can have thought of himself, as overworked. The
essential soundness, the vital force made his way of life spontaneous
and inevitable. The strong, even, white teeth, the strong, curling,
brown beard, were the visible token of bodily sanity and power, a sort
of physical validity of which the cause was not merely physical.
As the mediaeval builders reared and poised their great churches by
a calculated balance of thrust and strain, and hung aloft in stone a
proposition in proportion, so, you feel, with Street, it must have been
some extraordinarily just measure, some perfect balance of temper, some
secret of self-control, only comparable to the engineer’s control of
his crane or hammer or locomotive, that gave him life so abounding and
yet so temperate, so huge in accomplishment and yet so undistressed.
If we know that at times the pulse and the invention flagged, yet it
is only because we know by testimony that tasks designed in hours of
gloom were not, indeed, fulfilled in hours of insight, but instead they
were destroyed, to be replaced later by designs better because of more
vitality and more _élan_.
Doubtless in this a fine natural constitution played a large part, but
even a larger part, one is tempted to think, belongs to faith. _Nisi
Dominum_, says the Psalmist, but here the Lord did keep the house
and their labour was not lost that built it. One thinks of Huxley
coming home exhausted from his lectures to lie on a sofa at one side
of the hearth, that on the other side being permanently occupied by
his wife. There can be little question which of the two men did more
for his generation, but also there can be no question which found
more substantial and untroubled happiness. “It is _not_ lost labour
that ye rise up so early, and so late take rest, and eat the bread of
carefulness, for so He giveth His beloved sleep.” By every reasonable
standard of happiness we must admit that Street’s work, untiring,
joyous, faithful, done in direct loyalty to God Almighty, bore the
fruit of a constant blessing.
The domestic affections and the service of religion filled up a life
singularly pleasant to contemplate. Boating, cricket matches and
riding, plain-song meetings and the Philharmonic Society, opera,
exhibitions and sales of pictures, all found place without crowding. If
he did not ride he wrote letters for an hour and a half or two hours
before breakfast. He had his office in the house and kept long hours
in it without interruption except from clients, but his little son was
admitted as something less than a trouble, and watched him designing.
An assistant said, later: “We worked hard, or thought we did. We had
to be at the office at nine o’clock and our hour of leaving was six
o’clock, long hours--but he never encroached on our time and as a
matter of fact I am sure I never stayed a minute past six o’clock.”
After dinner there might be music, at home or abroad, cards or reading,
or a cigar and talk on the balcony over the square--a London balcony,
dingy and flower-beset, above a London square in summer, dim with
twilight and coal-smoke, smelling of soot and dewfall on green leaves.
At half-past nine came tea and thereafter three hours more of good work
alone. He travelled, of course, more than a little, and on the journey
put in the normal day’s work. The same friend goes on: “I well remember
a little _tour de force_ that fairly took our breath away. He told us
one morning that he was just off to measure an old church, I think in
Buckinghamshire, and he left by the ten o’clock train. About half-past
four he came back and into the office for some drawing paper; he then
retired to his own room, reappearing in about an hour’s time with the
whole church carefully drawn to scale, with his proposed additions to
it, margin lines and title as usual, all ready to ink in and finish.
Surely this was a sufficiently good day’s work. Two journeys, a
whole church measured, plotted to scale, and new parts designed, in
about seven hours and a half. He was the _beau-ideal_ of a perfect
enthusiast. He believed in his own work, and in what he was doing at
the time, absolutely; and the charm of his work is that when looking at
it you may be certain that it is entirely his own, and this applies to
the smallest detail as to the general conception.... No wonder we were
enthusiastic with such performances going on under our eyes daily.”
Yes, it is good to know that such lives can be, filled with pleasure
in the exercise of conscious strength, sufficient unto the day, with
enough for all needs and to spare. It is like watching a blooded dog
or a thoroughbred horse. As a rule we compare men to pleasant animals
only when they are unpleasant men, and say they are engaging only when
we cannot say they are trustworthy. Here was one singularly engaging.
