BROKEN WAR-BRIDGEA BROKEN WAR-BRIDGE OF THEXIIICENTURY, AT NARNI IN ITALY; REPAIRED WITH WOODII
BROKEN WAR-BRIDGEA BROKEN WAR-BRIDGE OF THEXIIICENTURY, AT NARNI IN ITALY; REPAIRED WITH WOOD
A BROKEN WAR-BRIDGE OF THEXIIICENTURY, AT NARNI IN ITALY; REPAIRED WITH WOOD
STRIFE AND HISTORIC BRIDGES
Thefirst theory sets thought astir on the necessity of having landways and waterways which in all respects are fitted to distribute the many functional activities of military and civil life. It is not enough that a complex type of society should have many intricate systems of circulation for its multiform traffic. The weakest points in each system ought to be regarded as dangerzones in the strategy of national defence, so it is a duty to protect them from attack, and the protection should be as complete as the military arts can make it, age after age. Now the most vulnerable points in a system of landways are the long bridges by which roads and railways are conducted across wide chasms, and deep valleys, and perilous waterways. Yet in England, and in other countries also, neither roads nor railways are defended; indeed, modern bridges are not only unfortified, but as sensitive to bombs as elephants are to large bullets. Why has the world forgotten that a powerful nation whose bridges were cut would be like a giant whose arteries were severed? As the suffragettes burnt down Yarmouth pier, so a conspiracy of civil disorder, acting in accordance with a well-formed plan, could in a night, with a few sappers, cripple a vast railway, by blowing up the main strategic bridges. I am giving a chapter to this urgent subject, most engineers having evaded with equal zest the charm of beauty and the security of our food supplies. At a time when the nations overarm themselves for war, tradesmen and engineers have erected ugly bridges for an imagined peace; but now that the art of flying threatens civilization from overhead and from all around, like a new Satan, the public attitude to highways cannot remain lethargic. Willingly or unwillingly, we must recall and renew those principles of defensive war with the help of which bridges were safeguarded by the Romans and also in the Middle Ages. Frank Brangwyn has painted many aged fortified bridges, making a most variedselection; and in each of these historic pictures he illustrates the attitude of old times to the theory of pontine defence.
The apathy of the public has been unintelligent, but not unintelligible, because bridges and roads are so ordinary, so very trite, that we who use them every day do not think of their supreme influence on the nation’s health and safety. They belong to that realm of custom where truths fall asleep in truisms and facts in platitudes. To understand a thing that seems obvious, or “inevitable,” is among the problems that genius alone can solve in a complete way. Dr. Johnson believed that men and women could marry ugliness without being in the least intrepid, because custom would soon teach them not to know the difference between good looks and bad. As custom dulls our minds even in family life, where affection is most watchful, we cannot be surprised that common roads and bridges are too evident to be seen intelligently.
Very few persons love a bridge until it is gone, or until it has been put out of action by Napoleon’s “whiff of gunpowder.” Then a victorious army may be brought to a standstill, like Wellington’s, in Spain, when the retreating French blew up an arch of the colossal Roman bridge at Alcántara, so that for some long days the unfordable Tagus might protect their rearguard. It was no easy task to repair the bridge with a netting of ropes that carried planks; and when the British army crossed the gap on this makeshift footway, Wellington knew that the Devil was not the only archfiend in human affairs.
PONT VALENTRÉPONT VALENTRÉ AT CAHORS IN FRANCE: THE FORTIFIEDGATES AND TOWERS. SEE ALSO THESECOND PICTURE
PONT VALENTRÉ AT CAHORS IN FRANCE: THE FORTIFIEDGATES AND TOWERS. SEE ALSO THESECOND PICTURE
Yes, believe me, it is worth while to think of the highways and byways. Try to imagine, for instance, what it has cost in suffering and in death to make fit for use all the traffic arteries and veins that nourish and sustain life in the bodies civil of the world. How long would it take to explore the myriads of rambling footpaths? Could this work be done in two hundred years by a thousand Stanleys? How many lives have been lost in making roads through forests and fens and over mountains? in the construction of railways? in the building of bridges? in the slow cutting of canals? The Suez Canal was a long campaign of stricken fields in the war of trade enterprise;[3]and the Panama Canal has reaped lives as quickly as minor battles reap them. If we could see in a form of visual conception all the sacrifice of life that civilizations have offered to progress on the historic landways and waterways, how terrified we should be! Even the hospitals and sick-beds of humanity have not had a more scaring pathos than that which has accompanied the more peaceable enterprises of mankind.
