Books: Letters from America
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Rupert Brooke >> Letters from America
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Parliament Buildings stand finely on a headland of cliff some 160 feet
above the river. There are gardens about them; and beneath, the wooded
rocks go steeply down to the water. It is a position of natural boldness
and significance. The buildings were put up in the middle of last
century, an unfortunate period. But they have dignity, especially of
line; and when evening hides their colour, and the western sky and the
river take on the lovely hues of a Canadian sunset, and the lights begin
to come out in the city, they seem to have the majesty and calm of a
natural crown of the river-headland. The Government have bought the
ground along the cliff for half a mile on either side, and propose to
build all their offices there. So, in the end, if they build well, the
river-front at Ottawa will be a noble sight. And--just to show that it
is Canada, and not Utopia--the line of national buildings will always be
broken by an expensive and superb hotel the Canadian Pacific Railway has
been allowed to erect on the twin and neighbouring promontory to that of
the Houses of Parliament.
The streets of Ottawa are very quiet, and shaded with trees. The houses
are mostly of that cool, homely, wooden kind, with verandahs, on which,
or on the steps, the whole family may sit in the evening and observe the
passers-by. This is possible for both the rich and the poor, who live
nearer each other in Ottawa than in most cities. In general there is an
air of civilisation, which extends even over the country round. But in
the country you see little signs, a patch of swamp, or thickets of still
untouched primaeval wood, which remind you that Europeans have not long
had this land. I was taken in a motor-car some twenty miles or more over
the execrable roads round here, to a lovely little lake in the hills
north-west of Ottawa. We went by little French villages and fields at
first, and then through rocky, tangled woods of birch and poplar, rich
with milk-weed and blue cornflowers, and the aromatic thimbleberry
blossom, and that romantic, light, purple-red flower which is called
fireweed, because it is the first vegetation to spring up in the prairie
after a fire has passed over, and so might be adopted as the emblematic
flower of a sense of humour. They told me, casually, that there was
nothing but a few villages between me and the North Pole. It is probably
true of several commonly frequented places in this country. But it gives
a thrill to hear it.
But what Ottawa leaves in the mind is a certain graciousness--dim, for
it expresses a barely materialised national spirit--and the sight of
kindly English-looking faces, and the rather lovely sound of the soft
Canadian accent, in the streets.
VI
QUEBEC AND THE SAGUENAY
The boat starts from Montreal one evening, and lands you in Quebec at
six next morning. The evening I left was a dull one. Heavy sulphurous
clouds hung low over the city, drifting very slowly and gloomily out
across the river. Mount Royal crouched, black and sullen, in the
background, its crest occluded by the darkness, appearing itself a cloud
materialised, resting on earth. The harbour was filled with volumes of
smoke, purple and black, wreathing and sidling eastwards, from steamers
and chimneys. The gigantic elevators and other harbour buildings stood
mistily in this inferno, their heads clear and sinister above the mirk.
It was impossible to decide whether an enormous mass of pitchy and
Tartarian gloom was being slowly moulded by diabolic invisible hands
into a city, or a city, the desperate and damned abode of a loveless
race, was disintegrating into its proper fume and dusty chaos. With
relief we turned outwards to the nobility of the St Lawrence and the
gathering dark.
On the boat I fell in with another wanderer, an American Jew, and we
joined our fortunes, rather loosely, for a few days. He was one of those
men whom it is a life-long pleasure to remember. I can record his
existence the more easily that there is not the slightest chance of his
ever reading these lines. He was a fat, large man of forty-five,
obviously in business, and probably of a mediocre success. His eyes were
light-coloured, very small, always watery, and perpetually roving. The
lower part of his face was clean-shaven and very broad; his mouth wide,
with thin, moist, colourless lips; his nose fat and Hebraic. He was
rather bald. He had respect for Montreal, because, though closed to
navigation for five months in the year, it is the second busiest port on
the coast. He said it had Boston skinned. The French he disliked. He
thought they stood in the way of Canada's progress. His mind was even
more childlike and transparent than is usual with business men. The
observer could see thoughts slowly floating into it, like carp in a
pond. When they got near the surface, by a purely automatic process they
found utterance. He was almost completely unconscious of an audience.
Everything he thought of he said. He told me that his boots were giving
in the sole, but would probably last this trip. He said he had not
washed his feet for eight days; and that his clothes were shabby (which
was true), but would do for Canada. It was interesting to see how Canada
presented herself to that mind. He seemed to regard her as a kind of
Boeotia, and terrifyingly dour. "These Canadian waiters," he said, "they
jes' _fling_ the food in y'r face. Kind'er gets yer sick, doesn't
it?" I agreed. There was a Yorkshire mechanic, too, who had been in
Canada four years, and preferred it to England, "because you've room to
breathe," but also found that Canada had not yet learnt social comfort,
and regretted the manners of "the Old Country."
We woke to find ourselves sweeping round a high cliff, at six in the
morning, with a lively breeze, the river very blue and broken into
ripples, and a lot of little white clouds in the sky. The air was full
of gaiety and sunshine and the sense of the singing of birds, though
actually, I think, there were only a few gulls crying. It was the
perfection of a summer morning, thrilling with a freshness which, the
fancy said, was keener than any the old world knew. And high and grey
and serene above the morning lay the citadel of Quebec.
Is there any city in the world that stands so nobly as Quebec? The
citadel crowns a headland, three hundred feet high, that juts boldly out
into the St Lawrence. Up to it, up the side of the hill, clambers the
city, houses and steeples and huts, piled one on the other. It has the
individuality and the pride of a city where great things have happened,
and over which many years have passed. Quebec is as refreshing and as
definite after the other cities of this continent as an immortal among a
crowd of stockbrokers. She has, indeed, the radiance and repose of an
immortal; but she wears her immortality youthfully. When you get among
the streets of Quebec, the mediaeval, precipitous, narrow, winding, and
perplexed streets, you begin to realise her charm. She almost incurs the
charge of quaintness (abhorrent quality!); but even quaintness becomes
attractive in this country. You are in a foreign land, for the people
have an alien tongue, short stature, the quick, decided, cinematographic
quality of movement, and the inexplicable cheerfulness, which mark a
foreigner. You might almost be in Siena or some old German town, except
that Quebec has her street-cars and grain-elevators to show that she is
living.
The American Jew and I took a _caleche_, a little two-wheeled local
carriage, driven by a lively Frenchman with a factitious passion for
death-spots and churches. A small black and white spaniel followed the
_caleche_, yapping. The American's face shone with interest. "That
dawg's Michael," he said, "the hotel dawg. He's a queer little dawg. I
kicked his face; and he tried to bite me. Hup, Michael!" And he laughed
hoarsely. "Non!" said the driver suddenly, "it is not the 'otel dog."
The American did not lose interest. "These little dawgs are all alike,"
he said. "Dare say if you kicked that dawg in the face, he'd bite you.
Hup, Michael!" With that he fell into deep thought.
We rattled up and down the steep streets, out among tidy fields, and
back into the noisily sedate city again. We saw where Wolfe fell, where
Montcalm fell, where Montgomery fell. Children played where the tides of
war had ebbed and flowed. Mr Norman Angell and his friends tell us that
trade is superseding war; and pacifists declare that for the future
countries will win their pride or shame from commercial treaties and
tariffs and bounties, and no more from battles and sieges. And there is
a part of Canadian patriotism that has progressed this way. But I wonder
if the hearts of that remarkable race, posterity, will ever beat the
harder when they are told, "Here Mr Borden stood when he decided to
double the duty on agricultural implements," or even "In this room Mr
Ritchie conceived the plan of removing the shilling on wheat." When that
happens, Quebec will be a forgotten ruin.... The reverie was broken by
my friend struggling to his feet and standing, unsteady and bareheaded,
in the swaying carriage. In that position he burst hoarsely into a song
that I recognised as 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' We were passing the
American Consulate. His song over, he settled down and fell into a deep
sleep, and the _caleche_ jolted down even narrower streets,
curiously paved with planks, and ways that led through and under the
ancient, tottering wooden houses.
But Quebec is too real a city to be 'seen' in such a manner. And a
better way of spending a few days, or years, is to sit on Dufferin
Terrace, with the old Lower Town sheer beneath you, and the river beyond
it, and the citadel to the right, a little above, and the Isle of
Orleans and the French villages away down-stream to your left. Hour by
hour the colours change, and sunlight follows shadow, and mist rises,
and smoke drifts across. And through the veil of the shifting of lights
and hues there remains visible the majesty of the most glorious river in
the world.
