George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted PapersStreet, George Edmund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George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers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
“Mr. Street, having no special ties to any locality, desired to live at
Wantage where daily service and weekly celebration had been established
at a time when such were rare. He took, therefore, in conjunction with
Mr. Stillingfleet--one of the clergy of the parish--a little house in
Wallingford Street. During the time he lived there I saw him almost
daily.” This is Dr. William Butler, later Dean of Lincoln. “When not
called from Wantage on business, he regularly attended my service,
and took his part in the choir. He had, I remember, a baritone voice,
and took a tenor part. He was much interested in the improvement of
services, and, although at this time far from wealthy, he offered a
large annual subscription, I think it was £20, toward the payment of an
organist.... Never was there a man of simpler or less luxurious habits.
In those two years he dined with us and the clergy of the parish, he
drank no wine, and had only the plainest food.”
It was an energetic wholesome life, simple not so much by limitation
as by renunciation, full of interest and expression, keeping a right
line, as always, by the force of the initial impulse. The energetic,
wholesome figure stands firm in a clear sunlight that is hardly dimmed
by the space of sixty-odd years intervening. With nothing of the prig,
as little of the aesthete, he was alien to both types by virtue of
his vitality, his mirth, his essential soundness. A daguerreotype
taken about 1850 shows quiet strength with a sort of sweet gravity.
The hands are strong and flexible, not large, with tapering fingers
and fine modelling on the back. You would have turned in the street
to look after the head, with a big square brow jutting over blue
eyes, brown hair very soft and round chin very firm, a mouth poetic
and self-controlled. If poetry were (as once was rashly said) merely
an affair of genius, and genius the affair of energy, Street would
have been infallibly a poet. Energy and beauty in him were mingled
in unusual measure, and he found expression in active more than in
abstract creation: in loving landscape and sketching it, in hearing
music and singing it, in building Gothic churches and restoring them.
[Illustration: GEORGE EDMUND STREET AT ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE]
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