A book of bridges

by Walter Shaw Sparrow

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.

III

CUSTOM AND CONVENTION

Yet a 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 social concord 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 disease and 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 of generations 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.”

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 repeated by 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 were wild 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.