Some of them, if it must be known, are still but little studied; and with all the fine enthusiasm of Spanish architects, and societies learned and popular, treasures of the great age still remain unexplored. Only last summer the present writer rode over the flank of a hill to salute, all unprepared, a superb transitional church of the thirteenth century. It was not cathedral nor even collegiate, but mere parroquia, and perhaps the finest parish church in Spain:—and it is even to this hour, so far as may be ascertained, completely inédite. When Street went to Santiago he was much in the same case. “I had been able to learn nothing whatever about the cathedral before going there,” he records, with ironic amusement; “in all my Spanish journeys there had been somewhat of this pleasant element of uncertainty as to what I was to find; but here my ignorance was complete, and as the journey was a long one to make on speculation, it was not a little fortunate that my faith was rewarded by the discovery of a church of extreme magnificence and interest.”
The three journeys were so planned as not only to find out much that was new each time but to repeat and verify earlier impressions. With his usual sobriety he sets down the itinerary in the opening pages:
“In my first Spanish tour I entered the country from Bayonne, travelled thence by Vitoria to Burgos, Palencia, Valladolid, Madrid, Alcalá, Toledo, Valencia, Barcelona, Lérida, and by Gerona to Perpiñan. In the second I went again to Gerona, thence to Barcelona, Tarragona, Manresa, Lérida, Huesca, Zaragoza, Tudela, Pamplona, and so to Bayonne; and in the third and last I went by Bayonne to Pamplona, Tudela, Tarazona, Sigüenza, Guadalajara, Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Avila, Salamanca, Zamora, Benavente, Leon, Astorga, Lugo, Santiago, la Coruña, and thence back by Valladolid and Burgos to San Sebastian and Bayonne. Tours such as these have, I think, given me a fair chance of forming a right judgement as to most of the features of Spanish architecture; but it would be worse than foolish to suppose that they have been in the slightest degree exhaustive, for there are large tracts of country which I have not visited at all, others in which I have seen one or two only out of many towns which are undoubtedly full of interesting subjects to the architect, and others again in which I have been too much pressed for time.”
Street is too modest here: his acquaintance with Spain if not indeed exhaustive, like that with France and England, is entirely representative; and however pressed for time, he never scamps his work. The present writer may testify, having followed his tracks with an exact piety all the way, that he exhausted every town. He passed through Miranda at dawn, but he described, classified and dated the church; he went up the coast, from Barcelona to Port Vendres, by train, but he saw more churches and towers than the careful observer after him. He continues:
“Yet I hardly know that I need apologize for my neglect to see more, when I consider that, up to the present time, so far as I know, no architect has ever described the buildings which I have visited and indeed no accurate or reliable information is to be obtained as to their exact character, age, or history.”
In that sentence is written down the debt Spain owes to Street.
He took his wife on the first journey but not afterwards. She was both patient and spirited, but it was a little too rough for a lady. His own endurance and good temper are unfailing, and infallible his sense of due proportion. He never tells you what was for dinner, or how the bed ailed, or when he quarrelled with the landlord. It is much if he mentions, in a sort of postscript, that the journey to Compostela in diligence took sixty-six hours, and, elsewhere, that in autumn a man can live largely on bread and grapes. He is not, like Mr. Hewlitt or Mr. Hutton when they go on the road, writing a picaresque romance, but an account of Gothic architecture in Spain. The structural analysis of Santiago, the discussion of the date of Avila, the appreciation of the Catalan type of church-building—everyone knows that famous parallel with “our own Norfolk middle-pointed”—such passages provoke comparison and command praise, for substantiality and lucidity, with the very best of writing on a technical subject. The dexterity with which he singles out the English or Angevine elements at Las Huelgas, and those of the Isle-of-France at Toledo, and signals there the gradual interpenetration of local influences, has the happiest certainty and the most admired ease. It is hard to say where he is at his best,—whether in dealing with a style like the Romanesque of Cluny or the Gothic of Paris, where he has a vast store of experience long accumulated, and makes comparisons and illustrates distinctions from England or Italy indifferently, or whether coming upon fresh matter like the domed churches about Zamora or the brick building around Saragossa, or even something so much out of his line as the Mudejar work scattered about in the Castiles, he applies reason and method to the unknown, and, arriving at conviction, he enforces it. Nothing could be more succinct and more satisfying than his dealing with the dates of Don Patricio de la Escosura, in España Artistica y Monumental. “I see no reason,” he writes easily, “for believing that the plaster decorations are earlier than 1350 or thereabouts.”
Only once in a very long while, a slight twist or tang of perversity relieves the even good sense and good taste. Of the lovely sepulchre in Avila of that young brother of Joanna the Mad, too early dead, he remarks that the great tomb “is one of the most tender, fine, and graceful works I have ever seen, and worthy of any school of architecture. The recumbent effigy, in particular, is as dignified, graceful and religious as it well could be, and in no respect unworthy of a good Gothic artist.” The quaint anti-climax has the very, sweet, gaucherie of a woodcut by Rossetti or a bit out of Scripture by the young, unspoiled Holman Hunt. We have come, since that could be said, a very long way.
THE OLD CATHEDRAL OF SALAMANCA