III Niagara
I shall not describe Niagara; instead I shall repeat a conversation.
After a day spent in visiting the falls and the rapids, I was sitting to-night on a bench on the river bank. The racing water-ridges glimmered faintly in the dusk and the roar of the falls droned in unwavering monotony. I fell, I think, into a kind of stupor; anyhow, I cannot remember when it was that some one took a seat beside me, and began to talk. I seemed to wake and feel him speaking; and the first remark I definitely heard was this: “All America is Niagara.” “All America is Niagara,” the voice repeated—I could see no face. “Force without direction, noise without significance, speed without accomplishment. All day and all night the water rushes and roars. I sit and listen; and it does nothing. It is Nature; and Nature has no significance. It is we poets who create significance, and for that reason Nature hates us. She is afraid of us, for she knows that we condemn her. We have standards before which she shrinks abashed. But she has her revenge; for poets are incarnate. She owns our bodies; and she hurls us down Niagara with the rest, with the others that she loves, and that love her, the virile big-jawed men, trampling and trampled, hustling and hustled, working and asking no questions, falling as water and dispersing as spray. Nature is force, loves force, wills force alone. She hates the intellect, she hates the soul, she hates the spirit. Nietszche understood her aright, Nietszche the arch-traitor, who spied on the enemy, learned her secrets, and then went over to her side. Force rules the world.”
I must have said something banal about progress, for the voice broke out:
“There is no progress! It is always the same river! New waves succeed for ever, but always in the old forms. History tells, from beginning to end, the same tale—the victory of the strong over the sensitive, of the active over the reflective, of intelligence over intellect. Rome conquered Greece, the Germans the Italians, the English the French, and now, the Americans the world! What matters the form of the struggle, whether it be in arms or commerce, whether the victory go to the sword, or to shoddy, advertisement, and fraud? History is the perennial conquest of civilisation by barbarians. The little islands before us, lovely with trees and flowers, green oases in the rushing river, it is but a few years and they will be engulfed. So Greece was swallowed up, so Italy, and so will it be with England. Not, as your moralists maintain, because of her vices, but because of her virtues. She is becoming just, scrupulous, humane, and therefore she is doomed. Ignoble though she be, she is yet too noble to survive; for Germany and America are baser than she. Hark, Hark to Niagara! Force, at all costs! Do you hear it? Do you see it? I can see it, though it is dark. It is a river of mouths and teeth, of greedy outstretched hands, of mirthless laughter, of tears and of blood. I am there, you are there; we are hurrying over the fall; we are going up in spray.”
“Yes,” I cried as one cries in a nightmare, “and in that spray hangs the rainbow.”
He caught at the phrase. “It is true. The rainbow hangs in the spray! It is the type of the Ideal, hanging always above the Actual, never in it, never controlling it. We poets make the rainbow; we do not shape the world.”
“We do not make the rainbow,” I said. “The sun makes it, shining against it. What is the sun?”
“The sun is the Platonic Good; it lights the world, but does not warm it. By its illumination we see the river in which we are involved; see and judge, and condemn, and are swept away. That we can condemn is our greatness; by that we are children of the sun. But our vision is never fruitful. The sun cannot breed out of matter; no, not even maggots by kissing carrion. Between Force and Light, Matter and Good, there is no interchange. Good is not a cause, it is only an idea.”
“To illuminate,” I said, “is to transform.”
“No! it is only to reveal! Light dances on the surface; but not the tiniest wave was ever dimpled or crisped by its rays. Matter alone moves matter; and the world is matter. Best not cry, best not even blaspheme. Pass over the fall in silence. Perhaps, at the bottom, there is oblivion. It is the best we can hope, we who see.”
And he was gone! Had there been anyone? Was there a real voice? I do not know. Perhaps it was only the roar of Niagara. When I returned to the hotel, I heard that this very afternoon, while I was sunning myself on one of the islands, a woman had thrown herself into the rapids and been swept over the fall. Niagara took her, as it takes a stick or a stone. Soon it will take the civilisation of America, as it has taken that of the Indians. Centuries will pass, millenniums will pass, mankind will have come and gone, and still the river will flow and the sun shine, and they will communicate to one another their stern immortal joy, in which there is no part for ephemeral men.