WAR-BRIDGEA WAR-BRIDGE OF THEXIVCENTURY AT ORTHEZ IN FRANCE
A WAR-BRIDGE OF THEXIVCENTURY AT ORTHEZ IN FRANCE
This reflexion brings us to the second theory that has a home in the life of bridges and roads. Other homes it has also, a vast number of them, for this theory belongs to the law of battle, the universal law of strife. In so far as thelower organisms are concerned, this law seems to be as permanent as the sun; we have no reason to suppose that its rule will ever be relaxed among birds, beasts, fishes, insects, or among other forms of life, such as competitive trees in a wood; but mankind is an eternal mystery, and none can say into what civilization of symphonic harmony the human race may be evolved by gradual improvements in the crowded struggle for existence. A hundred thousand years hence the competitions of human life may be like harmonious rivalries between notes in music, or like thewondrous orchestration that unites into a symphony of benign health all the communities of cells in a sound body. “All for Each, Each for All” is the social rule that Nature administers in her cellular civilizations; and she punishes with disease and death the bodies that rebel against her rule by developing harmful egotisms. Yet mankind has stereotyped a very different social rule, “Each for All, yet Each for Himself”; and what right have we to believe that this egotism, so long inherited, and continuously active, can change its nature gradually, till at last it will be as philharmonic as the cellular commonwealths forming a strong human body? At present this appears to be very improbable, but impossible we dare not call it, since every type of society is free to improve its own lot. So the law of strife in human affairs appeals to us not as a truth destined to last till doomsday, like the strife of carnivorous hunger, but as a theory which human life has not yet contradicted, but which in course of time may be tempered into a social art—a competitive harmony favourable to everybody. Yet even then, no doubt, inequalities of mind will be active in accordance with Nature’s law of infinite variation.
Meanwhile, however, we have to accept history as mankind has made it. Strife has reigned everywhere; even the test of efficiency has been—not the survival of the finest natures, but—the survival of the least unfitted for a long battle against bad environments. Very often the delicate have the best characters and the most alert brains; and in times past the delicate died from hardships by myriads.Consider also the innumerable wars; slaughter and success have tried to go hand-in-hand together as boon companions. 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.
No one knows how many invasions were broken up by the forests and fens of England before the Romans came with their colonising methods, and linked their scattered camps together by means of paved highways, great roads destined to be used for many centuries, and by many raids and armies. The earliest prehistoric tribes came along a bridge of land by which England was united to France; they found in their course some of the nature-made bridges (p.114), and the spoor and tracks of formidable animals, such as the mastodon and the mammoth. Much later invasions, also prehistoric, must have come over the sea in boats, for the bridge of land had the history of most bridges, the water swallowed it up; but every boat may be regarded as a floating bridge which is moved from place to place, so that a pontist when he studies the sea-borne invasions keeps in touch with his favourite subject. On their arrival in England the later prehistoric colonists found that most of the nature-made bridges had been copied, and thata great many footpaths and tracks rambled from settlements to watering-places and through the forests where huntsmen risked their lives in a sport of habit.
The men of the Bronze Period were supplanted in Europe by a race more powerful, whose clenched fists needed larger sword-handles; it was a race of manly and swaggering nomads, strong and fierce; and yet, as Darwin believed, their success in the war of life may have been aided still more by their superiority in the arts. Can we fix a date for the introduction of bronze into the British Isles? Here is a matter of opinion; but, according to Sir John Evans, the most likely date is separated from the Christian era by about 1400 years, perhaps 200 years less. Iron belongs to a much later time. Probably, in the fourth centuryB.C., it was known as a metal in South Britain; and about a century later it began to supersede bronze in the manufacture of cuttingimplements.[4]
Then, as now, England waited for great discoveries to be imported. Many British tribes were hermits of convention, willing drudges to a routine of fixed habits and customs. For example, the highest form of prehistoric bridge-building, the lake-village, came to England not earlier than the Bronze Age, and we shall see (p.137) that a lake-village, with its late Celtic handicrafts, existed at Glastonbury when in its neighbourhood the Romans were at work. But I do not wish to imply that no British tribe had any alertness.As Cæsar found out to his cost, there were Britons with an enterprising conservatism, whose war-chariots were managed with a skilful bravery. This wheeled traffic postulates a good road here and there, with bridges over some deep rivers; and to this supposition two facts must be added: the war-chariots were small, and their wheels were primitive, so in a wet climate they would have been useless on unmended tracks. Let us infer, then, that the Roman conquest of England was aided by some British landways which were genuine roads, valued for their service and kept in repair. Is not this implied also by the circulation of Druidism from its venerated heart in Anglesey? There is no evidence better than that of a just inference from known events, for events cannot lie, whereas the eye-witnesscan, and very often hedoes.
