III

PONT SIDIPONT SIDI RACHED AT CONSTANTINE, ALGERIA. BUILT IN 1908-1912The span of the great arch is 70 metres. The work illustrates the longevity of custom and convention, being inspired partly by Roman aqueducts and partly by the two famous bridges over the Tech at Céret, in France, one of which dates from the year 1321. The span of its great arch is 45m. 45cm.III

PONT SIDI RACHED AT CONSTANTINE, ALGERIA. BUILT IN 1908-1912

The span of the great arch is 70 metres. The work illustrates the longevity of custom and convention, being inspired partly by Roman aqueducts and partly by the two famous bridges over the Tech at Céret, in France, one of which dates from the year 1321. The span of its great arch is 45m. 45cm.

CUSTOM AND CONVENTION

Yeta pontist must be exceedingly careful when his tramps through any period bring him in touch with ethical problems. He should try to live on the highways of history, not in order to pass judgments on vice and on crime, but because he wants to see clearly, under the form of visual conception, why socialconcord and equity have never fared well, even the best forms of civilization being only half-educated barbarisms that allow their strife to be drilled by a vast number of active laws. These phases of compulsion go on increasing, yet they fail to resolve into harmony those rapacious egotisms that compete against each other in the body social like microbes in living tissues. As soon as a pontist understands his wayfaring through history, as soon as he feels at home in the general atmosphere of the human drama, he is glad to be a realist; then nothing that societies do or have done seems unexampled and inexplicable. To him, for example, the infanticide practised age after age by savage tribesmen is not more terrible than the death of babies in the slums of civilized towns, or than the degradation brought before his mind by the alert philanthropy that saves little English children from cruelties. To him, again, the slaughter on a great battlefield is not more woeful than the annual sacrifice of lives in street accidents, and railway smashes, and mine disasters, and sea tragedies; as well as in games and sports, in nursing the sick, and in all trades and professions. He is not scared by the fact that the sum of human life is war, but he is scared by the primordial customs and conventions that make the incessant war infinitely less humane than it could be and ought to be. So a pontist in his attitude to history is a sociologist, and not an abstract moralist. Each body social and its systems of circulation are to him what patients are to medical students in a hospital; he has to learn to be attentive to all diseaseand to make his diagnoses thoughtfully. Even then frequent mistakes will occur. One thing he must regard as his clinical thermometer: it is the truth that civilizations in their intercourse with right and wrong have been governed by habits and customs and conventions, which have caused most men to be other men; so that most human actions, whether studied in old history or in the current routine of living, are mere quotations from other human actions, instead of being like original ideas in a well-ordered composition. In other words, the ordinary human brain has tried to be automatic, as if to be in harmony with the rest of the vital organs.

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. Even more, at this moment in England, and even in busy Lancashire, where to-day’s machinery abounds, there are primitive bridges which are not even primitively structural; bridges which need in their making not more thought than is given to a difficult sneeze when we are troubled by a cold (p.60). When I look at them and think of the myriads ofgenerations which in different parts of the world have used bridges akin to these, I am so awed with fear that I feel like a baby Gulliver in a new Brobdingnag where everlasting conventions are impersonated by brainless giants whose bodies are too vast for my eyes to focus. Often, too, I say to myself: “In the presence of this dreadful conservatism, this inept mimicry that endures unruffled by a thought for many thousands of years, you are as futile as a single microbe would be on a field of battle. Or imagine that the microbe is in Westminster Abbey, and that it has a blurred sense that makes it dimly conscious of all the many historic things there gathered together; then you have a figure of yourself in your relation to the mingled good and bad in history. For the Abbey shows in its architecture that convention, though a bane to ordinary minds, is the grammar of progress to the rare men of genius who from time to time shake the world free from its bondage to fixed customs and routines, and compel it to move on to other routines and customs, where it will dawdle until other geniuses come out of the dark and find in new mother-ideas a compulsive force that works a new liberation.”

