GEORGE EDMUND STREET4 Fox his understanding of, and hie passionate
devotion to, Gothic archi- tannin, GeorgeEdmund Street improbably had no parallel since the Middle Ages. The book that the Hispanic Society of America has recently published shows him as an almost fanatical devotee of the earlier and purer forms of pointed architecture, a critic of extreme fastidiousness, an artist intolerant of anything which falls bel8w the high and austere standard that he makes his measure. His great scholarship, his marvellously quick eye and sure pencil, together with a terse yet vivid style of writing, conspire to make his (hitherto) " Unpublished Notes " extraordinarily attractive and stimulating even to a layman. Gothic architecture is his perpetual preoccu- pation, as its practice wee his profession ; but his glowing enthu. thaw: lights up all sorts of picturesque incidents in his travels,
• Perohnst Wady, the Crest Question of To-Dar. By B. P. B. NIL London Methuen and Co. lb.. net.) Eotddtr Jar. "LV,IZsouPluttt t4:.1.4011?«111.tr"• °.'"glea
scenic and other, with the same glamour that he contrives to throw about the great Cathedrals. The author has much to say of him as a man, and one gets a clear and very charming picture of a character that is at once saintly and robust, of a life no less beautiful than busy. Glimpses of Street as man and artist are caught in such passages as these :- " The Churches of England and the Cathedrals of France taught him that perfect measure, that economy of force, that high serious- ness, that austerity of beauty, for which others are sent to the Marl and the Divine Comedy."
" If architecture is on the one side an art, it is on the other a profession, and partakes as little of the tradesman's mean-minded- ness as of the artist's irresponsibility."
" 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."
" One of the first elements is height. I know of no one thing in which one is so much astonished, in all one's visits to foreign churches, as by the luxury of that art which could afford to be so daringly grand."
" There is perhaps this advantage of height over length, that whilst the one seems entirely done for the glory of God, the other is always more apparently for use."
" Many have put their heart into their work, but only a great heart lives and burns in it."
" Now that in the pursuit of colour and light most painters have abandoned form, and second-rate impressionists are content to let a landscape welter in blues and mauves like a basket of dying fish, his forcible contours and cool washes awake a tingling of reality."
" The question of Gothic with him was not only a matter of conscience, it was more, a matter of temperament all his life, all his religion, the very fibres of his body, were strung to that interplay of thrust and strain, were tuned to that upward reaching of the mountain's heart toward God."
" On the Sunday evening there was a grand procession of a figure of the B.V.M., with a vast number of attendants all with lighted candles, a Military Band, and a few cavalry to bring up the rear. The view from the lowest bridge looking up the Arno, with the picturesque outlines of the bold hills above Pisa behind the towers, is one of the most charming I remember."
Previous page