Again, to think of the aggression which has travelled along roads and over bridges, is to think also of the five phases through which civilization has evolved many times. During the first phase a new home is won by invasion; and during the second phase the new home is extended by invasions, and efforts are made to co-ordinate the separated parts by improving their intercommunications. Then civil and economic competitions not only multiply, but become too active in the body social; wealth breeds wealth, and poverty, poverty. So the classes grow discordant, and put too much strain on each other, just as diseased lungs poison the strongest heart, or as virile hearts rupture weak arteries. Here is the fourth phase; it means a gradual disintegrationbrought about partly by the economic war, partly by a relaxing faith in stern duties and in patriotism. Amusement becomes a passion, even a mania, and discontent seethes under the fool-fury of the merry-making. Then comes the gradual break-up or downfall, which may be hastened by invasions from a younger and more militant country. Each phase may be a long development, sometimes delayed by events, and sometimes hurried; and the final phase may be postponed for a long time when the strife of poverty is relieved by constant emigration. Human gunpowder does not explode if it is shipped to a happier country where a day’s work brings comfort enough for three days. But the main point is this: that civilizations have travelled always in the same direction and ended always in a break-up, just as great rivers have flowed always toward their destiny in the sea, though all have changed their beds many times and widened their valleys.
When we meditate on the part played by bridges and roads in the rise and fall of ambitious nations, we should choose a fit environment, such as a Roman bridge crippled by three forms of war: floods, winds, and human strife. France has three or four Roman bridges of this kind, but let us take an Italian example. Brangwyn has chosen the Ponte Rotto, at Rome, and the great ruins of the bridge at Narni. It was Augustus Cæsar who erected Narni Bridge, in order to join two hills together across the valley of the Nera, on the Flaminian Way, in the Sabine country. There were four arches of white marble, and the finest onehad a span of 142 feet. The others varied much in breadth.[5]The Romans plumbed the river and chose the best natural foundations for their piers; stability was more to them than a sequence of uniform arches. At the present time only one arch remains; but under its great vault, as youstand on the left bank, you will feel alone with the pity and terror that history brings to those who see past events as clearly as painters behold their concepts.
GREAT ROMAN BRIDGERUINS OF THE GREAT ROMAN BRIDGE OVER THE NERA AT NARNI, ITALY
RUINS OF THE GREAT ROMAN BRIDGE OVER THE NERA AT NARNI, ITALY
Under this arch at Narni many types of society have passed, with their customs, religions, fears, hopes, ambitions, predatory trades and pillaging armies; have passed one after the other, and vanished.Tempus edaxdevoured them; and now they are studied in relics of their arts and crafts, their mute historians. What permanent social good did they do? Ought we to be as forgetful of them as they were of their buried generations? Do they merit any praise at all? They were proud, of course, and looked upon change as abiding progress, yet the more they altered the more their egotism was the same thing, either intensified and developed, or slackened and degraded; for the ruling motive powers of their life were but variations of the aboriginal war between the enfeebled and the strengthened. The social rule tried to prove that “Each for All, yet Each for Himself,” was the only sane doctrine for men to be guided by in their civil competitions. Everybody had to do much for the commonweal, but yet he was taught to believe that astuteness, even more than upright ability, would enable him to gain control over a number of slaves, or serfs, or servants, whose lot would be what he thought fit to make it. This habitual struggle for Dominion over others was a friend to the fortunate classes only: it bred microbes in the body social and produced fever and disruption. Is it surprising that civilizations withered away?Their autopsies have a horrible sameness; but from their mute historians—their books, pictures, sculpture, potteries, bridges, roads, and other relics of a lasting communism—we learn to have faith in useful work done thoroughly. In all that endures there is some altruism. Who would care a fig for ancient Greece if all her mute historians had perished with her incompetent social order?
The Middle Ages exist for us, not in records of their freebooting social aims, but in the work done by a few men of genius and their pupils and assistants. More than one mediæval century is represented by a few churches, a few castles, a few bridges, a few books, a damaged house here and there, and some weapons, tools, and furniture. All else in the story of its life is tragic and sinister, a wild pilgrimage whose shrines are battlefields and whose ranks are visited periodically by the plague.
