Part 1

Produced by Sonya Schermann, Charlie Howard, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

PUBLICATIONS OF THE HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA No. 100

GEORGE EDMUND STREET

UNPUBLISHED NOTES AND REPRINTED PAPERS

_WITH AN ESSAY_

BY GEORGIANA GODDARD KING

QUAM DILECTA TABERNACULA TUA DOMINE VIRTUTUM

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Church is menaced by Disestablishment in Wales, and Modernism on the Continent; his strong and sincere architecture is superseded by steel and concrete; yet no man ever less fought a losing fight, no figure ever less evoked regret or toleration.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.

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.