Every one in remembering him recalls his wit, fireside mirth, good
temper, ready answer. When a dull gentleman, having dissected at great
length the old mare’s nest about mediaeval irregularities in design,
wound up after a pompous question about the secrets of freemasonry:
“Now Mr. Street, what do _you_ think?” Street flashed back: “What do
I think? I think the beggars could not build straight.” When a young
architect consulted him about going to law to recover his designs from
a client--would it be wise? Street answered, “That depends on what sort
of man your client is and whether you have any expectation of further
commissions from him.” “His experience and natural shrewdness,” wrote
an acquaintance at the time of his death, “made him a valuable adviser
on points of professional practice, and he had a humour very often
caustic, which one could not help sympathizing with.”
He was a good son and brother, a good husband and father, without
loss of manliness. No man was less a prig. No man, indeed, was ever
more respectable, but the touch of genius makes respectability itself
engaging. He was not subtle, but his directness can make subtlety look
devious and insincere. He was not complex, but his straightness can
make complexity look morbid and mean-minded. In 1863 Crabbe Robinson
wrote in his diary:
“_October 17_. Dined with the Streets. Our amusement was three-handed
whist. Both Mr. and Mrs. Street very kind. On every point of public
interest he and I differ, but it does not affect our apparent esteem
for one another. I hold him in very great respect, indeed admiration.
He has first-rate talent in his profession as an architect. He will be
a great man in act--he is so in character already.”
He lived afterwards in Russell Square and then in Cavendish Square;
always in the dear, unspoiled, substantial, smoke-stained professional
quarter, the London of those that live there all the year, where autumn
lights vistas of tawny splendour down every street, and spring offers
nosegays of early wall-flower and narcissus from the Scilly Isles at
every corner; where the air perpetually tastes of soft coal, damp mud,
and warm malt; where in December the moist pavement glistens with a
permanent slime, and in May the porch roofs burgeon into azaleas pied
and trailing pink geraniums.
His life thenceforth falls into such periods as Ezekiel counted,--a
time and a time and half a time. Ten years, from 1855 to 1865, were
given to church-building, to travel for the sake of study, to writing,
beginning with the _Brick and Marble in Italy_ and culminating in
the _Gothic Architecture in Spain_. Mainly within the next ten fall
the great commissions--for the Law Courts, for building the nave
of Bristol cathedral, for rebuilding the cathedral at Dublin, for
restoring that of York. If this period is closed with the death of his
second wife, in 1876, there will remain just five years for bringing
all to a conclusion, finishing wholly or very nearly the great works,
lending a strong hand to such public undertakings as saving London
Bridge, adorning S. Paul’s, rescuing S. Marco at Venice, and serving
on the council of the Royal Academy. Finally, he was President of the
Royal Institute of British Architects. He delivered, as Professor of
Architecture to the Royal Academy, six lectures on Gothic Architecture
in the spring of 1881. Those were widely read at the time, printed in
the weekly journal, the _Builder_, as they were delivered, and in the
_Architect_; and reprinted by his son as an appendix to the _Memoir_.
In that same year he died and on the twenty-ninth of December was
buried in Westminster Abbey. He was only fifty-seven and he had been
ill only a month.
With Street’s actual building I have little here to do. Immense in
quantity, admirable in kind, it stands and long will stand, not only
amid the dense green of English hedgerows and in the bitter grime of
English towns, but beside the graves of Alpine valleys and in the
Stranger’s Quarter of continental cities. Of its technical excellence,
the way it meets and happily resolves the builder’s problems, I am not
competent to speak. Architects have praised him well. The distinguished
American who has devoted his own rich and exquisite talent to the quest
of Gothic, tells me that Street, of them all, had the most genius. To
the mere ecclesiologist, who comes to the American church at Paris, or
the church and schools of S. James the Less, in Westminster, or the
village spire of Holmbury S. Mary, it seems that if new churches must
be at all, they should be thus. Where Scott’s work seems colder than
death and Butterfield’s trivial or thin, Street’s alone has a kind of
present life, a pulse, an inner glow. It is again the abounding life of
the man which communicates of itself. Many have put their heart into
their work, but only a great heart lives and burns in it.
[Illustration: IN LEON CATHEDRAL]