Again, what are we as pontists to say about the fallen master of many Christian periods, the Roman genius, whose architecture and road-making were copied? The Roman baths were not copied, of course, for a clean body was not regarded as sacred in a Christian way; but the Roman bridges, roads, aqueducts, were favourite models for imitation. Many a ruler, from Charlemagne to the Moorish zealots in Spain, not only valued their service, but restored them carefully. Mediæval architects invented very little in bridge-building; their first work tried to recover the lost Roman art; and then, little by little, they added some ideas to their acquired knowledge. Here and there they equalled theRomans, as in the great bridges at Montauban and Cahors, which Brangwyn has painted with a vigorous enjoyment; but in most of their efforts the design was either too rustic or too lubberly, so ponderous was the technical inspiration. Far too often their ideal of strength was a mere man-at-arms, brave but underbred. Rivers were obstructed by immense piers, for instance, by which spates were turned into dangerous inundations; and footways along bridges were so narrow that safety recesses for pedestrians had to be built out from the parapets into the piers. Even in exceptions to this rule of ungainliness, as in much Spanish workmanship, architects were overapt to make the use of bridges a tiring penance that wayfarers could not avoid. Thus the bridge over the Sella at Cángas de Onis has a lofty footway shaped like a gable; to-day it is little used, for the climbing exercise that it offers to everybody is put out of vogue by a modern bridge, its neighbour and rival. In brief, many gabled bridges in Spain[6]were made narrow enough to be useless to wheeled traffic and friendly to pack mules; friendly in a mediæval manner, for a seasoning of peril was added to their inconvenience. Most of them are without parapets; and when their rivers flood into roaring spates, and across their giddy pathways a gale sweepseagerly, an Alpinist can enjoy a mad crossing, after dark, between dinner and bedtime.
Frank Brangwyn has drawn for us, with as much fidelity as vigour, one of the finest gable bridges, the Puente de San Juan de las Abadesas at Gerona. This bridge has a great historic interest. The Moors left in Spain a peculiar grace of style which native architects often united to their own qualities—a haughty distinction and a lofty ambition. Consider the immense nave in Gerona Cathedral, a glorious pointed arch not less than seventy-three feet from side to side, almost double the width of Westminster nave. It belongs to the fifteenth century, yet in the magic of its youthful hope it proves that its architect, Guillermo Boffiy, was a child of the thirteenth. And the great central arch of the Gerona bridge has in it some of the soaring courage that transcends all expectation in the cathedralnave[7].
Yet this gabled bridge, though very spacious and attractive, has less charm than its rival at Orense, in Gallicia, a noble monument 1319 feet long, built in 1230 by BishopLorenzo, and repaired in 1449 by Bishop Pedro de Silva. The six arches differ in size, yet their combination is symmetrical; four are gracefully pointed, and the finest one rises above the Miño to a height of a hundred and thirty-five feet, and its brave span, a hundred and fifty-six feet from pier to pier, is the widest of any in Spain.[8]
PUENTE DE SAN JUANPUENTE DE SAN JUAN DE LAS ABADESAS AT GERONA, SPAIN
PUENTE DE SAN JUAN DE LAS ABADESAS AT GERONA, SPAIN
It is commonly supposed that gable bridges wereinvented by the genius of Gothic architecture. Yet Marco Polo found them in China,[9]and the Roman bridge of two arches at Alcantarilla is hog-backed. Usually the Romans liked a flat road over a river, though it was easier and less expensive to build a steep bridge from low embankments. But the bridge at Alcantarilla, about twenty miles below Seville, is quite steep enough to be the forerunner of all the gable bridges erected inSpain.[10]
There is little in stone bridge building that the Romans did not discover. To this day their aqueducts and bridges are models of thoroughness, and apologise nobly for a civilization that rambled through wonderful achievements into a gradual suicide. While arenas for barbaric sports were being built at a great expense, and while most of the Roman roads circulated war, did many persons guess that their imperial genius in handicraft would outlive their statesmanship by hundreds of years? Who knows why Rome very often squandered her energy on the least fruitful phases of strife, neglecting those benign phases out of which intellectual vigour ought to have come, age after age, in a continuous zeal for research, and revision, and improvement? She neglected science, for instance, and her bad example was followed by the mediæval Church. Not a mind had any inkling of the fact that the brightest hopes for mankind would emerge from science, like medicinal plants from dry seeds. Innumerable millions died fromignorance because Pasteur and Lister were not evolved until the races of man were perhaps a million years old. In the creeping progress of humanity the dead have been mocked by every good discovery; there has been nothing so cruel as a healing success, for it has ever been too late by thousands of years.
To visualise this truth in the strife of man is a great trial to any mind; but yet it is the one thing that a pontist cannot evade without being disloyal to his honour as a student, since he knows that strife has ruled over the tremendous drama which has had for its theatres the highways and byways, and for its actors the races of man, continuously at odds with one another. If this truth had to be deleted from the drama, then I, for one, would not be a student of roads and bridges. As well read the Greek tragedians after deleting all the passions that make for contests and crises.
