archaeological, there is little profitable to be said. Like the other
arts which deal directly with bodily experience, it suffers from the
necessity of translating into an alien speech. You may talk about
Shelley forever, since poetry is made of words, or about Plato, since
philosophy is made of ideas, but the truest praise of the _Passion
according to St. Matthew_ is reserved for the organ, and the real
right comment on any Perugino is the Granducal Madonna. Criticism may
take a lawful pleasure in explaining, first, how a given work of
art came to be what it is--which is matter of history; and, second,
why we enjoy it as much as we do,--which is matter of psychology; but
the enjoyment itself criticism cannot express except by a laborious
process of transmutation and translation. Of all the arts architecture
is least apt for this sort of evocation. Even Pater hardly knows
that song to which the memory of Chartres would, like a mist, rise
into towers, though he could reweave by his magic the very spell of
Botticelli, and recall with his subtle harmonies the very presence
that rose so strangely by the waters of Leonardo. Those who have
lingered at nightfall in the nave of Chartres until through mounting
darkness the blue windows burned as by their own proper light, may
know, some of them, that a great church, like the deep sea, like the
ancient woods, like the starry heavens, can liberate for an instant
the soul from the limitations of the conscious intelligence. But even
if a man would tell of that, and no man would, there are no words for
the telling. To put the matter another way:--the experience of music
is a matter of the auditory sensations and their recall in memory;
the experience of painting a matter of the visual, for the most part;
that of architecture is a very curious combination of the tactual and
muscular with certain respiratory and vaso-motor functions. Words, in
each of the cases, are at the second and third remove from the actual
appreciation; and moreover architecture shares with music, except where
figure-sculpture enters in, the supreme condition that representation
merges in presentation, that form and content coincide.
The love of thirteenth century France flowered in the beauty of
Street’s designing; the knowledge of Catalan city churches bore fruit
in the frequent use of the lofty nave arcade, which barely marks
the aisle off, and opens all the church to sight and hearing of the
preacher; the long acquaintance with Italian brick construction led to
his perpetual endeavour by bands of colour to lighten the monotony of
English stone. But marbles under a southern sun will fade and stain
and modulate together, where other material and other skies will not
effect the combination, and while I feel that some of Street’s essays
in colour have been less happy than his other audacities, I feel
stronglier yet that the fault lies more with the material at hand than
with the shaping spirit of imagination.
He is supposed to have been at his best in designing middle-sized
churches for general use, like All Saints’ at Clifton, and S.
Margaret’s, Liverpool. I know he felt that he never worked more to his
own mind than when he built his own church at Holmbury. The American
churches in Paris and Rome, the English churches in Rome and Genoa,
the Anglican churches at Lausanne, Vevey and Mürren are all his. The
list of his buildings published in his son’s _Memoir_ stretches from
Constantinople to Trinidad. I notice that at the time of his death some
called the new nave of Bristol cathedral his most entirely successful
work. That may in a way be reckoned as restoration, if one likes, and
remain equally characteristic, for Street did much work of restoring,
and the list of original work is followed in the _Memoir_ by a longer
list of ancient work to which he lent a reverent hand. Against any
restoration but the most reverent he protested, both generally and in
such particular cases as that of the Lincoln doorways. He was a member
of Morris’s “Anti-scrape” society, though once at least that body fell
foul of him. The mere ecclesiologist in this case is again disposed to
admit that if, to keep a church above ground, some restoration must be
done, it had better be in such hands as his.
In truth all the best work of Street was done in the spirit and in the
terms of mediaeval work, as the best poetry of Morris was written. Each
by a rare chance found himself of blood kin, born to the same language,
gesture and emotion, with those long dead. I do not know that Street’s
church building was ever blamed for not being of its own age: certainly
such a criticism would be peculiarly unjust, for it is the translation
into brick and stone of _The Christian Year_. The Tractarians and
Street gave their lives to the same task, and they patched up their
churches so well that these will stand for generations yet.
