A book of bridges

by Walter Shaw Sparrow

These eight subjects are vastly intricate as well as world-wide. In scope they are infinite, if we compare their magnitude with the brief seasons of our perishable days. Let us then ask ourselves a question: How much may we expect to learn about bridges and roads, the distributive agents of all human aims and ambitions? Suppose we live to be threescore years and ten, and suppose we work gladly for eight hours a day from the age of fifteen to that of seventy; encouraged by perfect health, and so delighted with our work that we rescue Sunday from a sabbatarian inertia, and lose no time at all by being drudges to the holiday mania. For a pontist never need be idle; not only has he a thousand problems to reconsider, but in all his walks and rides he is a wayfarer with his hobby. When he feels cocksure he can visit a detestable railway bridge and drink the wormwood of pessimism; and when for a whole week he has tried in vain to follow a devious fact through all its golf-ball antics from bunker to bunker, let him go to a classic bridge such as the Puente Trajan over the Tagus at Alcántara; or let him be as a delighted pupil to Turner’s Walton Bridges or to Brangwyn’s magnificent vision of the Pont St. Bénezét at Avignon.

From time to time, also, after paying his rates and taxes, a pontist should recall to memory the rare great “finds” which his long research has unburied. To enjoy a “find” properly is to feel sure that one has made a gallant entry into El Dorado. Never shall I forget the elation that came to me when at the same moment I came upon two wondrous facts: first, that Nature had created lofty arched bridges, like the Rock Bridge in Virginia and the Pont d’Arc over the Ardèche[1] in France; next, that the earliest archways in handicraft were copied from Nature’s models, and copied with a plodding mimicry, for they were built not with converging archstones, but with courses of stone laid horizontally, just as Nature in stratified rocks had put one flat layer upon another ([p. 155]). To discover facts of this kind is a joy that keeps the heart youthful. Study is not a friend to the Income Tax, but it puts trouble out of mind, a true Nepenthe. Even aged scientists at the Pasteur Institute grow young and merry when they isolate a virulent microbe which for a long time has baffled their curiosity. Yes, research ought to be very popular; in its companionship any person of sense may learn gladly as an “old boy” from his fifteenth year to the seventieth, working daily for eight thorough hours.

How many hours in all would be given to study and thought? In fifty-five years there are twenty thousand and seventy-five days; these we multiply by eight and behold! we have been sedulously youthful for 160,600 hours. Here is a record of industry; it may be unexampled until centenarians become as frequent as M. Metchnikoff wants them to be; and yet, after all, is it a great record? Great it may be in its relation to human weakness, but it means only a trivial apprenticeship to any vocation that lures the mind with illimitable open fields. Our happy toil is nothing more than a gleaner, but it should keep us from being prigs—little students overfed on a little knowledge and too foolish to feel ignorant. What Sir Clifford Allbutt has told the public about the immaturity of modern science is true also of the study of bridges and roads; here, too, knowledge is often hollow while ignorance has a solid weight, even among men who are not content with current formulas. “In every direction we seem to travel but a very short way before we are brought to a stop; our eyes are opened to see that our path is beset with doubts, and that even our best-made knowledge comes but too soon to an end. In every chapter arises problem after problem to beckon us on to farther investigation; yet this way and that we are so baffled by darkness and ignorance that to choose one of these problems for attack, one which is likely to repay his labour, is often beyond the scope of a junior candidate.”[2]

Not that a young man should be very humble in his choice of a problem, for it is with students as with empire makers, who would do very little if a bold indiscretion were unfruitful. Let us have faith in the sunburnt cockiness of extreme youth. When it hunts the far horizon as if mirages of self-deception were the butterflies of ambition, easy to catch and easy to preserve, it is guided by the genius of research; and certainly it has done far more for the world than will ever be done by a reasoning caution that looks too far ahead.

