Portraits of Places (London: Macmillan & Co., 1883)/Niagara
XX.
NIAGARA.
1871.
My journey hitherward by a morning's sail from Toronto across Lake Ontario, seemed to me, as regards a certain dull vacuity in this episode of travel, a kind of calculated preparation for the uproar of Niagara—a pause or hush on the threshold of a great impression; and this, too, in spite of the reverent attention I was mindful to bestow on the first seen, in my experience, of the great lakes. It has the merit, from the shore, of producing a slight ambiguity of vision. It is the sea, and yet just not the sea. The huge expanse, the landless line of the horizon, suggest the ocean; while an indefinable shortness of pulse, a kind of fresh-water gentleness of tone, seem to contradict the idea. What meets the eye is on the scale of the ocean, but you feel somehow that the lake is a thing of smaller spirit. Lake-navigation, therefore, seems to me not especially entertaining. The scene tends to offer, as one may say, a sort of marine-effect missed. It has the blankness and vacancy of the sea, without that vast essential swell which, amid the belting brine, so often saves the situation to the eye. I was occupied, as we crossed, in wondering whether this dull reduction of the main contained that which could properly be termed "scenery." At the mouth of the Niagara River, however, after a sail of three hours, scenery really begins, and very soon crowds upon you in force. The steamer puts into the narrow channel of the stream, and heads upward between high embankments. From this point, I think, you really enter into relations with Niagara. Little by little the elements become a picture, rich with the shadow of coming events. You have a foretaste of the great spectacle of colour which you enjoy at the Falls. The even cliffs of red-brown earth are crusted and spotted with autumnal orange and crimson, and, laden with this gorgeous decay, they plunge sheer into the deep-dyed green of the river. As you proceed, the river begins to tell its tale—at first in broken syllables of foam and flurry, and then, as it were, in rushing, flashing sentences and passionate ejaculations. Onwards from Lewiston, where you are transferred from the boat to the train, you see it from the edge of the American cliff, far beneath you, now superbly unnavigable. You have a lively sense of something happening ahead; the river, as a man near me said, has evidently been in a row. The cliffs here are immense; they form a vomitorium worthy of the living floods whose exit they protect. This is the first act of the drama of Niagara; for it is, I believe, one of the commonplaces of description that you instinctively convert it into a series of "situations." At the station pertaining to the railway suspension-bridge, you see in mid-air, beyond an interval of murky confusion produced at once by the farther bridge, the smoke of the trains, and the thickened atmosphere of the peopled bank, a huge far-flashing sheet which glares through the distance as a monstrous absorbent and irradiant of light. And here, in the interest of the picturesque, let me note that this obstructive bridge tends in a way to enhance the first glimpse of the cataract. Its long black span, falling dead along the shining brow of the Falls, seems shivered and smitten by their fierce effulgence, and trembles across the field of vision like some enormous mote in a light too brilliant. A moment later, as the train proceeds, you plunge into the village, and the cataract, save as a vague ground-tone to this trivial interlude, is, like so many other goals of aesthetic pilgrimage, temporarily postponed to the hotel.
With this postponement comes, I think, an immediate decline of expectation; for there is every appearance that the spectacle you have come so far to see is to be choked in the horribly vulgar shops and booths and catchpenny artifices which have pushed and elbowed to within the very spray of the Falls, and ply their importunities in shrill competition with its thunder. You see a multitude of hotels and taverns and stores, glaring with white paint, bedizened with placards and advertisements, and decorated by groups of those gentlemen who flourish most rankly on the soil of New York and in the vicinage of hotels; who carry their hands in their pockets, wear their hats always and every way, and, although of a stationary habit, yet spurn the earth with their heels. A side-glimpse of the Falls, however, calls out your philosophy; you reflect that this may be regarded as one of those sordid foregrounds which Turner liked to use, and which may be effective as a foil; you hurry to where the roar grows louder, and, I was going to say, you escape from the village. In fact, however, you don't escape from it; it is constantly at your elbow, just to the right or the left of the line of contemplation. It would be paying Niagara a poor compliment to say that, practically, she does not hurl away this chaffering by-play from her edge; but as you value the integrity of your impression, you are bound to affirm that it suffers appreciable abatement from such sources. You wonder, as you stroll about, whether it is altogether an unrighteous dream that with the slow progress of taste and the possible or impossible growth of some larger comprehension of beauty and fitness, the public conscience may not tend to confer upon such sovereign phases of nature something of the inviolability and privacy which we are slow to bestow, indeed, upon fame, but which we do not grudge at least to art. We place a great picture, a great statue, in a museum: we erect a great monument in the centre of our largest square, and if we can suppose ourselves nowadays to build a cathedral, we should certainly isolate it as much as possible and expose it to no ignoble contact. We cannot enclose Niagara with walls and a roof, nor girdle it with a palisade; but the sentimental tourist may muse upon the contingency of its being guarded by the negative homage of empty spaces and absent barracks and decent forbearance. The actual abuse of the scene belongs evidently to that immense class of iniquities which are destined to grow very much worse in order to grow a very little better. The good humour engendered by the main spectacle bids you suffer it to run its course.