His knowledge, in truth, of the Middle Ages was often enough made
a reproach. He was accused by competitors, by church-wardens and
committees, by journalists and critics, of allowing an undue influence
over his work to foreign styles. No one would be likely now to hold
that for a ground of grievance, but the charge is the less plausible
considering how early mature were both the man and his workmanship.
It was in 1850 that he went to the Continent for the first time,
already knowing his England well. Rarely, thereafter, he let a year
go by without crossing the Channel, and often he added, especially in
later life, an autumn or a winter holiday. There would be interest in
drawing up a table of his journeys, if one could be made complete,
year by year, and in supplying from letters and diaries his fresh
impressions, if these were available. With the help of old notebooks,
even without other material, may be made out a list tentative and
imperfect, indeed, but still suggestive,--by the change in recurrence,
for instance, by the perpetual discovery of fresh interest on ground
no matter how familiar. From what he saw he took refreshment and
suggestion, never precisely a model. There would be no use in setting
off, against the table of his travels, a table of his buildings.
These were the growth of English soil, and from his masters, the
cathedral builders of France and Spain, the masons of Germany and
Lombardy, he asked not what they did but how. More often, the direct
outcome of travel, the transformation of observation into activity,
was not the high-reared vault but the written word--figuring in the
_Ecclesiologist_, in the _Transactions_ of Diocesan Societies and
Architectural Associations, in the Italian and the Spanish volumes, and
in at least two more that he projected but did not live to finish.
Street never went to Greece or Russia, nor, I think, to Dalmatia. The
Gothic lands he loved, there his genius renewed its mighty youth. For
him as for the young Pre-Raphaelites in 1845 and then for the young
Aesthetes in 1855, the first sight of a great French church, say of
Amiens, marked as much the close of one stage and the commencement of
another, as if they all had not known Westminster and York Minster,
Iffley and Fountains Abbey; as if they were, in effect, young Americans
fed on nothing more ancient than those white wood pillars of a front
porch, that rough-dressed stone or bluish brick of a central square
with flanking wings, which appear in our earliest and only, our
“Colonial,” style.
If one is tempted to press the American parallel in the matter of
enthusiasm, as the only one adequate to express the degree of it and
the surprise, fresh as a May morning, irrevocable as falling in love
for the first time, one is even more tempted to push the same parallel
in the matter of method--of “doing” churches and “doing” towns at an
incredible rate. Burne-Jones and Morris on their memorable trip arrived
at Abbeville late Thursday night after a Channel crossing, and on
Friday had an hour in Amiens cathedral before dinner and stayed there
afterwards till nine, reached Beauvais on Saturday and went to Sunday
Mass and vespers, thence on to Paris the same night, spent sixteen
hours Monday in sightseeing, and had only three days there in all
with which to see the Beaux-Arts exhibition, the Cluny, Notre Dame,
the Louvre, and hear _Le Prophète_. Thursday and Friday they gave to
Chartres--a longer time, one likes to remember, than they spared for
any other cathedral. So, of Street, his son writes: “In September,
1850, ... in ten days he saw Paris, Chartres, Alençon, Caen, Rouen and
Amiens, sketching all the time with might and main.” That would be a
fair record now for any but the shameless, even if you substituted
kodak and motor-car for sketch-book and infrequent trains. “In the
summer of 1851 three weeks sufficed to make him acquainted with
Mayence, Frankfort, Wurtzburg, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Ratisbon, Munich,
Ulm, [Constance], Freiburg, Strasburg, Heidelberg, [Cologne], and
three or four of the best of the Belgian towns.” The next trip was his
wedding tour and reached the great churches of what might be called
in architecture, conveniently, the Burgundian March--Dijon, Auxerre,
Sens, Troyes; and the year after that, late in August, the pair came to
Italy. The things done and seen, and, even more the things thought, in
something like five weeks, crammed the notebooks and bore fruit in a
volume that Murray published in 1855, _Brick and Marble in the Middle
Ages_.
