George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund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George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers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