So let us try to get nearer and nearer to strife, the most active genius in the life of our subject. Why has it set tribe against tribe, nation against nation, class against class, tradesman against tradesman, intellect against intellect? Must we clear from our minds all the shibboleths of modern idealism? and feel pity for the supergood when they chatter to us about their isles of dreams, their unsubstantial fairy places, where “cosmic conscience” reigns with “the universal brotherhood of man,” and where “everlasting peace” promises never to be effete and sterile? When a Wellington of Finance erects a Peace Palace, at TheHague or elsewhere, are we to be glad that the pomp of irony did not leave the world when Gibbon died? Should we gain anything at all if we were bold enough to condemn the whole past life of the human race? Ought we to pass with Carlyle from democratic hopes into hero worship, and thence into a hot-brained conviction that faith in mankind is impossible? Are we to suppose that man has transformed into instincts the worst habits he has acquired, so that his ultimate destiny upon earth will be determined by his attitude to these instincts? Will he obey them or will he try to conquer them?
GREAT SPANISH BRIDGEA GREAT SPANISH BRIDGE, THE ALCÁNTARA AT TOLEDO. MAINLY THE WORK OF ARCHBISHOP TENORIO, A.D. 1380; FORTIFIED BY ANDRES MANRIQUE, A.D. 1484. ON THIS SITE A ROMAN BRIDGE WAS DESTROYED IN A.D. 871
A GREAT SPANISH BRIDGE, THE ALCÁNTARA AT TOLEDO. MAINLY THE WORK OF ARCHBISHOP TENORIO, A.D. 1380; FORTIFIED BY ANDRES MANRIQUE, A.D. 1484. ON THIS SITE A ROMAN BRIDGE WAS DESTROYED IN A.D. 871
Again, is there a glint of hope in the hysterical words that came to Charles Dickens when he wrote as follows, after a visit to Chillon?—“Good God, the greatest mystery in all the earth, to me, is how or why the world was tolerated by its Creator through the good old times, and wasn’t dashed to fragments.” You see, Dickens understood the terror of strife, but he made no effort to be calm with Darwin, who knew that the evolution of man could not have happened if nascent humanity had been unfit to endure the sufferings of its daily contests both against Nature’s violence and against a terrible fauna. Thus a pitiless character was thrust upon primitive man by the environment in which unlimited strife worked his development; and what the ages have evolved only a long future can amend in another evolution. What Dickens called unpardonable cruelty was to the distant past what strikes are to our own time, a weapon, a phase of war, approved bypublic opinion; and let us remember also that the cruelties which a hard life has bred, and turned into customs, have not shown an egotism fiercer than that primal necessity which has compelled life among the species to feed on lives. Dickens himself, while writing his condemnation of the past, was nourished by the death of many living things; was in himself a mysterious alembic that transmuted food, slain life, into benign health and action. Had he been logical in his feelings toward strife he would have had mercy on those forms of life that feed mankind; in other words, he would have died of hunger rather than be cruel; but, naturally, the manifestations of strife hateful to him were those that happened to be far off from his needs and sympathies. Yet he ought to have seen in the national efforts of his time that strife, though easy to rebel against, is woefully difficult to improve, since even kindness of heart when shown in promiscuous charities may unseat from their thrones in the public mind many good racial qualities, doing as much harm as ever was done by mediæval brutality.
“Let me think” should be everybody’s motto; nothing less than arduous thinking can save us from the cant and the sentimentalism which at the present time enfeebles England.[11]Let me give you an example. Yesterday I wastalking to a friend about the mediæval battle-bridge. Putting before him Frank Brangwyn’s excellent sketch in water-colour of Parthenay Bridge, I said: “This fortified gateway belongs to the thirteenth century, and through its machicolations red-hot stones and boiling oil were poured down many times upon the head and shoulders of an attack. Thegateway was built between 1202 and 1226, not without help from English money, for the Josselin-Larchêveques of Parthenay were allies of the Anjou Plantagenets, who gave us English kings; but a few years later our English troops were driven from Parthenay by LouisIX, calledSt.Louis. Can’t you imagine the assault? Would you care to rush that gateway in a thirteenth-century manner?”
My friend, a Quaker, was scandalised. “Rush the gateway?” he cried. “Red-hot stones and boiling oil! What imbecile savagery! Thank goodness, we are not savages now; life has improved wonderfully. To-day most men of sense fear war, and those who don’t fear it scorn it for moral reasons.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “Do you really believe that the history of this old war-bridge is more strifeful than the industrialism of to-day? 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? Chivalry did try to put some generous feeling into mediæval warfare; and how much feeling of chivalry do you expect to find in the battles of industry? Are the strategic victories of finance morehumane than were the politics of the Black Prince? Do they harm the defeated less, or more? And can you explain, old chap, why it is that Quakers, Jews, Hindus, though they fight for money with an astuteness that never flinches, prattle about peace after office hours? Their ideal of peace includes all warfare except that which employs battleships and big battalions. Myself, I would sooner lead an attack against the PorteSt.Jacques on Parthenay Bridge than be opposed in trade by a wealthy firm of shrewd Quakers, whose great skill in the combats of trade would soon ruin me. I shouldn’t have a chance of doing credit to myself in a dangerous adventure.”
