of the sculptor's art may now be mingled our national fame. Twenty years
ago, the address in Murray's Guide-Book,--_Crawford, an American Sculptor,
Piazza Barberini_,--would have been unique; now that name is enrolled on
the list of the world's benefactors in the patrimony of Art. Greenough, by
his pen, his presence, and his chisel, gave an impulse to taste and
knowledge in sculpture and architecture not destined soon to pass away; no
more eloquent and original advocate of the beautiful and the true in the
higher social economies has blest our day; his Cherubs and Medora overflow
with the poetry of form; his essays are a valuable legacy of philosophic
thought. The Greek Slave of Powers was invariably surrounded by visitors
at the London World's Fair and the Manchester Exhibition. Story's
Cleopatra was the nucleus of charmed observation at Sydenham. The Pearl
Diver of Paul Akers is his own most beautiful monument. Palmer has sent
forth from his isolated studio at Albany a series of ideal busts, of a
pure type of original and exquisite beauty; and many others might be named
who have honourably illustrated an American claim to distinction in an art
eminently republican in its perpetuation of national worth, and the
identity of its highest achievements with social progress.
BRIDGES.
'I stood on the bridge at midnight,
As the clocks were striking the hour,
And the moon rose over the city,
Behind the dark church-tower.
And like those waters rushing
Among the wooden piers,
A flood of thoughts came o'er me,
That filled my eyes with tears.'
LONGFELLOW.
Instinctively, Treason, in this vast land, aimed its first blow at the
Genius of Communication,--the benign and potent means and method of
American civilization and nationality. The great problem Watt and Fulton,
Clinton and Morse, so gloriously solved, a barbaric necessity thus reduced
back to chaos; and not the least sad and significant of the bulletins
whereby the most base of civic mutinies found current record, is that
entitled _Destruction of the Bridges_; and (melancholy contrast!)
simultaneously we hear of constructive energy in the same direction, on
the Italian peninsula,--an engineer having submitted to Victor Emmanuel
proposals for throwing a bridge across the Straits of Messina, 'binding
Scylla to Charybdis, and thus clinching Italian unity with bonds of
iron.'[46] Bonds of nationality, in more than a physical sense, indeed,
are bridges; even cynical Heine found an endeared outlook to his native
Rhine on the bastion of a familiar bridge. Tennyson makes one an essential
feature of his English summer-picture, wherein for ever glows the sweet
image of the 'Gardener's Daughter;' and Bunyan found no better similitude
for Christian's passage from Time to Eternity than the 'river where there
is no bridge.'
The primitive need, the possible genius, the science, and the sentiment of
a bridge, endear its aspect and associations beyond those of any other
economical structure. There is, indeed, something genially picturesque
about a mill, as Constable's pencil and Tennyson's muse have aptly
demonstrated; there is an artistic miracle possible in a sculptured gate,
as those of Ghiberti so elaborately evidence; science, poetry, and human
enterprise consecrate a lighthouse; sacred feelings hallow a spire, and
mediæval towers stand forth in noble relief against the sunset sky; but
around none of these familiar objects cluster the same thoroughly human
associations which make a bridge attractive to the sight and memory. In
its most remote suggestion it typifies man's primal relation to Nature,
his first instinctive effort to circumvent or avail himself of her
resources; indeed, he might take his hint of a bridge from Nature
herself,--her fallen monarchs of the forest athwart a stream, 'the
testimony of the rocks,' the curving shores, cavern roofs, and pendent
branches, and the prismatic bow in the heavens, which a poet well calls 'a
bridge to tempt the angels down.'
A bridge of the simplest kind is often charmingly effective as a
landscape-accessory; there is a short plank one in a glen of the White
Mountains, which, seen through a vista of woodland, makes out the picture
so aptly that it is sketched by every artist who haunts the region. What
lines of grace are added to the night-view of a great city by the lights
on the bridges! What subtile principles enter into the building of such a
bridge as the Britannia, where even the metallic contraction of the
enormous tubes is provided for by supporting them on cannon-balls! How
venerable seems the most graceful of Tuscan bridges, when we remember it
was erected in the fifteenth century,--and the Rialto, when we think of
Shylock and Portia; and how signal an instance is it of the progressive
application of a true principle in science, that the contrivance whereby
the South Americans bridge the gorges of their mountains, by a pendulous
causeway of twisted osiers and bamboo,--one of which, crossed by Humboldt,
was a hundred and twenty feet long,--is identical with that which sustains
the magnificent structure over the Niagara river! The chasms and streams
thus spanned by a rope of seven strands have a fairy-like aspect. Artist
and engineer alike delight in this feature of tropical scenery. In some
cases the stone structures built by the Spaniards, and half destroyed by
earthquakes, are repaired with bamboo, and often with an effective grace.
