with all the fine enthusiasm of Spanish architects, and societies
learned and popular, treasures of the great age still remain
unexplored. Only last summer the present writer rode over the flank of
a hill to salute, all unprepared, a superb transitional church of the
thirteenth century. It was not cathedral nor even collegiate, but mere
_parroquia_, and perhaps the finest parish church in Spain:--and it is
even to this hour, so far as may be ascertained, completely _inédite_.
When Street went to Santiago he was much in the same case. “I had been
able to learn nothing whatever about the cathedral before going there,”
he records, with ironic amusement; “in all my Spanish journeys there
had been somewhat of this pleasant element of uncertainty as to what
I was to find; but here my ignorance was complete, and as the journey
was a long one to make on speculation, it was not a little fortunate
that my faith was rewarded by the discovery of a church of extreme
magnificence and interest.”
The three journeys were so planned as not only to find out much that
was new each time but to repeat and verify earlier impressions. With
his usual sobriety he sets down the itinerary in the opening pages:
“In my first Spanish tour I entered the country from Bayonne, travelled
thence by Vitoria to Burgos, Palencia, Valladolid, Madrid, Alcalá,
Toledo, Valencia, Barcelona, Lérida, and by Gerona to Perpiñan. In
the second I went again to Gerona, thence to Barcelona, Tarragona,
Manresa, Lérida, Huesca, Zaragoza, Tudela, Pamplona, and so to Bayonne;
and in the third and last I went by Bayonne to Pamplona, Tudela,
Tarazona, Sigüenza, Guadalajara, Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Avila,
Salamanca, Zamora, Benavente, Leon, Astorga, Lugo, Santiago, la Coruña,
and thence back by Valladolid and Burgos to San Sebastian and Bayonne.
Tours such as these have, I think, given me a fair chance of forming
a right judgement as to most of the features of Spanish architecture;
but it would be worse than foolish to suppose that they have been in
the slightest degree exhaustive, for there are large tracts of country
which I have not visited at all, others in which I have seen one or
two only out of many towns which are undoubtedly full of interesting
subjects to the architect, and others again in which I have been too
much pressed for time.”
Street is too modest here: his acquaintance with Spain if not
indeed exhaustive, like that with France and England, is entirely
representative; and however pressed for time, he never scamps his
work. The present writer may testify, having followed his tracks with
an exact piety all the way, that he exhausted every town. He passed
through Miranda at dawn, but he described, classified and dated the
church; he went up the coast, from Barcelona to Port Vendres, by train,
but he saw more churches and towers than the careful observer after
him. He continues:
“Yet I hardly know that I need apologize for my neglect to see more,
when I consider that, up to the present time, so far as I know, no
architect has ever described the buildings which I have visited and
indeed no accurate or reliable information is to be obtained as to
their exact character, age, or history.”
In that sentence is written down the debt Spain owes to Street.
He took his wife on the first journey but not afterwards. She was both
patient and spirited, but it was a little too rough for a lady. His
own endurance and good temper are unfailing, and infallible his sense
of due proportion. He never tells you what was for dinner, or how the
bed ailed, or when he quarrelled with the landlord. It is much if he
mentions, in a sort of postscript, that the journey to Compostela in
diligence took sixty-six hours, and, elsewhere, that in autumn a man
can live largely on bread and grapes. He is not, like Mr. Hewlitt or
Mr. Hutton when they go on the road, writing a picaresque romance, but
an account of Gothic architecture in Spain. The structural analysis
of Santiago, the discussion of the date of Avila, the appreciation
of the Catalan type of church-building--everyone knows that famous
parallel with “our own Norfolk middle-pointed”--such passages provoke
comparison and command praise, for substantiality and lucidity,
with the very best of writing on a technical subject. The dexterity
with which he singles out the English or Angevine elements at Las
Huelgas, and those of the Isle-of-France at Toledo, and signals there
the gradual interpenetration of local influences, has the happiest
certainty and the most admired ease. It is hard to say where he is at
his best,--whether in dealing with a style like the Romanesque of Cluny
or the Gothic of Paris, where he has a vast store of experience long
accumulated, and makes comparisons and illustrates distinctions from
England or Italy indifferently, or whether coming upon fresh matter
like the domed churches about Zamora or the brick building around
Saragossa, or even something so much out of his line as the Mudejar
work scattered about in the Castiles, he applies reason and method to
the unknown, and, arriving at conviction, he enforces it. Nothing could
be more succinct and more satisfying than his dealing with the dates
of Don Patricio de la Escosura, in _España Artistica y Monumental_.
