L. Holtz; her High School principal, Rice Brown; her doctor, Frank
Foncannon; her friend, W. W. Finney; her pal at the _Gazette_ office,
Walter Hughes; and her brother Bill. It would have made her smile to
know that her friend, Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, had been
transferred from Sixth and Commercial to the corner near the church to
direct her friends who came to bid her good-by.
A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her
coffin as her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But
the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was
flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn.
NIAGARA FALLS
_By_ RUPERT BROOKE
The poet usually is the best reporter, for he is an observer not
merely accurate but imaginative, self-trained to see subtle
suggestions, relations and similarities. This magnificent bit of
description was written by Rupert Brooke as one of the letters sent
to the _Westminster Gazette_ describing his trip in the United
States and Canada in 1913. It is included in the volume _Letters
from America_ to which Henry James contributed so affectionate and
desperately unintelligible a preface--one of the last things James
wrote. Brooke's notes on America are well worth reading: they are
full of delightful and lively comments, though sometimes much (oh,
very much!) too condescending. The last paragraph in this essay is
interesting in view of subsequent history.
Brooke was born in 1887, son of a master at Rugby School; was at
King's College, Cambridge; died of blood-poisoning in the Ægean,
April 23, 1915.
Samuel Butler has a lot to answer for. But for him, a modern traveler
could spend his time peacefully admiring the scenery instead of feeling
himself bound to dog the simple and grotesque of the world for the sake
of their too-human comments. It is his fault if a peasant's _naïveté_
has come to outweigh the beauty of rivers, and the remarks of clergymen
are more than mountains. It is very restful to give up all effort at
observing human nature and drawing social and political deductions from
trifles, and to let oneself relapse into wide-mouthed worship of the
wonders of nature. And this is very easy at Niagara. Niagara means
nothing. It is not leading anywhere. It does not result from anything.
It throws no light on the effects of Protection, nor on the Facility for
Divorce in America, nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on Canadian
character, nor even on the Navy Bill. It is merely a great deal of water
falling over some cliffs. But it is very remarkably that. The human
race, apt as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its best to
surround the Falls with every distraction, incongruity, and vulgarity.
Hotels, powerhouses, bridges, trams, picture post-cards, sham legends,
stalls, booths, rifle-galleries, and side-shows frame them about. And
there are Touts. Niagara is the central home and breeding-place for all
the touts of earth. There are touts insinuating, and touts raucous,
greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class, refined, gentlemanly,
take-you-by-the-arm touts; touts who intimidate and touts who wheedle;
professionals, amateurs, and _dilettanti_, male and female; touts who
would photograph you with your arm round a young lady against a faked
background of the sublimest cataract, touts who would bully you into
cars, char-à-bancs, elevators, or tunnels, or deceive you into a
carriage and pair, touts who would sell you picture post-cards,
moccasins, sham Indian beadwork, blankets, tee-pees, and crockery, and
touts, finally, who have no apparent object in the world, but just
purely, simply, merely, incessantly, indefatigably, and ineffugibly to
tout. And in the midst of all this, overwhelming it all, are the Falls.
He who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are not very high, but
they are overpowering. They are divided by an island into two parts, the
Canadian and the American.
Half a mile or so above the Falls, on either side, the water of the
great stream begins to run more swiftly and in confusion. It descends
with ever-growing speed. It begins chattering and leaping, breaking into
a thousand ripples, throwing up joyful fingers of spray. Sometimes it is
divided by islands and rocks, sometimes the eye can see nothing but a
waste of laughing, springing, foamy waves, turning, crossing, even
seeming to stand for an instant erect, but always borne impetuously
forward like a crowd of triumphant feasters. Sit close down by it, and
you see a fragment of the torrent against the sky, mottled, steely, and
foaming, leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of water.
Perpetually the eye is on the point of descrying a pattern in this
weaving, and perpetually it is cheated by change. In one place part of
the flood plunges over a ledge a few feet high and a quarter of a mile
or so long, in a uniform and stable curve. It gives an impression of
almost military concerted movement, grown suddenly out of confusion. But
it is swiftly lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment. Here
and there a rock close to the surface is marked by a white wave that
faces backwards and seems to be rushing madly up-stream, but is really
stationary in the headlong charge. But for these signs of reluctance,
the waters seem to fling themselves on with some foreknowledge of their
fate, in an ever wilder frenzy. But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience.
They prove, rather, that Greek belief that the great crashes are
preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety. Leaping in the
sunlight, careless, entwining, clamorously joyful, the waves riot on
towards the verge.