BRIDGE OVER THE CLAINOLD BRIDGE OVER THE CLAIN, NEAR POITIERS

OLD BRIDGE OVER THE CLAIN, NEAR POITIERS

This, indeed, is the only encouragement that I am able to perceive when I watch in history the periodical strife between inveterate conventions and the mother-ideas of genius. In the case of bridges, for example, the first mother-ideas were those that enabled a primitive craftsman here and there to copy with success the least difficult of Nature’s models. What this man achieved was repeatedby his tools, the ordinary men of his tribe; then other tribes got wind of the discovery and began to make similar bridges, until at last several conventions were formed, and they became widespread and stereotyped. When a convention was very simple and also effective for a given purpose, no one wished to see it developed, so it entered that domain of infertile mimicry where stone tools and weapons remained unpolished for years to be reckoned by scores of thousands. If experience had shown that chipped flint in a rough state would neither cut wood nor break human skulls, then at an early date polishing would have been found out by a savage of genius who yearned to prove that his invention could be made useful; but rough-hewn stones were rudely efficient, so mankind settled itself in a routine and plodded on and on automatically. And thus it was also in the case of many primitive bridges which became so firmly fixed in conventions that now they seem to be contemporary with nearly all the ages of human strife. Not in any other way can we explain their present use by many Europeans, as well as by the natives of Asia, and Africa, and America (p.145). On the other hand, when a primeval bridge did not serve its purpose efficiently, when it was useless in tribal wars and dangerous in rainy seasons, then a mother-idea paid it a visit from time to time, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Whence the idea came we do not know. It entered a mind that was ready to receive it, coming unbidden from a place unknown like an abiding quest from a spirit world.The mind that welcomed the idea was neither masculine nor feminine, it was both, a thing androgynous, for genius has ever been a single creative agent with a double sex. The tools with which genius has worked—the selected traditions and conventions, the acquired knowledge, the original observation, and the handicrafts of social life—have ever been plain enough, of course; but to see and admire tools is not to understand the advent of those imperishable ideas which not only transform history, but turn all ordinary men into their mimics and mechanics. For instance, whenever we light a candle or a fire we obey the genius of a Palæolithic savage, who, with sparks beaten from flint into some inflammable grass or moss or fluff from cocoons, brought into the world the earliest missionaries, artificial light and heat. Similarly, whenever we walk across a timber bridge, whether old or new, we are servants to the earliest savage who with a stone axe cut down a tree, causing it to fall from bank to bank of a river or chasm. Delete from history even two mother-ideas—the invention of wheels, for example, and the evolution of arched bridges from Nature’s models—and how many civilizations would you cancel? Omit from the annals of our “modern democracy” not more than three mother-ideas: the discovery of steam as a motive-power, the discovery of microbes, and the use of metal in bridge building. In a twinkling we go back to the middle of the eighteenth century, when hospitals were cesspools,[14]when surgery and medicine werewild empirics, when travellers in stage-coaches longed for the general Turnpike Act (a boon delayed till 1773), and when England was unspoiled by jerry-builders and a factory system. A pontist, then, if he understands his subject, looks upon genius as the solar system of human societies, hence he cannot be a willing servant to any mob-rule or mob-worship.

On the contrary, he would gladly see in every town a fine church dedicated to the men and women of genius who with great mother-ideas have tried to better the strife of human adventure. For two reasons I used the phrase “have tried to better.” In the first place, the constituents of new knowledge, when mingled with the old customs and conventions, lose much of their good invariably; and, next, the amalgam thus formed may become explosive. At this moment we see in our new art, the art of flying, how precarious is the charity that mother-ideas bring into the battlefields of competition. What aeroplanes can do in war is already the only consideration that the mother-idea of mechanical flight receives from the most alert minds; and very soon military engineers will be called upon to invent bomb-proof covers for every strategic bridge which cannot be displaced by a tunnel. So we compel airmanship to torment us with visions of wrecked cities, when she ought to delight us with bird’s-eye views of happier countries.

In brief, the more we study mother-ideas the more clearly we perceive that they in themselves are phases ofstrife, for they have power to do harm as well as good. Providence for ever tries to quicken the inept human mind, since no blessing is granted to us without its attendant bane. Electricity has dangers of its own, so has fire; Pasteurism has dangers of its own, so has food; radium is curative and very perilous, like the sea or the sun; and all other good things ask us to pick our way with care between danger and utility.

The most tragic element of all in human indiscretion is the mindless routine which has deadened the brain of ordinary men. There is in Lancashire, for example, a charming valley where six or seven old bridges make a few minutes’ walk a very long pilgrimage through the history of primitive conventions. Wycollar the valley is called, and antiquaries and pontists ought to go there at once, but not in motor-cars that devour topography as well as miles. One bridge is exceedingly low in the scale of thought and skill; indeed, no prehistoric tool or weapon stands below it. Even the Adam of Evolution, if he ever lived in rock-strewn places, had common sense enough probably to choose a flat stone and to lay it across a deep rivulet, so as to save his children from danger. Such is the most primeval of the Wycollar bridges: three schoolboys could make a smaller one between two April showers. For the stone is not a huge slab ten feet long by four wide, such as we find not far from Fernworthy Bridge, Dartmoor; nor is it like the single slab over the Walla Brook on Dartmoor. It is a long lintel-stone, and in eight or nine strides a little girlwould cross it easily.[15]If the stone were new, and also alone in the valley, no one would think more of it than of a plank used as a temporary bridge; but the stone is very old, and lintel-bridges are ancient customs in the valley of Wycollar. If Nature once in a century allowed bridges to tell their tales, I should expect two of the Wycollar historians to trace their lineage through a great many ancestors until at last they came to a time when the first nomads hacked their way with flint axes through the undergrowth of Lancashire forests, and cursed in primitive words or sounds at the virile brambles whose thorns were sharper than pointed flints.