“I see no reason,” he writes easily, “for believing that the plaster
decorations are earlier than 1350 or thereabouts.”
Only once in a very long while, a slight twist or tang of perversity
relieves the even good sense and good taste. Of the lovely sepulchre
in Avila of that young brother of Joanna the Mad, too early dead,
he remarks that the great tomb “is one of the most tender, fine,
and graceful works I have ever seen, and worthy of any school of
architecture. The recumbent effigy, in particular, is as dignified,
graceful and religious as it well could be, and in no respect unworthy
of a good Gothic artist.” The quaint anti-climax has the very, sweet,
_gaucherie_ of a woodcut by Rossetti or a bit out of Scripture by the
young, unspoiled Holman Hunt. We have come, since that could be said, a
very long way.
[Illustration: THE OLD CATHEDRAL OF SALAMANCA]
It would seem that he finished a great piece of work only to be free
for another. When he had published _Brick and Marble_ he moved to
London and went in for the Lille and the Government House competitions;
when he had published _Gothic Architecture in Spain_ he was to go in
for the National Gallery and the Law Courts. It is a great piece of
work. The reading it implies, that would have been for a mere student
no trifle, was done by a professional man already more occupied than
most. The drawings for it were made on the wood by a working architect,
already designing for his own churches every several moulding, every
piece of ironwork, every free-flowing tracery. Though the task took
all he had to spare out of five years of his life, that was, after
all, a life filled with other and more important interests; yet the
proudest nation in Europe has gone to school to him. Every Spanish
ecclesiologist knows this book, not by repute only but by heart. Even
those who disclaim all working knowledge of English have the volume on
their shelves and the substance of it in their heads. The part which
deals with Cataluña has been translated into Catalan and published
separately. A Castilian version of the half-chapter on Valladolid, with
rich and appreciative annotation and comment, appeared in the _Boletin
de la Sociedad Castellana de Excursiones_ in 1898. He is still cited
as a final authority. The effect of it was to teach the rest of Europe
that the glory of mediaeval Spain endured; that one could actually see
something south of the Pyrenees, neither Saracenic nor Jesuit, a great
religious art surviving, not decadent, not moribund nor morbid nor
corrupted by the gold of the Indies, strong, virile, spontaneous, the
expression of personal independence and manly piety. No one ever packed
up fewer prejudices in his baggage, no one ever brought out more truth.
On his accounts we still may confidently rely. The most important truth
was, of course, the debt to France, which Spanish pride still at times
shrinks from acknowledging. But what some amiable enthusiasts are
loth to admit for love of Spain, and others less amiable are fain to
deny for a grudge against France, the stones of the towns cry out to
testify, and they have Señor Lampérez and Don Rafael Altamira, let them
hear them! The glory of Street is that by the light of his intimate
knowledge and love of France, he saw it fifty years ago. To-day, as
then, his is the one book that cannot be spared. The great lover of
Spain, who set himself, on the first journey thither, to follow in the
steps of the Cid, reckoned also on planting his foot in the track of
Street. The casual traveller writes back to London for a copy and sits
down by the way for it to overtake him. It is the best companion in
the world, never irrelevant, or peevish, or stodgy. It never fails in
sensibility to exalted beauty; it is never betrayed into unction and
the professional whine, or what Swinburne once called rancid piety.
The English sobriety and good breeding just sufficiently are leavened
with enthusiasm--yet that temperate admiration was really, I suppose,
the betrayal of an inner passion: the sound rule of faith and the sober
standard of feeling being again in play.
With the National Gallery in mind, Street had gone abroad in 1866 to
study great halls, and swept a wide round through Munich, Vienna,
Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Hanover, Hildesheim, and the Belgian towns.