But there they change. As they turn to the sheer descent, the white and
blue and slate color, in the heart of the Canadian Falls at least, blend
and deepen to a rich, wonderful, luminous green. On the edge of disaster
the river seems to gather herself, to pause, to lift a head noble in
ruin, and then, with a slow grandeur, to plunge into the eternal thunder
and white chaos below. Where the stream runs shallower it is a kind of
violet color, but both violet and green fray and frill to white as they
fall. The mass of water, striking some ever-hidden base of rock, leaps
up the whole two hundred feet again in pinnacles and domes of spray. The
spray falls back into the lower river once more; all but a little that
fines to foam and white mist, which drifts in layers along the air,
graining it, and wanders out on the wind over the trees and gardens and
houses, and so vanishes.
The manager of one of the great power-stations on the banks of the river
above the Falls told me that the center of the riverbed at the Canadian
Falls is deep and of a saucer shape. So it may be possible to fill this
up to a uniform depth, and divert a lot of water for the power-houses.
And this, he said, would supply the need for more power, which will
certainly soon arise, without taking away from the beauty of Niagara.
This is a handsome concession of the utilitarians to ordinary
sight-seers. Yet, I doubt if we shall be satisfied. The real secret of
the beauty and terror of the Falls is not their height or width, but the
feeling of colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the
plunge of that vast body of water. If that were taken away, there would
be little visible change, but the heart would be gone.
The American Falls do not inspire this feeling in the same way as the
Canadian. It is because they are less in volume, and because the water
does not fall so much into one place. By comparison their beauty is
almost delicate and fragile. They are extraordinarily level, one long
curtain of lacework and woven foam. Seen from opposite, when the sun is
on them, they are blindingly white, and the clouds of spray show dark
against them. With both Falls the color of the water is the
ever-altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into
one another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun.
Sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow
from within with a deep, inexplicable light. Sometimes the white
intricacies of dropping foam become opaque and creamy. And always there
are the rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the Falls from above, a
great double rainbow, very vivid, spanning the extent of spray from top
to bottom, is the first thing you see. If you wander along the cliff
opposite, a bow springs into being in the American Falls, accompanies
you courteously on your walk, dwindles and dies as the mist ends, and
awakens again as you reach the Canadian tumult. And the bold traveler
who attempts the trip under the American Falls sees, when he dare open
his eyes to anything, tiny baby rainbows, some four or five yards in
span, leaping from rock to rock among the foam, and gamboling beside
him, barely out of hand's reach, as he goes. One I saw in that place was
a complete circle, such as I have never seen before, and so near that I
could put my foot on it. It is a terrifying journey, beneath and behind
the Falls. The senses are battered and bewildered by the thunder of the
water and the assault of wind and spray; or rather, the sound is not of
falling water, but merely of falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So,
if you are close behind the endless clamor, the sight cannot recognize
liquid in the masses that hurl past. You are dimly and pitifully aware
that sheets of light and darkness are falling in great curves in front
of you. Dull omnipresent foam washes the face. Farther away, in the roar
and hissing, clouds of spray seem literally to slide down some invisible
plane of air.
Beyond the foot of the Falls the river is like a slipping floor of
marble, green with veins of dirty white, made by the scum that was foam.
It slides very quietly and slowly down for a mile or two, sullenly
exhausted. Then it turns to a dull sage green, and hurries more swiftly,
smooth and ominous. As the walls of the ravine close in, trouble stirs,
and the waters boil and eddy. These are the lower rapids, a sight more
terrifying than the Falls, because less intelligible. Close in its bands
of rock the river surges tumultuously forward, writhing and leaping as
if inspired by a demon. It is pressed by the straits into a visibly
convex form. Great planes of water slide past. Sometimes it is thrown up
into a pinnacle of foam higher than a house, or leaps with incredible
speed from the crest of one vast wave to another, along the shining
curve between, like the spring of a wild beast. Its motion continually
suggests muscular action. The power manifest in these rapids moves one
with a different sense of awe and terror from that of the Falls. Here
the inhuman life and strength are spontaneous, active, almost resolute;
masculine vigor compared with the passive gigantic power, female,
helpless and overwhelming, of the Falls. A place of fear.