In a bridge the arch is triumphal, both for practical and commemorative
ends. Unknown to the Greeks and Egyptians, even the ancient Romans, it is
said by modern architects, did not appreciate its true mechanical
principle, but ascribed the marvellous strength thereof to the cement
which kept intact their semicircle. In Cæsar's _Commentaries_, the bridge
transit and vigilance form no small part of military tactics,--boats and
baskets serving the same purpose in ancient and modern warfare. The church
of old originated and consecrated bridges; religion, royalty, and art
celebrate their advent; the opening of Waterloo Bridge is the subject of
one of the best pictures of a modern English painter; and Cockney visitors
to the peerless bridge of Telford still ask the guide where the Queen
stood at its inauguration. But it is when we turn from the historical and
scientific to the familiar and personal that we realize the spontaneous
interest attached to a bridge. It is as a feature of our native landscape,
the goal of habitual excursions, the rendezvous, the observatory, the
favourite haunt or transit, that it wins the gaze and the heart. There the
musing angler sits content; there the echoes of the horse's hoofs rouse to
expectancy the dozing traveller; there the glad lover dreams, and the
despairing wretch seeks a watery grave, and the song of the poet finds a
response in the universal heart,--
'How often, oh, how often,
In the days that have gone by,
Have I stood on that bridge at midnight,
And gazed on the wave and sky!'
One of the most primitive tokens of civilization is a bridge; and yet no
artificial object is more picturesquely associated with its ultimate
symbols. The fallen tree whereon the pioneer crosses a stream in the
wilderness is not more significant of human isolation than the fragmentary
arch in an ancient city of the vanished home of thousands. Thus, by its
necessity and its survival, a bridge suggests the first exigency and the
last relic of civilized life. The old explorers of our Western Continent
record the savage expedients whereby watercourses were passed,--coils of
grape-vine carried between the teeth of an aboriginal swimmer and attached
to the opposite bank, a floating log, or, in shallow streams, a series of
stepping-stones; and the most popular historian of England, when
delineating to the eye of fancy the hour of her capital's venerable decay,
can find no more impressive illustration than to make a broken arch of
London Bridge the observatory of the speculative reminiscent.
The bridge is, accordingly, of all economical inventions, that which is
most inevitable to humanity, signalizing the first steps of man amid the
solitude of Nature, and accompanying his progress through every stage of
civic life; its crude form makes the wanderer's heart beat in the lonely
forest, as a sign of the vicinity or the track of his kind; and its
massive remains excite the reverent curiosity of the archæologist, who
seeks among the ruins of Art for trophies of a bygone race. Few
indications of Roman supremacy are more striking than the unexpected sight
of one of those bridges of solid and symmetrical masonry which the
traveller in Italy encounters, when emerging from a mountain-pass or a
squalid town upon the ancient highway. The permanent method herein
apparent suggests an energetic and pervasive race whose constructive
instinct was imperial; such an evidence of their pathway over water is as
suggestive of national power as the evanescent trail of the savage is of
his casual domain. In the bridge, as in no other structure, use combines
with beauty by an instinctive law; and the stone arch, more or less
elaborate in detail, is as essential now to the function and the grace of
a bridge, as when it was first thrown, invincible and harmonious, athwart
the rivers Cæsar's legions crossed.
As I stood on the scattered planks which afford a precarious foothold amid
the rapids of St. Anthony, methought these frail bridges of hewn timber
accorded with the reminiscence of the missionary pioneer who discovered
and named the picturesque waters, more than an elaborate and ancient
causeway. Even those long, inelegant structures which lead the pedestrian
over our own Charles river, or the broad inlets of the adjacent bay, have
their peculiar charm as the scene of many a gorgeous autumnal sunset and
many a patient 'constitutional' walk. It is a homely but significant
proverb, 'Never find fault with the bridge that carries you safe over.'
What beautiful shadows graceful bridges cast, when the twilight deepens
and the waves are calm! How mysteriously sleep the moonbeams there! What a
suggestive vocation is a toll-keeper's! Patriarchs in this calling will
tell of methodical and eccentric characters known for years.
Bridges have their legends. There is one in Lombardy whence a jilted lover
sprang with his faithless bride as she passed to church with her new
lover; it is yet called the 'Bridge of the Betrothed.' On the mountain
range, near Serravazza, in Tuscany, is a natural bridge which unites two
of the lofty peaks; narrow and aërial, it is believed by the peasantry to
have miraculously formed itself to give foothold to the Madonna as she
passed over the mountains, and it bears her name. An old traveller,
describing New York amusements, tells us of a favourite ride from the city
to the suburban country, and says,--'In the way there is a bridge, about
three miles distant, which you always pass as you return, called the
'Kissing Bridge,' where it is part of the etiquette to salute the lady who
has put herself under your protection.'[47] A curious lawsuit was lately
instituted by the proprietor of a menagerie who lost an elephant by a
bridge giving way beneath his unaccustomed weight; the authorities
protested against damages, as they never undertook to give safe passage to
so large an animal.
The office of a bridge is prolific of metaphor, whereof an amusing
instance is Boswell's comparison of himself, when translating Paoli's talk
to Dr. Johnson, to a 'narrow isthmus connecting two continents.' It has
been aptly said of Dante's great poem, that, in the world of letters, it
is a mediæval bridge over that vast chasm which divides classical from
modern times. All conciliating authors bridge select severed
intelligences, and even national feeling: as Irving's writings brought
more near to each other the alienated sympathies of England and America,
and Carlyle made a trysting-place for British and German thought; as
Sydney Smith's talk threw a suspension-bridge from Conservative to
Reformer, and Lord Bacon's (in the hour of bitter alienation between Crown
and Commons) 'reconciling genius spanned the dividing stream of party.'
How quaint, yet effective, Jean Paul's illustration of an alienated state
of human feeling, '_the drawbridge of countenances_, whereupon once the
two souls met, stood suddenly raised, high in air.' Nor less significant
is a modern historian's definition of an Englishman, as 'an island
surrounded by a misty and tumultuous sea of prejudices and hatreds,
generally unapproachable, and at all times _utterly repudiative of a
bridge_.' Pontifex Maximus has long ceased to wear the great spiritual
title whose unchallenged attribute was to bridge the chasm between earth
and heaven. What humour may be evolved from a nose-bridge, _Punch_ in his
dealings with the great Duke, and Sterne in his record of Tristram
Shandy's infancy, have notably chronicled; while the infinite delicacy of
tension in the bridge of Paganini's violin, indicates the relation thereof
to exquisite gradations of sound. 'The Mohammedans,' says Scott, 'have a
fanciful idea that the believer, in his passage to Paradise, is under the
necessity of passing barefoot over a bridge composed of red-hot iron
plates. All the pieces of paper which the Moslem has preserved during his
life, lest some holy thing being written upon them might be profaned,
arrange themselves between his feet and the burning metal, and so save him
from injury.' In the 'Vision' of Mirza, a bridge is typical of human life.
That was a ludicrous incident related of poor, obstinate, crazy George the
Third,--that encountering some boys near a bridge early one morning, he
asked them what bridge it was. 'The Bridge of Kew,' they replied;
whereupon the king proposed and gave three vociferous cheers for the
Bridge of Kew, as a newly-discovered wonder. Amusing, too, was the warm
dispute of the two errant lake poets whether a certain acutely-angular
bridge in the Alps was called great A from its resemblance to that letter,
or as the first of its kind.
How isolated and bewildered are villagers, when, after a tempest, the news
spreads that a freshet has carried away the bridge! Every time we shake
hands we make a human bridge of courtesy or love; and that was a graceful
fancy of one of our ingenious writers to give expression to his thoughts
in _Letters from under a Bridge_. With an eye and an ear for Nature's
poetry, the gleam of lamps from a bridge, the figures that pass and repass
thereon, the rush and the lull of waters beneath, the perspective of the
arch, the weather-stains on the parapet, the sunshine and the
cloud-shadows around, are phases and sounds fraught with meaning and
mystery.