WAR-BRIDGE PARTHENAYA WAR-BRIDGE OF THE MIDDLE AGES AT PARTHENAY IN FRANCE
A WAR-BRIDGE OF THE MIDDLE AGES AT PARTHENAY IN FRANCE
There is nothing more odious than the modern cant about peace. 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. James Martineau went so far as to picture the strife as absolutely barbaric. He said: “The battle for existence rages through all time and in every field; and its rule is to give no quarter—to despatch the maimed, to overtake the halt, to trip up the blind, and drive the fugitivehost over the precipice into the sea.” Tennyson also went too far when he wrote about strife; too far, because he did no more than skim along the surface of a primordial truth, by which man’s history has been made a part of Nature’s. From Tennyson we gain no help at all; he tells us merely “that hope of answer or redress” must come from “behind the veil.” In his opinion Nature cares for nothing, so careless is she of the single life, and so ready to let a thousand types go. Yet her realms teem with miracles of contentious life, and I cannot think of any great extinct species that I should care very much to meet in a country walk. I do not wish to hob-nob with the Iguanodon, for instance. When John Stuart Mill complains that “nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are Nature’s everyday performances,” he forgets the far-reaching harm that men can do within the tolerance of “Old Father Antic, the Law”; and, besides this, he forgets to explain how a world of organisms ruled by hunger and thirst and passion, and dependent on innumerably various climates, could be other than Providence has decreed.
To talk as Mill did is to imply that Nature sins against us, and against herself, when she allows any species to grow completely unfit for the gift of life. Yet her aim is to protect life from the suicidal fertility of lives, so that the whole economy of Nature demands death in the highest interests of the future. When we die we do an act of charity to our children and grandchildren; for if each of us lived to be active at ninety, the world would need a much smallerpopulation of young people. It is our frail tenure of life that renders a high birthrate necessary; and progress gains more from the enterprise of vigorous youth than from the too cautious knowledge of old age. So I do not understand the pother raised by Mill and others over the benign discipline of death that Nature wields as a servant of the Eternal.
Believe me, a pontist can never solve even one problem in the law of battle if he lets himself be scared into a revolt against natural forces; scared by the incessant tragedy that each day’s little trip along the highways of history brings in a challenging manner before his mind’s eye. He must try to protect himself with humour and irony and scorn, as Thackeray tried to save himself from a feminine heart. The main point is that he should learn to live outside himself; then self-pity will not be his troublesome guide through the labyrinths of strife.
Cardinal Newman asks us to believe that human life has been terrible—“a vision to dizzy and appal”—because mankind has been punished by God for some aboriginal sin too abominable for mercy and forgiveness. This doctrine is completely dark and horrible. If it were illumined on one side only, like the moon, it would invite the companionship of thought, but it gives no light whatever. Indeed, it implies that no civilization has been free to improve its own lot and to get progressive reason from the large brain of man. To blame God for our own follies—to say that our social acts are wild and foolish because we are beingpunished by Heaven for a sin of ignorance committed by man in the babyhood of the human race—what is this but a charge of illimitable cruelty against the Creator? Besides, we learn from the much nobler doctrine of evolution that human nature, despite all her wilful fondness for wrong actions, has crept up and up from a very low beginning, in an ascent continually wonderful, though infinitely slow and tragical. The accumulated progress excites in me as much awe as I should feel in the presence of a resurrection from the dead. Indeed, what is evolution but a vast drama of resurrections, by means of which base forms of life have become gradually better? Can anyone suppose that Milton, had he been a contemporary of Darwin, would have turned from the endless hopes that evolution ought to inspire, just to dally with fallen angels and with an errant couple in the Garden of Disobedience? And can we suppose that Newman would have written his famous page on the doctrine of original sin, had he not turned his back on modern thought and knowledge?
Amid the doubts and difficulties that trouble this meditation on strife, just a few things are bright and clear-eyed, like illumined windows which on dark nights cause jaded tramps to feel less their lone wayfaring; and these things I have watched for years in the life of bridges, where their activity never ceases. It is clear enough, for instance, that custom and convention have acted as narcotics on the mind, sending reason to sleep. This explains why human strife has never turned to the best use the great opportunitiesthat each generation has inherited. To custom and convention, mankind has owed the social rule which has sown the seed of death in every civilization; the rule of illogic and discord, “Each for All, yet Each for Himself.” Let us see this rule in operation on the highways, taking care to note how it has inflamed egotism and deadened both the sense of honour and the spirit of citizenship.
