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PUBLICATIONS OF
THE HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA
No. 100

ZAMORA ON THE DOURO

GEORGE EDMUND STREET
UNPUBLISHED NOTES
AND
REPRINTED PAPERS

WITH AN ESSAY

BY
GEORGIANA GODDARD KING

QUAM DILECTA TABERNACULA TUA DOMINE VIRTUTUM

THE HISPANIC SOCIETY
OF AMERICA
1916

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
THE HISPANIC SOCIETY
OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

GEORGE EDMUND STREET

I have to thank Arthur Edmund Street, Esq., of London, for the generous loan of some notebooks and drawings, and through these for a more intimate knowledge of his great father’s fine temper and manly art.

Bryn Mawr, Epiphany, 1915

I

“And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof and the walls thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper; every several gate was of one pearl.”

GEORGE EDMUND STREET

I

I have written the memorial, brief enough and all inadequate, of a man who died more than thirty years ago, who lived a Tory and a High Churchman, who worked to revive Gothic architecture in England. His books are out of print, his occasional papers and pamphlets so entirely dispersed and forgotten that not even a bibliography can be recovered. His name goes unrecognized in general talk; his party is wasted to a wraith or transformed beyond recognition; his Church is menaced by Disestablishment in Wales, and Modernism on the Continent; his strong and sincere architecture is superseded by steel and concrete; yet no man ever less fought a losing fight, no figure ever less evoked regret or toleration. He prospered, but his personality made that a kind of happy consequence; he served God, but his genius made that a kind of crowning grace; he was an Englishman, but was that in no mean or halfway fashion. Rather, George Street embodied and expressed in his own temper the very genius of the northern kind.

His people were substantial, of the strong British stock which is good for grafting on. In the sixteenth century they were respected in and about Worcester; one of the name went to Parliament in 1563, and another had been Mayor in 1535. In the eighteenth century some of them went to Surrey, and early in the nineteenth Thomas Street was a solicitor in London. He had moved into the suburbs, however, before his youngest son, George Edmund Street, was born. This was in 1824. The boy did well enough at school, but at fifteen he was taken away, when his father removed from Camberwell to Crediton. No school was at hand, and a solicitor would not send his son to Eton and Oxford. Instead, he sent him to the London office. This was in 1840. After the father’s death, in that year, young Street was anxious to go to college and to prepare for Holy Orders, but want of money made the hope impossible, and the strong vocation proved to be for the Third Order—a layman’s part in building up the house of the Lord and making fair the ministry therein.

It seems to have mattered not at all, in the event, that Street was not a University man. In reading the correspondence of Keats, we must deplore that he had not had certain conventions of good taste and good feeling sharply imposed upon him at a great public school; in reading the poetry of Browning we must regret that he missed the tradition of self-criticism and academic stability which would have saved him from the fantasticality of his Greek names and the dullness of his longer Parleyings; but Street seems to have got out of his profession and his associates all that Oxford would have given, and escaped whatever harm it could have done. He saved, meanwhile, nearly ten years of life, and spent these on churches, chiefly old. He has not the marks of the University man, but for that he is none the worse. No more in truth has Morris. Instead of culture he has energy, instead of urbanity he has self-control, instead of classical he has professional reading behind him. It is only in a very special sense, after all, that he did without what we call culture and what we call urbanity; in the sense of Newman’s rather malicious definition of a gentleman as a University man who is too indifferent for enthusiasms and too sceptical for prejudices. If young Street never went to school after he was fifteen, and no record remains of his reading regularly or under direction, yet he read irregularly all his life; by middle age he had read everything that a man must have read. Beyond this, in the subjects that he had at heart he had gone wide and deep. He must have mastered and spoken, besides French and German, both Italian and Spanish, and he carried on his research into Latin documents, it seems, with ease and speed. After meals and on journeys the busy man found his opportunity; he took up and took in a vast deal of contemporary thinking; finished the newspaper quickly, and reviews and the graver sort of periodical literature almost as fast. In his case, as rarely happens, another art could give what most men seek in literature if they ever seek it, and the taste was refined and the spirit inspired not so much by fine poetry as by pure Gothic. The churches of England and the cathedrals of France taught him that perfect measure, that economy of force, that high seriousness, that austerity of beauty, for which others are sent to the Iliad and the Divine Comedy. Barring belles-lettres and biology, there is little indeed, whether in science or in mathematics, that the University can offer, which the arts do not exact. If architecture is on the one side an art, it is on the other a profession, and partakes as little of the tradesman’s mean-mindedness as of the artist’s irresponsibility. It is probable, moreover, that his passion for landscape had as much to do in forming the character as Wordsworth’s. By the living rock and the ancient wall, by the perfect fabric of Notre Dame and S. Marco, by the worship in chanted psalm and antiphonal prayer, his spirit was forged and tempered.

At school he had sketched and scrawled, and when after his father’s death in 1840 he was recalled to live with his mother and sister at Exeter, he studied painting for a while as painting was taught in the provinces, learning the management of oils and the science of perspective. No harm could come from this except that in landscape sketching later he was shy of strong colour, and set down Spain and Italy more pallid than he liked; but already the current of his life was running by church walls. In the year before, his brother, who was eight years his senior and was brim-full of mediaevalism, had taken him on a short walking trip for what they called ecclesiologizing. For a while he lived near Exeter cathedral, drawn to it at that time by every sentiment: grief for his father—since his domestic affections were stable—and anxiety for the future, strong religious feeling, aesthetic feeling as strong, the beauty of the service and the beauty of the building. Thence he made another trip with this same brother, Thomas, around about through the West of England to Barnstaple, Bideford, Torrington and Clovelly. The diary of that tour, written shortly after his sixteenth birthday, is simply the first of the always happy notebooks which record his many journeys in the interest of landscape and art. It sets down the lay of the land and the aspect of the streets where they passed; it notes that he got up at six to sketch out of his bedroom window; and it preserves more fact than comment, and less of the trivial than of the significant. Within another year he was articled to an architect in Winchester, studying the cathedral from every point and at every hour. The two brothers tramped the country for twenty miles about, and as they could pushed further, for the most part on foot still. In the spring of 1843 they walked to Chichester; in the autumn into Lincolnshire; the next year into Sussex. In 1845 they reached Northampton, returning thither in 1846 and again in 1850. The same autumn he went to the Lake Country and thence across to Durham and home by the Yorkshire dales and abbeys. Jervaulx, however, he missed at this time, nor does it appear among the sketches of other abbeys in a notebook of 1875. In the spring of 1847 the two brothers were among the churches of the fen-land in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. Meanwhile in 1844 Thomas, who was the eldest of the brothers, and had succeeded to his father’s practice, took a house near London and fetched his mother and sister to live with him there.

George, who was lonely and heartily sick of Winchester, came up to share it, with a letter for G. G. Scott and drawings of his own to show. Taken on because work was pressing, he was kept on because his work was good, and stayed in the office of Scott and Moffatt until he was ready to set up for himself five years later. Thomas Street by 1849 was married; the requirements of his profession, if not more serious, were more exacting. He made fewer tours, but his taste for architecture, and apparently his taste in architecture, remained sound. “At this time, they were all living together at Lee, and afterwards at Peckham,” says the Memoir written in 1888 by George Street’s son. “My aunt relates how the two young men used to arrive with sketch-books full and rolls of rubbings of brasses, and would then sit up till the small hours, in all the excitement of archaeological discussions and arguments. My uncle [Thomas] was quite untaught. His love for and appreciation of good architecture were quite spontaneous, and the proficiency which he attained with his pencil and the knowledge he had of this subject, more than considerable.”

As the first knowledge of architecture had come through a brother, so Street’s first commission came through the sister. Miss Street worked at ecclesiastical embroidery. She heard through another lady embroiderer of a clergyman who intended building a church in Cornwall. The story turns prettily on the scrupulous girl’s anxieties. Mr. Prynne, the clergyman, begins—“Has your brother got much work going on?” The sister, who wants to make him out as important as possible, yet cannot bring herself to a fib; and the sorry truth that he is quite at leisure from affairs of his own, unexpectedly satisfies the impatient projector. The commission for Biscovey church led to others in Cornwall. Between restorations and new churches and schools, commissions accumulated, and Street at this period was in those parts for several weeks together, three or four times a year, overseeing the work in progress and finding new work ready always at hand. In 1849 he had chambers in London and was “on his own”: at the end of 1850 he went to Wantage to be within reach of Cuddesden, being appointed by the Bishop of Oxford, diocesan architect.

Two main interests mark this time. He was engaged to be married, and he was at the well-spring of the Oxford Movement. He spent his Sundays at Maidenhead with Marquita Proctor, on the river, seeing churches and sketching; he spent his working days at Wantage.

“Mr. Street, having no special ties to any locality, desired to live at Wantage where daily service and weekly celebration had been established at a time when such were rare. He took, therefore, in conjunction with Mr. Stillingfleet—one of the clergy of the parish—a little house in Wallingford Street. During the time he lived there I saw him almost daily.” This is Dr. William Butler, later Dean of Lincoln. “When not called from Wantage on business, he regularly attended my service, and took his part in the choir. He had, I remember, a baritone voice, and took a tenor part. He was much interested in the improvement of services, and, although at this time far from wealthy, he offered a large annual subscription, I think it was £20, toward the payment of an organist.... Never was there a man of simpler or less luxurious habits. In those two years he dined with us and the clergy of the parish, he drank no wine, and had only the plainest food.”

It was an energetic wholesome life, simple not so much by limitation as by renunciation, full of interest and expression, keeping a right line, as always, by the force of the initial impulse. The energetic, wholesome figure stands firm in a clear sunlight that is hardly dimmed by the space of sixty-odd years intervening. With nothing of the prig, as little of the aesthete, he was alien to both types by virtue of his vitality, his mirth, his essential soundness. A daguerreotype taken about 1850 shows quiet strength with a sort of sweet gravity. The hands are strong and flexible, not large, with tapering fingers and fine modelling on the back. You would have turned in the street to look after the head, with a big square brow jutting over blue eyes, brown hair very soft and round chin very firm, a mouth poetic and self-controlled. If poetry were (as once was rashly said) merely an affair of genius, and genius the affair of energy, Street would have been infallibly a poet. Energy and beauty in him were mingled in unusual measure, and he found expression in active more than in abstract creation: in loving landscape and sketching it, in hearing music and singing it, in building Gothic churches and restoring them.

GEORGE EDMUND STREET AT ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE

His invention was inexhaustible; he designed not only all the mouldings for his churches, and all delicately various, not only reredos and pulpit, baldachin and font, and once a whole book of organs, but equally as a matter of course the windows, the stalls, the ironwork, the very altar-cloths. About this time he painted the ceilings to some of his churches after Fra Angelico, and elsewhere from his own designs. His early work may have been a trifle severe at times, and at times a trifle daring, but it had always freshness, vitality, one might say vibration. His capitals ring clearer than glass when it is struck; his mouldings sound as true a note as a violin when it is tuned. His building expresses, beyond possibility of mistake, as specific a sentiment as any composition of Palestrina or Fra Angelico:—viz., religious emotion, a combination of reverence and action, a solemn joy. But with this power to express an emotion from within himself and furthermore to create it in others, went an indefatigable energy. He was tall and very ready of movement, thickset and thin-skinned, blue-eyed and brown-bearded, ruddy, compact of strength and gentleness.

The energy found outlet normal and adequate in three directions—his work, his affections and his religion. He worked apparently as a young dog runs, from accumulated motor impulses, from strength that brims over. You have never the pang of our brother the ass, over-ridden, over-laden, that agonizes under the goad. You have never the fever craving for work as anodyne, that drives on desperately at the straining task as the only escape from the hell-hounds that bay hard after the sickening soul. The work is never done for work’s sake. It is a pleasure always, but only by the way. It is done to support some one he loves and to add to the glory of God.

The affections are close and sweet, those of the hearth. His mother was a good Christian but even more a Stoic, and Street held her the better for it. Theirs was a love undemonstrative but recognized, of the most exacting sort, neither of them accepting from the other anything short of the very best. After he went to Winchester, being then seventeen, she treated him like a man, and rarely praised him for doing what he should. If a pleasure was renounced, she said, “I knew that under the circumstances you would be Philosopher enough to give it up.” Her grandson wrote: “It is enough to read the mother’s letters to see the source of the son’s strength and steadfastness of character. She was one of those women who, in some indefinable way, have a powerful influence for good on all those into whose company they are thrown; who, themselves rather sparing in outward signs of affection, create in others a warm love and a perfect confidence. Her pride in her son was unbounded, but was left to be inferred rather than expressed; while her love was shown more in the demand for sacrifices, in the confidence with which she appealed to her son’s sense of duty and obedience, however severe the test.”