It is an acknowledged truth in the philosophy of Art, that Beauty is the
handmaid of Use; and as the grace of the swan and the horse results from a
conformation whose _rationale_ is movement, so the pillar that supports
the roof, and the arch that spans the current, by their serviceable
fitness, wed grace of form to wise utility. The laws of architecture
illustrate this principle copiously; but in no single and familiar product
of human skill is it more striking than in bridges; if lightness,
symmetry, elegance, proportion, charm the ideal sense, not less are the
economy and adaptation of the structure impressive to the eye of science.
Perhaps the ideas of use and beauty, of convenience and taste, in no
instance coalesce more obviously; and therefore, of all human inventions,
the bridge lends the most undisputed charm to the landscape. It is one of
those symbols of humanity which spring from and are not grafted upon
Nature; it proclaims her affinity with man, and links her spontaneous
benefits with his invention and his needs; it seems to celebrate the
stream over which it rises, and to wed the wayward waters to the order and
the mystery of life. There is no hint of superfluity or impertinence in a
bridge; it blends with the wildest and the most cultivated scene with
singular aptitude, and is a feature of both rural and metropolitan
landscape that strikes the mind as essential. A striking confirmation of
this idea offers itself in a recent critic's definition of a classic style
of writing: 'A bridge,' he says, '_completes_ river landscape; it
_stiffens_ the scenery which was before too soft, too delicate, too
vegetable. Just such is the effect of pure style in literary art.'[48] The
most usual form has its counterpart in those rocky arches which flood and
fire have excavated or penned up in many picturesque regions--the segments
of caverns or the ribs of strata,--so that, without the instinctive
suggestion of the mind itself, Nature furnishes complete models of a
bridge whereon neither Art nor Science can improve. Herein the most
advanced and the most rude peoples own a common skill; bridges, of some
kind, and all adapted to their respective countries, being the familiar
invention of savage necessity and architectural genius. The explorer finds
them in Africa as well as the artist in Rome; swung, like huge hammocks of
ox-hide, over the rapid streams of South America; spanning in fragile
cane-platforms the gorges of the Andes; crossing vast chasms of the
Alleghanies with the slender iron viaduct of the American railways; and
jutting, a crumbling segment of the ancient world, over the yellow Tiber:
as familiar on the Chinese tea-caddy as on Canaletto's canvas; as
traditional a local feature of London as of Florence; as significant of
the onward march of civilization in Wales to-day as in Liguria during the
middle ages. Where men dwell and wander, and water flows, these beautiful
and enduring, or curious and casual expedients are found, as memorable
triumphs of architecture, crowned with historical associations, or as
primitive inventions that unconsciously mark the first faltering steps of
humanity in the course of empire; for, on this continent, where the French
missionary crossed the narrow log supported by his Indian convert in the
midst of a wilderness, massive stone arches shadow broad streams that flow
through populous cities; and the history of civilization may be traced
from the loose stones whereon the lone settler fords the watercourse, to
such grand, graceful, and permanent monuments of human prosperity as the
elaborate and ancient stone bridges of European capitals.
When we look forth upon a grand or lovely scene of Nature--mountain,
river, meadow, and forest,--what a fine central object, what an harmonious
artificial feature of the picture, is a bridge, whether rustic and simple,
a mere rude passage-way over a brook, or a curve of gray stone throwing
broad shadows upon the bright surface of a river! Nor less effective is
the same object amid the crowded walls, spires, streets, and
chimney-stacks of a city. There the bridge is the least conventional
structure, the suggestive point, the favourite locality; it seems to
reunite the working-day world with the freedom of Nature; it is, perhaps,
the one spot in the dense array of edifices and thoroughfares which 'gives
us pause.' There, if anywhere, our gaze and our feet linger; people have a
relief against the sky, as they pass over it; artists look patiently
thither; lovers, the sad, the humorous, and the meditative, stop there to
observe and to muse; they lean over the parapet and watch the flowing
tide; they look thence around as from a pleasant vantage-ground. The
bridge, in populous old towns, is the rendezvous, the familiar landmark,
the traditional nucleus of the place, and perhaps the only picturesque
framework in all those marts and homes, more free, open, and suggestive of
a common lot than temple, square, or palace; for there pass and repass
noble and peasant, regal equipage and humble caravan; children plead to
stay, and veterans moralize there; the privileged beggar finds a
standing-place for charity to bless; a shrine hallows or a sentry guards,
history consecrates or art glorifies; and trade, pleasure, or battle,
perchance, lend to it the spell of fame. The dearest associations of a
life are described in one of Jean Ingelow's most elaborate poems, as
revolving around and identified with 'Four Bridges:'--
'Our brattling river tumbles through the one;
The second spans a shallow, weedy brook;
Beneath the others, and beneath the sun,
Lie two long stilly pools, and on their breasts
Picture their wooden piles, encased in swallows' nests.