The second bridge of lintel-stones at Wycollar is a simple adaptation from one of Nature’s bridges, the bridge of stepping-stones littered over the beds of rivers by earthquakes and floods. When the stepping-stones are long you turn them on end and use them as piers; when they are short and squat you pile them up into piers; then lintel-stones are put from pier to pier, and from pier to each bankside. Here is the A B C of primitive bridge-making with slabs, boulders, and fragments of rock. It needs very much less mother-wit than that which enabled primitive men to survive innumerable hardships, and to breed and rear thosetrue artists who in Palæolithic times, about 50,000 years ago,[16]turned a good many European caves into the first public art galleries, famous for their rock-paintings and for their sculpture and engravings. Thus the Altamira Cavern, near Santander, in Northern Spain, and the La Madeleine cave in the Dordogne (about eighty miles east of Bordeaux), are among the prehistoric museums, or art galleries, which have given us work very far in advance of the Wycollar lintel-bridges; so far, indeed, that trees and shrubs in the valley ought to blush with shame by keeping autumn tints in their leaves all the year round. This hint from Dame Nature might awaken some little self-reproach in the Lancashire weavers and peasants whose heavy clogs clatter day after day over the lintel-stones, wearing them into troughs where rainwater collects pretty pictures from the sky.

THE WEAVERS’ BRIDGEIN THE VALLEY OF WYCOLLAR, LANCASHIRE: THE WEAVERS’ BRIDGE

IN THE VALLEY OF WYCOLLAR, LANCASHIRE: THE WEAVERS’ BRIDGE

Not long ago a busy official mind in the neighbourhood was troubled by one of the bridges at Wycollar, named the Weavers’ Bridge, a dull-witted primitivity made with three lintel-stones and two rough piers in the water. Though the busy official mind was troubled it did not suggest that the bridge should be put under glass and kept with as much care as the perfect skeleton of a mastodon would receive; nor did it wish to build a successor in the cheapest style of industrial metal-work. No; what the official mind advertised as a fortunate inspiration was a foolish little act of commonplace vandalism. It set a mason to chisel out of existence the trough worn in the lintel-stones by generationsof clog-wearers! I have two photographs, now historic, in which the trough can be seen distinctly; but the poor weavers have no such consolation. Their ancestors’ work has to be done all over again, and they know that their great-grandchildren will find in the lintel-stones not a trough but a vague hollow scarcely deep enough to hold a few raindrops. Mr. Sargisson wrote to tell me this pathetic story of a crisis in antiquarianism. But it is fair to add that the busy official mind was content with one foolish act; it spared the rude pillar on the left bank,though this rough stone looks like a small menhir and completes the primeval bridge.

And now let us look at the survival of convention under a form that is even more distressing. Is it true that in many times and lands human beings have been sacrificed not to bridges, but to the spirits of floods and storms which have been feared as destroyers of bridges? One good reference to this question will be found in Francis M. Crawford’s “Ave Roma Immortalis.” The most venerated bridge in ancient Rome was the Pons Sublicius, whose history dated from the time of Ancus Marcius, who reigned twenty-four years—B.C.640-616. In much later times, long after the good fight that made Horatius Cocles famous for ever, strange ceremonies and superstitions lingered around the Pons Sublicius. On the Ides of May, which were celebrated on the fifteenth of the month, Pontiffs and Vestals came in solemn state to the bridge, accompanied by men who carried thirty effigies representing human bodies. The effigies were made of bulrushes, and one by one they were thrown into the Tiber, while the Vestals sang hymns or the priests chanted prayers. What did this rite signify? A tradition popular in Rome taught children to believe that the effigies took the place of human beings, once sacrificed to the river in May. This tradition is attacked by Ovid, “but the industrious Baracconi quotes Sextus Pompeius Festus to prove that in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber for one reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise sacrificed until the year of the City 657,when, Cnæus Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus being consuls, the Senate made a law that no man should be sacrificed thereafter.”

It is possible, if not, indeed, probable, that the effigies were made at first in order to placate the common people who were indignant over the loss of a festival. We can imagine what would be said to-day if Cup-finals were stopped by Act of Parliament; and the Romans, in their fool-fury over “sport” at second-hand, were always glad to appease their curiosity with shows of bloodshed. Further, in the folk-lore of later times bridges and rivers are connected with the primitive rite of killing women and men as a sacrifice to evil spirits. This dread tradition is related now in the Asiatic provinces of Turkey, as I learn from Sir Mark Sykes, whose “Dar-Ul-Islam” is a book for pontists to read. It was at Zakho that Sir Mark heard the followinglegend:—

“Many years ago workmen under their master were set to build the bridge; three times the bridge fell, and the workmen said, ‘The bridge needs a life.’ And the master saw a beautiful girl, accompanied by a bitch and her puppies, and he said, ‘We will give the first [life] that comes by.’ But the dog and her little ones hung back, so the girl was built alive into the bridge, and only her hand with a gold bracelet upon it was left outside.“At the foot of this bridge I found the local Agha, Yussuf Pasha, superintending the collection of the sheep-tax, in which as a large landowner he has an interest.”