Besides a wide and wakeful kindness and untiring interest in others of his own profession, he had full, warm friendships, but where he could he took his pleasure with his nearest of kin. The early journeys were made in his brother’s company, the continental with his wife, and later with his son. The brothers, George and Thomas, were married to cousins, and up to the very last the longest and most frequent visits abroad were made to his son’s grandfather. After his wife’s death he took for a second wife her close friend, an intimate of the household and frequent companion.

The relations not of choice, the intimacies sweetened and consecrated by tender use and wont and all the sanctities of the hearth, the blind impulses of the blood and yearnings of the flesh toward kindred flesh and blood, were for him alike inevitable and dear. Here also he expresses the genius of the English stock. The northern race stood out long for the righteousness of the married life even in the priesthood, and the English church has at all times tended toward the family life as distinguished from the cloistered, and elaborated and adorned those services and sacraments which celebrate marriage and the birth of children and their coming to maturity.

The Church of England may be in a position undignified, uncomfortable, or even ridiculous, coupled up with the State as it is; the doctrine of the great English churchmen may be honeycombed with Erastianism; but the English church has the virtue of providing for every one of her children, lay not less than clerical, a daily office in which they may take an intelligent, a personal, and a common share. The first characteristic of the primitive church was apparently the fact of worship done in common, action in some sort not merely simultaneous but mutual. There are some—the Society of Friends for instance—who define religion by that collectivity of feeling, and in expectation of the Holy Ghost assemble themselves together. They draw most profit from thirty minutes of silent meditation where a hundred people in presence make up that silence and meditate each one. The monastic life, with its multiplied choir offices, met in another way this same desire for the warmth of human contact, this same enhancement of the experience of the whole far beyond the several experiences. The Roman church, with its sodalities and confraternities meeting regularly for special services, its litanies and rosaries recited by tired, troubled women together after nightfall, has recognized this and is busy recovering hereby what has been lost out of the Sacrament of the Mass. I remember after three weeks’ incessant travel finding myself in Siena cathedral, among women unquestionably devout, who held well-thumbed books, and, having lost count of the Sundays after Pentecost, as I opened my Paroissien I asked my neighbour on the right what Sunday it was. She shook her head and questioned her neighbour; I turned to the one on my left, but there was no one within decent whispering distance who knew what the priests and the choir were singing that day. Against such a chance, their church service assures Anglicans. The English Prayer Book may be a compromise, the office for morning and evening prayer may be patched up and anomalous, but it is an order of common prayer. The instinct of kind enhances the personal expression of psalm and antiphon, and daily service and saints’-day celebration have the sweetness and warmth of the family life, the dearness of the sacred ritual of the hearth.

Into his religion Street was born, as he was born into his family. In the dawn of consciousness he found it about him; with adolescence he felt it an influence and a motive. In the months at Exeter he was anxious often, but always there was the cathedral. In the last year at Winchester he was lonely and sick for home, but at hand there was the cathedral. While in Scott’s office he used to go with his sister to mattins before walking into town; in the later years in London he never missed with his wife the early celebration on saints’-days. Church-going was as natural as eating, and as satisfactory. He loved God as consciously as he loved his mother and his wife; and said even less about it. After he gave up the hope of taking Holy Orders he made a plan for a sort of half-monastic fraternity of artists and architects, who should be in art what the Templars were, selected, set apart, and dedicated. It was patterned after his own life unawares.

Younger than any of the great men of the Oxford Movement, he was born in the Promised Land. What they had hardly won, he inherited untroubled. Among the many things the average Englishman would rather go without than talk about, even to himself, may be counted his religion, but the strain of enthusiasm in the temper of Street, the genius that leavens his English substance, would not let him rest without a reason for the faith that was in him. He read and thought much at this time. In later years, while the phrasing is reticent yet the architecture is eloquent. In carved stone and hewn timber, in chant and carol, in the colour and contour of his records of the visible world, he let loose the strong inward impulse that burned upward like a flame. His natural element was creation not conflict, and though he could strike a good blow at “pagan” architecture and services restricted to the clergy and the seventh day, he seems to have had small joy in fighting and it, perhaps, killed him at the last. On the ground, already won, of English Catholicity, he stood firm and built strong and fair. Webbe and Neale and Wilberforce, and I suppose Keble and Pusey, were friends and advisers, but his real contemporaries were the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with their allies and admirers who launched the Aesthetic Movement.

How that was born at Oxford, and was baptized into the English church with the Heir of Redclyffe for godfather, is hard to keep in mind. But Morris and Burne-Jones knew each other there and knew Street, who had married in the June of 1852 and taken his wife to a house in Beaumont Street. To us in another century it seems that in those years, from 1852 when the two boys from Walthamstow and Birmingham met and matriculated together at Exeter College, even to 1857 when Rossetti brought them back to paint the walls of the Union, Oxford must have been a place of lightnings and splendours. It sheds the same radiance that a great city just beyond the horizon’s bound throws up at night against low-hanging clouds. To them it seemed spiritually grey and dull enough. The Oxford Movement was in a sense ended; some men had broken away, some had got to cover, and in the rest religious emotion, having gone past the stage of smoke and flame, glowed clear but very still. Burne-Jones, according to his wife, “had thought to find the place still warm from the fervour of the learned and pious men who had shaken the whole land by their cry of danger within and without the Church.... But when he got there the whole life seemed to him languid and indifferent, with scarcely anything left to show the fiery times so lately past.”

“Oxford is a glorious place,” he wrote home, “Godlike. At night I have walked round the colleges under the full moon and thought it would be heaven to live and die here.” He described it later:—

“It was a different Oxford in those days from anything that a visitor would now dream of. On all sides, except where it touched the railway, the city ended abruptly, as if a wall had been about it, and you came suddenly upon the meadows. There was little brick in the city, it was either grey with stone or yellow with the wash of the pebble-dash in the poorer streets. It was an endless delight with us to wander about the streets where were still many old houses with wood-carving and a little sculpture here and there. The chapel of Merton College had been lately renovated by Butterfield, and Pollin, a former fellow of Merton, had painted the roof of it. Indeed, I think the buildings of Merton and the cloisters of New College were our chief shrines in Oxford.”

These two undergraduates, both alike so young and so typically English, lived at a high pitch in those years; each strong impetus pushing hard upon the foregoing. There was, to begin, an intention to take Orders, with a real and inward sense of dedication in both. Out of that flowered Burne-Jones’s dream of a Brotherhood very like that which Street had earlier nursed. “A small conventual society of cleric and lay members working in the heart of London,” his wife called it soberly, many years later, but he himself, at the time, “the Order of Sir Galahad.” To a friend he wrote at the end of a letter—and the postscript is like one of his own exquisite pencil drawings, all archaic, and altogether lovely: “You have as yet taken no vows, therefore you are as yet perfectly at liberty to decide your own fate. If your decision involve the happiness of another you know your course, follow nature, and remember the soul is above the mind and the heart greater than the brain; for it is mind that makes man, but soul that makes man angel. Man as the seat of mind is isolated in the universe, for angels that are above him and hearts that are below him are mindless, but it is soul that links him with higher beings and distinguishes him from the lower also, therefore develops it to the full, and if you have one who may serve for a personification of all humanity, expand your love there, and it will orb from its centre wider and wider, like circles in water when a stone is thrown therein. But self-denial and self-disappointment, though I do not urge it, is even better to the soul than that. If we lose you from the cause of celibacy, you are no traitor; only do not be hasty. Pax vobiscum in æternum—Edouard.”

That summer they went to France and saw Amiens. Their companion said: “Morris surveyed it with calm joy and Jones was speechless with admiration. It did not awe me until it got quite dark, for we stayed till after seven, but it was so solemn, so human and divine in its beauty that love cast out fear.” They went to Beauvais, Paris and Chartres. “There we were for two days, spending all our time in the church, and thence made northward for Rouen, travelling gently and stopping at every church we could find. Rouen was still a beautiful mediaeval city, and we stayed awhile and had our hearts filled. From there we walked to Caudebec, then by diligence to Havre, on our way to the churches of the Calvados; and it was while walking on the quay at Havre at night that we resolved definitely that we would begin a life of art and put off our decision no longer—he should be an architect and I a painter. It was a resolve only needing final conclusion; we were bent on that road for the whole past year and after that night’s talk we never hesitated more—that was the most memorable night of my life.”

They were to start The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, and Burne-Jones was to meet Rossetti and very heartily worship him but never to be drawn, even by that blazing, fiery star, out of his own orbit of art deliberate and devout. Morris meanwhile, as soon as he had taken his degree, addressed himself to work under Street. Afterwards, as we know, he tried painting, before he found his happiest outlet in decorative designing, in dyeing and printing, and surely his finest and most enduring expression in the writing that came so easily we can only wish that he had taken it harder. A note of Burne-Jones’s in the year 1856 is so charming and so characteristic that it may well serve as the note of the whole set when they had really found themselves. “There was a year in which I think it never rained nor clouded, but was blue summer from Christmas to Christmas, and London streets glimmered, and it was always morning, and the air sweet and full of bells.”

Their lives were, however, what could not be called less than intense. Their emotions were all fervid and their sentiments all impassioned, their enthusiasms fairly militant, their convictions even intransigent. Lady Burne-Jones communicates an exquisite sense of their way of being something better than human nature’s daily food:

“I wish it were possible to explain the impression made upon me as a young girl.... The only approach I can make to describing it is by saying that I felt in the presence of a new religion. Their love of beauty did not seem to me unbalanced, but as if it included the whole world and raised the point from which they regarded everything.” Again she quotes from a letter of her husband’s, written long afterwards, an impression of that first journey into France. “Do you know Beauvais, which is the most beautiful church in the world? I must see it again some day—one day I must. It is thirty-seven years since I saw it and I remember it all—and the processions—and the trombones—and the ancient singing—more beautiful than anything I had ever heard and I think I have never heard the like since. And the great organ that made the air tremble—and the greater organ that pealed out suddenly and I thought the Day of Judgement had come—and the roof, and the long lights that are the most graceful thing man has ever made. What a day it was, and how alive I was, and young—and a blue dragon-fly stood still in the air so long that I could have painted him. Yes, if I took account of my life and the days in it that went to make me, the Sunday at Beauvais would be the first day of creation.”

Emotion exquisite and almost as frail as the dragon-fly, almost as quick to pass as the Sunday sunlight! It is the impression of a boy, an aesthete and a poet, who kept to the end of his days the same sensibility and the same delight in beauty tangible. What he expresses, however, he felt with his generation; his associates had a like organization and a like attitude. In that very year Street, who had gone first to France, at a like age, not so long before, wrote from recollection, in a paper that was read at Oxford and published at Cambridge:

“One of the first elements is height. I know of no one thing in which one is so much astonished, in all one’s visits to foreign churches, as by the luxury of that art which could afford to be so daringly grand. From the small chapel, not forty feet long, to the glorious minster of some four hundred, one feels more and more impressed with the sense which the old men evidently entertained of its value; and exaggerated as it often is, even to the most curious extent, it is never contemptible. It is indeed a glorious element of grandeur, and not the less to be admired by Englishmen because we seem always to have preferred length to it; whilst they, so they could have height, cared little as to the length to which they could draw out a long arcade, and prolong the infinite perspective of a roof. And there is perhaps this advantage of height over length, that whilst the one seems entirely done for the glory of God, the other is always more apparently for use. So in a church, height in excess seems to typify the excess of their adoration who so built; whilst the greater length makes one think of possible calculations as to how many thousands of men and women might pass through, or how long a procession.... And as I have said so much about foreign examples I will but observe that the wonderful beauty of the apsidal east ends abroad ought to be gladly seized upon.... No one who has stood as I have at the west end of such a cathedral as that at Chartres, and watched the last rays die out from all other windows and at last gradually fade away from the eastern crown of light in its five windows; or who has seen the mounting sun come through all those openings one after the other, with matchless and continued brilliancy, would deny that such glorious beauties are catholic of necessity, and not to be confined by custom or etiquette to one age or one nation.”

There is the expression of the man, mustering his facts, enforcing his conclusions, weighing his estimates, recording of his pleasure the least possible part. The comparison is hardly fair to painter or builder either, but it is none the less significant. His power of expression, to be sure, is less, and his determination toward self-control is greater, but all the while the source of delight, though stiller, is no less deep. Street’s private notebooks are as reticent as his public papers. Like everything else that he did, they illustrate the characteristic maxim which opens The Christian Year, that, next to a sound rule of faith, there is nothing of so much consequence as a sober standard of feeling—strong feeling, but sober. A better notion of his response to beauty could be formed from some personal letters that he wrote in 1845, being then twenty-one years of age.

“I got out at Milton station and trudged off for Lanercost Abbey, an enthusiastic ecclesiologist, with everything upon earth to make my enthusiasm higher than usual—a glorious autumn day, a beautiful walk and an abbey in prospect, in ruins it is true, but so lovely and admirable in its ruin that in my admiration of it, the day, and the scenery, I had almost forgotten to be enraged with its iconoclastic destroyers; but it was not in mortal temper, after having seen and sketched it and studied it carefully and lovingly as I did, to ascend the hill away from it, to look at the river still rushing along as beautiful and as swift as when holy men planned its bridge of yore, to look at the sunny fields first cultivated by them, and not to feel sorrow and indignation at the thought that avarice and sin could so far have transported men as to lead them to the destruction of so fair a scene.” “O that the abusers of the monastic system would trouble themselves to examine this once happy valley, and watch the soothing influence of the lovely building and landscape, and would ask themselves whether they did not, in looking, feel more of reverence, more of awe and of love for the religions and for the men than they have heretofore felt.”

Street was twenty-six before he crossed the Channel. A foreigner may be pardoned for feeling it a piece of his good luck that he should have learned and loved the English Gothic before seeing the larger beauties and the grander styles of France, lest otherwise his own should have seemed to him fair but pallid, pure but cold, bearing much the same relation to the continental that the English service bears to the Roman use. It was not in him, however, to withdraw the affection once given for due cause, nor yet to withhold that just devotion the larger excellence could command. For him the greater glory would not dim the less. Both shared henceforth in his life.

The foreign journey was omitted only twice, in the year 1855, when his son was born in October, and in 1870, when the Germans had invaded France. In the latter year Street went to Scotland; in the former he stayed at home on the Thames with Mrs. Street’s people, bringing out his Italian book and working on the buildings for the Bishop of Oxford at Cuddesden. Towards the end of the year he moved to London and took a house in Montague Place. The plans which he submitted in competition for a new cathedral at Lille won a second prize, and the Frenchman to whom the actual building was given in the end had been rated originally below him. He had by this time at least three assistants working under him regularly, Edmund Sedding, Philip Webbe, and William Morris. He was perpetually occupied with parishes and private persons—on schools, chapels, restorations, residences even, country churches fitted to a village community, town churches designed for the artisan populace and their employers. He had finished Cuddesden College and carried work far already on the whole important cluster of diocesan buildings; he had begun building for the Anglican sisterhood at East Grinstead; he had been praised not a little in the competition at Lille; he was to take a second place, the next year, with his design for the Crimean Memorial and in the end to build the church; and shortly thereafter he sent in plans for new Government Offices. About this last he reasoned, with the spendthrift logic of youth, that while he could hardly expect to win the commission with a Gothic design, the premium offered to him among others of the best was a hundred pounds and would give him another trip to Italy, while he would gain, furthermore, from the public exhibition of the drawings.

The undertaking cost, to be sure, time and strength, but of these he was never stingy. He seems to have known how to be at once thrifty and generous of himself—generous perhaps because thrifty. All his life he seems to have done three men’s work in a day and all work in a third of the time that other men would take. He mentions once, being on a journey, that “it rained, so we read, wrote, and occupied the many hours in the rumbling diligence as best we might.” The notes were written often in diligence or train, as the firm clear writing betrays, while it remains characteristic and legible. He worked habitually till half-past twelve at night, yet with all the incessant occupation of the most exacting sort, in large measure creative labour, you never think of him, as he never can have thought of himself, as overworked. The essential soundness, the vital force made his way of life spontaneous and inevitable. The strong, even, white teeth, the strong, curling, brown beard, were the visible token of bodily sanity and power, a sort of physical validity of which the cause was not merely physical.

As the mediaeval builders reared and poised their great churches by a calculated balance of thrust and strain, and hung aloft in stone a proposition in proportion, so, you feel, with Street, it must have been some extraordinarily just measure, some perfect balance of temper, some secret of self-control, only comparable to the engineer’s control of his crane or hammer or locomotive, that gave him life so abounding and yet so temperate, so huge in accomplishment and yet so undistressed. If we know that at times the pulse and the invention flagged, yet it is only because we know by testimony that tasks designed in hours of gloom were not, indeed, fulfilled in hours of insight, but instead they were destroyed, to be replaced later by designs better because of more vitality and more élan.

Doubtless in this a fine natural constitution played a large part, but even a larger part, one is tempted to think, belongs to faith. Nisi Dominum, says the Psalmist, but here the Lord did keep the house and their labour was not lost that built it. One thinks of Huxley coming home exhausted from his lectures to lie on a sofa at one side of the hearth, that on the other side being permanently occupied by his wife. There can be little question which of the two men did more for his generation, but also there can be no question which found more substantial and untroubled happiness. “It is not lost labour that ye rise up so early, and so late take rest, and eat the bread of carefulness, for so He giveth His beloved sleep.” By every reasonable standard of happiness we must admit that Street’s work, untiring, joyous, faithful, done in direct loyalty to God Almighty, bore the fruit of a constant blessing.

The domestic affections and the service of religion filled up a life singularly pleasant to contemplate. Boating, cricket matches and riding, plain-song meetings and the Philharmonic Society, opera, exhibitions and sales of pictures, all found place without crowding. If he did not ride he wrote letters for an hour and a half or two hours before breakfast. He had his office in the house and kept long hours in it without interruption except from clients, but his little son was admitted as something less than a trouble, and watched him designing. An assistant said, later: “We worked hard, or thought we did. We had to be at the office at nine o’clock and our hour of leaving was six o’clock, long hours—but he never encroached on our time and as a matter of fact I am sure I never stayed a minute past six o’clock.”

After dinner there might be music, at home or abroad, cards or reading, or a cigar and talk on the balcony over the square—a London balcony, dingy and flower-beset, above a London square in summer, dim with twilight and coal-smoke, smelling of soot and dewfall on green leaves. At half-past nine came tea and thereafter three hours more of good work alone. He travelled, of course, more than a little, and on the journey put in the normal day’s work. The same friend goes on: “I well remember a little tour de force that fairly took our breath away. He told us one morning that he was just off to measure an old church, I think in Buckinghamshire, and he left by the ten o’clock train. About half-past four he came back and into the office for some drawing paper; he then retired to his own room, reappearing in about an hour’s time with the whole church carefully drawn to scale, with his proposed additions to it, margin lines and title as usual, all ready to ink in and finish. Surely this was a sufficiently good day’s work. Two journeys, a whole church measured, plotted to scale, and new parts designed, in about seven hours and a half. He was the beau-ideal of a perfect enthusiast. He believed in his own work, and in what he was doing at the time, absolutely; and the charm of his work is that when looking at it you may be certain that it is entirely his own, and this applies to the smallest detail as to the general conception.... No wonder we were enthusiastic with such performances going on under our eyes daily.”

Yes, it is good to know that such lives can be, filled with pleasure in the exercise of conscious strength, sufficient unto the day, with enough for all needs and to spare. It is like watching a blooded dog or a thoroughbred horse. As a rule we compare men to pleasant animals only when they are unpleasant men, and say they are engaging only when we cannot say they are trustworthy. Here was one singularly engaging. Every one in remembering him recalls his wit, fireside mirth, good temper, ready answer. When a dull gentleman, having dissected at great length the old mare’s nest about mediaeval irregularities in design, wound up after a pompous question about the secrets of freemasonry: “Now Mr. Street, what do you think?” Street flashed back: “What do I think? I think the beggars could not build straight.” When a young architect consulted him about going to law to recover his designs from a client—would it be wise? Street answered, “That depends on what sort of man your client is and whether you have any expectation of further commissions from him.” “His experience and natural shrewdness,” wrote an acquaintance at the time of his death, “made him a valuable adviser on points of professional practice, and he had a humour very often caustic, which one could not help sympathizing with.”

He was a good son and brother, a good husband and father, without loss of manliness. No man was less a prig. No man, indeed, was ever more respectable, but the touch of genius makes respectability itself engaging. He was not subtle, but his directness can make subtlety look devious and insincere. He was not complex, but his straightness can make complexity look morbid and mean-minded. In 1863 Crabbe Robinson wrote in his diary:

“October 17. Dined with the Streets. Our amusement was three-handed whist. Both Mr. and Mrs. Street very kind. On every point of public interest he and I differ, but it does not affect our apparent esteem for one another. I hold him in very great respect, indeed admiration. He has first-rate talent in his profession as an architect. He will be a great man in act—he is so in character already.”

He lived afterwards in Russell Square and then in Cavendish Square; always in the dear, unspoiled, substantial, smoke-stained professional quarter, the London of those that live there all the year, where autumn lights vistas of tawny splendour down every street, and spring offers nosegays of early wall-flower and narcissus from the Scilly Isles at every corner; where the air perpetually tastes of soft coal, damp mud, and warm malt; where in December the moist pavement glistens with a permanent slime, and in May the porch roofs burgeon into azaleas pied and trailing pink geraniums.

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.

IN LEON CATHEDRAL

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:

“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.

THE OLD CATHEDRAL OF SALAMANCA

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.”

GEORGE EDMUND STREET IN 1877

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.

The situation of Chambéry is exquisite. It is hemmed in on all sides by mountains, and their outlines are generally unusually sharp and bold, finishing as many of them do with great bluffs of rock. A figure resting on the fore-quarters of four elephants who spout water from their trunks is the most remarkable modern feature in the city. It is to the memory of General ——[4], a great benefactor. The streets contain few old houses: I saw one of the sixteenth century nearly all windows. The fronts of the shops have the old arrangement of a stone arch the whole width of the front and a bold stone counter.

We left Chambéry at 5.30 P.M. for S. Jean de Maurienne. The scenery as long as we could see it was beautiful, but the clouds were low and at the point where Mont Blanc ought to have been seen they effectually prevented our seeing anything. At S. Jean we took possession of the diligence for Turin and saw nothing till we were well up on the mountain from Lons-le-Bourg. It took us two hours to scale this height, pulled at a slow pace by nine mules and two horses. The ascent was uninteresting but we gradually came upon more and more snow and the pass increased in interest. There is a small lake at the top and a dreary drive across a crest led us to the fine part of the descent. This is, for the last hour and a half before reaching Susa, singularly fine, finer indeed, I am inclined to think, than any descent I have yet seen. The mountains are fine in their outlines, and the road winds backward and forward between chestnut and walnut trees. Susa is mainly remarkable for its beautiful situation among mountains with snowy peaks always in sight, and a burning sun just now. The cathedral has a good campanile of brick and a west front built on by the side of an old Roman gateway, whose scale makes that of the church seem very small. The spire of the cathedral is covered with small pieces of copper (I think) cut like slates. The interior is painted all over in the worst possible taste. Indeed throughout the Sardinian dominions there seems to be a passion for painting shaded imitations of tracery upon walls and groining. Chambéry cathedral is a notable specimen of this and Susa not much better. We left Susa at 8.30 P.M. and reached Turin at 10.30. I expected nothing here and was agreeably disappointed. A city cannot fail to be charming which has at the end of every street such a view, of mountains and snow at one end and hills at the other, as Turin can show. And then, though quite modern, its streets have that narrow picturesque character so universal in Italy, and in every way leave a pleasanter impression than one would expect from maps and descriptions....

The women in Turin wear handkerchiefs on their heads. The streets are some of them arcaded, by arcades filled with stalls of all kinds of wares—but fruit is the staple commodity now. The effect is to make the place look rather shabby and rubbishy. There is not one church of any interest. The view of the city from the opposite bank of the Po is charming, owing to the immense chain of Alps spreading from right to left all behind the city, and the hills above the Po are very respectable, rising as they do about 2000 feet above the city to where they are crowned by the church called the Superga.

We left Turin at 5.30 and reached Genoa at 9.30. The views of the Alps by sunset very charming. At Asti we had a bottle of the effervescing vin d’Asti brought to our carriage, and could not resist indulging in the pleasant draught....

The notes on Genoa appear in the second edition of Brick and Marble.

August 29, Pisa.

My expectations were very high here and were a little disappointed. The Gothic work in the grand group is mainly confined to the Campo Santo and the baptistery, and in the former the traceries are, as Pisano’s always are, very unscientific and more like a confectioner’s work than an architect’s, whilst the latter has undergone such an amount of “restoration” that not one old crocket is left and barely one old piece of tracery. There is abundant evidence however in the Spina chapel and in the few portions of the original marble still left in the Baptistery that Pisano could do his work in a way very different from what we do, and I therefore prefer to think only of what his work once was and not of what it is. The external design is very striking and if the cone above the dome were properly finished with a circle of canopied traceries and figures I have no doubt its effect would be perfect. The traceries, carvings, etc., when looked into are very bad, and it should be seen therefore from a distance. The interior looks much older than the exterior and there can be no doubt that this must be the case, notwithstanding the inscription which says it was “ædificata de novo” in 1728. Unquestionably this must refer to the destruction of the exterior which left the interior all but untouched. The dome is in part covered with red tiles and in part with metal.

The Campo Santo is architecturally not pleasing. Its large traceries, unskilful and long, never at all fit on to the capitals of the shafts that support them—but its great length and size are very effective and the court with its greensward and some tall cypress trees at the centre, the mountains blazing in the sun and the deep blue sky above, combine to make a very charming picture. The great treasure here is the frescoes with which its walls are covered. Orcagna’s great fresco of the Last Judgement quite and more than came up to my hopes. It is a wonderful work and full of exquisitely natural treatment of figures in most delicate colours. The aureole round the figure of our Lord is too green, I think, otherwise the dignity of the figure is unmatched if not unapproachable.

The cathedral is not to my mind a pleasing structure. Like most of the great churches in this part of the world, it is raised on a basement of several steps extending in front of it on every side. It is Romanesque in character throughout, its nave of great height and the crossing covered with a low and ugly tiled dome. The columns between the nave and aisles (there are two aisles on each side) are either antique or closely copied from the antique and have nowhere any trace either in their proportions or sculpture of any really Romanesque character. The columns everywhere have the entasis distinctly developed. All the walls are arcaded externally and striped with black marble. All the Pisan and Luccan buildings are similarly striped and (unlike the architecture at Genoa) the black forms but a very small proportion of the whole wall. It is generally spaced regularly, and introduced at springings and sills of windows and under cornices, and there is no approach even to irregularity in its arrangement. The roof is one of a class of heavy panelled wooden roofs which were common here in the Renaissance period, similar in idea to the roof of the Banqueting House at Whitehall. The aisles are pleasing, vaulted without ribs. In the old glass, of which some quantity remains, the colours are very rich, there is scarcely any white (if any) and the designs are almost entirely made of lead lines and not by painting. The pulpit has two figures and some lions under the columns which were preserved from an older pulpit said to be the work of Giovanni Pisano. The detail of all the ornamental mouldings is completely Roman, the egg and tongue being everywhere finely introduced....

Of domestic buildings Pisa retains very extensive remains, inasmuch as almost every house bears evidence of being mediaeval, but they have been so much cut about that there is little to be seen now at all perfect. There is an elaborate brick and terra cotta front to a house on the Lungarno but it is of very late date—almost Renaissance in much of its detail and very flat, regular, and ineffective.

On the opposite side of the Arno is another old house now used as the Custom House; this is of stone but its traceries and details are poor, very much like those of the Ptolomei palace at Siena. The windows are shafted, but the capitals of the shafts are generally too large for the arch mouldings which they have to support, and the mouldings, if they may be called so, do not unite properly and are singularly ineffective. Most of the old houses seem to have had a row of plain pointed arches rising some twenty feet from the ground line, but I could not make out whether they had been filled in with windows, or whether they belonged to the stage of stables and coach houses so universal in these Italian towns. The work is either brick or stone, but in no case did I see the two materials countercharged.

On the Sunday evening there was a grand procession of a figure of the B. V. M., with a vast number of attendants all with lighted candles, a military band, and a few cavalry to bring up the rear. The view from the lowest bridge looking up the Arno, with the picturesque outlines of the bold hills above Pisa behind the towers, is one of the most charming I remember.

A railway journey from Pisa of an hour brought us to Lucca. The railway cuts some fine hills, and passes by the ruins of a large castle close to the station before Lucca.

Lucca is entirely enclosed within elaborate brick fortifications, there being, I think, no vestige of suburbs on any side. The ramparts are well planted with trees, and the view of them from below, giving an impression of the tall walls covered with trees and these surmounted by the tall towers of the town, is fine. The view of the surrounding mountains is, too, very exquisite.

Of course our first object was the cathedral. Its west front need hardly be described. Its detail is very rich and beautiful and there is a great deal of very good inlaid work. In the upper part subjects from field sports are introduced, whilst lower down they are mainly geometrical patterns. Some of the shafts are inlaid. The three great arches which stretch across this front give a dignity to it in which S. Michele, Lucca, Pisa cathedral, and the other imitations, are quite wanting. They are remarkable for the way in which their arches are treated; these are semicircular and the width of the voussures is two or three times as great at the crown as at the springing—the effect is good. An image is cut in the right-hand upper end of this front.

All the walls and arches are partially striped with black, the black courses being very thin with a considerable space between them. The north and south walls of the nave and transepts are cased in much later work than the west front and are good specimens of Italian pointed of the thirteenth century. The carving of foliage in this work is very bad and what little moulding there is hardly looks like the work of Gothic men. There is a good inlaid string-course under the windows. A fine campanile stands a little in advance of the south-west angle of the cathedral. It is of Romanesque date and built of brownish rough stone below and of white stone (or marble) above; it is of very considerable height and effect. The interior is certainly grand but disappointing—almost all the arches are semicircular but (as the groining bays are not square) the wall ribs of the groining bays are pointed, and this gives in some way a general effect of pointed to the whole work. The main arches are round, but they were so covered with red hangings that it was impossible to see much of them. The triforium is of great height and consists in each bay of two round-head windows, filled in with slight tracery—the whole is of poor character and badly proportioned. Above these two windows is a small circular window which serves for clerestory. The groining of the nave is painted richly. It has broad borders next the ribs and the wall is painted blue, and figures in the centre of each painted in a circle. The borders have a good many white lines, but there is no gold in any part of the work.

The planning of the transepts is very singular. They are divided by an arcade down the centre, and as the nave arcades and triforia are continued across them some singular combinations are produced. The pavements have small compartments of Italian fifteenth century geometrical patterns in mosaic, surrounded by square arrangements of plain black and white.

Close to the cathedral is S. Giovanni, which, though not otherwise remarkable, has an immense baptistery built on against its north transept; it is a square of about fifty-seven feet internally and covered with a square vault of a domical form. The old font has been removed.

Near the south end of the cathedral is the little chapel of S. Maria della Rosa. It is a small low building of about the proportions of the Spina chapel, and mainly remarkable for the window tracery in its side wall. This is, like all other tracery hereabouts, unpalatable to me. The windows are shafted and I suppose therefore that they must have had their glass put in frames inside. This seemed to have been the case in the Spina chapel. There are dates of 1309 and 1333 on the building, the latter on part of a door which in England I should venture to call Renaissance. We could not get inside but saw through a window that the interior had been completely modernized....

When we reached Siena we found the station elaborately decorated with wreaths and flowers in pots, banners, and every possible kind of railway utensil (even portions of engines), and all in honor of the Pope who had left that morning for Città della Pieve on his way home after a tour through various parts of Italy. He seemed to have been greatly fêted at Siena.

Siena is situated on the irregular summit of a considerable hill. All streets are up and down and in some places very precipitous. A sort of natural amphitheatre in the centre of the city—the Piazza del Campo—is the chief point round which the rest is built, containing the Palazzo Pubblico, a grand Gothic building, out of the end of which soars the finest campanile, after that at Verona, that I have seen. On the circle of the Campo opposite the Palazzo Pubblico are some old houses but not any of special interest. The Palazzo Pubblico is of the usual type of brick buildings here and very regular.... The campanile is brick without break or ornament of any kind for a great height, and then is boldly corbelled forward on all sides; the whole of the work is in stone. The arches of the machicoulis, the bands round them, and some older parts, are rendered much more distinct by the introduction of lines of black marble. Seen by a bright moonlight this campanile possesses such an exquisite contour that nothing can be much more beautiful. The contrasts of colours too are most admirably arranged, and the exceeding simplicity of the lower part cannot be too much praised.

A considerable ascent leads from the Campo to the east end of the cathedral. This has a central door and on entering you find a small chapel under the altar of the cathedral gained out of the slope of the ground. The detail of this chapel and of the east end of the cathedral above it is by far the best example of Gothic work in the city. There are all kinds of things which, to an eye used to the exceptional skill and care in fitting one part to another usual among northern architects, are very unscientific-looking, but nevertheless this work is original in its character and certainly beautiful in its effect. It is of white marble striped sparingly with black. A flight of steps leads up from the east end to a north doorway in the east wall of the immense unfinished work which, though in the position of a south transept, would really have been rather larger than the existing nave of the cathedral.

This south transept is quite unfinished though very considerably advanced. Its south wall shows that the vaulting was to have been semicircular in section like that of the nave. The proportions of the whole are very bold and fine.... The rest of the exterior has been much modernized. The west front is much like that of Orvieto but I don’t know how much is original. There is very little in it which I should accept as really pointed architecture. The foliage and the feeling of the whole is very Renaissance and the steep gables are all sham and are very unpleasantly conspicuous in a distant general view of the church. The campanile, coursed in black and white in nearly even proportions (two courses of white material for one course of colours), is Romanesque, of very great height, and follows the usual rule of increasing its number of openings in each stage. It is capped with square spirelets at the angles, and a low octagon spire, I think of stone—this I thought had crockets, but I found they were only some arrangements for illumination in honour of the Pope’s visit.... Internally the church has been painfully modernized; a row of Popes’ heads—about as artistic as a row of barber’s blocks—is ranged all round above the nave arcade, and the whole of the church has been plastered and painted in the most abominable manner. The walls are striped in exactly equal courses (about eight and a half inches in height) of black and white. The effect is certainly too bizarre. There are no good specimens of carving, and the detail of groining ribs, arches, etc., is hopelessly bad. All of the pavements are covered with subjects formed by inlaying and incising the marbles which compose them. There is a certain grandeur in the completeness of the idea but the effect is not good....

We spent some hours to great advantage in the Accademia. The collection of pictures of the early Sienese school is wonderfully rich and gave me a very high idea of the power of some of the men whose names one does not often hear.

There are three or four tondos similar to that at San Domenico and a considerable number of reredoses of various sizes. A favorite subject is the B. V. M., surrounded by saints in the outer compartments. Nothing can exceed the beauty of some of the angels. In all, the wood seems to have had canvas laid on it which was prepared with a thick layer of size, and on this gold was laid all over preparatory to painting. In some the colour has peeled off and left the gold with lines for the outline of the figures scratched on it. Generally speaking the preservation of the colours in these pictures is something quite marvellous, not a crack being visible anywhere; may this be attributed to the gold ground?

The later pictures are not so interesting nor is the collection of them so complete as it is of the others. Room III is that in which the work is most beautiful. There were several students at work drawing from the life, and in one of the rooms all the designs submitted in competition for prizes were exhibited. The architectural designs were generally very commonplace but one or two for a holy-water stoup showed power of drawing and some fancy. Renaissance is the only style thought of....

September 2.

The view from Cortona is very fine, over the broad Val de Chiana with the end of Lake Thrasimene full in view, and the irregular mountain outlines of Monte Cortona and other heights filling up the whole of the background.

We left after only two hours’ pause and soon reached the head of the lake. We were busy making out all the sites of the battle (which may be done with great vividness), when we reached the Papal dogana. There were two difficulties—first, my passport was improperly viséd but this I got over; and second, our driver had no visé at all, and it was half an hour before he was allowed to take us on as far as the next village under strict promise to come back again at once. It rained heavily as we started and we lost some of the beauty of this the best part of our drive. Thrasimene is a grand sheet of water but wants some striking feature on its banks, some jutting out rocks or mighty hills plunging perpendicularly into its depths, to make it thoroughly attractive. Now it has a deserted look: its banks are not grand and yet no houses or villages show there and one gets a rather gloomy impression. The place at which we changed our horse, Pasignano, is a miserable Italian village,—and how miserable that is I can hardly say—with its fair proportion of beggars, i.e., every one whose eye you catch holds out a hand immediately for a mezzo baioccho. It is prettily situated, and, as one of the places at which vetturini stop on the road to Rome, ought to be rather better favoured as to an inn. The only one did not look promising and we preferred fasting to trying it. A few miles more and we left the lake, and aided by two bullocks climbed a steep hill above its banks, reached the cathedral and village of Magione, and drove the rest of the way by moonlight to Perugia where we were heartily glad to find ourselves at 10.30 P.M. very ready for something to eat.

September 4.

Lucca in its flat, surrounded by mountains, Pisa grand with water and hills, Genoa with the blue Mediterranean at its feet, Siena on its lofty though arid hills, and Arezzo with its fine prospect of cultivated valley girt with hills, must all, lovely as they are, give way to Perugia, seated on the irregular summit of a mountain, looking one way toward Thrasimene and Monte Cortona, another toward the irregular peaks of the Appenines, a third down the rich flat valley of the Tiber, and last of all toward the noble mountain against whose streaked side stands whitely shining in the distance the object of many an artistic as well as many a religious aspiration, the shrine of the great saint of Assisi. Add to this beauty of situation a beauty of atmosphere which we never dream of in England, and the picture is complete.

Certainly since we have been here this has been no land of cloudless blue skies. We have had glorious weather, and yet without any doubt the most glorious cloud scenery we have ever known anywhere. Sometimes a violent storm in the distance and another close at hand, sunsets short in duration but brilliant to excess while they last, and in midday a purple, blue or violet tint over every portion of the wonderful landscape....

September 6.

We started at 5.30 A.M. for Assisi.... The sacristan took us up through the sacristy by a staircase which opens into the north transept of the upper church. From the gloom of the lower church to the flood of coloured light in the upper the contrast is very great. The latter is in all respects one of the most joyous buildings I have ever seen, bold, nervous and simple in its design, exquisitely harmonious in all its colouring, and in most respects unharmed by the hand of the restorer. Obviously however the frescoes on the roof are losing their colour and being gradually washed out. This is not difficult to account for when one sees the state of the outer roof of the church, which, I have no doubt, admits an ample supply of wet at the top of the groining. The upper church is used only on some few great days during the year and is I suppose even less cared for. It gave me a pang to be shown into such a building by a door in a corner, to see the principal door permanently closed, grass growing thick upon the dreary piazza in front of it: it was even more mournful, I think, than is the sad solitude of the great group at Pisa.

I am much puzzled by the interior of this upper church. I cannot get out of my head the impression that they [the two “churches”] were designed and in part executed by Frenchmen. The detail of the groining piers and their capitals and bases are so peculiarly and characteristically French that (seeing how very different Italian work of the same date was) I cannot believe that they were ever wrought by Italian hands from French designs, because sculpture of foliage was just one of these things in which the character of different schools was so marked that it was impossible to get any but Frenchmen to do such work as this. Above this point I do not feel the same thing because I see that the window traceries, though very fair, have a feature peculiar to Italian Gothic—in the way in which the circles, etc., in the tracery are put under the main arch, just touching but not uniting with it. The string under the windows has for a considerable portion of its length a complete English dog-tooth. The whole of the walls are painted. Below the string-course, which is very high from the floor, is, first a painted imitation of hangings (much like our thirteenth century patterns) in which the diaper is continued regularly without reference to folds in the draperies; then a row of noble frescoes by Giotto; and above the string on each side of the windows other frescoes by Cimabue. The roof is by the latter, and the groining bays are alternately blue studded with stars, and frescoed in subjects. The latter have a predominance in the ground of a rich chrome—reddish yellow—and the ribs throughout are bordered with wide patterned borders. The contrast of colours is admirable and finer than anything I have seen. The borders round the work done by Giotto are very inferior to those in Cimabue’s work. The latter[5] are all severely flat and geometrical, indulging, after a few feet of plain pattern, in a quatrefoil

or one inscribed on a square, painted with a head on a blue ground. Giotto’s, on the other hand, though in some respects very beautiful, indulge too much in perspective, e.g. each division between the groining piers is divided into the subjects by painted and shaded imitations of twisted columns bearing cornices. There are some features of interest in the work beyond the exquisite beauty. To me it was new to find Cimabue painting with so little rudeness and so much magnificent simplicity and breadth of purpose. I note another of Giotto’s frescoes is interesting as showing the original use of the painted roods of which we have seen so many. I think there can be little doubt they were to be placed on the rood-screen, as he distinctly shows them, and, curiously, I find in this upper church the two ends of the ancient rood-beam sawn off a foot from the wall. This was a few feet west of the crossing. The transepts, altar and stalls are all modern in their arrangements.

Externally there is nothing to notice save the fine west door and circular window over it, of a type peculiar so far as I have seen to the churches of Assisi. The glass in the nave windows is certainly old and good, very little white introduced.

After seeing this most interesting building well, we betook ourselves to the not very easy work of climbing about the city to see the other churches. The whole place is as decayed, forlorn and dirty as the smallest and rudest of fishing villages in the worst out-of-the-way parts of Cornwall, spread out to ten times the extent. Old walls remain nearly all round, with gateways, and at the highest point the picturesque ruin of a castle.

The west end of the cathedral is fine and the campanile by its side is also of noble size and good character though built with very rough stone....

September 7.

We left Perugia this morning at 6 A.M. in the banquette of the diligence for Arezzo. The day was charming so that we enjoyed the ride thoroughly, though we had done it all so lately on our way to Perugia.

Here I shall note down a few of the things we have discovered on the road:—

Hay and corn stacks are all made round a tall pole fixed in the ground. Another piece of wood nailed across often converts this into a cross over the corn.

In Arezzo cathedral during tierce a black cat was howling about the cathedral in a most ludicrous manner. It belongs to the church and is always howling about, sitting on altars, and so forth. Foreigners never care about taking animals into church with them. Dogs are special church-goers in Italy!

About Perugia the women’s costume is good: white sleeves, blue skirt, pink bodice and bright handkerchief over the head. The women usually wear immense straw hats about two feet six inches in diameter, generally pinned on to the back of the head and flapping back to shade none of the face. Between Arezzo and Florence the women often wear round beaver hats with broad flat brims—and very ugly they are. Women carry a fan instead of a parasol. Women in Genoa wear white veils.

The staple production of much of Tuscany, Siena, and the Papal States seems to be olives. The trunks of the trees are always very old, crushed down in the centre and sometimes two or three feet in diameter. The branches are young wood and always trained out so as to leave a hollow circle in the centre. The colour is a very blue green and as they are planted everywhere in lines and at regular intervals, they do not improve either the near or the distant view of the landscape. Maple trees are trained in the same way for the purpose of growing vines. The vines are festooned sometimes from tree to tree and at others festooned round the tree itself.

The ploughs here are very clumsy, they have a very heavy wooden frame with an iron shoe put on in front. It does not turn the dirt over but only digs a rough furrow in the ground. Oxen are always used for all agricultural work. They are ringed through the nose and a cord, fastened to this ring and passing under a rope between the horns, serves as a rein. The carts are so made that they are loaded far out on the pole to the shoulder of the men.

All houses here have a pigeon house raised above the roof. On it are painted some flying pigeons on a white ground. It is generally a large construction and looks like a look-out room at first.

It is curious that we never see a bird flying about, yet we eat at dinner every day portions of two or three. Where do they all come from?

All the houses are built over stables.

Wayside churches seem almost always to have a small window on each side of their western door protected by a grating and with a shutter inside. Often there is an arcaded porch above.

September 8.

We left Arezzo at 6 A.M. in the diligence for Florence. With such a bourne the pace of an Italian diligence is very aggravating—five and a quarter miles an hour is the average speed, and the poor wretches of horses have to go stages of twenty miles without stopping. The road is very interesting. It passes nearly all the way through hilly country rich in olives and vines and with the grand outlines of the Appenines in the immediate neighborhood. I saw not one architectural feature in the entire journey. We passed through two or three small towns busy with festivities in honour of the Nativity of the B. V. M. but their churches seemed to be all modern.

After passing ——[6] we recommenced a long ascent and aided by four mules and ponies achieved the highest point after about two hours of the hardest work under the hottest of suns. Here I caught a glimpse of Florence in the distance; but about three miles further the whole city suddenly opened to the view, filling up the valley of the Arno with its campanile and dome thrown out grandly by a passing shadow upon the delicate blue and violet tints of the Pistojese mountains in the background. Fiesole was on our right and the whole country between it and Florence seemed to be dotted over with villas, looking gay and lovely in the brilliant sunshine. Behind Fiesole a long hill of rich reddish brown stood out from the rest and afforded by its contrast with the other colours of the landscape as complete a whole as can be imagined. It is in vain to describe such a view: it is the most exquisite of the kind that I have ever seen, and words cannot carry the impression of an effect not produced solely by facts but in part undoubtedly by sentiment.

A long drive through suburbs brought us to an old gate (shorn of its old Florentine machicoulis, however) where we were detained nearly half an hour about our passports and luggage, and this done we soon arrived at our inn, crossing the Arno by the Ponte alle Grazie and passing in our way the Palazzo Vecchio, Or San Michele and Giotto’s tower. The latter was looked for eagerly and rewarded my anxious eyes. It is certainly the most lovely piece of building I have ever seen. I shall say no more but go on to journalize on the buildings as I am able....

Street’s appreciation of Florence was intelligent, ardent, and characteristic, but is, more than any other of his notes, a journal intime. I have respected his sincerities.

September 13.

We spent the whole of the afternoon very profitably at Pistoia. The cathedral has not much architectural character. The west front has a good simple Romanesque door and an open arcade all across in front. At the north-west stands a very lofty and massive campanile, plain below but arcaded richly above with arcades that have the appearance of being put on in front of the real tower instead of helping to support it. They have semicircular arches and then have their tympana filled in with chequer patterns in white and black marble. The whole of this arcaded part of the steeple is coursed in alternate white and dark green: the lower part is of stone. Internally the cathedral has little to show. There is a moderately good monument near the west end to a professor who is represented lecturing; no mark of his religious faith (I think) is introduced.[7] ... Opposite the cathedral’s west front stands the fine baptistery. This is octangular in plan and built in equal courses of white and dark marble. Its external effect is very good indeed. It has a western door[8] and north and south doors and a small chancel projected on the west side. The design recalls in some respects the baptistery at Pisa and must have been built about the time that was altered. The interior unfortunately is as plain and bare as whitewash can make it. The great octangular font in the centre is of the same kind of work as the screens at S. Miniato, Byzantine in the character of its sculpture, but delicate and elaborate in its detail and altogether a good specimen: it is executed mainly in white marble....

In another church, S. Bartolomeo, I found a pulpit (also dated, etc.) made by Guido da Como in 1250. This is square in plan, supported partly in the wall and partly on three shafts, two of which rest on lions’ backs and the third on a sitting figure of a woman. The sculpture is rude but vigorous. The whole of the sides is covered with subjects, and at the angles are three figures, or rather one figure with two others looking out from behind him. The subjects are described by inscriptions under each in Latin.

Going from here to the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista, we saw a similar pulpit of later date and superior workmanship but evidently very closely copied from the work in S. Bartolomeo. The two angle columns remain, both resting on lions’ backs. The lions have been turned round so as both to face the west wall,—a most ridiculous position. It is clear indeed that all of these pulpits have been taken down and reconstructed. In this work the central column at S. Giovanni has been taken away. It seems to me that this pulpit at S. Bartolomeo is the prototype of all those for which the Pisani have so much credit. Giovanni Pisano is said to have sculptured the pulpit in S. Giovanni and if so (and I think it seems probable) he simply copied the older work. I do not know what the pulpit of S. Andrea is like, but I have little doubt that it was really from this pulpit that they obtained their idea for all their very similar works.

The south front of S. Giovanni is arcaded in the Pisan fashion (with lozenge panels in the arches) and above arcaded with two rows of elaborate arcading. The whole elevation is remarkable in its effect. The roof is of the usual type, with long tie-beams, and quite flat in pitch....

We were followed about everywhere here by two very dirty and very ragged urchins who took us to see everything. They knew about the pulpits, talked about Luca della Robbia, etc., and when I gave them an indivisible coin, about which they quarrelled, they settled the matter by putting it into the poor box. How unlike any English boys altogether! We were immensely amused by their sharp impudence.

The inn at Pistoia looked out on green shrubs and gardens, very pleasant: the consequence was not so pleasant—the being kept awake half the night and bitten in all directions by our troublesome enemies the mosquitoes. We had to turn out early to join the diligence which arrived by railway from Florence at 7.30 A.M. We made a brilliant start but very soon altered our pace, the road beginning to ascend almost immediately, and then for about four hours we toiled slowly up the slopes of the Appenines, at first with six and afterwards with eight horses. The day was fine but misty so that we lost very much of the distant view. The scenery is fine but not alpine. It reminded me more of the Jura, save that the hills seem here more to be shaken confusedly about and not to range themselves into regular lines or masses. The olive tree was seen for the last time as we went up and then we came through great numbers of Spanish chestnuts, and lastly for half an hour at most through a bleak, open and treeless country.

The descent was very different, down a narrow valley, following the windings of the mountain stream, with fine combinations of scenery and views. Stopped at La Porretta for dinner, and then on through a fine country but along a miserable road constantly crossing the (now dry) beds of mountains torrents. The soil is exceedingly liable to land slips and seems to be sliding about in all directions—of course road-making is difficult. At Vergato, a small village or town on this part of the road, the old Palazzo Pubblico was passed, covered with coats of arms in the usual way and distinguished by its Ringhiera still perfect and jutting out into the narrow street. We reached Bologna at 8 P.M. A wall and gate was passed about a mile from the town; I could not understand what wall it was.

September 15.

S. Petronio is the grandest church in Bologna. Its west front is of immense size and width but left nearly all in rough brick, the door and basement alone being finished. This part of the work is of poor character and the sculpture[9] (except in a stela on the south-west door which I thought very vigorous) not particularly good. The interior is magnificent....

S. Francesco is one of the finest churches in the town but shabby and decayed outside and “painted and decorated” to such an extent inside as to have destroyed nearly all its good effect. I never saw anything more vile. The whole church is of brick and it has an apsidal east end with an aisle all round the apse and chapels beyond. The buttresses are “flying” but very heavy. The west door is good and indeed the whole west front is striking. The windows are new but appeared to me to be probably copies of the original windows. The campanili are curious. There are two—one much smaller than the other and both on the south side of the choir. They form a curious combination in the views from the east....

September 16.

The ride to Ferrara was very uninteresting—about four and a half hours; we had left the hills altogether and saw nothing at all of any distant country. The land was rich with vines, mulberry trees and rice plantations, but certainly not picturesque. The grapes were being picked, and we met everywhere here and in Bologna waggons bearing magnificent casks for the reception of the grapes. These carts have a great beam from back to front elaborately carved and ornamented with colour, and wheels also carved and ornamented. They are really very handsome and put one in mind of the framework for guns of Queen Elizabeth’s time. They are always drawn by white oxen.

Here the Brick and Marble volume takes up the tale. To 1872 belongs a notebook particularly spirited in text and drawings. It opens:

1872—With M. S. and Jessie Holland (afterwards J. M. A. Street)

February 24.

Left London at 8.35, and reached Paris at 7 A.M. ...

Towns generally built on hills. Curious number of churches in which the tower and spire at one end and a very high choir at the other have a low nave between them. The scenery has the large French character, owing to absence of hedgerows and the very long lines of trees—generally lanky poplars closely set. Just before Dijon, at Plombières, I saw a very pretty tiled spire, tiles of golden yellow, green, etc., very rich and charming in colour;—green not at all blue-green.

Reached Mâcon at 8.30 and after coffee walked out to try to see something. Moon rose beautifully over the opposite side of the Saône, here a very fine looking river. Walked about nearly in vain but came at last on remains of a church of some interest.[10] It has two octagonal towers, the lower part of which seems to be Romanesque, and a nave of some forty feet long with an enormous central doorway of the fifteenth century, and aisle arches on each side of it (now glazed) of the twelfth century,—choir entirely destroyed, and a small cloister arcade built up in front. The whole has been all but destroyed and then I suppose just patched up by some good-intentioned antiquary. It is (at least in the dark) an architectural puzzle.

February 25.

Called at 4.30 and off by train for Genoa via Turin at 6 A.M. As we left and crossed the Saône saw that the church I had discovered last night was the only old looking church, and that the cathedral is an entirely new stone building. It was a fine frosty morning and we could do no more than keep ourselves warm by shutting up windows, and so seeing but little through the hoar frost on the glass.

At Culoz we had a second breakfast and found the hills all about us suddenly looking like mountains owing to the snow on all their higher points. When we came back from Geneva last year, fresh from the Alps, we hardly deigned to look at them, and to-day they seem to all of us about as lovely and grand as they could be. At Culoz we changed carriages and then, keeping by the pretty Lac du Bourget, were soon at Chambéry, and then all the way to Modane we entertained ourselves by the discovery, first on one side then on the other, of snow mountains of the first magnitude! At Modane carriages are changed again for Italy, passports are examined, and then we start for the tunnel. The railway runs round Lons-le-Bourg, where we used to take sledges for the Mont Cenis, and then ascends winding round until the mountain above Modane is reached. Here the tunnel begins and we were just twenty-six minutes passing through it. I promised every one spring, oranges in fruit, and trees in full foliage when we really reached Italy; but it was just the opposite, for there was more snow, by very much, when we reached Bardonnecchia than when we left Modane. We caught one or two views of churches and I just managed to secure a note of Susa seen in the most picturesque way far below us. We reached Turin at 6.42, got some dinner at the railway station and had some much too sweet vin d’Asti, and started again at 7.35 for Genoa, where we arrived at midnight.

February 29, Genoa.

A glorious morning welcomed us to this most delightful town. It was really like summer and the views in all directions were most exquisite. Even before I got up I saw through my window the beautiful outline of the mountains of the Riviera all covered with snow, and just a line of the blue Mediterranean above and beyond the crowd of vessels below us in the port. We had rooms at Feder’s hotel—now Trombetta’s—and our bedroom had an oratory in it with a very elaborately carved altar, etc., which has been not very reverently turned now into a sleeping room.

I spent most of my day at the new English church directing the workmen, etc. Lunched with the Shelbells, but did not see Brown the consul, who had gone off to a castle he had bought near Sestri. The church looks fairly well, but it is difficult to make anything lofty enough to compete with the enormous houses which it is the fashion to build now in Genoa and with which it is surrounded.

Walked a little about the city: into the Via Nuova which is straight for the greater part of its length (instead of curved as I fancied)—up and down the goldsmith’s street which seems always to lead to everything—into the cathedral and some of my other old friends among the churches. Noticed particularly the sumptuous effect which the painted palaces produce. The palace now used by the British consul is covered outside with painting, a good deal of which remains in fair condition whilst the two arcades round the courtyard are in a very fairly perfect state. The doors to the houses in Genoa had commonly an oblong panel of sculpture over them. These were cut in slate at or near Savona. The Gothic houses here have arcades below, and corbel tables under the second floor, and the windows divided into lights by very delicate shafts. The best samples are the Doria houses close to S. Matteo.

We left Genoa at 9.00 by steamer for Livorno. The boat was small and full of passengers, but I slept well on the floor of the cabin till we reached our port soon after 5 A.M.

March 1.

Started by the 9.12 train for Empoli. Murray describes Empoli in such terms as made us feel no regret at having to stop there those three hours. Unfortunately his description turned out to be all wrong, and we found but little to see or sketch. The best thing there is the steeple of the collegiata. The front of this church is a work of about 1600 in white marble and serpentine. And the Pallei building opposite to it is entirely seventeenth century, but has some wall painting outside which somewhat redeems its otherwise uninteresting walls.

Our train left Empoli at 2.25 and did not reach Orvieto till nearly 10. During the first part of the journey I was well employed making sketches from the windows of the carriage of Certaldo, S. Gemignano, etc. We caught some beautiful glimpses of Siena as we dashed by, and then as we passed through the wretched country just to the south of it, we gradually lost the daylight, and slept away the hours till Orvieto was reached. Here the station by daylight looks just under the town, but it took us forty minutes to drive up.

March 2, Orvieto.

I was out before breakfast and spent a long, busy, and happy day here. The town is perched on the top of a rock which is on most sides a precipice at first and then a long slope carries the eye on to the river and valleys at the bottom. Beyond on all sides are distant hills to be seen, one of them very picturesque in outline. In summer it must be a perfect view, but now the olives are the only trees in leaf, and their colour is so sad that it does not do much for the landscape.

The old walls exist round much of the town. They are generally set back a few feet from the edge of the rock so as to leave a passage outside, which in its turn is defended by battlements built on the cliff. The lay of the ground reminds one of Toledo, but the country is more open, and the river is not a Tagus and does not produce much effect on the landscape. The views which may be had from various points of the rocks and walls are, however, superb, and I have seldom seen anything more striking. On the other hand there is no building of sufficient importance in the town to give the best effect to the views. The cathedral, not having any tower, produces but little general effect, and the only towers are some of the plain square family fortress towers like these sketched at S. Gemignano.

MASTER MATTHEW’S PORCH AT SANTIAGO

The cathedral more than fulfilled my expectations. The west front is in its way very beautiful, delicate and refined—perhaps over-refined everywhere, and beautiful in the symmetry of its arrangement. But it is still not a great success. My great interest here is in the sculpture of the piers between and at the sides of the doors. First of all, I must say that they strike me as too small and delicate for their place. This is their one fault. If they were to be there they ought to be, as they are, small and in low relief so as not to interfere with the flatness and look of strength in the walls. The sculpture in the northern pier—the days of creation—is perhaps the most beautiful of the four. Nothing can be much more refined in feeling or treatment. The heads are a little exaggerated. The next pier which contains the succession of the seed of Abraham seems to me to be altogether inferior to the others. The third and fourth (from the north) are equal, or nearly, to the first, though a little more crowded. In the last the figure of our Lord surrounded by an aureole of angels, in the Last Judgement, is beautifully designed. The foliage decorations of all this work are very natural in their treatment and extraordinarily skilful. The play of relief in leaves, whose extreme projection from the face of the marble is often not more than an eighth of an inch, is of the most delicate, subtle and artistic description. Contrast the skill with which it is treated with the workmanship in the south door, and the difference of power will be seen.

The interior is very large and simple—the architectural detail generally very poor. Columns (large cylinders with exaggerated capitals of queer semi-classic detail) carrying alternated arches, show the characteristic faults of the Pisan school of architects. The clerestory has long, simple, traceried windows, and the best detail is in the east window, which has good geometrical tracery, is of very long proportion, and is filled with stained glass of beautiful design—subjects in square panels. The effect of its colour is perfect. All round it are paintings by Agnolino of Orvieto, not very fresh now, but giving a colour of the most tender kind to the interior, to which the simple black and white striped construction of the columns and walls leads the eye up gradually and well. In the east window the glass is divided into small panels. There are four lights but in spite of the irregularity caused by this even number the grounds of the subjects are all countercharged, alternately ruby and blue....

What Street said, and what he thought, of Siena and Orvieto, is nearly unique. At Viterbo and Toscanella, he could only see and feel the first what others have since made familiar. Corneto is less known.

March 4.

Looking back to Viterbo I saw it lighted up with beautiful effect by a sudden burst of sunshine. Its towered walls were in deep shade whilst a cloud of light, wind-started from the town behind, caught the bright sunshine and seemed to set the steeples of the town in a sort of halo. Behind rose the high mountain and to the left of this, in the far distance, a line of snow-capped mountains which added immensely to the beauty of the view. This open country is very charming—clouds casting their shadows here and there and a horizon always lovely in the pure colour of the mountains or hills which fringe it. All the way we had Montefiascone in full view.

Corneto stands on a steep hill above the marshy flat which borders the Mediterranean. Its old walls and towers standing generally on a rocky base give it a very imposing appearance, but its interest seems to be mainly Etruscan. The inn at which we stopped made amends for any lack in the churches by its extremely good character. It is of late fourteenth century work, but the internal courtyard with its open arcades on two sides is most beautiful. The front towards the street shows in some of its detail and especially in the construction of the masonry in its upper portion, the influence of the Renaissance. The building formed originally three sides of a quadrangle with a passage-way corbelled out on the wall which forms the fourth side. The lower storeys have fine open arcades, and the third a series of delicate shafts with very effective capitals oblong in plan, carrying a white marble lintel under the wall plate. The whole scheme is one of extreme beauty and has much of the effect of being earlier in date than it really is....

With a few notes on Rome, and the exquisite drawing of a living acanthus leaf at Paestum, the book dies away into a sort of Journal, that records talks with the Bishop of Gibraltar and Père Hyacinth,—“I found him very pleasant and intelligent.”

NOTES ON FRENCH CHURCHES

III
SOME FRENCH CHURCHES CHIEFLY IN THE ROYAL DOMAIN

(From a notebook of 1855)

June 13.

Somer has lost much of its original interest by the destruction wantonly in 1830 of nearly the whole of the abbey of S. Bertin. It is wicked, but I did not lament this so much as I should have done, had the church been of rather earlier date. From what now remains it appears to have been entirely in one style, and that an early phase of flamboyant—much more like some of our English late middle-pointed than flamboyant, and really very effective in its mouldings and sculpture, the two great tests of all architecture. The west front and the north wall of the nave are all that now remains of the once magnificent church, and the latter has lost all its window tracery and is in a sad state of decay.

The west doorway of the tower (which is central at the west end) is fine, and has cut in the lintel stone of its door an inscription:—“Castissimum Divi Bertini templum caste memento ingredi.” The tympanum had a painted subject and much of the rest of the stone work still retains traces of decorative colour. The west window of the south aisle is an unhappy example of the worst kind of flamboyant, the tower is covered all over with vertical lines of panelling but is nevertheless, from its great size, imposing, and indeed gives S. Omer all the character it has when seen from the railway. A sentinel keeping watch warned me off as I was measuring the aisle: I suppose having lost so much they were nervously alive to the chance of architects’ hacking off what remains!