The just and beautiful principle that every man lives by his mother the State, and that he must do good for the benefit of the commonweal, was enforced upon mediæval landowners by thetrinoda necessitas, or triple obligation, which among other duties made the upkeep of roads and bridges a general charge on all owners of the English soil. Not even the religious houses were exempted, though the State favoured them in other ways. But the second principle of the social rule—“Each for Himself”—interfered constantly with the first principle, bringing trouble after trouble into the administration of the highways, as into all other useful and necessary things. Landowners transferred their duties to their tenants, and very often the tenants made negligence a habit, until at last the Law and the Church became equally active for the people’s benefit. Again and again bishops offered “forty days’ indulgence to all who would draw from the treasure that God had given them valuable and charitable aid towards the building and repair” of a poor bridge ruined by neglect, or of some quagmire which had been a decent road.[12]It happened in the year 1318 thatthe Law pottered into action because a timber bridge at Old Shoreham, in Sussex, had been scandalously ill-used by those who were responsible for its upkeep. Half of it had fallen into the river. Year after year an evident crime against the State had gone on publicly, yet no one had taken steps to make the dangerous condition of the bridge a subject for legal enquiry and punishment. The village grumbled, of course, but grumblers have never had any initiative of their own; unless a man of action has come to be their conscience and their leader, they have done nothing. 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 themselvespontificesbecause they built and repaired the Pons Sublicius, a bridge of stakes at the foot of Mount Aventine?[13]The sheriff and his officers had a different question to consider; they would wish to know whether the Archbishop had been an astute man of the world, whether he had made his tenants responsible to thetrinoda necessitas. If not, then he and the Law were in a fix, and peasants over their ale would guffaw with malice. But enquiries proved that his Gracewas a canny landlord; the tenants alone ought to have mended the bridge; and so the Law was free to act with a vigour that common folk knew too well.
Its agent was the bailiff, good Simon Porter, and Porter set out at once to collect money from the tenants. If any tenant either declined to pay his share or was unable to pay it, then the bailiff put his hand on some marketable property, perhaps a few sheep, or a cow, or “a gaggle of geese.” The necessary thing was to take enough; never an easy thing to do in the country, as no one cared to pay a fair price for escheated live stock. The peasant has ever been at heart a pawnbroker. But Simon Porter had no reason to look upon his troublesome work as a high office of trust important enough to keep his name alive for six hundred years. It was when he met Hamo de Morston, a truculent fellow, that Simon entered into history. Hamo de Morston was a logical egoist, he fought for his own hand only, trying to use the State at a trivial cost to himself; but now this amusement, after prospering for years, brought him suddenly face to face with legal pains and penalties—a thing most irritating to a bad temper. So Hamo refused to pay; and his fury was terrific when Porter confiscated a horse. Even then he was not defeated, for he set lawyer against lawyer, and one day a petition was sent by him to King EdwardII. The rascal was a good fighter, but his appeal to the supreme authority failed; the bailiff’s action was approved, and Hamo had costs to pay.
As for the bridge, it was repaired, and repaired very well. Twenty years ago it was in use, a shaggy and venerable structure, not yet crippled by old age. Then certain highwaymen, popularly known as road officials, visited Old Shoreham, and there they tried to prove that a bridge admired by landscape painters was unfit for a commercial time. The poor bridge! At this moment it has no charm at all; not only is it dull, it is neat in a shabby way—a discord in good surroundings, like bankruptcy at a wedding breakfast. So we pass from Hamo de Morston to our own roadway officials, and find ourselves in the presence of a public bridge injured by public servants. To Hamo we can give a little sympathy, he fought for his creed of self and paid costs, whereas highway boards have never been fined for spoiling old bridges. Perhaps they do not hate venerable architecture, but they belong to a system of public service that is ill-equipped for its work, receiving neither criticism from the newspaper press nor supervision from county committees of independent architects.
That the State has been wronged by these public servants is known to all artists and antiquarians; also the fact is advertised by the great many hideous railway bridges that demean towns and blemish the country. In this matter, as in others, the State must defend her own just rights, so as to get by compulsion what a free egotism has declined to give—efficiency and good taste. It is possible that England has not suffered a great deal more than the Continent; for even in France, despite the excellent administrationof thePonts et Chaussées, crimes against noble bridges have been committed, as when the second ancient bridge at Cahors was lost in a storm of local party politics. But England happens to be poor in great old bridges, whereas the Continent is rich; we cannot afford to lose even the modest little ballads of arched stone which have resisted floods for many generations, while working as necessary drudges in the making of England. Trivial they are when compared with the bridges of Isfahan or with many of those in France and Spain, but yet they are hallowed by time, and they mimic the gentle rusticity of English landscapes. It is a crime to spoil them, because modern bridges for heavy traffic can be built at a lesser cost near by the little mute historians.