The next three years he was in Italy, and after the war oftener
there than elsewhere, coming or going by way of the Val d’Aosta or
the Engadine, the Bernese Oberland or the Austrian Tyrol. The sad
summer of 1871 he spent in Switzerland. Street could not, indeed,
have been born and lived and died in England in the Victorian age,
without feeling that same passion for high mountains which makes so
touching the letters of Meredith, in whom it was thwarted perpetually,
and so inspires the letters of Leslie Stephen, for whom it seems to
have supplied a source of spiritual regeneration. The two Stephens,
Tyndall, Clifford, Arnold and the rest of that strong mid-century race
that broke, most of them, with the church, and repudiated, all of
them, religion as by law established, found literally in the Alps a
substitute for God. Street was able to keep God and the Alps too--since
“all these things shall be added unto you.”
In 1874 he published a second edition of _Brick and Marble_, augumented
by notes gathered in journeys as far back as 1857. Both editions
have long been out of print. It would be a good work if the ancient
house of Murray would republish it, for the author’s most fantastical
reactions against Palladio cannot affect--shall I say, its solid worth?
Accurate observation, close and careful description, knowledge that can
read into every detail its implications, would make the dullest book
indispensable for reference, and this runs lightly as a traveller’s
tale. You are surprised when you find how few of the books, with
pictures and without, that every year unloads on the subject of Italy,
give any substantial information beyond the hotel door-step. Upon my
faith, every author, from the venerable Mr. Howells to the diligent Mr.
Hutton, will run on and on discoursing most excellent music--but if
you would know what a church really looks like, without or within, he
is not your man. Forms shift and dyes mingle in their descriptions as
in sunset clouds. Mr. Pennell will turn you off a wonderful portfolio
of pictures, each worthy to be framed and glazed and hung on the wall,
but if the church be Gothic or Romanesque, if the square be classic or
baroque, who can say? If you need to know, down comes the shabby Street
from the shelf, and after you have consulted the page and the drawing
you may have, belike, more than the author had when he set down what
he saw. His son notes somewhere that on referring to an old landscape
sketch they found accurate record of details they had not known till
later: so truly does truth stand by her lovers.
Meanwhile he had planned the companion volume on central and southern
Italy, to which he refers in the preface. It is a sad pity he could
not have found the time nor the heart to write this, for with it in
mind he pushed as far in 1873 as Ancona, Lucera and Benevento. The MS.
notebook, I fear, has perished which should have gone with a square
thick book of sketches more than usually stimulating and lovely. The
choir of the S. Chapelle at Chambéry shows the way he went; then plans
of S. Ciriaco, at Ancona, the crossing and dome seen from the nave, the
south porch, the eastern and western apses, with a tenderly faithful
drawing of the innumerably-arcaded front of S. Maria, imply the kind
of close study that culminates in a book. Had he but followed up his
observations there and elsewhere, at Lucera for instance, where he
recorded not only the cathedral and the castles, but a whole group of
churches and a cluster of castles that front the Adriatic coast thence
southward; or at Foggia, where, with a sketch of the façade of the
cathedral and a separate study of the most characteristic Pisan and
Pistojan traits he fairly underlined the relation and suggested Troja
to a surprising degree;--had he merely knotted up the syllogisms that
he laid out ready on the page, and written his Q. E. D., then, beyond
a question, from his intimate knowledge of the Royal Domain he would
have made out and declared, here as in Spain, the determining influence
of northern France, and anticipated the thesis of M. Bertaux. That
would have been such another triumph as the Spanish volume, for English
intelligence and English taste. But in these Christmas holidays of 1873
he snatched, as the train passed, a castle at Recanati and a portal at
Giulianuova, then from Foggia made a great leap to Salerno, and ended
for the nonce with careful detailed drawings of the ambons and towers
throughout the wonderful Salernitan group, at Amalfi and Ravello and
Scala.
Year after year he went back to the south-west coast in winter; in
1874, after his wife’s death, spending Christmas with her father as
usual, going down by the Riviera and coming back by Florence and the
Brenner. It is this year, I fancy, that we may thank for a record of
Spoleto cathedral before the restorers had it, for a series of notes in
the Umbrian towns, and for another series of the churches of Asti.
