Chapter II: Appendix: 253 (2)

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_:

“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.

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.”

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.

Mrs. Street lived only eight weeks after her marriage. Thereafter Street kept men’s company mostly. He had for friends all that was most living in London, the Rossettis and Holman Hunt, George Boyce and J. W. Inchbold, William Bell Scott, Madox Brown, Morris and Burne-Jones. That _enfant terrible_ of the last generation, Mr. Ford Madox Hueffer, has probably reminiscences of him. He had, before all, his son, who on quitting Oxford came up to work under him; he had his associates in his own profession and in the Royal Academy. In that last year he made a tour with Arthur Street among the German cities, but the drawings that could date it are few, and one of the latest notebooks passes within a few leaves from pulpits in southern Italy to the landscape around S. Gervais. Thither he had gone in the autumn to take the waters: “he was troubled more or less by headache the whole time, but he did a good deal of walking and sketching in spite of very bad weather.” That was in September. The stroke fell on him the middle of November; then he was better, was planning a long journey in Egypt. On December 18 he was dead. The tireless energy never knew a real abatement. He lies in the nave of the Abbey as Pierre de Montéreau lies in S. Germain-des-Prés, and in Rheims Robert de Coucy.

It is not a long life as you count it over: five years with Scott and Moffatt; five in and near Oxford; twenty years in London of triumphant work; then five of honours like the pause at flood-tide, and never the ebb. Like such a great river as that he knew so well and frequented all his days, his life flowed steadily and strongly, the brimming stream augmenting always, deepening and widening, the heavier current moving, at the end, more slowly but not through slackening of power, until, at the last turn, the majestic estuary opens and broadens, as, with no hurry of fretting waves, no straining through silted sandbanks, undiminished, the mighty mass of waters mingles with the sea.

NOTES OF A TOUR IN CENTRAL ITALY TO WHICH ARE APPENDED A FEW NOTES FROM A LATER TOUR

II

NOTES OF A TOUR IN CENTRAL ITALY

(_From a notebook of 1857_)

_August 20, 1857._

Left town at 8.30 P.M. by South-Eastern Railway for Folkstone. A close push for it, as I was an unwilling auditor of Lord Riverdale in the House of Lords till 7 P.M. I then had a conference with the Bishop of Oxford.

I left them to settle if possible the Divorce question and rushed home just in time to pack and be off. A very quiet passage over to Boulogne was seconded by a weary hour’s waiting at the station before the train started.

We reached Paris at 9.10 and drove to the _Hôtel de l’Europe_ and then wandered about for the day seeing sights. Tried for but could see no good MSS. Drove to the _Bois de Boulogne_ and went to the _Pré Catalan_, for which I cannot say much. By dint of watering the grass vigorously they get it to look very green, but it is coarse stuff, more like a water meadow in texture than an English lawn. The _Pré Catalan_ without a soul in it except the show men, etc. eating _al fresco_ dinners, is rather slow, so we came back soon. In the afternoon went to the Hippodrome. The best thing probably was the racing between three men each riding a four-in-hand and going at a great pace. Dined at Véfour’s and then off to the station, and in a rash moment, and in submission to the peremptory order of a grand railway clerk, booked ourselves through from Paris to Turin. The train was very full but I rested tolerably well and awoke in the morning just in time to get a glimpse of the cathedral at Tournus.[3] At Mâcon we changed to another train and crossing the Saône turned off toward Geneva; the country invisible in a thick fog till we reached Ambérieu, the junction with the line from Lyons, where it rose sufficiently to disclose an exceedingly picturesque situation. From this point up to Culoz, where we left the line, the country is very wild and beautiful. The railway runs up a very narrow winding valley hemmed in with grand hills, showing here and there fine bold bluffs of rock. The stream, a mountain torrent, was nowhere--but wide banks of well-worn stones show that it is powerful enough after rain or in the winter and spring. At Culoz we embarked on a long and very shaky steamboat, the “Coquette,” and going stern foremost a half mile down the rapid Rhone (here a dirty white colour) we finally turned out of it into a sort of canal which connects the Lac du Bourget with the Rhone. Our steamer was so long that in getting along we invariably just touched land at one end and occasionally at both, but by dint of great energy in the steering and by aid of men who ran along the bank to push us off, we were safely discharged into the lake. The water here is of the blue green which one remembers at Geneva. The banks are precipitous and the lake, though not very large, very pretty. The Dent du Chat on the south-west is a fine hill, and the high bold hill above Culoz stands out to great advantage over the immense, perfectly flat, meadow which occupies the space between the Rhone and the lake, and which to-day is full of haymakers,--I should say some two or three hundred--all hard at work. We embarked at a temporary kind of port called S. Innocent and went thence by railway to Chambéry. Here we stopped for five hours to see the cathedral, wash and eat. The cathedral is of small interest. Its flamboyant west front is fairly good of its kind. On the whole the church wants dignity, and gives the impression of a parish church more than of a cathedral. The castle which rises above the west side of the town has not much old remaining. The chapel is poor flamboyant with some good stained glass in the apse. The king has a fine papered and cushioned gallery at the west end. I looked into one or two other churches but found no old features.