RAILWAY BRIDGE AT ALBI IN FRANCE

About five-and-twenty years ago, when I began in my leisure time to be a pontist, a good old slippered antiquary gave me some hints on what he called “a discreet fervour in the study of bridges.” I was to choose an English county, perhaps Derbyshire, and for eight or nine years I was to live all day long with the bridges, getting them photographed from many points of view, and recovering bits of their stories from dusty old records and forgotten muniment chests. Then a clay-cold book in two volumes was to be written, with a frigid zeal for the accuracy of minute data, and with enough glacial footnotes on every page to strike terror into that general reader who does generally read. No thought at all was to be given to the public, whose vulgar mind had neglected the many antiquaries who had told the historic truth unflinchingly, with a desperate effort to be impartial, unemotional, and yet effective also, like icebergs. I told my adviser that his ideals were those of a studious millionaire. He could afford to write without heart and to be pleased with a bad circulation; could afford also to forget that old English bridges, though at times as charmingly rustic as the Robin Hood Ballads, were not great masterpieces of art, like a good many old bridges on the Continent. If I invited readers to dine with me on Brazil nuts, unaided by nutcrackers, how in the world could I expect to receive company? But argument was useless. The antiquary had two homes—himself and the past, and in both he lived as a rapt dreamer. I see him still, a lean and dusty figure, unkempt, unwashed, for he “hated immersion” like Dr. Johnson. His favourite aim—and he never realised it—was to put a spade tenderly against a human skull buried in Pliocene deposits. “I would sooner do that,” he declared one evening, “than be married to all the prettiest women in England—girls, not widows, of course.” Courage was not his forte—except in one pugnacious habit which he shared with most antiquaries: not only did he love facts with a zeal that was always ready to defend them, but he regarded every fact as a big truth.

The old man would say to me, for instance, “Hunt in the Middle Ages for common but shining truths about roads and bridges. Ah yes! There’s the fact that many bridges were property owners; their landed estates were sometimes inconsiderable, to be sure, like the noble parks of Lilliput; but each estate, whether large or small, was a great truth in the history of bridges. And I like to remember the good folk who in their wills bequeathed money to their favourite bridges, like Count Neville, who in 1440 left twenty pounds to ‘Ulshawe Bridge,’ near Middleham. Now and then the testator was a skinflint, like John Danby, who in 1444 left in his will a beggarly six and eightpence to ‘Warleby Bridge.’ Yes, and he was rash enough to die unrepentant. Another man, a notable merchant in his day, Roger Thornton, of Newcastle, was clever enough to save himself from oblivion, a merchant’s destiny, by leaving a hundred marks to the Tyne Bridge in his native town—a bridge, by the way, that needed much renovation. But Thornton in his charity struck a hard bargain: the hundred marks would not be paid unless the ‘mair and ye comyns’ released the testator from certain actions at law! Thornton died in 1429; and to show you that the beautiful truth which I am illustrating was not then historically juvenile, I will mention an earlier fact from the life of a Newcastle citizen, John Cooke by name, who in 1379 bequeathed twenty marks to the fortified bridge at Warkworth.”

The old man gossiped quaintly about his “truths,” but when he wrote about them he was legal in profuse entanglements. Then it seemed to him that truth could not be protected by too many fortifications. Had he looked upon facts as facts, mere things which had happened and which had no future, his antiquarian knowledge would have been less arid. But he belonged to a school of pedants—the same school which either kills antiquarian magazines or enables them to live obscurely on unpaid contributions. That a man’s lifework should be futile to the public, a mere cemetery where facts lie buried like fossils in a rock, is pitiful; yet antiquaries are very proud of their barren labour. Scarcely one of them understands that a fact, however entertaining, has no value to thought unless it is a useful item in a mass of corroborative evidence; and even then it can be nothing more than a fact, a thing to illustrate the perpetual action of an absolute truth, or the increasing worth of a given hypothesis, or the general belief in a given theory. Two or three facts that confirm each other justify a guess, a random “shot,” or a vague suspicion; an important collection of such facts, if it continues to grow, gives validity to a hypothesis; and when from many sources as various as they are many new facts are added year after year to the collection, until at last the cumulative evidence holds the field with the best judges, then we know that the hypothesis has been developed into a theory, the highest form of mobile knowledge in the realms of Thought. But a theory is not absolute truth, of course; it is a harbour where Knowledge rests while Thought is on the high seas, a Columbus, searching for new worlds.