This was all familiar ground, of course, to him. The MS. notes on
central Italy belong mostly to a journey to Florence made in 1857,
reinforced by another, in 1872, that carried him the rest of the way
to Rome. Of these notes I am reprinting not a little: in part because
such analysis as that of Assisi is profounder than any that has been
written since: in part because such comment as that on Siena and
Orvieto if not palatable is yet salutary even to those who have learned
to love the Tuscan Gothic. Of Florence, others have written more
eloquently though not with more sincerity. To the MS. of the Florence
episode the privileged reader will turn with keen curiosity indeed, but
without apprehension, to learn how Street felt about Donatello and the
primitives, having the assurance beforehand that he will not like the
wrong thing. If one has to forgive Shelley the tinkling guitar of Jane,
and to forgive Browning the thick legs of Guercino’s Guardian Angel,
and both an occasional lapse upon Guido Reni, Street wants no allowance
made. His taste is hardly out of date, even yet. His friends at home
had always been the young painters, his house in London held not only
some good pieces of theirs but some early Italian panels and tondi.
Inevitably he transposed his taste in architecture bodily into
painting: Giotto and Fra Angelico are sure of his liking, so usually
are their pupils; but Donatello’s S. George is “a poor knock-kneed
figure, and no one of the statues [at Or San Michele] comes near the
early French figures in any way.” Well, recalling the S. George on the
south porch of Chartres, on what ground shall one dispute that?
Not merely the dates that Street will like may be foreseen, but the
intellectual attitude and spiritual style: as he cared little for the
architecture of the Renaissance, he will care no more for the masters
of chiaroscuro, and the baroque style he will feel equally distasteful
in the two arts. Lastly, his abiding love for Perugino and Francia is
utterly in keeping with his Anglican faith; it recalls the very tone of
the boyish letter about Lanercost.
“It is particularly characteristic of Lanercost that all is in harmony,
every portion seems designed upon the same principle and with the same
amount of reverential feeling, and all is so simple as to indicate
truth and solidity and the absence of gaudy and hypocritical religion.
I dare say you have smiled at the way I come at architecture and
religion, it may perhaps be the bias of a profession which makes me
do so, but I cannot but think that architecture as well as, not more
than, the other fine arts, is a great and most important assistant
to religion. Again in the matter of abbeys, I know there will be an
outcry when you read my journal [_if we could but read that journal!_]
against my admiration of them and their system; but when I lament their
destruction I lament it because I venerate the men who founded them.”
Rome he never cared for so much as Tuscany and Umbria, that, too, being
temperamental. In the early weeks of 1876, after his second marriage,
upon making the usual visit to Naples he came back by Rome again,
taking the time from his business to see Subiaco, Albano, Palestrina,
and Frascati. The brief wedding journey, when almond trees must have
been in flower all the way, though it was to end so cruelly in a Roman
fever, had begun in a strong fresh flow of happiness that found outlet
in a set of MS. notes on Amalfi. That is the last bit of writing which
I can trace that is not strictly exacted by the circumstances of his
profession.
Occasionally always, when something called for it, he had written an
open letter or a brief pamphlet of protest or vindication. Like all
men of strong creative imagination, Street cared more for doing than
for undoing. He was not a man of war, but he was a good fighter when
the issue was clear and the charge laid upon him. Having taken part
in the stormy competition over Edinburgh cathedral in 1872, he said
forcibly during the proceedings, in the name of the English architects
engaged, that the award did not comply with the conditions. As finally
made it complied less than ever, and thereafter he said nothing. It
was a hurt and he held his peace. Some other great controversies in
which he was engaged, fell later and lasted longer. One’s own opinion
to-day is apt to sustain Street. In the matter of the younger Scott’s
restoration at S. Albans the work was generally challenged and came
out unsatisfactory; in that of his own dealing with the Fratry at
Carlisle, he felt himself at liberty, in the face of late and ugly
alterations, to replace and piece out such fragments of the original
work as he found embedded in the building; in that of re-adapting
to general and cathedral use the Minster at Southwell, his proposal
respected the visible indications of the architecture. The present
writer, being at Southwell not long ago, had contrived to make out by
mother wit, from the signs of vault and arcade, of structure and carved
decoration, just such intentions as Street, it appears, presumed.