And round about them grows a fringe of weeds,
And then a floating crown of lily flowers,
And yet within small silver-budded weeds;
But each clear centre evermore embowers
A deeper sky, where stooping, you may see
The little minnows twirling restlessly.'
In the neighbourhood of Aberdeen, the picturesque bridge over the Don,
with its adjacent rocks, trees, and deep, dark stream, is known as the
'brig of Balgownie.' Thomas the Rhymer uttered many prophecies about
'Balgownie's brig black wa';' and it figures among the scenes of Byron's
boyhood. Let any one recall his sojourn in a foreign city, and conjure to
his mind's eye the scenes, and prominent to his fancy, distinct to his
memory, will be the bridge. He will think of Florence as intersected by
the Arno, and with the very name of that river reappears the peerless
grace of the Ponte Santa Trinità with its moss-grown escutcheons and
aërial curves. He will recall the Pont du Gard with the vicinage of
Nismes; the Pont Neuf, at Paris, with its soldiers and priests, its
boot-blacks and grisettes, the gay streets on one side, and the studious
quarter on the other, typifies and concentrates for him the associations
of the French capital; and what a complete symbol of Venice--its canals,
its marbles, its mysterious polity, its romance of glory and woe--is a
good photograph of the Bridge of Sighs! Her history is, indeed, singularly
identified with bridges. One, as her exchange, is permanently associated
with the palmiest days of mediæval commerce; another with the darker
records of her criminal law; while on one of her bridges, Sarpi, the
'terrible friar' Paolo was waylaid and nearly killed by Papal assassins,
whence dates the most efficient protest against ecclesiastical tyranny.
The history of Rome is written on her bridges. The Ponte Rotto is Art's
favourite trophy of her decay; two-thirds of it has disappeared; and the
last Pope has ineffectively repaired it, by a platform sustained by iron
wire: yet who that has stood thereon in the sunset, and looked from the
dome of St. Peter's to the islands projected at that hour so distinctly
from the river's surface, glanced along the flushed dwellings upon its
bank, with their intervals of green terraces; or gazed, in the other
direction, upon the Cloaca of Tarquin, Vesta's dome, and the Aventine
Hill, with its palaces, convents, vineyards, and gardens, has not felt
that the Ponte Rotto was the most suggestive observatory in the Eternal
City? The Ponte Molle brings back Constantine and his vision of the Cross;
and the statues on Sant' Angelo mutely attest the vicissitudes of
ecclesiastical eras.
England boasts no monument of her modern victories so impressive as the
bridge named for the most memorable of them. The best view of Prague and
its people is from the long series of stone arches which span the Moldau.
The solitude and serenity of genius are rarely better realized than by
musing of Klopstock and Gessner, Lavater and Zimmermann, on the Bridge of
Rapperschwyl on the Lake of Zurich, where they dwelt and wrote or died.
From the Bridge of St. Martin we have the first view of Mont Blanc. The
Suspension Bridge at Niagara is an artificial wonder as great, in its
degree, as the natural miracle of the mighty cataract which thunders for
ever at its side; while no triumph of inventive economy could more aptly
lead the imaginative stranger into the picturesque beauties of Wales than
the extraordinary tubular bridge across the Menai Strait. The
aqueduct-bridge at Lisbon, the long causeway over Cayuga Lake in our own
country, and the bridge over the Loire at Orléans, are memorable in every
traveller's retrospect.