Though hereabouts so much is great, distances are small, and a ramble of two or three hours enables you to gaze hither and thither from a dozen standpoints. The one you are likely to choose first is that on the Canada cliff, a little way above the suspension-bridge. The great fall faces you, enshrined in its own surging incense. The common feeling just here, I believe, is one of disappointment at its want of height; the whole thing appears to many people somewhat smaller than its fame. My own sense, I confess, was absolutely gratified from the first; and, indeed, I was not struck with anything being tall or short, but with everything being perfect. You are, moreover, at some distance, and you feel that with the lessening interval you will not be cheated of your chance to be dizzied with mere dimensions. Already you see the world-famous green, baffling painters, baffling poets, shining on the lip of the precipice; the more so, of course, for the clouds of silver and snow into which it speedily resolves itself. The whole picture before you is admirably simple. The Horseshoe glares and boils and smokes from the centre to the right, drumming itself into powder and thunder; in the centre the dark pedestal of Goat Island divides the double flood; to the left booms in vaporous dimness the minor battery of the American Fall; while on a level with the eye, above the still crest of either cataract, appear the white faces of the hithermost rapids. The circle of weltering froth at the base of the Horseshoe, emerging from the dead white vapours—absolute white, as moonless midnight is absolute black—which muffle impenetrably the crash of the river upon the lower bed, melts slowly into the darker shades of green. It seems in itself a drama of thrilling interest, this blanched survival and recovery of the stream. It stretches away like a tired swimmer, struggling from the snowy scum and the silver drift, and passing slowly from an eddying foam-sheet, touched with green lights, to a cold, verdantique, streaked and marbled with trails and wild arabesques of foam. This is the beginning of that air of recent distress which marks the river as you meet it at the lake. It shifts along, tremendously conscious, relieved, disengaged, knowing the worst is over, with its dignity injured but its volume undiminished, the most stately, the least turbid of torrents. Its movement, its sweep and stride, are as admirable as its colour, but as little as its colour to be made a matter of words. These things are but part of a spectacle in which nothing is imperfect. As you draw nearer and nearer, on the Canada cliff, to the right arm of the Horseshoe, the mass begins in all conscience to be large enough. You are able at last to stand on the very verge of the shelf from which the leap is taken, bathing your boot-toes, if you like, in the side-ooze of the glassy curve. I may say, in parenthesis, that the importunities one suffers here, amid the central din of the cataract, from hackmen and photographers and vendors of gimcracks, are simply hideous and infamous. The road is lined with little drinking-shops and houses, and from these retreats their occupants dart forth upon the hapless traveller with their competitive attractions. You purchase release at last by the fury of your indifference, and stand there gazing your fill at the most beautifol object in the world.