“At the foot of this bridge I found the local Agha, Yussuf Pasha, superintending the collection of the sheep-tax, in which as a large landowner he has an interest.”

Try to visualise in all their details these pictures, passing from to-day’s tax-gatherer, a Pasha Lloyd George, into the drama of a very terrible superstition. 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.

Why in the Turkish story the workmen say, “Thebridgeneeds a life,” I do not know. Their superstition goes away from the river and its evil spirits, and from those other demons, which in olden times made winds so variable. Are we then to suppose that men have defiled the charity of bridges with bad spirits other than those that live in wilted conventions and in modern engineers? I prefer to believe that a bridge that fell three times would muddle the superstition of any workman. In fact, there are many bridges which superstition—not modesty in men—has given to the Devil, and as a rule they have been connected with the same legend, or bogie tale. Mr. Baring-Gould takes a great interest in the bridges ascribed to the Devil, and writes about them as follows in his “Book of SouthWales”:—

PONT DU DIABLEPONT DU DIABLE,ST.GOTTHARD PASS

PONT DU DIABLE,ST.GOTTHARD PASS

“The Devil’s Bridge is twelve miles from Aberystwyth; it is over the Afon Mynach just before its junction with the Rheidol[17].... The original bridge was constructed by the monks of Strata Florida, at what time is unknown, but legend says it was built by the Devil.Old Megan Llandunach, of Pont-y-Mynach,Had lost her only cow;Across the ravine the cow was seen,But to get it she could not tell how.“In this dilemma the Evil One appeared to her cowled as a monk, and with a rosary at his belt, and offered to cast a bridge across the chasm if she would promise him the first living being that should pass over it when complete. To this she gladly consented. The bridge was thrown across the ravine, and the Evil One stood bowing and beckoning to the old woman to come over and try it. But she was too clever to do that. She had noticed his left leg as he was engaged on the construction, and saw that the knee was behind in place of in front, and for a foot he had a hoof.In her pocket she fumbled, a crust out tumbled,She called her little black cur;The crust over she threw, the dog after it flew,Says she, ‘The dog’s yours, crafty sir!’“Precisely the same story is told of S. Cadoc’s Causeway in Brittany; of the bridge over the Maine at Frankfort, and of many and many another.“How comes it that we have an almost identical tale in so many parts of Europe? The reason is that in all such structures a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil who haunted the place. When a storm came down on the sea, Jonah had to be flung overboard to allay it. When, in the old English ballad, a ship remained stationary, though all sails were spread, and she could make no headway, the crew ‘cast the black bullets,’ and the lot falls to the captain’s wife, and she is thereupon thrown overboard. Vortigern sought to lay the foundations of his castle in the blood of an orphan boy. A dam broke in Holland in the seventeenthcentury; the peasants could hardly be restrained from burying a living child under it, when reconstructed, to ensure itsstability.[18]“When the [Cistercian] monks of Strata Florida threw the daring arch over the chasm, they so far yielded to the popular superstition as to bury a dog beneath the base of the arch, or to fling one over the parapet.”

Old Megan Llandunach, of Pont-y-Mynach,Had lost her only cow;Across the ravine the cow was seen,But to get it she could not tell how.

Old Megan Llandunach, of Pont-y-Mynach,

Had lost her only cow;

Across the ravine the cow was seen,

But to get it she could not tell how.

“In this dilemma the Evil One appeared to her cowled as a monk, and with a rosary at his belt, and offered to cast a bridge across the chasm if she would promise him the first living being that should pass over it when complete. To this she gladly consented. The bridge was thrown across the ravine, and the Evil One stood bowing and beckoning to the old woman to come over and try it. But she was too clever to do that. She had noticed his left leg as he was engaged on the construction, and saw that the knee was behind in place of in front, and for a foot he had a hoof.

In her pocket she fumbled, a crust out tumbled,She called her little black cur;The crust over she threw, the dog after it flew,Says she, ‘The dog’s yours, crafty sir!’

In her pocket she fumbled, a crust out tumbled,

She called her little black cur;

The crust over she threw, the dog after it flew,

Says she, ‘The dog’s yours, crafty sir!’

“Precisely the same story is told of S. Cadoc’s Causeway in Brittany; of the bridge over the Maine at Frankfort, and of many and many another.

