Part 2

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.