The first thing, and, even on reflexion, the most surprising, in all
this travel, is of course the quality and the quantity of what Street
did in his vacations, the incredibly rapid and inconceivably hard work,
no less than the enthusiasm and endurance of the man. The labour, in
the very doing, passes into creation. Besides the great sketch-block
he carried a leather-bound luxurious notebook or two, of heavy and
beautiful paper, some five or six inches by eight, and thick as would
go into a coat pocket, in which he put down alternately sketches
and notes, plans and measurements, names of local building-stone or
extracts from a parish register, and occasionally a memorandum of
railway trains or addresses and dates for forwarding letters. These
worn little volumes are evocative, are potent. He begins sketching,
always, the moment he reaches the Continent and keeps it up till he
touches the Channel again, but he rarely repeats a subject or an
observation. The text records facts and inferences, judgements and
estimates, more often than impressions; and emotions, I think, never.
The drawings preserve more often a plan, a detail, a profile, than a
façade or an interior--in short, a picture. In a sense everything is a
picture, in its vitality of line and unerring selection. For the rest,
the great views of ambulatory and transept, west front and apse, were
done on a larger sheet, and such of them as were not later used up or
given away still preserve in books the itinerary of the successive
years. Whoever has known churches hitherto by photographs only will
turn the leaves of these with strong delight. It is hard ever to say
fully why all drawings of architecture should satisfy more than any
photographs, and these overpass comparison. The camera, after all
cannot see around a corner and an artist can.
The solar print is a dead thing, and here is the living line. Street
can afford, with great economy of line, immense vitality; his son says
that he never carried an india rubber and never put in a line that he
was not sure of, and on the pages of the dusty note-books the line
lives and vibrates. One of 1874 may open at a chapel of the abbey at
Vézelay or a capital from the choir arcade of Auxerre, or another of
1860, at the church of Ainay or the gateway of Nevers; but all the
work of all the years is interchangeable in respect of firmness and
life, certainty and authority; and what you see on the page is not
merely knowledge, accuracy, dexterity, it is genius. The quick notes,
as surely as the large studies and the great original designs, show
never lack of it. Architecture is a craft, a thing a man by application
can learn, like journalism, and architectural drawings may be merely
exact, neat and compact, and give pleasure. But genius is like the
grace of God in a man’s work, it is all in all and all in every part.
The vitality of the line in sketching, the vitality of the design
in building, are the outcome of it. The very handwriting, rapid but
neither negligent nor meticulous, is as much a part of him as a man’s
hair.
The original notes, written from day to day, are never slight, or
stupid, or cock-sure. The _Brick and Marble_ volume has kept their
fresh, quick finality. Thanks in part most likely to _Modern Painters_,
landscape in the early journeys counted nearly as much as cities.
Street had seen the Alps in 1851 from the Lake of Constance, and looked
at them and stuck to his work. The next year, apparently, he visited
Switzerland with his wife and walked up as many as possible. On the
Italian journey two years later he literally made the most of the
mountains, going and coming--through the Rhineland and the Vosges, by
the lakes of Zurich and Wallenstadt, down the canton of the Grisons
and over the Splügen to the lake of Como, one way, and the other by
Lake Maggiore and the S. Gothard, climbing the Furka and including the
lake of Lucerne. As, on another visit, he comes down through the Tyrol
by Grauenfels and the Pustertal, the bare hints are electrical, the
reader’s imagination catches fire. In this first book, the landscape
gets more attention than ever again in print, but all his life he loved
a mountain about as well as a cathedral, he saw the Alps as often as
Amiens. His pencil was almost as often and as happily set to landscape
sketching as to any other; it caught the profile of a bluff and traced
the swelling and subsidence of a mountain’s flank. Now that in the
pursuit of colour and light most painters have abandoned form, and
second-rate Impressionists are content to let a landscape welter in
blues and mauves like a basket of dying fish, his forcible contours
and cool washes awake a tingling of reality.