To the Scotch, on the other hand, many a fine old brig is a Burns of the highways; and this sentiment for history and for sylvan poetry has kept from the cruel hands of industrialism some very attractive single-arched bridges, and some long bridges also, notably the rhythmical Brig of Stirling, which Brangwyn has chosen as an example of quiet good taste in mediæval civic architecture. The Brig of Stirling is a Scotch citizen of the dour old school, but warmed with an undercurrent of that kindly emotion which even the canniest Scot is glad to show off when he is away from business. I am inclined to think that not even a militant suffragette would have folly enough to attack the Scotch brigs; she would be fascinated by their names, and this would keep her out of mischief. Such a name as the Brigo’ Doon is music combined with a racial vigour. No weak people would have invented it, and no dull people could have retained such a poetic name.
BRIDGE OF STIRLINGTHE OLD WAR-BRIDGE OF STIRLING
THE OLD WAR-BRIDGE OF STIRLING
The Irish also are fond of bridges, like the true unspoiled Welsh. As late as a century ago Irish peasants were pious in their attitude to any bridge that crossed a dangerous river; they saluted it reverently because of its friendliness to poor wayfarers, and because good thoughts come from simple hearts. As for the Welsh, thanks partly to their Celtic blood and partly to the waywardness of their rivers, they have been known as pontists for a very longtime. In the romantic hills their bridges seem to belong to Nature herself, so lovingly have they been united to the spirit of ancestral landscapes; whereas the industrial parts of Wales make the bridges of trade into vile objects, as if beauty has no right to a home where money is earned out of coal mines, and ironworks, and the debilitating factory system. 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? And why is it that only a person here and there, after compelling himself to leave the atmosphere of custom, sees our industrial war clearly, and views it in its relation to the body social?
The truth is that our creed of self has become instinctive; we cannot without an effort live for an hour outside our personal interests; and thus the beautiful principle “Each for All” has to be kept alive by a host of active laws that encircle us with compulsion. Where there is no compulsion we are governed by our preferences. If we like bridges, for instance, we try to protect them from ill-usage; but if they are indifferent to us we care not a straw when engineers add half a dozen uncouth viaducts to the many other misdeeds which they have thrust upon theState. Instead of regarding all bad public work as a sin against the commonweal, we let ourselves be ruled by the creed of self even in our best efforts to serve the State properly.
Is our egotism better or worse than that of the Middle Ages? This seems to be a matter of opinion. Thorold Rogers believed that mediævalism in a good many respects was kinder than our industrialism; and the late Russel Wallace regarded “our social environment as a whole, in relation to our possibilities and our claims,” as “the worst that the world has ever seen.” On the other hand, a great scientist from his laboratory has told us that “the sun rises on a better world every morning.” Gracious! If the sun could speak to us about his complete knowledge of mankind, if he did not obey the law of silence that rules over the greatest motive-powers and creative agents, our conjectures would be less wayward, for sunrays would whisper into our ears the story of the most evil civilization in the whole strife of mankind. In this matter the sun would be authoritative; but how can we poor mortals expect to see the whole past truly when we are half blind to the significance of our own social life? Besides, it is enough for us to see how one civilization has differed from another, and how in many respects all human life has been like the sky, always the same elementally, but never quite the same in colour and form, and in the effects of strife.
A pontist, as he journeys through present-day England, sees very clearly the difference between our commercialtime and the past; for industrialism is plainly out of joint with that which is normal in organic growth, and its workmen are conscious of the unstable energy bred and frittered away by hurry and speed-worship. Consider those dread “hives of industry” where trade bridges are makeshifts, and where the jerry-built villa or cottage is repeated thousands of times, and always in mean streets. Do they not bear witness to the feeling of insecurity from which our age suffers? I shall be told that many things are very well made, as in the case of battleships, motor-cars, engines, steamships, guns, rifles, artillery, surgical instruments, expensive clothes, implements for games, and gigantic metal bridges; but in this good craftsmanship, tradesmen are thorough because they dare not be slipshod; they fear to turn out work that would endanger human life, and business would fail if they angered the specialists of luxury and of sport. Where they are free from restraint, as in work for ordinary households, tradesmen manufacture trash and prosper. In fact, the quicksands of cheapness are to most people in England what cheese in a trap is to mice, or what seasonable bait is to fish. So widespread is the feeling of insecurity that the poorer classes do not think it worth while to buy enduring goods and chattels. Instead of practising a thrift that would hand on furniture to their grandchildren, they say, “Never mind; perhaps these things may last our time.” And this dull pessimism in the creed of self is the most wretched phase of strife that a pontist has to connect with the circulation of trade enterprise.