Books: Letters from America
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Rupert Brooke >> Letters from America
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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.
To taste the full deliciousness of travelling in an American train by
night through new scenery, you must carefully secure a lower berth. And
when you are secret and separate in your little oblong world, safe
between sheets, pull up the blinds on the great window a few inches and
leave them so. Thus, as you lie, you can view the dark procession of
woods and hills, and mingle the broken hours of railway slumber with
glimpses of a wild starlit landscape. The country retains individuality,
and yet puts on romance, especially the rough, shaggy region between
Port Arthur and Winnipeg. For four hundred miles there is hardly a sign
that humanity exists on the earth's face, only rocks and endless woods
of scrubby pine, and the occasional strange gleam of water, and night
and the wind. Night-long, dream and reality mingle. You may wake from
sleep to find yourself flying through a region where a forest fire has
passed, a place of grey pine-trunks, stripped of foliage, occasionally
waving a naked bough. They appear stricken by calamity, intolerably bare
and lonely, gaunt, perpetually protesting, amazed and tragic creatures.
We saw no actual fire the night I passed. But a little while after dawn
we noticed on the horizon, fifteen miles away, an immense column of
smoke. There was little wind, and it hung, as if sculptured, against the
grey of the morning; nor did we lose sight of it till just before we
boomed over a wide, swift, muddy river, into the flat city of Winnipeg.
Winnipeg is the West. It is important and obvious that in Canada there
are two or three (some say five) distinct Canadas. Even if you lump the
French and English together as one community in the East, there remains
the gulf of the Great Lakes. The difference between East and West is
possibly no greater than that between North and South England, or
Bavaria and Prussia; but in this country, yet unconscious of itself,
there is so much less to hold them together. The character of the land
and the people differs; their interests, as it appears to them, are not
the same. Winnipeg is a new city. In the archives at Ottawa is a picture
of Winnipeg in 1870--Main street, with a few shacks, and the prairie
either end. Now her population is a hundred thousand, and she has the
biggest this, that, and the other west of Toronto. A new city; a little
more American than the other Canadian cities, but not unpleasantly so.
The streets are wider, and full of a bustle which keeps clear of hustle.
The people have something of the free swing of Americans, without the
bumptiousness; a tempered democracy, a mitigated independence of
bearing. The manners of Winnipeg, of the West, impress the stranger as
better than those of the East, more friendly, more hearty, more certain
to achieve graciousness, if not grace. There is, even, in the
architecture of Winnipeg, a sort of _gauche_ pride visible. It is
hideous, of course, even more hideous than Toronto or Montreal; but
cheerily and windily so. There is no scheme in the city, and no beauty,
but it is at least preferable to Birmingham, less dingy, less directly
depressing. It has no real slums, even though there is poverty and
destitution.
But there seems to be a trifle more public spirit in the West than the
East. Perhaps it is that in the greater eagerness and confidence of this
newer country men have a superfluity of energy and interest, even after
attending to their own affairs, to give to the community. Perhaps it is
that the West is so young that one has a suspicion money-making has
still some element of a child's game in it--its only excuse. At any
rate, whether because the state of affairs is yet unsettled, or because
of the invisible subtle spirit of optimism that blows through the
heavily clustering telephone-wires and past the neat little modern
villas and down the solidly pretentious streets, one can't help finding
a tiny hope that Winnipeg, the city of buildings and the city of human
beings, may yet come to something. It is a slender hope, not to be
compared to that of the true Winnipeg man, who, gazing on his city, is
fired with the proud and secret ambition that it will soon be twice as
big, and after that four times, and then ten times....
"Wider still and wider
Shall thy bounds be set,"
says that hymn which is the noblest expression of modern ambition.
_That_ hope is sure to be fulfilled. But the other timid prayer,
that something different, something more worth having, may come out of
Winnipeg, exists, and not quite unreasonably. That cannot be said of
Toronto.
Winnipeg is of the West, new, vigorous in its way, of unknown
potentialities. Already the West has been a nuisance to the East, in the
fight of 1911 over Reciprocity with the United States. When she gets a
larger representation in Parliament, she will be still more of a
nuisance. A casual traveller cannot venture to investigate the beliefs
and opinions of the inhabitants of a country, but he can record them all
the better, perhaps, for his foreign-ness. It is generally believed in
the West that the East runs Canada, and runs it for its own advantage.
