advantage of this is that you can keep fairly clean and quiet of nerves;
the disadvantage is that you don't 'see the country.' I travelled most
of the way from Ottawa to Toronto by water. But between Ottawa and
Prescott then, and later from Toronto to Niagara Falls, and thence to
Sarnia, there is a good deal of Southern Ontario to be seen--the part
which has counted as Ontario so far. And I saw it through a faint
grey-pink mist of _Heimweh_. For after the States and after Quebec it is
English. There are weather-beaten farm-houses, rolling country, thickets
of trees, little hills green and grey in the distance, decorous small
fields, orchards, and, I swear, a hedge or two. Most of the towns we
went through are a little too vivacious or too pert to be European. But
there seemed to be real villages occasionally, and the land had a quiet
air of occupation.
Men have lived contentedly on this land and died where they were born,
and so given it a certain sanctity. Away north the wild begins, and is
only now being brought into civilisation, inhabited, made productive,
explored, and exploited. But this country has seen the generations pass,
and won something of that repose and security which countries acquire
from the sight.
The wise traveller from Ottawa to Toronto catches a boat at Prescott,
and puffs judicially between two nations up the St Lawrence and across
Lake Ontario. We were a cosmopolitan, middle-class bunch (it is the one
distinction between the Canadian and American languages that Canadians
tend to say 'bunch' but Americans 'crowd'), out to enjoy the scenery.
For this stretch of the river is notoriously picturesque, containing the
Thousand Isles. The Thousand Isles vary from six inches to hundreds
of yards in diameter. Each, if big enough, has been bought by a rich
man--generally an American--who has built a castle on it. So the
whole isn't much more beautiful than Golder's Green. We picked our way
carefully between the islands. The Americans on board sat in rows saying
"That house was built by Mr ----. Made his money in biscuits. Cost
three hundred thousand dollars, e-recting that building. Yessir." The
Canadians sat looking out the other way, and said, "In nineteen-ten
this land was worth twenty thousand an acre; now it's worth forty-five
thousand. Next year...." and their eyes grew solemn as the eyes of
men who think deep and holy thoughts. But the English sat quite still,
looking straight in front of them, thinking of nothing at all, and
hoping that nobody would speak to them. So we fared; until, well on in
the afternoon, we came to the entrance of Lake Ontario.
There is something ominous and unnatural about these great lakes. The
sweet flow of a river, and the unfriendly restless vitality of the sea,
men may know and love. And the little lakes we have in Europe are but
as fresh-water streams that have married and settled down, alive and
healthy and comprehensible. Rivers (except the Saguenay) are human. The
sea, very properly, will not be allowed in heaven. It has no soul. It is
unvintageable, cruel, treacherous, what you will. But, in the end--while
we have it with us--it is all right; even though that all-rightness
result but, as with France, from the recognition of an age-long feud and
an irremediable lack of sympathy. But these monstrous lakes, which
ape the ocean, are not proper to fresh water or salt. They have souls,
perceptibly, and wicked ones.
We steamed out, that day, over a flat, stationary mass of water, smooth
with the smoothness of metal or polished stone or one's finger-nail.
There was a slight haze everywhere. The lake was a terrible dead-silver
colour, the gleam of its surface shot with flecks of blue and a vapoury
enamel-green. It was like a gigantic silver shield. Its glint was
inexplicably sinister and dead, like the glint on glasses worn by
a blind man. In front the steely mist hid the horizon, so that the
occasional rock or little island and the one ship in sight seemed hung
in air. They were reflected to a preternatural length in the glassy
floor. Our boat appeared to leave no wake; those strange waters closed
up foamlessly behind her. But our black smoke hung, away back on the
trail, in a thick, clearly-bounded cloud, becalmed in the hot, windless
air, very close over the water, like an evil soul after death that
cannot win dissolution. Behind us and to the right lay the low, woody
shores of Southern Ontario and Prince Edward Peninsula, long dark
lines of green, stretching thinner and thinner, interminably, into the
distance. The lake around us was dull, though the sun shone full on it.
It gleamed, but without radiance.
