Walter Shaw Sparrow

“ But a pontist soon learns that strife of every sort is a phase of war. Indeed, whether roads and bridges aid a pilgrimage of the sick, or an army of Crusaders, or a primitive migration, or the ramblings of charity, or the enterprise of monasteries; whether they help a mediæval pope at Avignon to thwart the land-hunger of a French king, or enable modern life to turn industrialism into a world-wide Armageddon whose scouts are lying advertisements; whatever they do or have done their history brings us in touch with the same human motive, a desire to win victories. ”

“ One thing more than any other is attractive to a pontist: it is the varied strife that bridges and roads have circulated, not only in military campaigns, but in the thronged struggle for existence—the one incessant war in the affairs [Pg vii] of men. A routine of idle sentiment prattles about an illusion named Peace, yet strife everywhere remains the historian of life, every effort to do and to live claiming a battle-toll of killed and wounded and maimed. Even sleep, the nearest kinswoman of peace, is united to the law of battle by dreams that torture. ”

“ In the Middle Ages also, though disease and filth and bloodshed made life as uncertain as a game of chance, the social egotism that built and purchased for itself had faith in the future, and claimed and got full value for its money. In fact, from nearly all specimens of mediæval handicraft we may learn why the peoples of Europe survived terrible crises and bred men of genius to represent them for ever. In each race, and particularly in ours, there was a wonderful endurance, certainly based on the creed of self, but admirable all the same, like the tough elasticity of yew timber. ”

“ Even the Tower Bridge, London, a vast feat in engineering, is so conventional with a meretricious mediævalism that it needs the screening dust and mist that veil the Thames. This is among the modern bridges that Brangwyn has drawn and painted, raising them into art as a record of current history. Nothing moves him more than the huge mechanisms that seize upon to-day’s life and turn it into their obedient slave. Men dwindle ever more and more in scale as machines become fatal in their enormous bulk, like Super-Dreadnoughts and the “Titanic” ”

“ It is in metal bridges alone that we find a virile growth, a genuine evolution; not often artistic, and as sensitive to bombs as card castles are to a touch from your finger; but yet a great evolution because it represents modern times. If we could summon to earth the spirits of the greatest bridge-builders—Caius Julius Lacer, Apollodorus of Damascus, Isembert, Bénézet, Ammanati, and several others—they would learn nothing much from our stonework, whereas a metal bridge here and there could not fail to strike awe into these spiritual beholders. ”

“ Now the architecture of bridges, like that of huts and houses and cottages, never fails to keep before our minds the awful slowness of each reluctant advance from custom to custom, and from convention to convention. I have no words to describe the terror that comes to me when I find in daily use a type or species of bridge so aboriginal in its poor workmanship that a forerunner not only similar to it, but as rudely effective, may well have been employed by the earliest Flint Men, whose delight in imitation was stimulated by all the bridges which Nature had created. ”

“ Is a passion for “refinement” to turn us into valetudinarians? Surely the Roman genius, in a supreme monument such as the Pont du Gard, is the very tonic for which we ought to have an inborn care and liking? Yet some professors of taste, being devotees of the epicene, condemn it as a “rough” genius, just as bad climbers revile the Alps.
When J. J. Rousseau visited the Pont du Gard he was awed into silence by the immensity of the three arcades. For the first time in his life he understood the grandeur of the Roman spirit in adventurous achievement. ”

“ Every road through history is a changing procession of armies; every ancient bridge has a long story of battles. Indeed, bridges and roads have circulated all the many phases of strife that men have employed in civil rivalries, in mercantile competitions, in generative migrations, in roadside adventures with footpads and cut-throats, in fateful invasions, and in those missionary conquests which have given to religions their rival empires. ”

“ A horrible slowness marked each advance from a bad copy of a natural bridge to a slightly better one. In fact, only a few brilliant creative minds—not more than two or three thousand—separate our own social order from the strife of Palæolithic savages. Into the coarse dough of humanity an infrequent genius has put some enchanted yeast. And we must needs believe that the dead routine of imitation, to which human nature has ever been enslaved, held primeval man even more relentlessly than it holds ourselves. ”

“ RUINS OF A ROMAN BRIDGE OVER THE LOIRE AT BRIVES-CHARENSAC, FRANCE
We pass on to Spain, which has been called the land of bridges and aqueducts. A pontist may live there for many years and be happy all the time. Even a hurried author, who visits the antiquity of Spain as a mere journalist, and who mimics vainly the travel books of Alexandre Dumas, finds that the many bridges put some thoroughness into his own work, acting as a drag on the far-sought and dear-bought liveliness with which the million may be charmed. ”

“ Tay Bridges and Titanics are like strong acts in a tragic play, whose influence we forget very soon. It is a thousand pities, for the next war may teach us, by frequent disasters, that machine-worship has been a mad gambler everywhere. Bridges suffered much from the priggishness of the Renaissance, but they have suffered infinitely more from the obsessions that ruined Sir Thomas Bouch. Poor Bouch! Not only did he wish to astonish the world by constructing an unparalleled bridge, wonderfully long, curved at both ends, and with a varying gradient. ”

“ As for the Ponte Nomentano, he is nothing more than a burly soldier, a common man-at-arms. The mediæval engineer was uninspired by an enchanted site, and gave the whole of his attention to the pronged battlements. He had no feeling for proportion, and no liking for a stern eloquence of line such as we find in the noble castle of Chenonceaux, a masterpiece of the French Renaissance, whose long wing is carried by a bridge of five round arches, and whose turreted portion is pierced by a single arcade. ”

