A book of bridges

by Walter Shaw Sparrow

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 fugitive host 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 smaller population 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 being punished 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 opportunities that 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 the trinoda 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 that the 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 themselves pontifices because 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 the trinoda 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 Grace was 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 Edward II. 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 administration of the Ponts 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 Brig o’ 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.