“How comes it that we have an almost identical tale in so many parts of Europe? The reason is that in all such structures a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil who haunted the place. When a storm came down on the sea, Jonah had to be flung overboard to allay it. When, in the old English ballad, a ship remained stationary, though all sails were spread, and she could make no headway, the crew ‘cast the black bullets,’ and the lot falls to the captain’s wife, and she is thereupon thrown overboard. Vortigern sought to lay the foundations of his castle in the blood of an orphan boy. A dam broke in Holland in the seventeenthcentury; the peasants could hardly be restrained from burying a living child under it, when reconstructed, to ensure itsstability.[18]

“When the [Cistercian] monks of Strata Florida threw the daring arch over the chasm, they so far yielded to the popular superstition as to bury a dog beneath the base of the arch, or to fling one over the parapet.”

There! We have followed a superstition—a vile convention in ignorance and cowardice—from the Pons Sublicius in Ancient Rome to the Pont-y-Mynach in South Wales; and the best we can say of it is that in Pagan Rome it went from human victims to effigies of men and women, while in Christian times it passed from human victims to dogs.[19]Mr. Baring-Gould has told us that in bridges, and “in all such structures, a sacrifice was offered to the Spirits of Evil who haunted the place.” Yet it was notina structure—a finished building—that Vortigern wished to offer his sacrifice; he “soughtto lay the foundationsof his castle in the blood of an orphan boy,” so his aim was to placate the Spirits of Evil before his castle was built. As to his conception of the spiritual agencies to be appeased, it would mingle his own passions with the fears bred by his primitive fanaticism. For, as Darwin says, “savages would naturally attribute to spirits the same passions, the samelove of vengeance or simplest form of justice, and the same affections which they themselves felt.”

Now in the case of bridges we have to identify primitive men with the terror inspired by storms and floods; a terror difficult for us to understand in our sheltered lives. Have you read Matthew Paris, who lived in the reign of HenryIII? If not, go to him and study the tempests that he described, and see how villages were desolated by winds and inundations. Amid these disasters the ignorant would cling to ancient superstitions; fear would be pagan out of doors whatever faith might say in church; and I have no doubt at all that the many so-called Devil’s Bridges were as supernatural to the mediæval peasant as were witches. The Dutch of the Middle Ages were more advanced in domestic civilization than our own ancestors; and yet at heart they were cruel pagans, even as late as the seventeenth century, as Mr. Baring-Gould has shown. How very humble human nature ought to be!

Let us pass on, then, to a convention that does not reek like a stricken field. One of the best historians in architecture, Viollet-le-Duc, found in the hills of Savoy a primeval bridge whose structure had been changed very little, if at all, since the days when its ancestors were described by Cæsar and used by the Gauls. It is a timber bridge, known in France asun empilage, a thing piled together rudely, and not constructed with art. Indeed, it needs no carpentry, so it is far behind the social genius of prehistoric lake-dwellers. To make a simple Gaulish bridge,as to-day in Savoy, we must choose a deep-lying river with rugged banks; then with water-worn boulders we make on each bank a rough foundation about fifteen feet square, or more. Upon this we raise a criss-cross of tree trunks, taking care that the horizontal trees jut out farther and farther across the water, narrowing the gap to be bridged by four or five pines. Each criss-cross must be “stiffened” or filled in with pebbles and bits of rock; and across the unfinished road of pines thick boards are nailed firmly.Viollet-le-Duc says:—

“Cette construction primitive ... rappelle singulièrement ces ouvrages Gaulois dont parle César, et qui se composaient de troncs d’arbres posés à l’angle droit par rangées, entre lesquelles on bloquait des quartiers de roches. Ce procédé, qui nest qu’un empilage, doit remonter à la plus haute antiquité; nous le signalons ici pour faire connaître comment certaines traditions se perpétuent à travers les siècles, malgré les perfectionnements apportés par la civilisation, et combien elles doivent toujours fixer l’attention de l’archéologue.”

Does anyone suppose that Savoy would have been loyal to a prehistoric bridge if all primitiveness had vanished from her social life?

Not that Savoy is the only place where criss-cross bridges are still in vogue. Much finer specimens are to be found in Kashmír, thrown across the river Jhelum, the Hydaspes of Greek historians. At Srínagar, the capital city, founded in the sixth centuryA.D., there is a quitewonderful example, for it has many spans, and corbelled out from the footway is a quaint little street of frail shops, rickety cabins with gabled roofs, and so unequal in size that they are charmed with an amusing inequality. I have several photographs of this bridge, and in them I see always with a renewed pleasure its ancestry, its descent from the prehistoric lake-villages, those heralds of Venice and of Old London Bridge (p.216). All the piers are made with deodar logs piled up in the criss-cross manner; those that stretch across the river are cut in varying lengths, and each succeeding row is longer than the one beneath it, so the logs in a brace of piers project towards each other farther and farther over the water, till at last they form an arched shape; not an arch perfect in outline, of course, since the head of it is flattened by the long bearing beams of the roadway. Still, the arched shape is very noticeable.