From this contemplation, and from musing on men's agreement to mark by
this one great sign of the Taking of the Heights of Quebec, the turning
of one of the greatest currents in our history, I was torn by a journey
I had been advised to make. The boat goes some hundred and thirty miles
down the St Lawrence, turns up a northern tributary, the Saguenay, goes
as far as Chicoutimi, ninety miles up, and returns to Quebec. Both on
this trip, and between Quebec and Montreal, we touched at many little
French villages, by day and by night. Their _habitants_, the
French-Canadian peasants, are a jolly sight. They are like children in
their noisy content. They are poor and happy, Roman Catholics; they
laugh a great deal; and they continually sing. They do not progress at
all. As a counter to these admirable people we had on our boat a great
many priests. They diffused an atmosphere of black, of unpleasant
melancholy. Their faces had that curiously unwashed look, and were for
the most part of a mean and very untrustworthy expression. Their eyes
were small, shifty, and cruel, and would not meet the gaze.... The
choice between our own age and mediaeval times is a very hard one.
It was almost full night when we left the twenty-mile width of the St
Lawrence, and turned up a gloomy inlet. By reason of the night and of
comparison with the river from which we had come, this stream appeared
unnaturally narrow. Darkness hid all detail, and we were only aware of
vast cliffs, sometimes dense with trees, sometimes bare faces of sullen
rock. They shut us in, oppressively, but without heat. There are no
banks to this river, for the most part; only these walls, rising sheer
from the water to the height of two thousand feet, going down sheer
beneath it, or rather by the side of it, to many times that depth. The
water was of some colour blacker than black. Even by daylight it is inky
and sinister. It flows without foam or ripple. No white showed in the
wake of the boat. The ominous shores were without sign of life, save for
a rare light every few miles, to mark some bend in the chasm. Once a
canoe with two Indians shot out of the shadows, passed under our stern,
and vanished silently down stream. We all became hushed and
apprehensive. The night was gigantic and terrible. There were a few
stars, but the flood slid along too swiftly to reflect them. The whole
scene seemed some Stygian imagination of Dante. As we drew further and
further into that lightless land, little twists and curls of vapour
wriggled over the black river-surface. Our homeless, irrelevant, tiny
steamer seemed to hang between two abysms. One became suddenly aware of
the miles of dark water beneath. I found that under a prolonged gaze the
face of the river began to writhe and eddy, as if from some horrible
suppressed emotion. It seemed likely that something might appear. I
reflected that if the river failed us, all hope was gone; and that
anyhow this region was the abode of devils. I went to bed.
Next day we steamed down the river again. By daylight some of the horror
goes, but the impression of ancientness and desolation remains. The
gloomy flood is entirely shut in by the rock or the tangled pine and
birch forests of these great cliffs, except in one or two places, where
a chine and a beach have given lodging to lonely villages. One of these
is at the end of a long bay, called Ha-Ha Bay. The local guide-book, an
early example of the school of fantastic realism so popular among our
younger novelists, says that this name arose from the 'laughing
ejaculations' of the early French explorers, who had mistaken this
lengthy blind-alley for the main stream. 'Ha! Ha!' they said. So like an
early explorer.
At the point where the Saguenay joins the St Lawrence, here twenty miles
wide, I 'stopped off' for a day, to feel the country more deeply. The
village is called Tadousac, and consists of an hotel and French
fishermen, to whom Quebec is a distant, unvisited city of legend. The
afternoon was very hot. I wandered out along a thin margin of yellow
sand to the extreme rocky point where the waters of the two rivers meet
and swirl. There I lay, and looked at the strange humps of the
Laurentian hills, and the dark green masses of the woods, impenetrable
depths of straight and leaning and horizontal trees, broken here and
there by great bald granite rocks, and behind me the little village,
where the earliest church in Canada stands. Away in the St Lawrence
there would be a flash as an immense white fish jumped. Miles out an
occasional steamer passed, bound to England perhaps. And once, hugging
the coast, came a half-breed paddling a canoe with a small diamond-
shaped sail, filled with trout. The cliff above me was crowned with beds
of blue flowers, whose names I did not know. Against the little gulfs
and coasts of rock at my feet were washing a few white logs of
driftwood. I wondered if they could have floated across from England, or
if they could be from the _Titanic_. The sun was very hot, the sky
a clear light blue, almost cloudless, like an English sky, and the water
seemed fairly deep. I stripped, hovered a while on the brink, and
plunged. The current was unexpectedly strong. I seemed to feel that two-
mile-deep body of black water moving against me. And it was cold as
death. Stray shreds of the St Lawrence water were warm and cheerful. But
the current of the Saguenay, on such a day, seemed unnaturally icy. As
my head came up I made one dash for the land, scrambled out on the hot
rocks, and lay there panting. Then I dried on a handkerchief, dressed,
and ran back home, still shivering, through the woods to the hotel.
VII
ONTARIO
The great joy of travelling in Canada is to do it by water. The
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.
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