The perfect taste of it is the great characteristic. It is not in the least monstrous; it is thoroughly artistic and, as the phrase is, thought out. In the matter of line it beats Michael Angelo. One may seem at first to say the least, but the careful observer will admit that one says the most, in saying that it pleases—pleases even a spectator who was not ashamed to write the other day that he didn't care for cataracts. There are, however, so many more things to say about it—its multitudinous features crowd so upon the vision as one looks—that it seems absurd to begin to analyse. The main feature, perhaps, is the incomparable loveliness of the immense line of the shelf and its lateral abutments. It neither falters, nor breaks nor stiffens, but maintains from wing to wing the lightness of its semicircle. This perfect curve melts into the sheet that seems at once to drop from it and sustain it. The famous green loses nothing, as you may imagine, on a nearer view. A green more vividly cool and pure it is impossible to conceive. It is to the vulgar greens of earth what the blue of a summer sky is to artificial dyes, and is, in fact, as sacred, as remote, as impalpable as that. You can fancy it the parent-green, the head-spring of colour to all the verdant water-caves and all the dear, sub-fluvial haunts and bowers of naiads and mermen in all the streams of the earth. The lower half of the watery wall is shrouded in the steam of the boiling gulf—a veil never rent nor lifted. At its heart this eternal cloud seems fixed and still with excess of motion—still and intensely white; but, as it rolls and climbs against its lucent cliff, it tosses little whiffs and fumes and pants of snowy smoke, which betray the convulsions we never behold. In the middle of the curve, the depth of the recess, the converging walls are ground into a dust of foam, which rises in a tall column, and fills the upper air with its hovering drift. Its summit far overtops the crest of the cataract, and, as you look down along the rapids above, you see it hanging over the averted gulf like some far-flowing signal of danger. Of these things some vulgar verbal hint may be attempted; but what words can render the rarest charm of all—the clear-cut brow of the Fall, the very act and figure of the leap, the rounded passage of the horizontal to the perpendicular? To say it is simple is to make a phrase about it. Nothing was ever more successfully executed. It is carved as sharp as an emerald, as one must say and say again. It arrives, it pauses, it plunges; it comes and goes for ever; it melts and shifts and changes, all with the sound as of millions of bass-voices; and yet its outline never varies, never moves with a different pulse. It is as gentle as the pouring of wine from a flagon—of melody from the lip of a singer. From the little grove beside the American Fall you catch this extraordinary profile better than you are able to do at the Horseshoe. If the line of beauty had vanished from the earth elsewhere, it would survive on the brow of Niagara. It is impossible to insist too strongly on the grace of the thing, as seen from the Canada cliff. The genius who invented it was certainly the first author of the idea that order, proportion and symmetry are the conditions of perfect beauty. He applied his faith among the watching and listening forests, long before the Greeks proclaimed theirs in the measurements of the Parthenon. Even the roll of the white batteries at the base seems fixed and poised and ordered, and in the vague middle zone of difference between the flood as it falls and the mist as it rises you imagine a mystical meaning—the passage of body to soul, of matter to spirit, of human to divine.
Goat Island, of which every one has heard, is the menagerie of lions, and the spot where your single stone—or, in plain prose, your half-dollar—kills most birds. This broad insular strip, which performs the excellent office of withholding the American shore from immediate contact with the flood, has been left very much to itself, and here you may ramble, for the most part, in undiverted contemplation. The island is owned, I believe, by a family of co-heirs, who have the good taste to keep it quiet. More than once, however, as I have been told, they have been offered a "big price" for the privilege of building an hotel upon this sacred soil. They have been wise, but, after all, they are human, and the offer may be made once too often. Before this fatal day dawns, why should not the State buy up the precious acres, as California has done the Yo-Semite? It is the opinion of a sentimental tourist that no price would be too great to pay. Otherwise, the only hope for their integrity is in the possibility of a shrewd provision on the part of the gentlemen who know how to keep hotels that the music of the dinner-band would be injured by the roar of the cataract. You approach from Goat Island the left abutment of the Horseshoe. The little tower which, with the classic rainbow, figures in all "views" of the scene, is planted at a dozen feet from the shore, directly on the shoulder of the Fall. This little tower, I think, deserves a compliment. One might have said beforehand that it would never do, but, as it stands, it makes rather a good point. It serves as a unit of appreciation of the scale of things, and from its spray-blackened summit it admits you to an almost downward peep into the green gulf. More here, even, than on the Canada shore, you perceive the unlimited wateriness of the whole