A pontist should study these rude arches with care, and connect them with similar arches in the Gaulish bridges of Savoy, and also with the historic fact that the first arches built withvoussoirs(i.e. arch-stones) were evolved from vaults roughly constructed with parallel courses of stone and layers of timber (p.155). It is probable that the parallel layers of timber or rows of logs came before the parallel courses of stone, as the evolution of architecture passed from wood to stone. Forests much more than rocks and quarries have been an inspiration to primitive builders, as if the handling of wood has quickened in human nature an arboreal instinct dating from the family trees in the descent of man.

ALBI ON THE TARNAT ALBI ON THE TARN, IN FRANCE, SHOWING ON OUR RIGHTTHE OLD HOUSES, AND ON OUR LEFT, BEYOND THE BRIDGE,THE GREAT OLD CHURCH, FAMOUS FOR ITS FORTIFICATIONS

AT ALBI ON THE TARN, IN FRANCE, SHOWING ON OUR RIGHTTHE OLD HOUSES, AND ON OUR LEFT, BEYOND THE BRIDGE,THE GREAT OLD CHURCH, FAMOUS FOR ITS FORTIFICATIONS

However, another criss-cross bridge in Kashmír ought to be studied in photographs; it is carried on six piers over the Jhelum at Baramula—quite close to the Himalayas; the piers rise from boat-shaped platforms that meet the oncoming water as boats do, with their blunt stems looking brave as rearguards. The parapet is a simple latticework, and the abutments are masonry. Here we have a type of bridge perhaps quite similar to the one from which the Gauls got their rude methods, long after the craft of the lake-dwellers had left its sheltered moorings and adventured across wide rivers.

Is there any concrete evidence to suggest that the bridge with criss-cross piers has gone through many phases of change, of growth or of decadence? Yes. At Archangel, in North Russia, the criss-cross piers are more primitive; instead of being arched they are upright and stiff; but as the bridge is nearly a quarter of a mile long, and as it is taken down every spring (before the ice breaks up noisily, and the Dwina thunders into a raging torrent), crude workmanship in a hurried routine is excusable. The main point is that a bridge akin to the Gaulish type and to the variation in Kashmir exists in North Russia.

And another variation is met with at Bhutan, in India. Brangwyn has drawn it, and we shall study it later in a page on gateway-towers (p.272). In the highlands of Eastern Kurdistan, the borderland of Asiatic Turkey andPersia, travellers find a bridge akin to the Bhutan variety. An excellent book on these highlands has been published,[20]and its authors, very generously, have written for me some valuable notes on the bridges. Before I quote them in full, let me ask you to remember that in Eastern Kurdistan timber is uncommon; hence the criss-cross bridge has been evolved into another sort of primitive structure—a third cousin, several times removed. A Kurdistan bridge is built as follows: “A site is selected, if one can be found, where two immovable and flat-topped masses of rock face one another across the stream to be bridged: an abutment of unhewn stones is built on these, solid, until a height has been reached sufficient to be safe from any flood.

“Then a bracket of four or more rows of poplar trunks is constructed on each abutment; short stout trunks form the bottom row, and those of each succeeding one are naturally longer than the preceding. Unless the bridge is unusually wide in the footway four poplars are enough to form a row, and the butts of the trees, which are kept shore-wards, are weighted down with big stones as counter-weights to hold them in place.

“The top of each row of trunks projects perhaps five feet beyond the preceding one, so that when a bracket of four rows is completed, it may project perhaps twenty feet over the stream.

“When the corresponding bracket has been completed,two long poplar trunks are slung by withies from bracket end to bracket end, a footway of withy hurdles, resting on faggots, is laid down over all, and the bridge is complete. The length of this centre span is of course limited by the height of the poplars available. I should think fifty feet the extreme possible.

“If the width of the river makes it necessary, one or more piers of stone,—I have seen as many as three,—are erected in midstream, preferably on rock foundations. Each of these carries a bracket on each side, but this double bracket is usually made of ‘whole trunks’ and these naturally need no counter-weighting.

“As a rule the footway is about four feet wide, and the whole structure is very elastic, so that, as it is guiltless of handrails, it requires a steady head in the passenger. Further, the central span often acquires a pronounced ‘sag,’ and not seldom an equally pronounced tilt to one side or other. Ancient rule says that the passenger ought not to look down in crossing such a place, lest the sight of water whirling below should unnerve him. In Kurdistan, however, look down he must, and make the best of the hurdles that form the footway; they abound in holes and other traps for the unwary, and a stumble may mean disaster. These bridges, then, though admirably planned (for they are true cantilevers), are not built in the most convenient manner. It is characteristically Oriental, this union of real fineness of design with great casualness in construction and in upkeep. The piers are invariably of stone, never of wood. Goodtimber is almost unknown in Kurdistan. The poplar grows well, but it is at best only a good pole. Stone, on the other hand, is embarrassingly abundant.

