A book of bridges

by Walter Shaw Sparrow

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 long time. 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 the State. 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 commercial time 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.

CANNON STREET RAILWAY BRIDGE, LONDON