In 1854 he went to Münster and Soest, and wrote for the
_Ecclesiologist_ during the following year three pieces on the
architecture of northern Germany, besides another for the Oxford
Architectural Society. Summary as are these brief and practical
papers, they remain still so entirely and beyond dispute the fullest
and most suggestive account of German brick work, they are so good
to steal from and so indispensable as adjuncts to Baedeker, and
finally, so characteristically foreshadow and supplement the Spanish
volume, that they are reprinted bodily in the appendix here. It is
precisely sixty years since they were written, and they are not only
not superseded, they are still unapproached. Back of the energy which
enabled him to cover a vast deal of ground and never miss a detail,
beyond the personal acquaintance, and not mere book-knowledge, of the
twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in England,
France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy (to which later he was to add
Spain)--beneath all this learning lay the happiest instinct for what
was either first-rate or important or both. He rarely went out of his
way to look at a church that was not worth his while, he rarely failed
to look at every church in a town that would repay him. The _Memoir_
quotes a letter from this journey, with the characteristic prelude,
“he worked hard, as he always did, up early and in late”:--“I have got
a great budget of sketches; indeed, I have done pretty well, for in
a fortnight I have mustered about fifty-five large sketches besides
filling a goodly memorandum book. We enjoyed Lübeck immensely, and
amongst other feats astonished the natives by making rubbings of some
magnificent brasses, of which Marique did her share, to the delight of
the sacristan.”
His interest in German building was more practical than aesthetic; he
found suggestive parallels to his own problems in those of the rich
merchant cities, set down, often, in a country without accessible
stone. He recurs a dozen times, in his writings, to the similar
solutions found in S. Mary’s at Barcelona and S. Elizabeth’s at
Marburg, and the same type of building in brick developed about Lübeck
and Saragossa, Toulouse and Cremona--in the great plains of the north
of Germany, the north of Spain, and the north of Italy.
Though in 1855 he took no summer holiday, he went over in the fall
to see the designs at Lille with William Morris, and pushed on to S.
Omer. The notebook of that journey is particularly rich in detail, both
personal and architectural. The trip supplied material for papers in
the _Ecclesiologist_, supplemented by another two years later, through
Normandy, the Soissonnais and the German border. Even to-day when that
country has been written to death, ploughed up by pedants and harrowed
by illiterate motorists and photographers, the papers are almost too
good to leave in the dust of old libraries, with their tang of a spring
morning early enough to taste of frost. The notebook still is more than
half a journal, coloured with detail not so irrelevant as the writer
fancied, and I have snatched out a bit about Laon to reprint.[1]
Far more brief are the notebooks, however, of 1860, when he went to
the Bernese Oberland and took in the country that lies westward from
Lyons--Le Puy, Brioude, Clermont-Ferrand, Nevers,--and many of the
smaller churches of that curious Auvergnat type which was to help him
so well in the interpretation of Spanish Gothic during the following
years. There are sketches and plans aplenty, with the scantiest
jottings of fact, and then a few fragments of bibliography; lastly
terse notes of reading done, I fancy, in Paris on the way home.
These served for an essay on _The Churches of Velay_, which has been
printed twice in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Institute of British
Architects, once at the time, and again, long after his death, in 1889.
It is still inaccessible to most, and I reprint it once more, partly
for the bearing on his interpretation of Spanish building, and partly
because I know nothing better on Auvergne.
Nothing missed him, not the paintings on the wall at Brioude nor the
Liberal Arts on the pavement at Ainay. A scrawled road-map on one page
would be still the ecclesiologist’s best guide for the region. The
village of Monistrol which harbours, thereabouts, a characteristic
church, and to which he refers again for comparison in the Spanish
volume, is not, I take pleasure in noting, the scene of the first
meeting with Modestine. If it had been, you should not know from
Stevenson that a church stood thereby, for the good creature had no
great taste in churches, and though the _Inland Voyage_ lay through a
cathedral country, small good was that to him.
The volume shows how Street’s published books were made, and it shows
furthermore, what any other of these little leather books could
equally illustrate, how his instinct drove straight at the truth and
needed from documents only confirmation. He wrote once:
“For that period of just five hundred years so regular was the
development that it is not too much to say that a well-informed
architect or antiquary ought always to be able to give, within ten or
at most twenty years, the date of any, however small a portion, of
Mediaeval architecture with almost absolute certainty of being correct
when his judgement can be tested by documentary evidence.”