“Dry-stone arches are thrown over smaller streams, but their builders, though acquainted with the principle of the vault, do not venture on a span of more than thirtyfeet!”[21]

How do you like the antiquity of conventions? Does it not make you feel that the greatest part of mankind has never shown a particle of desire that its civil institutions should be improved? Note, too, that convention among men is inferior to the instinct of animals, for animals invariably repeat themselves with a passionate interest, whereas we in our formulas grow more and more unfeeling and automatic. Even rabbits when they dig their burrows seem to be guided by inspiration, as if routine work with them is an appetite, like love and hunger; so very different are they from the conservative peasants of Savoy, whose dull routine has delivered down through the centuries a primeval bridge which an hour’s thought could have improved.

One day, let us hope, most men will realise that it is woefully commonplace to be as other men; then conventions will go out of vogue. Courts and clubs will invent new and good etiquettes every year; no game will be stereotyped; and laws will command that such and such things be altered and improved by given dates. For example, if an Act of Parliament decreed that during the next ten years all therailway bridges in England must be made less uncomely and less at odds with the needs of military defence, I have no doubt that compulsion, the scout of civil progress, would discover among engineers more than enough invention.

Railway bridges have been built in obedience to a brace of conventional arguments. It has been argued, first, that because traffic and trade are the main considerations, therefore art is not a matter to be considered; next, that because boards of directors have to please their shareholders, therefore a most strenuous economy must be advertised in a very evident manner, even although its results blot fine landscapes with the shame of uninspired craftsmanship.

Thirty-four years have passed since the late E. M. Barry,R.A., in a thoughtful book, asked the public to understand that modern engineering was not architecture at all, but mere building; and he chose as an example of horrible work the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits. “Here we have the adoption of the trabeated principle of large iron beams laid upon supports of masonry, which rise from the valley beneath, and tower up above the beams to a height far exceeding that which is necessary for their support. I well remember the animated discussions in scientific circles as to the form and design of these beams, which were ultimately decided upon as rectangular tubes. In the many discussions of the merits and defects of circular, elliptical and square sections, I do not recollect that a word was said about architectural effect [or about military convenience and strategy]. Had anyone venturedto suggest that this, too, was an important matter, and that an unsightly structure would be an eyesore for all time, he would have been promptly told that the forms to be employed were an affair of science alone, and that utility pure and simple would dictate their arrangement. In the result a lovely valley was defaced....”

The same convention in mean tradecraft is shown in the tale about Tennyson and the jerry-builder. “Why do you cut down these trees?” the poet asked reprovingly. “Trees are beautiful things.” “Ah!” answered the jerry-builder, “trees are luxuries; what we need is utility.” And what this utility has done for us may be seen in a thousand railway bridges as bad as those that disgrace even the Harrow Road, near by Paddington Station.

It is not my argument that every railway bridge in England is underbred and crapulous; here and there an engineer has made an effort to be architectural, but the usual level of taste is exceedingly vulgar, and not in railway bridges only. 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”; not toforget such vulnerable monsters as the bridges of New York, which airships sent forth by Mr. H. G. Wells have already attacked with prophetic success. Is man really doomed to be the tool of machines? Is this to be his final convention?

In one great picture by Brangwyn the High Level Bridge at Newcastle represents our time. Historically the High Level Bridge has much interest; it displaced the Britannia Bridge as an object of scientific veneration, and from the first it has ranked high in the conventional ugliness that the British public has accepted from engineers. When the Britannia Bridge was proved to be a bad railway line (trains were the decisive critics), and when men of science after weighing their after-thoughts began to find fault with the distribution of metal in the section of its tubes, then engineers said, “And now—now we must have a good railway bridge, completely scientific in all respects.” It was to be built with two roadways, the one for common traffic passing under a railway, so that business folk might be comforted by the noise overhead, which would be as music to any believer in a pushful industrialism. Six arches of metal would be united to five piers and the abutments; their spans would have precisely the same width, i.e. 138ft.10in., for minds long used to office hours and ledgers would enjoy a dead uniformity. Indeed, everybody was pleased with these plans; and in 1849, when Queen Victoria opened the High Level Bridge, artists alone were unexcited with joy. All the rest of the English worldimagined that science, at the cost of only £243,000, had achieved a metal masterpiece. New London Bridge had cost six times as much (i.e. £1,458,311), and her materials were stones, not metals, so once more the north of England had scored heavily over the south. “Besides,” remarked the engineers, “we have put into the superstructure 321 tons of wrought-iron, and into the arched ribs 4,728 tons of cast-iron. Economy.... Scientific economy.... And we have now in use a perfect example of the true bowstring arch in which no cross-bracing is needed.” All this, when discussed at dinners, enriched the flavour of champagne; and opinion became so “heady” that even the “Encyclopædia Britannica” in its eighth edition received the High Level Bridge as an inspired work, and gave to its engineering as much space as the thrifty Romans would have given to all their Spanish bridges and aqueducts.