His superb scheme for rearranging S. Paul’s, with the altar under a
great baldachin at the crossing, stood no chance of liking because it
ignored the average English habit of mind, it made religion splendid
and brought it near. Now the English like their religion chilly and
infrequent and a long way off. His stubborn adherence to Gothic for all
uses may have cost him the award for the National Gallery, and cost
England a new and intelligible building in place of that which still
survives. Street’s plan would have brought forth, in a way, something
not so unlike in effect, while quite different in style, to the Boston
Public Library, stately and gracious, a pleasure to the passer-by,
adapted not only to its use but to its dignity. The question of Gothic
with him was not only a matter of conscience, it was more, a matter of
temperament: all his life, all his religion, the very fibres of his
body, were strung to that interplay of thrust and strain, were tuned to
that upward reaching of the mountain’s heart toward God. He could not
otherwise. The battle of the Law Courts echoes still, though faintly,
in Englishmen’s depreciation and guide-books’ disapproval. The great
pile, notwithstanding, in every aspect is noble, and the question must
turn merely on the style. Modern Gothic granted at all, little can be
said against it, and if the sixties and seventies of the last century
had not used modern Gothic, what else could they have used? It seems
unlikely that the new Law Courts in New York will be better, built on
the plan of the Colosseum.
That work was to outlast his life. Meanwhile private commissions did
not fall off and ecclesiastical appointments multiplied. At Oxford
he had long been diocesan architect; and he held somewhat the same
relation to the cathedrals of York, Ripon, Winchester, Gloucester,
Salisbury and Carlisle. With all this he had building of his own
in which to take delight. In 1872 he bought land at Holmbury, near
Dorking, and made himself a garden there and in time a house, lastly a
church.
The country is there of very ancient occupation, essential England.
The buxom contour of the hills, the generous leafage of the woods, are
richer than elsewhere. The lawns are springy with delicate turf of
grass fine like hair, the close hedges taller than a man, the stocks
and gillyflowers heavy-scented, the dahlias and snapdragons dark-hued
and gold-dusted. From the ridge the eye can range--but the English
landscape needs an English pen.
“The house he decided to place on a brow, with a terrace running all
along its front, the whole, or nearly the whole of the garden being
disposed in the hollow below. A certain formal effect had been obtained
by sunk rectangular lawns and banks. As the views to the south-east and
the south were almost equally good, he planned the house in two wings,
forming an obtuse angle one with the other;[2] one facing south-east
and the other full south over the sunken garden.... Below the hill the
ground swept down in an amphitheatre open at one end to give a glimpse
of the blue distance seen over a bit of park-like foreground, whilst
above it rose one spur behind another of the near hills, clothed with
junipers and grand bushes of holly, and over them again the farther
edge of the hill crowned with masses of dark firs.”
He had, as he maintained the architect should always in truth have,
a right judgement in all things, interior decoration as well as
structure, secular and domestic detail as well as ecclesiastic. When he
had thought of giving up the house in Cavendish Square a friend “told
me he never saw so charming a room as this drawing-room and he was
rejoicing that I could not leave it just now--nearly every one seems
to be of the same mind.... All my happiest associations are with these
rooms and I begin to think I should be less happy anywhere else.”
[Illustration: GEORGE EDMUND STREET IN 1877]
He was to need the happiness of associations. The work begun and
carried out by the nest-building instinct, that faculty which shapes
after one’s own desire a shelter for one’s own kind and kin, was to
prove a solace for grief at the last. His wife had died in 1874; two
years later Street married “a lady who had been of all my mother’s
friends the most highly prized, and had been so intimate with us as to
have been her companion on many of our foreign tours”--her step-son
writes. It is typical of the homing breed, of the instinct that holds
in the old paths, to rebuild with the least possible of novelty, and
recommence without snapping one of the old threads. The blind impulse
of solidarity finds its wants in the ancient walks, the ancient
intimacies, the ancient affections.