Part 3

His life thenceforth falls into such periods as Ezekiel counted,--a time and a time and half a time. Ten years, from 1855 to 1865, were given to church-building, to travel for the sake of study, to writing, beginning with the _Brick and Marble in Italy_ and culminating in the _Gothic Architecture in Spain_. Mainly within the next ten fall the great commissions--for the Law Courts, for building the nave of Bristol cathedral, for rebuilding the cathedral at Dublin, for restoring that of York. If this period is closed with the death of his second wife, in 1876, there will remain just five years for bringing all to a conclusion, finishing wholly or very nearly the great works, lending a strong hand to such public undertakings as saving London Bridge, adorning S. Paul’s, rescuing S. Marco at Venice, and serving on the council of the Royal Academy. Finally, he was President of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He delivered, as Professor of Architecture to the Royal Academy, six lectures on Gothic Architecture in the spring of 1881. Those were widely read at the time, printed in the weekly journal, the _Builder_, as they were delivered, and in the _Architect_; and reprinted by his son as an appendix to the _Memoir_. In that same year he died and on the twenty-ninth of December was buried in Westminster Abbey. He was only fifty-seven and he had been ill only a month.

With Street’s actual building I have little here to do. Immense in quantity, admirable in kind, it stands and long will stand, not only amid the dense green of English hedgerows and in the bitter grime of English towns, but beside the graves of Alpine valleys and in the Stranger’s Quarter of continental cities. Of its technical excellence, the way it meets and happily resolves the builder’s problems, I am not competent to speak. Architects have praised him well. The distinguished American who has devoted his own rich and exquisite talent to the quest of Gothic, tells me that Street, of them all, had the most genius. To the mere ecclesiologist, who comes to the American church at Paris, or the church and schools of S. James the Less, in Westminster, or the village spire of Holmbury S. Mary, it seems that if new churches must be at all, they should be thus. Where Scott’s work seems colder than death and Butterfield’s trivial or thin, Street’s alone has a kind of present life, a pulse, an inner glow. It is again the abounding life of the man which communicates of itself. Many have put their heart into their work, but only a great heart lives and burns in it.

Of architecture, apart from technical questions, structural or 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_: