George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund
History
George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers
Street, George Edmund
Architecture, Gothic; Church architecture -- Europe; Europe -- Description and travel; Street, George Edmund, 1824-1881
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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