“ The workmen can be fitted with fairly good primitive characters, for they do not suggest the sacrifice of a life until the bridge has fallen thrice. As to their master, he is a fiend, since he acts upon their suggestion at once, unmoved by the girl’s beauty and the frisking springtime that accompanies her. A little dead hand—and a gleaming bracelet—and the masons chanting at their work, as bridge-builders chant now in Persia: so the drama ends, or so it would end if we could not unite it with a similar legend known almost everywhere in Europe. ”

“ The qualities of a great bridge should make their appeal in stern lines, in ample proportions, in a scale that befits not the site alone but the site and its history; for all fine architecture dwells with the fugitive generations as a lasting citizen; it is an epitome of racial character alembicated by genius. Bridges cannot be fine when they are dwarfed by their environments, or when they are too big to be in harmony with the externals of their setting. ”

“ Whatever this fateful war may bring to us and to others, the defenceless bridge will have to be reconsidered; and for this reason its evolution attracts me even now, despite the darkling uncertainty that encompasses every hour of the day. The Forth Bridge, all shatterable bulk and no beauty [Pg 352] and grace, does full justice to our industrialism, but yet he belongs, not to the public spirit of Great Britain, but to the spirit of the age everywhere; for in other lands he has a great many rivals not a whit less huge and vulnerable. ”

“ Harvests were grown somewhere, as women used querns to grind the corn. Good little people! They wanted to be pacific and artistic; fighting did not set their genius; and so they vanished. How could they hope to protect the gift of life when British war-chariots and Roman soldiers began to fight in the neighbourhood, obeying the dread mysterious law of fruitful carnage? They slunk away from the fierce midwifery of war, fearing the long self-sacrifices of a painful renaissance. ”

“ Their energy has evaporated in talk, like steam from a boiling pan. It was not until the bridge had fallen that the village hummed intelligently like a hive of bees, and set itself to work. What could be done then? Who was the landowner? No less a person than the Archbishop of Canterbury. Are we then to believe that in 1318 a Primate of England scamped his public duty? Was his attitude to a timber bridge inferior to that of the high priests of ancient Rome, who called themselves pontifices because they built and repaired the Pons Sublicius, a bridge of stakes at the foot of Mount Aventine? ”

“ So the design is a clever feat not merely of repetitive decoration, but of repeating solids and voids that oppose each other in a harmony of contrasts; for the empty spandrils in their form oppose the leaf-shaped openings made by the arches, and all the curved solids of the bridge are foiled in a rugged manner by the upright columns, as well as by the long horizontal lines of the covered roadway. In the contrast between cold granite and warm brick there is colour also, and it suits the pulsating light and heat of Italy. ”

“ One by one facts are to us what a few slates and tiles are to a builder, but Thought collects them, and then with care and inspiration she builds with them as she builds with stones and bricks and timber. In her work, moreover, there is nothing little when she does little things admirably; but when her devotees go away from her and parade guesswork as theory and fact as truth, we should ask them whether brick-kilns are houses and stone quarries cathedrals. ”

“ Is it an act of peace when a trust ‘corners’ some article of food, or when a limited liability concern kills all competition from little neighbours, whose wives and families can’t get rid of hunger because business has failed? Those who attacked the bridge at Parthenay were armour-clad, while those who suffer in trade wars from the greed of co-operative egotisms have usually no self-defence, as their capital is small. Don’t you see, then, that from machicolated towers to millionaire tradesmen is but an evolution in social strife? ”

“ But the main point is that the archways made by Nature not only suggested the arched bridge of handicraft, but heralded all the lovely styles of building which have used vaults, domes, turrets, towers, spires, steeples, and arched openings—gateways, porches, and windows. There is a rival art, as we know, an art which has glorified the long lintel-stone carried by pillars; but it has never won from the genius of great men the highest technical inspiration. ”

“ Beasts of prey know how weak he is; most animals outrun him; birds in their swift flight escape from his weapons, and he feels rage and jealousy when monkeys at play leap long distances from bough to bough. Out of his nature comes a pitiless hatred for all living creatures. Do you not see this earthling, this Adam of Evolution, part ape and part man, standing alone on a windfall bridge, with a river in flood below his feet, and the sun a radiant crescent, blood-red, dipping below that far horizon of peaked hills? ”

“ Two other bridges, one Moorish and one Roman, cross the chasm at Ronda, but at the upper end where the depth is less prodigious; so their architects had easier problems to solve, and yet they did not equal in any respect the heroic inspiration of Aldeguela. Mr. Edgar Wigram has said that although Ronda Bridge owes much of its effect to its extraordinary site, yet an extraordinary piece of architecture is necessary to command the site; it is the triumph of genius over nature that we feel both at Ronda and in the Pont Napoléon. ”

“ Far too often the industrial bridge everywhere is like an ill-used highway uniting the purgatory of a seared district to some hell or other invented by poets or by priests. There are many such bridges in the Staffordshire Black Country, and in the scarred Potteries, where an ebon meanness lives with jerry-builders, and where puny drab children take from the present generation the youth that endures. What would a Dante think in the stricken fields of industrialism? ”

“ Though we have lived for many years on the brink of war, every highway in Europe as in America is at the mercy of bridge-wreckers. Is it not dumbfounding that no respect has been paid anywhere to the social guardianship that bridges and roads ought to perform? Why has this all-important matter been forgotten? It has been made memorable a great many times in history, ever since Horatius Cocles and his two companions held the Pons Sublicius against the whole Etruscan Army under Porsena,—a lesson never forgotten by Roman citizens. ”

“ He crawls along fallen trees over some torrents and chasms; across a flooded river here and there he leaps in a shambling, lopsided fashion, when stepping-stones and boulders rise above water-level; he roams into hilly districts where many a ledge of rock spans a dangerous gap; but he enjoys himself most of all when a suspension bridge of branches enables him to amble from tree to tree across a deep-lying river pent up between high cliffs. ”