Toronto (pronounce _T'ranto_, please) is difficult to describe. It has
an individuality, but an elusive one; yet not through any queerness or
difficult shade of eccentricity; a subtly normal, an indefinably obvious
personality. It is a healthy, cheerful city (by modern standards);
a clean-shaven, pink-faced, respectably dressed, fairly
energetic, unintellectual, passably sociable, well-to-do,
public-school-and-'varsity sort of city. One knows in one's own life
certain bright and pleasant figures; people who occupy the nearer middle
distance, unobtrusive but not negligible; wardens of the marches between
acquaintanceship and friendship. It is always nice to meet them, and in
parting one looks back at them once. They are, healthily and simply, the
most fitting product of a not perfect environment; good-sorts; normal,
but not too normal; distinctly themselves, but not distinguished. They
support civilisation. You can trust them in anything, if your demand be
for nothing extremely intelligent or absurdly altruistic. One of these
could be exhibited in any gallery in the universe, 'Perfect Specimen;
Upper Middle Classes; Twentieth Century'--and we should not be ashamed.
They are not vexed by impossible dreams, nor outrageously materialistic,
nor perplexed by overmuch prosperity, nor spoilt by reverse. Souls for
whom the wind is always nor'-nor'-west, and they sail nearer success
than failure, and nearer wisdom than lunacy. Neither leaders nor
slaves--but no Tomlinsons!--whomsoever of your friends you miss, _them_
you will certainly meet again, not unduly pardoned, the fifty-first
by the Throne. Such is Toronto. A brisk city of getting on for half a
million inhabitants, the largest British city in Canada (in spite of
the cheery Italian faces that pop up at you out of excavations in the
street), liberally endowed with millionaires, not lacking its due share
of destitution, misery, and slums. It is no mushroom city of the West,
it has its history; but at the same time it has grown immensely of
recent years. It is situated on the shores of a lovely lake; but you
never see that, because the railways have occupied the entire lake
front. So if, at evening, you try to find your way to the edge of the
water, you are checked by a region of smoke, sheds, trucks, wharves,
store-houses, 'depots,' railway-lines, signals, and locomotives and
trains that wander on the tracks up and down and across streets, pushing
their way through the pedestrians, and tolling, as they go, in the
American fashion, an immense melancholy bell, intent, apparently,
on some private and incommunicable grief. Higher up are the business
quarters, a few sky-scrapers in the American style without the modern
American beauty, but one of which advertises itself as the highest in
the British Empire; streets that seem less narrow than Montreal, but not
unrespectably wide; "the buildings are generally substantial and often
handsome" (the too kindly Herr Baedeker). Beyond that the residential
part, with quiet streets, gardens open to the road, shady verandahs, and
homes, generally of wood, that are a deal more pleasant to see than the
houses in a modern English town.
Toronto is the centre and heart of the Province of Ontario; and Ontario,
with a third of the whole population of Canada, directs the country for
the present, conditioned by the French on one hand and the West on
the other. And in this land, that is as yet hardly at all conscious of
itself as a nation, Toronto and Ontario do their best in leading and
realising national sentiment. A Toronto man, like most Canadians,
dislikes an Englishman; but, unlike some Canadians, he detests an
American. And he has some inkling of the conditions and responsibilities
of the British Empire. The tradition is in him. His fathers fought to
keep Canada British.
It is never easy to pick out of the turmoil of an election the real
powers that have moved men; and it is especially difficult in a country
where politics are so corrupt as they are in Canada. But certainly this
British feeling helped to throw Ontario, and so the country, against
Reciprocity with the United States in 1911; and it is keeping it, in the
comedy of the Navy Question, on Mr Borden's side--rather from distrust
of his opponents' sincerity, perhaps, than from admiration of the fix he
is in. It has been used, this patriotism, to aid the wealthy interests,
which are all-powerful here; and it will continue to be a ball in the
tennis of party politics. But it is real; it will remain, potential of
good, among all the forces that are certain for evil.
