Part 4

“Two foreigners deserve especial place and mention in this survey, the English Street and the French Enlart. Street was an architect, profoundly versed in Christian art, Gothic in chief; he had studied the monuments of it all over Europe; he visited Spain and before her churches he sketched and took notes with so sure a vision that his book on Gothic Art [_sic_] in Spain has come to be, if I may say so, classic. It is the greater pity that Street saw of Spain only one very small part. On any count, his work is of exceptional importance. His text is too widely known for me to need to analyze it here; suffice it to say that his method is based on a technical study of each building, without any divagation into poetic descriptions or literary lucubrations.”

_Some account of Gothic Architecture in Spain_, published in 1865, was the outcome of the journeys in 1861, ’62 and ’63 and (I suppose) of two more summers spent at home in research and actual composition and publication. At any rate I find no record of autumn travel in ’64 and ’65.

It is hardly fair, in truth, for Señor Lampérez to say that he saw only a small part of Spain. His journeys covered, geographically speaking, much more than two-fifths of the Peninsula, and archaeologically speaking, all the best of the Romanesque and Gothic, both Gallegan, Castilian, and Catalan. What he missed was the pre-Romanesque, as it is found in the Asturias, and the true Moorish, _i.e._ the Asiatic and non-Christian. If he neglected the Mudejar work and the Renaissance period, it was deliberately, because when he looked at them he misliked them. The real difference between his field of labour and that of Señor Lampérez consists not so much in the latter’s possession of Estremadura and la Mancha, Seville and the south-east coast, as in his fuller knowledge and more minute experience of the northern provinces. The Castiles and Leon, Galicia and Navarre, and the ancient domain of the kings of Aragon, have been examined league by league and published both fully and frequently, since 1865. The peculiar styles which give their importance to the regions of the Biscay shore and the Sierra Morena, the Latin-Byzantine of Asturias and the Mohammedan of Andalusia, are special phenomena and must always be treated apart; they may therefore at need be omitted, without grave loss, from the general consideration of mediaeval building in Spain; and if these are struck out, for instance from the lists of Señor Lampérez, there will remain, as the significant monuments and the important regions, precisely those which Street had already treated. Cuenca and Soria, Poblet and Ripoll, Tuy and Orense, Toro, Jaca, the Seo de Urgel, were all unvisited and other churches yet; but the list is not long nor are the places vastly important.

Some of them, if it must be known, are still but little studied; and 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.

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.