At last, and all of a sudden, a reaction came; enthusiasm not only caught a chill, it passed in a hurry from its tropical summer into a bad winter of discontent. Scientists went so far as to declare that the High Level Bridge was a youthful indiscretion, advertised publicly in a material which might endure for centuries; and this change of opinion had a great effect on the “Encyclopædia Britannica,” whose ninth edition gave only eighteen lines to its former favourite. Even the bowstring arch was praised no longer, “being essentially more expensive and heavier than a true girder.”

TOWER BRIDGE LONDONTHE TOWER BRIDGE, LONDON

THE TOWER BRIDGE, LONDON

Such are the comedies invented by our new playwright,the genius of civil engineers. Still, the High Level Bridge at Newcastle looks well on a misty day; by moonlight it is more impressive than a Whistler nocturne; and in Brangwyn’s art it represents our industrial age with a vigour that is manly and impressive.

For the rest, from the pictures in this book you will be able to choose for yourself many a convention in the craft of bridge-building. Study, for example, the arches and their shapes, noting those which have a character of their own. These mark a new departure, and are famous. Thus the bridge at Avignon is admired by technicians because its architect, the great Saint Bénézet, gave to the arches what Professor Fleeming Jenkin has described as “an elliptical outline with the radius of curvature smaller at the crown than at the haunch, a form which accords more truly with the linear equilibrated arch than the modern flat ellipse with the largest radius at the crown.” Good Bénézet! Seven hundred and thirty years have gone by since he turned from the Roman tradition of semicircular arches, and designed an excellent arch of his own, a beautiful thing, with a look of triumph in its quiet dignity. Many writers think that L’arc de Saint Bénézet is original also in construction, its vault being composed of four separate bands put side by side in stones of about equal bulk. Sometimes this method of building is condemned as weak, though four of Bénézet’s arches have outlived seven centuries of war; and what engineer would feel disgraced if he were baffled by the terrific floods to which the Rhône is subject?

Moreover, Bénézet was not an originator in this matter; he borrowed from the Romans. In his time there was a bridge that carried the Via Domitiana over the Vidourle at Pont Ambroise; the vaults of its five arches were built in precisely the same manner, in four parallel arcs or bands that touched each other; and the bridge was notable for other reasons, and thus attractive to all bridge-builders. In the first place, a Bull of Pope AdrianIV, dated 1156, now treasured at Nîmes in the Church of Nôtre Dame, has proved that in the twelfth century a chapel was built either on or from the middle of the bridge; it was dedicated toSt.Mary, and it belonged to the chapter of Nîmes Cathedral. A Roman bridge sanctified by a Christian chapel recalls to one’s mind the devotion of the Flavian family that placed the monogram of Christ among the ensigns of ancient Rome. Unless the chapel stood out on corbels from the side of the bridge, it must have been a tiny place of prayer, for the bridge was only three metres wide, while the Via Domitiana had an average width of six metres. Further, the roadway across the bridge was peculiar; it followed in gentle curves the contour of the arches, instead of being either flat (as in most Roman bridges) or with a slight incline at the abutment ends (as in the bridge of Augustus at Rimini).[22]We cannotsuppose that this bridge, so noteworthy in several ways, was unknown to Bénézet, head of the Pontist Friars. Anyhow, the immense Pont du Gard, near Nîmes, a Roman masterpiece, must have been known to him; and the arches of its second tier have in the belly of each vault three parallel bands of equal-sized stones. If this method of construction be unsound, how are we to explain the heroic stability of the Pont du Gard, the finest of all the Roman aqueducts?

Myself, I do not believe that Bénézet was inexpert as a borrower. We shall meet him again (p.236), but let us note here that his work is rhythmical and charming; so it does not belong to the underbred heaviness that bridge-builders often copied from the art of mediæval fortification. This art was an unthrifty engineer; it employed far and away too much blind masonry. Castle walls were ten feet thick, and brave soldiers at home feared the light of day, merely to show respect for arrows and machine-worked catapults. They were not discreet; they made caution too timid and too uncomfortable. Did gallant married knights forget to sleep in their suits of mail? Was a honeymoon in armour a trifle more tiresome than were twelfth-century castles with their arrow slits for windows? For many a year home life was an ill-smelling twilight, particularly to persons of rank; and from this we may infer that the custom of war during the Middle Ages went hand-in-hand with a superstitious dread of death. Bénézet needed courage as well as genius when he slighted in a graceful manner the ponderous conventions of safety that ruled in his day overcastles (1177-1185). It was his arch that saved the vigour of his design from being dull and clumsy.

Some other arches in French bridges have provoked paper wars. This is true of those in the bridges at Albi and Espalion, chosen by Brangwyn partly because of their controversial interest, and partly because they illustrate a mood of handicraft which may be called the uncouth picturesque.

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