And the East means a very few rich men, who control the big railways,
the banks, and the Manufacturers' Association, subscribe to both
political parties, and are generally credited with complete control over
the Tariff and most other Canadian affairs. Whether or no the
Manufacturers' Association does arrange the Tariff and control the
commerce of Canada, it is generally believed to do so. The only thing is
that its friends say that it acts in the best interests of Canada, its
enemies that it acts in the best interests of the Manufacturers'
Association. Among its enemies are many in the West. The normal Western
life is a lonely and individual one; and a large part of the population
has crossed from the United States, or belongs to that great mass of
European immigration that Canada is letting so blindly in. So,
naturally, the Westerner does not feel the same affection for the Empire
or for England as the British Canadians of the East, whose forefathers
fought to stay within the Empire. Nor is his affection increased by the
suspicion that the Imperial cry has been used for party purposes. He has
no use for politics at Ottawa. The naval question is nothing to him. He
wants neither to subscribe money nor to build ships. Europe is very far
away; and he is too ignorant to realise his close connection with her.
He has strong views, however, on a Tariff which only affects him by
perpetually raising the cost of living and farming. The ideas of even a
Conservative in the West about reducing the Tariff would make an Eastern
'Liberal' die of heart-failure. And the Westerner also hates the Banks.
The banking system of Canada is peculiar, and throws the control of the
banks into the hands of a few people in the East, who were felt, by the
ever optimistic West, to have shut down credit too completely during
the recent money stringency.
The most interesting expression of the new Western point of view, and in
many ways the most hopeful movement in Canada, is the Co-operative
movement among the grain-growers of the three prairie provinces. Only
started a few years ago, it has grown rapidly in numbers, wealth, power,
and extent of operations. So far it has confined itself politically to
influencing provincial legislatures. But it has gradually attached
itself to an advanced Radical programme of a Chartist description. And
it is becoming powerful. Whether the outcome will be a very desirable
rejuvenation of the Liberal Party, or the creation of a third--perhaps
Radical-Labour--party, it is hard to tell. At any rate, the change will
come. And, just to start with, there will very shortly come to the
Eastern Powers, who threw out Reciprocity with the States for the sake
of the Empire, a demand from the West that the preference to British
goods be increased rapidly till they be allowed to come in free, also
for the Empire's sake. Then the fun will begin.
X
OUTSIDE
I had visited New York, Boston, Quebec, Montreal, and Toronto. In
Winnipeg I found a friend, who was tired of cities. So was I. In
Canada the remedy lies close at hand. We took ancient clothes--and
I, Ben Jonson and Jane Austen to keep me English--and departed
northward for a lodge, reported to exist in a region of lakes and hills
and forests and caribou and Indians and a few people. At first the train
sauntered through a smiling plain, intermittently cultivated, and dotted
with little new villages. Over this country are thrown little pools of
that flood of European immigration that pours through Winnipeg, to
remain separate or be absorbed, as destiny wills. The problem of
immigration here reveals that purposelessness that exists in the affairs
of Canada even more than those of other nations. The multitude from
South or East Europe flocks in. Some make money and return. The most
remain, often in inassimilable lumps. There is every sign that these
lumps may poison the health of Canada as dangerously as they have that
of the United States. For Canada there is the peril of too large an
element of foreign blood and traditions in a small nation already little
more than half composed of British blood and descent. Nationalities seem
to teach one another only their worst. If the Italians gave the
Canadians of their good manners, and the Doukhobors or Poles inoculated
them with idealism and the love of beauty, and received from them
British romanticism and sense of responsibility!.... But they only seem
to increase the anarchy, these 'foreigners,' and to learn the American
twang and method of spitting. And there is the peril of politics. Upon
these scattered exotic communities, ignorant of the problems of their
adopted land, ignorant even of its language, swoop the agents of
political parties, with their one effectual argument--bad whisky. This
baptism is the immigrants' only organised welcome into their new
liberties. Occasionally some Church raises a thin protest. But the
'Anglo-Saxon' continues to take up his burden; and the floods from
Europe pour in. Canadians regard this influx with that queer fatalism
which men adopt under plutocracy. "How could they stop it? It pays the
steamship and railway companies. It may, or may not, be good for Canada.
Who knows? In any case, it will go on. Our masters wish it...."
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