spectacle. Its liquid masses take on at moments the likeness of walls and pillars and columns, and, to present any vivid picture of them, we are compelled to talk freely of emerald and crystal, of silver and marble. But really, all the simplicity of the Falls, and half their grandeur, reside in their unmitigated fluidity, which excludes all rocky staging and earthy commixture. It is water piled on water, pinned on water, hinging and hanging on water, breaking, crashing, whitening in shocks altogether watery. And yet for all this no solid was ever so solid as that sculptured shoulder of the Horseshoe. From this little tower, or, better still, from various points farther along the island-shore, even to look is to be immersed. Before you stretches the huge expanse of the upper river, with its belittled cliflfs, now mere black lines of forest, dull as with the sadness of gazing at perpetual trouble, eternal danger. Anything more horribly desolate than this boundless livid welter of the rapids it is impossible to conceive, and you very soon begin to pay it the tribute of your own suddenly-assumed suspense, in the impulse to people it with human forms. On this theme you can work out endless analogies. Yes, they are alive, every fear-blanched billow and eddy of them—alive and frenzied with the sense of their doom. They see below them that nameless pause of the arrested current, and the high-tossed drift of sound and spray which rises up lamenting, like the ghosts of their brothers who have been dashed to pieces. They shriek, they sob, they clasp their white hands and toss their long hair; they cling and clutch and wrestle, and, above all, they appear to bite. Especially tragical is the air they have of being forced backward, with averted faces, to their fate. Every pulse of the flood is like the grim stride of a giant, wading huge-kneed to his purpose, with the white teeth of a victim fastened in his neck. The outermost of three small islands, interconnected by short bridges, at the extremity of this shore, places one in singularly intimate relation with this portentous flurry. To say that hereabouts the water leaps and plunges and rears and dives, that its uproar makes even one's own ideas about it inaudible, and its current sweeps those ideas to perdition, is to give a very pale account of the universal agitation.
The great spectacle may be called complete only when you have gone down the river some four miles, on the American side, to the so-called rapids of the Whirlpool. Here the unhappy stream tremendously renews its anguish. Two approaches have been contrived on the cliff—one to the rapids proper, the other, farther below, to the scene of the sudden bend. The first consists of a little wooden cage, of the "elevator" pattern, which slides up and down a gigantic perpendicular shaft of horrible flimsiness. But a couple of the usual little brides, staggering beneath the weight of gorgeous cashmeres, entered the conveyance with their respective consorts at the same time with myself; and, as it thus carried Hymen and his fortunes, we survived the adventure. You obtain from below—that is, on the shore of the river—a specimen of the noblest cliff-scenery. The green embankment at the base of the sheer red wall is by itself a very fair example of what they call in the Rocky Mountains a foot-hill; and from this continuous pedestal erects itself a bristling palisade of earth. As it stands, Gustave Doré might have drawn it. He would have sketched with especial ardour certain parasitical shrubs and boskages—lone and dizzy witnesses of autumn; certain outward-peering wens and warts and other perpendicular excrescences of rock; and, above all, near the summit, the fantastic figures of sundry audacious minor cliffs, grafted upon the greater by a mere lateral attachment and based in the empty air, with great slim trees rooted on their verges, like the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence. The actual whirlpool is a third of a mile farther down the river, and is best seen from the cliff above. From this point of view, it seems to me by all odds the finest of the secondary episodes of the drama of Niagara, and one on which a scribbling tourist, ineffectively playing at showman, may be content to ring down his curtain. The channel at this point turns away to the right, at a clean right-angle, and the river, arriving from the rapids just above with stupendous velocity, meets the hollow elbow of the Canada shore. The movement with which it betrays its surprise and bewilderment—the sudden issueless maze of waters—is, I think, after the Horseshoe Fall, the very finest thing in its progress. It breaks into no small rage; the offending cliffs receive no drop of spray; for the flood moves in a body and wastes no vulgar side-spurts; but you see it shaken to its innermost bowels and panting hugely, as if smothered in its excessive volume. Pressed back upon its centre, the current creates a sort of pivot, from which it eddies, groping for exit in vast slow circles, delicately and irregularly outlined in foam. The Canada shore, shaggy and gaudy with late September foliage, closes about it like the rising shelves of an amphitheatre, and deepens by contrast the strong blue-green of the stream. This slow-revolving surface—it seems in places perfectly still—resembles nothing so much as some ancient palace-pavement, cracked and scratched by the butts of legionary spears and the gold-stiffened hem of the garments of kings.
THE END.
Printed by R. & R. Clarke, Edinburgh.