George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund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George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers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