George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund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George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers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