One is drawn back, strangely, to a contemplation of the Falls, at every
hour, and especially by night, when the cloud of spray becomes an
immense visible ghost, straining and wavering high above the river,
white and pathetic and translucent. The Victorian lies very close below
the surface in every man. There one can sit and let great cloudy
thoughts of destiny and the passage of empires drift through the mind;
for such dreams are at home by Niagara. I could not get out of my mind
the thought of a friend, who said that the rainbows over the Falls were
like the arts and beauty and goodness, with regard to the stream of
life--caused by it, thrown upon its spray, but unable to stay or direct
or affect it, and ceasing when it ceased. In all comparisons that rise
in the heart, the river, with its multitudinous waves and its single
current, likens itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a
community. A man's life is of many flashing moments, and yet one stream;
a nation's flows through all its citizens, and yet is more than they. In
such places, one is aware, with an almost insupportable and yet
comforting certitude, that both men and nations are hurried onwards to
their ruin or ending as inevitably as this dark flood. Some go down to
it unreluctant, and meet it, like the river, not without nobility. And
as incessant, as inevitable, and as unavailing as the spray that hangs
over the Falls, is the white cloud of human crying.... With some such
thoughts does the platitudinous heart win from the confusion and thunder
of a Niagara peace that the quietest plains or most stable hills can
never give.
THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE
_By_ DON MARQUIS
Don Marquis is a real name, not a pseudonym; it is pronounced
_Markwiss_, not _Markee_. I reprint here two of Mr. Marquis's
amiable meditations on the "Almost Perfect State," which have
appeared in the column (_The Sun Dial_) conducted by him for ten
years in the New York Sun. According to the traditional motto of
sun-dials, Mr. Marquis's horologe usually numbers only the serene
hours; but sometimes, when the clear moonlight of his Muse is
shining, it casts darker and even more precious shadows of satire
and mysticism. His many readers know by this time the depth and
reach of his fun and fancy. Marquis is a true philosopher and wit,
his humor adorns a rich and mellow gravity. When strongly moved he
sometimes utters an epigram that rings like steel leaving the
scabbard.
There are many things to be said against American newspapers, but
much of the indictment is quashed when one considers that every now
and then they develop a writer like Don Marquis. The violent haste,
pressure and instancy of newspaper routine, purgatorial to some
temperaments, is a genuine stimulus to others--particularly if they
are able, as in the case of the columnist, to fall back upon
outside contributors in their intervals of pessimism or sloth.
Mr. Marquis's _The Old Soak_, a post-prohibition portrait of a
genial old tippler, is perhaps the most vital bit of American humor
since _Mr. Dooley_--some say since Mark Twain. His _Prefaces_ and
his poems will also be considered by the judicious. He was born in
Illinois in 1878, and did newspaper work in Philadelphia and
Atlanta before coming to the _Sun_ in 1912.
I
No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not
nearly enough perfect unless the individuals who compose it can,
somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a
few years. The most wonderful governmental system in the world does not
attract us, as a system; we are after a system that scarcely knows it is
a system; the great thing is to have the largest number of individuals
as happy as may be, for a little while at least, some time before they
die.
Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be. The child seems happy all
the time to the adult, because the adult knows that the child is
untouched by the real problems of life; if the adult were similarly
untouched he is sure that he would be happy. But children, not knowing
that they are having an easy time, have a good many hard times. Growing
and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against
them, are not easy things to do. Adolescence is certainly far from a
uniformly pleasant period. Early manhood might be the most glorious time
of all were it not that the sheer excess of life and vigor gets a fellow
into continual scrapes. Of middle age the best that can be said is that
a middle aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in
spite of his troubles.
It is to old age that we look for reimbursement, the most of us. And
most of us look in vain. For the most of us have been wrenched and
racked, in one way or another, until old age is the most trying time of
all.
In the Almost Perfect State every person shall have at least ten years
before he dies of easy, carefree, happy living ... things will be so
arranged economically that this will be possible for each individual.
Personally we look forward to an old age of dissipation and indolence
and unreverend disrepute. In fifty years we shall be ninety-two years
old. We intend to work rather hard during those fifty years and
accumulate enough to live on without working any more for the next ten
years, for we have determined to die at the age of one hundred and two.
During the last ten years we shall indulge ourself in many things that
we have been forced by circumstances to forego. We have always been
compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be
prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, industrious, respectful
of established institutions, a model citizen. We have not liked it, but
we have been unable to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our
observation, inform us that the conservatives have the right side of the
argument in all human affairs. But the people whom we really prefer as
associates, though we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the
radicals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists, the
idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good-for-nothings, the
sentimentalists, the prophets, the freaks. We have never dared to know
any of them, far less become intimate with them.
Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall
be the ribald, useless, drunken outcast person we have always wished to
be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not
walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic
beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a
bucket of hot water, with a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and
write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our
chair will be a forty-five caliber revolver, and we shall shoot out the
lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off; when we
want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window
and be damned to it; we shall address public meetings to which we have
been invited because of our wisdom in a vein of jocund malice. We shall
... but we don't wish to make any one envious of the good time that is
coming to us ... we look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonored
and disorderly old age.
(In the meantime, of course, you understand, you can't have us pinched
and deported for our yearnings.)