That was his practice, the _élan_ of his own judgement, as certain as
the stroke of his pencil, which other architects, of other nations,
have delighted to honour.
Señor Lampérez, in his great book on Spanish architecture, bears
generous and graceful witness to the justness and certitude of Street’s
conjectures. He even gives him the credit of finding the date of S.
Maria at Benavente, now known to be 1220, though in point of fact
Street had set down as opinion and not knowledge that the church must
have been built between 1200 and 1220. The only case in which I know
his instinct at fault is that of the belated churches of Galicia, where
Romanesque forms persisted sometimes even into the fifteenth century.
There, knowing few dates of buildings and fewer of builders, he hardly
estimated them enough of laggards, and guesses wrong sometimes by a
century, or nearly.
Precisely in a case like this, where an unknown condition vitiates the
experiment, one sees how just is his method and how right in all but
the actual year of our Lord, even here, is the outcome. The steady
judgement, the wide knowledge, the happy divination, which we call
genius, cannot play false. While the saint, by ancient dogma, cannot
sin, the foredamned cannot do right; and the provincial-minded, even
though all the data lie before him, is foredoomed by his _campanilismo_
to come out wrong. It is, moreover, a trifle ungrateful in a few young
Spaniards and a few fretful Hispanophils to scold at Street, for he was
the best friend and the most practical, outside the Peninsula, that
Spain had ever had--not forgetting either the Duke of Wellington or
Murray’s Ford. Let me quote again Señor Lampérez, what he has to say
at the opening of his admirable _Historia de la Arquitectura Española
Cristiana_:
“Two foreigners deserve especial place and mention in this survey,
the English Street and the French Enlart. Street was an architect,
profoundly versed in Christian art, Gothic in chief; he had studied
the monuments of it all over Europe; he visited Spain and before her
churches he sketched and took notes with so sure a vision that his
book on Gothic Art [_sic_] in Spain has come to be, if I may say so,
classic. It is the greater pity that Street saw of Spain only one very
small part. On any count, his work is of exceptional importance. His
text is too widely known for me to need to analyze it here; suffice
it to say that his method is based on a technical study of each
building, without any divagation into poetic descriptions or literary
lucubrations.”
_Some account of Gothic Architecture in Spain_, published in 1865, was
the outcome of the journeys in 1861, ’62 and ’63 and (I suppose) of
two more summers spent at home in research and actual composition and
publication. At any rate I find no record of autumn travel in ’64 and
’65.
It is hardly fair, in truth, for Señor Lampérez to say that he saw only
a small part of Spain. His journeys covered, geographically speaking,
much more than two-fifths of the Peninsula, and archaeologically
speaking, all the best of the Romanesque and Gothic, both Gallegan,
Castilian, and Catalan. What he missed was the pre-Romanesque, as it
is found in the Asturias, and the true Moorish, _i.e._ the Asiatic and
non-Christian. If he neglected the Mudejar work and the Renaissance
period, it was deliberately, because when he looked at them he misliked
them. The real difference between his field of labour and that of Señor
Lampérez consists not so much in the latter’s possession of Estremadura
and la Mancha, Seville and the south-east coast, as in his fuller
knowledge and more minute experience of the northern provinces. The
Castiles and Leon, Galicia and Navarre, and the ancient domain of the
kings of Aragon, have been examined league by league and published both
fully and frequently, since 1865. The peculiar styles which give their
importance to the regions of the Biscay shore and the Sierra Morena,
the Latin-Byzantine of Asturias and the Mohammedan of Andalusia, are
special phenomena and must always be treated apart; they may therefore
at need be omitted, without grave loss, from the general consideration
of mediaeval building in Spain; and if these are struck out, for
instance from the lists of Señor Lampérez, there will remain, as the
significant monuments and the important regions, precisely those which
Street had already treated. Cuenca and Soria, Poblet and Ripoll, Tuy
and Orense, Toro, Jaca, the Seo de Urgel, were all unvisited and
other churches yet; but the list is not long nor are the places vastly
important.