quare id faciam?

Solid reading

Made an impulse buy this past week of Paul Johnson's 2003 popular-audience text Art: A New History. It was on the bargain racks at Borders for $13. I didn't know of the book beforehand. In fact, till now I've been little familiar with Johnson, and haven't had any particular impression of him as an historian or an opinionist, beyond being aware that he's generally well regarded among some of the folks I know who'd be conventionally classed as conservatives. The book's bright contrasty cover caught my eye as I was headed to the cashier (bearing a late Mothers Day gift – my excuse for allowing myself to go into a bookstore); I picked it up, leafed through it a bit, put it back, picked it up again and leafed some more, decided I could do considerably worse for that amount of change, and took it with me. It looks like an enjoyable read, whatever the limitations or strengths its author's point of view or temperament may bring to treatment of the subject itself. I expect I'll be reading it in bits & pieces, here & there, for a while, unless other reading comes to seem more pressing and crowds it from the pile's top tiers – altogether, of course, a possibility.

If you're curious, Google turns up a few reviews – usual fare as far as I can tell. There's a longish one, interestingly, in First Things, Mar 2004. WSJ's Opinion Journal has one too. Both, I suppose not surprisingly, are fairly favorable. Less favorable is one from the UK's Guardian; but even here, after a good deal of doubtlessly worthwhile fault-finding, author Julian Bell comes around to conclude that "To my surprise I find I don't wish to kick it: it's generous in spirit."

Contained also in Bell's critique – to consider now briefly something of Johnson's content – is this useful generalizing observation about the approach taken in A New History:

He reveres constructive ingenuity and technical prowess. Architecture is usually to the fore of his mind, which loves to investigate the world's great engineering systems and to laud the mighty men who have directed them, from ancient Egypt's Imhotep to the contemporary designer Santiago Calatrava. In fact his ability to carry the reader persuasively through constructive processes of all types, from bronze-casting to watercolour, is probably the book's most solidly [ahem] useful aspect.

Coincidentally, I began reading Johnson a few chapters in, where he gets into Rome, pivot of Western Civ. Last, then, let me give you here a passage I've marked. Relatively a commonplace sort of description of the Roman world, maybe, but a passage that illustrates Bell's observation exactly and that probably serves pretty well to demonstrate the engaging quality of Johnson's style, too.

Roman culture, then, had a largely Etruscan base and an overwhelmingly Greek superstructure. But it had Roman elements too. What Romans were good at were law and justice, war and defence, communications and transport, the conquest of dangerous and destructive barbarians, and the suppression of organised brigandry on land and piracy at sea. Hence, once the Romans were established in power all over the Mediterranean, it became a pacific inland sea bordered by huge, prosperous towns and splendid estates and vineyards, a vast area where the rule of law prevailed, where trade, industry and commerce begat vast wealth, and where men could hang on to their wealth, bequeath it and lavish it on civilised living.
   Thus if the Romans did not as a rule do things better than the Greeks, they did them much more often, on a larger scale and over a much wider area. The Greeks spread their culture over Magna Graecia and the fringes of the Levant and North-East Africa. The Romans did all this and more – they added most of Europe. Indeed they effectively created Europe as the 'natural' centre of civilisation, a position which it held virtually to our own times. Moreover, they added one man-made material which was central to all this grandeur and monumentality – concrete.
   . . . Without being quite aware of how it worked, the Romans began to use pozzuolanic mortar as a binding agent with a mixture (caementa) of stone chips, brick nuggets, broken tiles and other hard materials, the operation being carried out on the building site itself, and the product slapped on quickly. This opus caementicium, as they called the method, was put into timber shuttering or formwork, and laid out as courses running continuously across major buildings, and especially for piers, arches, vaults and main walls. In time the Romans learned to dispense with the shuttering, using stone instead, and as concrete was hideously ugly – it still is over 2,000 years later – they put a film of stuccoing on both exterior and interior.
   Concrete proved immensely strong, cheap and easy to use, and the Romans, as they strengthened their grip on Italy, and expanded their Empire, employed it in ever-increasing quantities for the infrastructure of roads, bridges, aqueducts, viaducts and harbours, which was the secret of their success. . . . Concrete helped the Roman authorities to get the troops wherever they were wanted, in the largest numbers, at the maximum speed, and with their heavy equipment. Once Roman military power was established, the excellence, uniformity, relative impartiality and honesty of Roman law ensured that the inhabitants of Romanised provinces were, on the whole, well content. Concrete, then, was an essential element in the material structure of the Roman Empire, which reflected its strength and durability.
   But was it something more? The Romans took their culture from Greece, their openly admitted superior in this respect, but in time concrete – and the added wealth and universal transmission of goods which it made possible – enabled the Romans to do things which the Greeks had never even contemplated. Thereby the Romans were able to give architecture a grandeur which is their principal achievement in the arts. The salient element in grandeur was size. In the twentieth century we became accustomed to dismiss mere size as an artistic element, though it is often impossible to achieve sublimity without it. But to our forbears size was a key component of art, if for no other reason than that it was so difficult to achieve. [Consider, by the way, monumental size as a feature of Tolkien's Numenorean ancientry.] In the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome in the West, ordinary people judged the greatness of Rome by size. . . . It was the sheer size of Rome's ruins which caught their imagination.
   Concrete, then, was the foundation of both the reality and the myth of Rome. Rome, and its empire, were indeed set in concrete.

(You may wish to object to Johnson's parenthetical blanket dismissal of concrete's value as a finish material. Please do – you won't get any disagreement from me.)

posted by paul bowman @ 9:21 PM