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 æsthetic 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, verd-antique, 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 warehouses, 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

beautiful 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 cliffs, 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.