We shall know that the Almost Perfect State is here when the kind of old
age each person wants is possible to him. Of course, all of you may not
want the kind we want ... some of you may prefer prunes and morality to
the bitter end. Some of you may be dissolute now and may look forward to
becoming like one of the nice old fellows in a Wordsworth poem. But for
our part we have always been a hypocrite and we shall have to continue
being a hypocrite for a good many years yet, and we yearn to come out in
our true colors at last. The point is, that no matter what you want to
be, during those last ten years, that you may be, in the Almost Perfect
State.
Any system of government under which the individual does all the
sacrificing for the sake of the general good, for the sake of the
community, the State, gets off on its wrong foot. We don't want things
that cost us too much. We don't want too much strain all the time.
The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you
have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth
doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and
get some joy out of it.
Do the best you can, without straining yourself too much and too
continuously, and leave the rest to God. If you strain yourself too much
you'll have to ask God to patch you up. And for all you know, patching
you up may take time that it was planned to use some other way.
BUT ... overstrain yourself _now and then_. For this reason: The things
you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and
joyously unless you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And when
you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the creation of a new
self--if you get what we mean. And if you should ask us suddenly just
what this has to do with the picture of the old guy in the wheel chair
we should answer: Hanged if we know, but we seemed to sort o' run into
it, somehow.
II
Interplanetary communication is one of the persistent dreams of the
inhabitants of this oblate spheroid on which we move, breathe and suffer
for lack of beer. There seems to be a feeling in many quarters that if
we could get speech with the Martians, let us say, we might learn from
them something to our advantage. There is a disposition to concede the
superiority of the fellows Out There ... just as some Americans
capitulate without a struggle to poets from England, rugs from
Constantinople, song and sausage from Germany, religious enthusiasts
from Hindustan and cheese from Switzerland, although they have not
tested the goods offered and really lack the discrimination to determine
their quality. Almost the only foreign importations that were ever
sneezed at in this country were Swedish matches and Spanish influenza.
But are the Martians ... if Martians there be ... any more capable than
the persons dwelling between the Woolworth Building and the Golden Horn,
between Shwe Dagon and the First Church, Scientist, in Boston, Mass.?
Perhaps the Martians yearn toward earth, romantically, poetically, the
Romeos swearing by its light to the Juliets; the idealists and
philosophers fabling that already there exists upon it an ALMOST PERFECT
STATE--and now and then a wan prophet lifting his heart to its gleams,
as a cup to be filled from Heaven with fresh waters of hope and courage.
For this earth, it is also a star.
We know they are wrong about us, the lovers in the far stars, the
philosophers, poets, the prophets ... or _are_ they wrong?
They are both right and wrong, as we are probably both right and wrong
about them. If we tumbled into Mars or Arcturus or Sirius this evening
we should find the people there discussing the shimmy, the jazz, the
inconstancy of cooks and the iniquity of retail butchers, no doubt ...
and they would be equally disappointed by the way we flitter, frivol,
flutter and flivver.
And yet, that other thing would be there too ... that thing that made
them look at our star as a symbol of grace and beauty.
Men could not think of THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE if they did not have it
in them ultimately to create THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE.
We used sometimes to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, that song in stone
and steel of an engineer who was also a great artist, at dusk, when the
tides of shadow flood in from the lower bay to break in a surf of glory
and mystery and illusion against the tall towers of Manhattan. Seen from
the middle arch of the bridge at twilight, New York with its girdle of
shifting waters and its drift of purple cloud and its quick pulsations
of unstable light is a miracle of splendor and beauty that lights up the
heart like the laughter of a god.
But, descend. Go down into the city. Mingle with the details. The dirty
old shed from which the "L" trains and trolleys put out with their
jammed and mangled thousands for flattest Flatbush and the unknown
bourne of ulterior Brooklyn is still the same dirty old shed; on a hot,
damp night the pasty streets stink like a paperhanger's overalls; you
are trodden and over-ridden by greasy little profiteers and their
hopping victims; you are encompassed round about by the ugly and the
sordid, and the objectionable is exuded upon you from a myriad candid
pores; your elation and your illusion vanish like ingenuous snowflakes
that have kissed a hot dog sandwich on its fiery brow, and you say:
"Beauty? Aw, h--l! What's the use?"
And yet you have seen beauty. And beauty that was created by these
people and people like these.... You have seen the tall towers of
Manhattan, wonderful under the stars. How did it come about that such
growths came from such soil--that a breed lawless and sordid and prosaic
has written such a mighty hieroglyphic against the sky? This glamor out
of a pigsty ... how come? How is it that this hideous, half-brute city
is also beautiful and a fit habitation for demi-gods? How come?