A long winding street leads from S. Bertin at one end of it to the cathedral of Notre Dame at the other. This is a church well worthy of a visit for several peculiarities and not less for its generally fine effect, especially in the interior.

The original fabric—of which the choir with its aisle and two apsidal chapels thrown out from the aisle, and the south transept and one and a half bays of the north, are all now remaining—is of the earliest pointed, with occasional round arches to windows, etc. The character is very simple and mainly remarkable for the great beauty of the profusion of sculptured capitals to all the shafts. The section of the piers is singular and gives great lightness of effect; they are in fact thin slices of wall, and not piers formed in the usual way, and as the weight of them is not a crushing weight, I look upon them as excessively scientific in their arrangement. The triforium is very lofty as compared with the rest of the design, and consists of a very simple arcade of pointed arches, supported only by long and slender shafts set near together.

The groining is good, and in the chapels a small shaft rises from the capitals for some feet and carries the wall rib: this gets over a difficulty in mitring the mouldings. The Lady-chapel appears to have been remodelled at a later day but upon the foundation of one coeval with the choir. A very grand effect is produced by the great size of the transepts—which have aisles on both sides—and by the placing of a chapel in the re-entering angles between them and the choir-aisle. In this way an internal effect of lightness and space, of very fine character, is obtained.

One of the most remarkable features about this cathedral is, however, the extent to which, in later days, the old design was persisted in: e.g. the remarkable triforium is carried round the entire church, varied a little in its details and quite different in its sculpture, but still evidently a copy and from its great size giving an air of great unity to the whole design. In the clerestory windows generally there is a good deal of poor flamboyant tracery with a little glass of the same date, but in the choir the original windows all happily remain. These are, in the apse, rather wide lancets, and in the rest of the clerestory simple triplets. In the aisle there were windows of two lights with a simple quatrefoil above. Many of the windows have the dog-tooth ornament round the external labels. The choir still retains on the outside a very fine and original corbel table.

In a chapel south of the choir are extensive remains of some most singular work for pavements—they are squares of stone slightly sunk in regular patterns and then filled in with some very hard black or red substance. The same work is carried up against the walls of this chapel, and in other parts of the cathedral are several small fragments of similar pavements. The stone is of a yellow colour and the system seems to admit of being turned to most useful account.

Of the exterior, the south transept door is about the most remarkable feature. It is very simple, almost plain, but nevertheless its great size and the deep shadow cast by its outer arch combine to make it a very magnificent work. The sculpture of the capitals is very good and the delicate arcade, containing figures on either side below the base of the columns, is thoroughly French in its beauty of detail and exquisite finish. Unhappily it has decayed much. There is a stoup inside against the pier dividing the doors; this is not used now. The western tower is like that of S. Bertin, engaged, and has but little to recommend it to notice.

In the interior there is a very fine high tomb of a bishop—I think S. Omer—early in the thirteenth century, about of the same date as the south transept door. The altar now stands on the east side of the crossing; either side of it, a range of music-stools affords fitting accommodation for the clergy, whilst behind, stalls are arranged in the choir around the apse, encircling an organ which stands about where the altar ought to stand. In front of this organ is a group of music stands etc., for the accommodation of the orchestra. The choir is enclosed with high stone screens toward the aisles—old but quite unornamental....

At S. Leu we had a very maigre meal at a small café biliard close to the station and left at 7.45 for Senlis. The road was rather pretty and took us in sight of Chantilly, a prettily situated town on the Oise with a château which belonged to the Duc d’Aumale. In little more than an hour we rumbled through the old narrow street of Senlis and took up our quarters at the Grand Cerf. Before dark we saw the church of S. Pierre, desecrated and used as a cavalry stable. A soldier who spoke some English insisted on our seeing the thirty “Hawks,” as he called them, who occupied the church. This we agreed to in order to see the building, which has, however, little to remark on save its elaborate west front and flamboyant architecture. Near this church is the cathedral and near this a desecrated church, but I must reserve them until to-morrow.

June 16.

My first visit in the morning was of course to the cathedral, of which the west front with its magnificent south-west tower and spire is the most delightful portion. The rest of the church, though retaining many of its old features and arrangements intact, has been overlaid on the exterior with flamboyant work to an unpleasant extent. The two transept fronts are very elaborate and entirely in this late style. At the east end some of the chapels which surround the apse are of Romanesque date, semicircular in their plan outside and roofed with lean-to roofs of stone. The west front was intended to have two similar towers and spires: the towers are both built but only one spire. The detail of the lower portion is very simple, that of the upper part of tower and spire very elaborate and covered with ornament of varied description. The whole surface of spire and turrets is covered with patterns which contribute very much to the general richness of effect. The most remarkable features are however the open pinnacles at the point where the tower becomes octangular, and the delicate spire-lights which are set on every side of the spire and rise nearly half its height. The spire-lights are remarkable in their arrangement at the top; instead of going back horizontally at the ridge they slope down rapidly to the spire so as to produce a very piquant effect. The detail of all the sculpture and mouldings is most carefully executed throughout, and though the scale of the steeple is not large it produces a very great effect of height. The crockets and finials on the spire are very vigorously carved.

The construction of the spire is very ingenious and allows of passage-ways in the wall to the base of the spire-lights. At this point it is constructed in two thicknesses, one of which slopes and forms the outer line of the spire; the other is perpendicular from the inside face until it meets the external sloping portion and dies into it; the two are occasionally bonded together with large blocks of stone, and a passage-way is formed between them. The view from the steeple is fine.

Close to the cathedral on the south is the desecrated church of S. Frambourg, a simple parallelogram in plan and finished with an apse, rather broad and low in its proportions, but nevertheless very effective. The groining is all sexpartite. The original windows remain only in the apse, and there is but little to be said of the building farther than that its west front is remarkable for the outer line of moulding of a prodigious rose window, (now blocked up), and for a west doorway which though mutilated has much beauty. There seems to have been a tower at the north-west of the nave. This church is now used as a store by a builder....

We left the city of Senlis with some difficulty. Imprimis we had an extortionate charge for a bad kind of accommodation at the Hôtel du Grand Cerf, and next had great difficulty in getting places in the omnibus to Pont S. Maxence. But all is well that ends well, and we succeeded, happily, in getting away. The view of the cathedral as the town is left behind becomes very fine, but it is soon lost as the road plunges into the woods through which for the best part of the way it runs. One village, Fleurines, was passed, with a poor late church; some large stone granaries are passed and then the long street of Pont S. Maxence. The Oise is crossed at its end and a few hundred yards bring us to the station; from hence we booked to Noyon, passing on the way Compiègne, which has an old town hall and two churches, one of which, as seen from the distance, seems likely to repay examination. Noyon was reached at four o’clock and we walked off to the cathedral which towers up most conspicuously above the town.

The general character of the church is, internally, much the same as that of S. Leu, etc., but it is very much loftier and has a singular arrangement into four stages in height. There are in the nave:—1. the arcades, 2. the triforium, very large, with windows and groined, 3. a small arcade more like an ordinary triforium, and 4. a clerestory. In the transepts there is no groined triforium and the two upper stages, being of similar height and both of them glazed, give the impression of a double clerestory. I do not at all like this quadruple arrangement of the interior. The columns of the nave are alternately of clustered and single shafts. The groining is divided into compartments of two bays by reason of the transverse ribs from the clustered piers being much larger than any of the others. Both the transepts terminate with apses and there are many very noble points in the internal effect. Here as at S. Leu the aisles are very narrow compared to the width of the nave, and the spaces between the columns of the arcades are also very small indeed. Of the exterior, the west end is perhaps the more striking part. It has two immense and very simple towers with a grand triple porch in front of its three great doorways. This porch was constructed weakly and has been boldly buttressed up. North of the north-west tower is a long building connected with the church, of exquisite beauty, and other old buildings enclose a considerable space on the north side of the cathedral. These buildings are remarkable, inter alia, for the bold foliage which is introduced beneath the parapets in a fashion very popular in this part of France.

There is a small porch of fine early pointed character on the east side of the north transept and above it a very fine rose window. The ground at the east end is planted out in a garden and the whole effect of the choir with the restored steep roofs above the apsidal chapels is very noble. There is what appears to be a distinct church (now desecrated) attached to the east side of the south transept. It is of simple early pointed and has in each bay two lancets and a round window above. It has several bays of length, and an apse, and is parallel with the choir. Careful works of restoration are going on here. I saw no trace of any other old building, saving a portion of very late domestic work.

We left Noyon at 8.40 and reached S. Quentin at 10 P.M. ...

June 17.

I turned out early and got a sketch of the great church before breakfast. Its height is very imposing but in its general character it disappointed my rather high expectations. It appears to me to be a kind of late imitation of early work. For instance the triforium and clerestory have almost geometrical tracery differing only in slight points from the best kind of geometrical work. The proportions too are good and the groining very simple. Many of the shafts in the choir are single columns, but the carving of their capitals is very inferior to that I have seen elsewhere. The choir has, too, a triforium which seems to be much earlier than that of the nave, probably early in the thirteenth century. One of the best features is the management of the chapels and aisles round the apse. There are two transepts; the eastern one does not show however in the ground plan. The tower was central at the west end, but has been all modernized and does not now rise above the immense pointed roof of the nave, so that in the distance the church wants distinctness of character and outline, badly. The flying buttresses are very elaborate and are steadied by arches thrown across from pinnacle to pinnacle, so as to keep them from falling laterally; notwithstanding these precautions the church has fallen out so much in some parts as to look very unsafe.

In the market place there is a quaint old town hall standing on open arches and rather elaborate in its details but very late in its date. There was less to interest in S. Quentin than in most places I have visited as yet, so I was very well able to get away at 11 to Tergnier by railway; here we waited for an hour and then started in a slow diligence for Laon through La Fère and Crépy. I could not see any church in the former place, but in the latter—a good sized village—are two, both of first-pointed date and one with a remarkably good chancel having an east window and side windows of two lights with a distinct circular window above, and all adorned with dog-tooth ornaments. The other was remarkable for a very striking western porch. The road was pretty and soon after passing Crépy brought us in sight of the cathedral of Laon crowning its noble hill in right royal style. A drenching storm of rain prevented our seeing much of the beauty of the view as we climbed the steep road that winds round the hill into the town, but in the evening when we walked round the ramparts we found that it was one of most uncommon magnificence—a vast expanse of flat country generally green in its colour, dotted here and there with woods or villages, and bounded in some parts of the horizon with distant hills....

Our first object in the morning was the cathedral. The original idea of the church (which is said to have been built in the extraordinarily short space of two years) was a great nave, choir and transepts, the west front and both the transept fronts being flanked with two towers of nearly equal height and even fairly similar design. Four of these were completed, those on the east side of the transepts having been only carried up to the height of the roof gables. There is a combination of intense simplicity with an intricate and delicate transparent effect in the open pinnacles at the angles which is wonderfully fine. The scale is larger and the whole treatment though similar is finer than that of Senlis, and though it was imitated it was not, I think, rivalled, even in the magnificent steeples at Rheims.

There is a lantern at the intersection of the nave and transepts which, had it been carried up some vast height above the other towers, might possibly have helped to reduce them all to order; but there is no sign of any such intention, and the only reason for it that can be seen is the desire to elevate the groining at the intersection to a great height above the rest of the roof. I have sketched and measured these towers so carefully that I shall say no more about them, save that they are groined just below the summit and that they were evidently intended for some further finish than they now have, probably for spires like those at Senlis.

The interior of Laon is singularly like that of Noyon, having the same double triforium, but being finished at the east with a square end instead of an apse. Going from one church to another differing only in this respect seemed to give the best possible means of ascertaining with some degree of certainty their relative merits; and certainly it seemed to me that, of the two, Noyon was incomparably the superior, and entirely on this account. The east end of Laon is nevertheless fine for a square east end, and has the windows filled with very magnificent old glass of deep colour. The altar is now brought forward one bay so as to leave a passage beneath the east window.

The capitals generally of this church are very finely treated and would afford endless examples of good work in this early style. In studying the church one of the features most to be noticed is the frequent recurrence of carved courses of foliage which everywhere take the place of moulded string courses.

The south transept has double doorways, and above them a very beautiful rose window. This has now become curious because by its side there is the jamb of a middle-pointed window, evidently inserted by some ambitious man who was going on to put in an entirely new window but who was happily stopped here; I say “here” because he was unhappily not stopped in the south transept and so we have to regret the loss of a grand window suitable to the building and the insertion of one which in no way improves it. On the north side of the choir a great alteration was made in the thirteenth century by throwing out the outer walls to the face of the buttresses in order to gain a considerable number of chapels. This was done in very good style indeed and much improves this part of the exterior.

