Читать книгу The Collector - Henry T. Tuckerman - Страница 5

‘Appeal, fair stone,

From God’s pure height of beauty, against man’s wrong;

Catch up in thy divine face not alone

East griefs but West, and strike and shame the strong

By thunders of white silence, overthrown.’

The image, indeed, is rather a bold one, reminding us of the soliloquy in a French tragedy, commencing with the observation—‘Quel silence se fait entendre.’

While directing attention to Mr. Tuckerman’s pleasant paper on Statues, it may be worth while recording that under the Christian era sculpture was first employed by a woman, under the influence of gratitude for a manifestation of the divine mercy. The story is, indeed, only traditional, but it is ancient, and comes down to us through Eusebius. According to that historian the woman of Paneas, after having been cured of her disease, as mentioned in the Gospels, returned to her native place and set up in one of the streets there an image of the Saviour, with the figure of herself in the act of adoration. This group of statuary (the material, indeed, is not mentioned, and the word image sometimes implies picture) was the progenitor of all the effigies of God and the saints that have since been erected in public highways in order to stimulate the religious fervour of the passers by. If that alleged proto-group did not exactly effect this, the story of the grateful woman and her statuary led to the same result. It may be a mere legend; but even then the legend itself was in such case invented for the purpose of bringing about the adoption of the fashion of setting up images challenging the reverence of all who looked on them, and it was afterwards appealed to as authority, alike for the fashion and the observance.

Nowhere have statues been erected with greater effect than on Bridges. They who remember the bridge at Prague, over the Moldau, with the statues and groups of saints, St. John Neoponuck towering over all, will confirm this fact. The fashion has not been followed in our own country, where there are some relics, however, of bridge architecture said to be as old as the days of the Britons. Such are rather fondly said to be the small red stone arches spanning the streams in some of the Cornish valleys. We may rest more satisfied, however, with the triangular bridge at Croyland, which was completed in the year after the island was first called England, namely, A.D. 830. Whether we can, in the days of Queen Victoria, detect in the structure any of the stones the laying of which was watched by the curious Lincolnshire folk in the reign of King Egbert, may be reasonably doubted. The foundations rather than the superstructure of the original bridge alone remain. This bridge was of great importance to the monastery of Croyland, but indeed as much may be said of all bridges and their vicinities. To build them was a holy work. The title of ‘Pontifex’ belonged to the highest of the sacred classes of Rome. ‘Pontifex Maximus’ is a designation which the pope himself inherits from the Roman emperors, and ‘Pontificum Cœnæ’ is a phrase by which we learn from Horace that the sacred successors of those who erected the Sublician bridge were persons who, with some care for the souls and well-being of the people, had a special regard for their own bodies.

Perhaps it was because of this connection between holy men and bridges that in early English times the keeping of our bridges and of the roads leading to them was intrusted to hermits, who were in fact the original toll-takers and turnpike-keepers in England. Old London Bridge, which was commenced in 1176 and finished in 1209, which was the only bridge at London over the Thames till that of Westminster was opened in 1738, and which lasted till the new bridge was inaugurated in 1831 by William the Fourth, was the work of a holy Pontifex, Peter Colechurch, chaplain of St. Mary’s in the Poultry. The architect found fitting burial place in the crypt of the chapel of St. Thomas, which stood in the centre of the bridge itself. Thus the London Bridge which Peter built became his sepulchre and monument when Peter died.

But it is time that I should be at least as silent as Peter himself, since Mr. Tuckerman is ready and the stage prepared. The first little piece is played out, and the curtain now rises to a better sustained drama and to a finished actor—Plaudite!

J. DORAN.