George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund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George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers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
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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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