Toronto, soul of Canada, is wealthy, busy, commercial, Scotch, absorbent
of whisky; but she is duly aware of other things. She has a most modern
and efficient interest in education; and here are gathered what faint,
faint beginnings or premonitions of such things as Art Canada can
boast (except the French-Canadians, who, it is complained, produce
disproportionately much literature, and waste their time on their own
unprofitable songs). Most of those few who have begun to paint the
landscape of Canada centre there, and a handful of people who know about
books. In these things, as in all, this city is properly and cheerfully
to the front. It can scarcely be doubted that the first Repertory
Theatre in Canada will be founded in Toronto, some thirty years hence,
and will very daringly perform _Candida_ and _The Silver Box_. Canada
is a live country, live, but not, like the States, kicking. In these
trifles of Art and 'culture,' indeed, she is much handicapped by the
proximity of the States. For her poets and writers are apt to be drawn
thither, for the better companionship there and the higher rates of pay.
But Toronto--Toronto is the subject. One must say something--_what_ must
one say about Toronto? What can one? What has anybody ever said? It is
impossible to give it anything but commendation. It is not squalid like
Birmingham, or cramped like Canton, or scattered like Edmonton, or sham
like Berlin, or hellish like New York, or tiresome like Nice. It is all
right. The only depressing thing is that it will always be what it is,
only larger, and that no Canadian city can ever be anything better or
different. If they are good they may become Toronto.
VIII
NIAGARA FALLS
Samuel Butler has a lot to answer for. But for him, a modern traveller
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 _naivete_
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, power-houses, 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-a-bancs, elevators, or tunnels, or deceive you into
a carriage and pair, touts who would sell you picture postcards,
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-colour, 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 colour, 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 centre 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 colour 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 traveller
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 gambolling 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 clamour, the sight cannot recognise
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 vigour 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 Niagara a peace that the quietest plains or most stable hills can
never give.
IX
TO WINNIPEG
The boats that run from Sarnia the whole length of Lake Huron and Lake
Superior are not comfortable. But no doubt a train for those six hundred
miles would be worse. You start one afternoon, and in the morning of the
next day you have done with the rather colourless, unindividual expanses
of Huron, and are dawdling along a canal that joins the lakes by the
little town of Sault Ste. Marie (pronounced, abruptly, 'Soo'). We
happened on it one Sunday. The nearer waters of the river and the lakes
were covered with little sailing or rowing or bathing parties. Everybody
seemed cheerful, merry, and mildly raucous. There is a fine, breezy,
enviable healthiness about Canadian life. Except in some Eastern cities,
there are few clerks or working-men but can get away to the woods and
water.
As we drew out into the cold magnificence of Lake Superior, the receding
woody shores were occasionally spotted with picnickers or campers,
who rushed down the beach in various deshabille, waving towels,
handkerchiefs, or garments. We were as friendly. The human race seemed
a jolly bunch, and the world a fine, pleasant, open-air affair--'some
world,' in fact. A man in a red shirt and a bronzed girl with flowing
hair slid past in a canoe. We whistled, sang, and cried 'Snooky-ookums!'
and other words of occult meaning, which imputed love to them, and
foolishness. They replied suitably, grinned, and were gone. A little old
lady in black, in the chair next mine, kept a small telescope glued to
her eye, hour after hour. Whenever she distinguished life on any shore
we passed, she waved a tiny handkerchief. Diligently she did this,
and with grave face, never visible to the objects of her devotion, I
suppose, but certainly very happy; the most persistent lover of humanity
I have ever seen....
In the afternoon we were beyond sight of land. The world grew a little
chilly; and over the opaque, hueless water came sliding a queer, pale
mist. We strained through it for hours, a low bank of cloud, not twenty
feet in height, on which one could look down from the higher deck.
Its upper surface was quite flat and smooth, save for innumerable tiny
molehills or pyramids of mist. We seemed to be ploughing aimlessly
through the phantasmal sand-dunes of another world, faintly and by an
accident apprehended. So may the shades on a ghostly liner, plunging
down Lethe, have an hour's chance glimpse of the lights and lives of
Piccadilly, to them uncertain and filmy mirages of the air.