The only apsidal terminations in the whole church are those of two chapels thrown out on the east side of the transepts. They are carried up three stages in height, one of which opens into the transept aisle and the two others form another chapel out of the magnificent triforium.

Round the east end of the cathedral are large remains of old buildings of early date, connected probably with the church (which, by the by, is said to have been built in A.D. 1113 and 1114, dates which seem to me to be at least fifty years too early for such a structure). The main portion of these buildings consists of a long pile opening to a sort of garth or cloister, north-east of the cathedral, with simple pointed arches supported on low circular columns, and showing on the other side the elevation which I have sketched roughly, and which, standing just at the edge of the cliff, looks on a vast expanse of country until the far distance is lost in mist. These buildings are now converted into some Courts of Law, store houses and lumber rooms.

The Bishop of Laon lives elsewhere I fancy, as our landlord made much of his having come expressly to join in a procession through the city which we witnessed on Sunday afternoon. This procession was new to me and may as well be recorded: it visited a number of altars got up in a temporary manner, elevated on high flights of steps, and decorated profusely with flowers, garlands and drapery. These were erected in every available space, and I suppose by the zeal of the neighbors in each locality. As the time for the procession came, all the good people of the city hung up white sheets over the fronts of their shops so that the whole street bore a most singular appearance, though the universal white was here and there relieved by the old pieces of tapestry with some sacred story on it hung out by some more well-to-do person.

Presently through the dense crowd came the procession—first, girls bearing banners and draped in white, then other banners, clergy, acolytes, censer-bearers and lastly the bishop under a square velvet baldachin carried by priests, walking between two priests, bearing a monstrance with the Host.

At intervals the censer-bearers turned and censed and then went on again, till they reached an altar, which the bishop always ascended and gave the benediction from it, displaying the Host to the people all kneeling below. The procession was followed and kept in some order by soldiers whose band, alternately with the choristers, accompanied the march. In half an hour after the return of the bishop from his rather long procession the town had resumed its old look, the white sheets were gone, and the altars pulled down or denuded of all their ornaments. All the towns we had been in had been preparing for the same fête, which was to be greatest at Lille, where “Notre Dame de la Treille”—whose day it was—is looked on as the patron of the city.

From the cathedral we went to the church of S. Martin at the other end of the main street. The general effect of the exterior is very good, and very superior to the interior,—which is very simple, rather bad in its design, and much modernized. The south transept front is very fine and remarkable for the boldness of the mouldings on its buttresses and strings. The west front is, after this, the finest portion of the building, being a very ornate addition in middle-pointed to the old Romanesque church. It is very picturesque and I liked it much.

From the church we turned down into a walk which follows the line of the old ramparts and nearly surrounds the city. The view, from this part of it, of the cathedral standing on a sort of promontory, with the cluster of houses around it, the vine-covered hill sloping down rapidly to the valley on the right, and then the flat vale, lined all over with rows of poplars, and finished against the horizon with fine hills, was most charming. Indeed I have never seen any town of which the views were so invariably magnificent as they are always round old Laon. We saw no other old church here, save one below the hill with a central tower and low spire, which looked at all as though it might be worth visiting. In the street close to the south transept of the cathedral is a gable end of a good middle-pointed house.

We left Laon in the coupé of a small diligence at 6 P.M. for Rheims, grateful in the extreme for the one fine day which we had as yet had—nowhere so grateful as here, where every turn disclosed some view or some subject of which a bright sun was the most indispensable adjunct.

Our going to Rheims afforded no incidents. When we crossed the hills from Laon and descended towards the broad valley of Champagne we had a most glorious view, simple in all its detail, but full of beautiful colour, and rich and verdant in the extreme. One small village we passed on the way had a church of which I managed to get a sketch while we changed horses. I went inside and found the whole church fitted with open seats on a raised wooden floor. The central tower is groined and has only a small apse to the east, and the effect of this inside is exceedingly good. The south aisle consists of a series of compartments running north and south, the roofs boarded on the under side and coved or canted, and descending not on arches across the aisle but on beams. The steeple was, I think, the only part groined. From this village to Rheims our journey was made in the dark and it was nearly eleven as we drove along under the shadow of the great walls of the cathedral and into the gate of the inn which faces its west front, where happily we found rest for our weary limbs....

June 19.

It rained fast when I turned out early this morning and continued to do so perseveringly all the day. This was miserable and perhaps has made my recollection of Rheims less pleasant than it ought to be.

The west front with its three great doorways is very magnificent. The two steeples, which are developments from the Laon idea, and like Laon unfinished, are at present not large enough for the porch and look too much like turrets, and yet they are of immense size. The substitution of second-pointed mouldings in these steeples for the first-pointed shafts of those at Laon, is unfortunately not an improvement. The whole porch is covered in the most lavish manner with elaborate sculpture of the very finest character and detail, but it is generally spread over the whole surface and gives perhaps an effect of littleness and fritter to the whole front. The detail of the pinnacles and flying buttresses at the sides is unusually fine, and all of the same fine early middle-pointed date—that of the apse and the chapels surrounding it is equally fine. The northern transept is also a fine composition, but the parapets were intended to have flanking towers and these are carried up in the same way as those both at Rouen and Chartres, hardly on a sufficient scale to be looked on as towers. Their great open belfry windows produce a fine effect. The three doors of the north transept are all very fine, though the sculpture on some of them is of earlier date than that of the west front, and of very ingenious execution.

On entering, the impression produced is one of exquisite proportions, colour, and decoration, but perhaps a little too much of all this and not so much of that indescribable feeling which some noble churches so eminently produce. It is in fact a work of faultless art rather than religious feeling, though so noble a work of art cannot help inspiring great religious feeling. The whole design is extremely simple and as free from superfluous decoration as the west front is crowded with it. Its triforium appeared to be poor and insignificant in the extreme, after the magnificent triforia of Noyon and the other early churches with their ampler open spaces and fine groinings. The treatment of the west wall on the inside is very curious. It is divided into a great number of trefoiled niches with very little in the way of moulding, each niche having a figure; and the background being coloured white throws out these figures remarkably. Borders, spandrels, etc., are filled in profusely with much delicately carved and very flat foliage, all most accurately copied from natural forms. In the north transept is a curious wooden clock-case of the fourteenth century.... We left Rheims at 6 o’clock in the evening by railway for Meaux where we arrived to sleep at 11.

June 20.

As is my wont, I was very early at the cathedral this morning. The scale is not large, and in particular the nave is singularly short, only three bays east of the towers. One tower only is completed, and that in a flamboyant style. The church is very open inside, having two aisles, and chapels on each side of the nave and a good arrangement of chapels, etc., around the choir. The great beauty of the interior is its generally fine style—very early third-pointed—the beauty of the triforia, and the particularly fine interior of the transepts. I managed to get some sketches to show its general character before we left, which was at 11 A.M. for Paris, and there seemed to be no old buildings of any interest in Meaux, though I saw one old pile with corner turrets near the cathedral.

We reached Paris at 12.30 having noticed a fine-looking church on our way, at the station of Lagny, which well deserves a visit....

June 22.

Wrote letters and then to Notre Dame.... A fee gave me admittance to the new sacristy and small cloister. The detail of this is all very good, save the doorways; and the glass, which is a grisaille with subjects boldly drawn on glass of very pale tincture but thick in texture, was very good indeed. The encaustic tiles used here are very inferior to ours.... On our way we just looked at the S. Chapelle, the new turret on which appears to me to be most unsatisfactory.

At 12.20 we left Paris for Evreux, going by railway to Vernon station. I expected much here and was much disappointed. The cathedral is a building whose substratum is good first-pointed, but this has been overlaid by an accumulation of late flamboyant work, so as to be almost invisible. The west front has been rebuilt in bad classic. The north transept is a rich and picturesque piece of flamboyant work of the most ornate kind, and has across its angles internally some immense squinches to carry a passage from the aisle to the end walls. A great deal of very good grisaille glass of the thirteenth century has been retained in the flamboyant windows, and in the others there is a good deal of late stained glass which seems to be of fair quality. The church internally is very narrow in proportion to its height and looks consequently more lofty than it really is. The other church at Evreux, S. Taurin, is a Romanesque church altered in flamboyant and adorned with a west front of pseudo-classic. It is a fine church, and its main ornament is the magnificent shrine of S. Taurin, of which I managed to get some slight sketches. It is of silver or other metal, gilt, with some very good ornamentation in enamel and niello. In the south transept wall is an arcade filled in with coloured tiles, but it hardly looks as if it would be original; nevertheless, it is said to be so and I see no reason for supposing it likely that such an enrichment would have been subsequently added in such a place.

June 23.

We left Evreux at 7 A.M. for S. Pierre station and passed through Louviers on the way. I had only time to run in for two minutes to look at the cathedral. It is like Evreux, an early pointed church with flamboyant alterations, but its scale is small. The triforium and clerestory in first-pointed are very good, with relieving arches inside....

We reached Rouen at 11 and though I had seen all its curiosities before, I was glad to have another opportunity of looking at them. The cathedral gains rather than loses in my estimation. Its general proportions are fine and all its detail admirably good. Unfortunately it is whitewashed and not much cared for, and so people fancy it a poor church. It is on the contrary very fine, and much finer in all ways than its rival S. Ouen....

After the cathedral almost everything in Rouen is very late in style and unsatisfactory therefore; it is an interesting town in many ways but in no way to be compared with such a town as Cologne for real architectural interest.

In the evening I made a sketch of the north-west tower, which with its quaint slated roof is a most picturesque composition. Indeed the whole west front is very grand and broad in its effect, whenever it can be seen without the detestable new cast-iron spire of the central steeple....

June 24.

We left Rouen by diligence for Lisieux at 7 A.M. The ride is for much of the way very pretty, notably so between Rouen and Elboeuf, and again about Brienne, a small town with two churches, one of them undergoing some restoration of not good character. At Bourgtheroulde I went into the church and found all the roofs of wood, arched and boarded, with tie-beams and ring-posts....

We reached Lisieux at 3 P.M. It was a fair day, and the place in front of the cathedral was crowded with people, shows and booths. The church was very full, and in the choir, suspended on a beam, were three great new bells just made, and I suppose in process of being blessed before being hung in the tower.

The whole church is very fine and of nearly uniform date, the choir rather more advanced first-pointed than the nave and with a late Lady-chapel added. The triforium of the choir is very charming; and here and in the side windows of the choir aisle—also very beautiful—there is a great fondness displayed for cusped circles sunk slightly in plain walling-spaces, as also in the spandrels of arches, etc. This is the case notably in the west front and again in the fine north-west steeple, where bands of circles are used as strings. This was seen also in the steeple of Senlis. In the west front, which has been elaborately restored, the side doorways are small but very beautiful, finishing with trefoil heads and remarkable for the great masses of regular foliage round their arches in place of mouldings. These are used with the happiest effect.[11] The exterior of the south transept is also a fine simple composition and the interior of this and of the north transept are specially good. The church is apsidal with two chapels besides the Lady-chapel.

The music used here was strictly Gregorian; so also at S. James’s, where the congregation joined most heartily.... The two western towers are very different, that on the south-west early and for a number of stages of Romanesque work; the other very beautiful, and in its belfry stage giving a type for others—as especially S. Pierre and others in Caen—to copy. The north-west steeple has no spire and that of the other has been much modernized. There is a low central tower which forms a fine lofty lantern internally.

The only other mediaeval church in Lisieux is on a large scale but entirely of poor flamboyant work. We were there whilst a collection was being made; a Gregorian psalm was sung and the collection was made by a priest first and then by a little girl dressed up very smartly in white. There was a crowded congregation composed mostly of women.

A good many old wooden houses remain in the streets of Lisieux; few however are of very rare character and all seemed of the latest date. Our inn was dirty, disagreeable, but cheap,—two dinners, two beds and servants coming to 8 francs only! But its merits were so questionable that we were very glad to find ourselves on our way to Caen. We left at 6 A.M. and arrived there at 10. There were one or two fine views on the road, but otherwise it had no interest until the many towers and spires of Caen rose before us.... I had seen Caen before, but five years had left me so far forgetful of the detail of its beauties as to be heartily glad to discover them again.

The church of S. Pierre was close to our inn and its spire was first of all looked at. It is certainly very glorious but not original. The spire is copied from S. Étienne and the tower is a repetition of what seems to have been the one idea of a tower in this part of France. Lisieux has an early example, and so too have Bretteville, Norrey and others; but giving up the point of his originality, the architect of S. Pierre must nevertheless have great credit for his mode of working up old ideas. S. Jean and Notre Dame in Caen have steeples copied from S. Pierre, so that we have here an instance of the same design being reproduced for three hundred years again and again, dressed only in different detail. This is a most curious fact and one not often paralleled, I think....