Newport consists, as the reader will know, of an ancient and honorable town, a goodly harbor, and a long, broad neck of land, stretching southward into the sea, and forming the chief habitation of the summer colony. Along the greater part of its eastward length, this projecting coast is bordered with lordly cliffs and dotted with seaward-gazing villas. At the head of the promontory the villas enjoy a magnificent reach of prospect. The pure Atlantic—the Old World westward tides—expire directly at their feet. Behind the line of villas runs the Avenue, with more villas yet—of which there is nothing at all to say, but that those built recently are a hundred times prettier than those built fifteen years ago, offering a modest contribution to our modern architectural Renaissance. Some years ago, when I first knew Newport, the town proper was considered extremely “picturesque.” If an antique shabbiness that amounts almost to squalor is a pertinent element, as I believe it is, of the picturesque, the little main street at least—Thames Street by name—still deserves the praise. Here, in their crooked and dwarfish wooden mansions, are the shops that minister to the daily needs of the expanded city; and here of a summer morning, jolting over the cobble-stones of the narrow roadway, you may see a hundred superfine ladies seeking with languid eagerness what they may buy—to “buy something,” I believe, being a diurnal necessity of the American woman of substance. This busy region gradually melts away into the grass-grown stillness of the Point, in the eyes of many persons the pleasantest quarter in Newport. It has superficially the advantage of being as yet uninvaded by fashion. When I first knew it, however, its peculiar charm was even more undisturbed than at present. The Point may be called the old residential, as distinguished from the commercial, town. It is meagre, shallow, and scanty—a mere pinch of antiquity—but, as far as it goes, it retains an exquisite tone. It leaves the shops and the little wharves, and wanders close to the harbor, where the breeze-borne rattle of shifted sails and spars alone intrudes upon its stillness, till its mouldy-timbered quiet subsides into the low, tame rocks and beaches which edge the bay. Several fine modern houses have recently been erected on the water-side, absorbing the sober, primitive tenements which used to maintain the picturesque character of the place. They improve it, of course, as a residence, but they injure it as a spectacle. Enough of early architecture still remains, however, to suggest a multitude of thoughts as to the severe simplicity of the generation which produced it. It is picturesque in a way, but with a paucity of elements which seems to defy all effect. The plain gray nudity of these little warped and shingled boxes seems utterly to repudiate the slightest curiosity. But here, as elsewhere, the magical Newport atmosphere wins half the battle. It aims at no mystery. It clothes them in a garment of absolute light. Their homely notches and splinters twinkle in the sun. Their steep gray roofs, barnacled with lichens, remind you of old scows, overturned on the beach to dry. They show for what they are—simple houses by the sea. Over-darkened by no wealth of inland shade, without show or elegance or finish, they patiently partake of the fortunes of the era—of the vast blue glare which rises from the bay, and the storms which sweep inward from the ocean. They have been blown free of all needless accretion of detail—scorched clean of all graceful superfluities. Most of the population of this part of Newport is, I believe, of Quaker lineage. This double-salted Quakerism is abundant motive for this soundless and colorless simplicity.
One of the more recent movements of fashion is the so-called “New Drive”—the beautiful drive by the sea. The Avenue, where the Neck abruptly terminates, has been made to prolong itself to the west, and to wander for a couple of miles over a lovely region of beach and lowly down and sandy meadow and salt brown sheep-grass. This region was formerly the most beautiful part of Newport—the least frequented and the most untamed by fashion. I by no means regret the creation of the new road, however. A walker may very soon isolate himself, and the occupants of carriages stand a chance of benefit quite superior to their power of injury. The peculiar charm of this great westward expanse is very difficult to define. It is in an especial degree the charm of Newport in general—the combined lowness of tone, as painters call it, in all the earthy elements, and the extraordinary elevation of tone in the air. For miles and miles you see at your feet, in mingled shades of yellow and gray, a desolate waste of moss-clad rock and sand-starved grass. At your left surges and shines the mighty presence of the vast immediate sea. Above the broken and composite level of this double-featured plain, the great heavens ascend in innumerable stages of light. In spite of the bare simplicity of this prospect, its beauty is far more a beauty of detail than that of the average American landscape. Descend into a hollow of the rocks, into one of the little warm climates of five feet square which you may find there, beside the grateful ocean glare, and you will be struck quite as much by their fineness as by their roughness. From time to time, as you wander, you will meet a lonely, stunted tree, into the storm-twisted multiplicity of whose branches all the possible grace and grotesqueness of the growth of trees seem to have been finely concentrated. The region of which I speak is perhaps best seen in the late afternoon, from the high seat of a carriage on the Avenue. You seem to stand just without the threshold of the west. At its opposite extremity sinks the sun, with such a splendor, perhaps, as I lately saw—a splendor of the deepest blue, more luminous and fiery than the fiercest of our common vespertinal crimsons, all streaked and barred with blown and drifted gold. The whole vast interval, with its rocks and marshes and ponds, seems bedimmed into a troubled monotone of glorious purple. The near Atlantic is fading slowly into the unborrowed darkness of its deep, essential life. In the foreground, a short distance from the road, an old orchard uplifts its tangled stems and branches against the violet mists of the west. It seems strangely grotesque and enchanted. No ancient olive grove of Italy or Provence was ever more hoarily romantic. This is what people commonly behold on the last homeward bend of the drive. For such of them as are happy enough to occupy one of the villas on the cliffs, the beauty of the day has even yet not expired. The present summer has been emphatically the summer of moonlights. Not the nights, however, but the long days, in these agreeable homes, are what specially appeal to my fancy. Here you find a solution of the insoluble problem—to combine an abundance of society with an abundance of solitude. In their charming broad-windowed drawing-rooms, on their great seaward piazzas, within sight of the serious Atlantic horizon, which is so familiar to the eye and so mysterious to the heart, caressed by the gentle breeze which makes all but simple, social, delightful then and there seem unreal and untasteful—the sweet fruit of the lotus grows more than ever succulent and magical. You feel here not more a man, perhaps, but more a passive gentleman and worldling. How sensible they ought to be, the denizens of these pleasant places, of their peculiar felicity and distinction! How it should purify their tempers and refine their intellects! How delicate, how wise, how discriminating they should become! What excellent manners and fancies their situation should generate! How it should purge them of vulgarity! Happy villeggianti of Newport!
NIAGARA
September 28, 1871
American Falls from Goat Island, Niagara, New York.
I.
My journey hitherward by a morning’s sail from Toronto across Lake Ontario, seemed to me, as regards a certain dull vacuity in this episode of travel, a kind of calculated preparation for the uproar of Niagara—a pause or hush on the threshold of a great sensation; and this, too, in spite of the reverent attention I was mindful to bestow on the first-seen, in my experience, of the great lakes. It has the merit, from the shore, of producing a slight perplexity of vision. It is the sea, and yet just not the sea. The huge expanse, the landless line of the horizon, suggest the ocean; while an indefinable shortness of pulse, a kind of freshwater gentleness of tone, seem to contradict the idea. What meets the eye is on the ocean scale, but you feel somehow that the lake is a thing of smaller spirit. Lake navigation, therefore, seems to me not especially entertaining. The scene tends to offer,
as one may say, a sort of marine-effect manqué. It has the blankness and vacancy of the sea without that vast essential swell which, amid the belting brine, so often saves the situation to the eye. I was occupied, as we crossed, in wondering whether this dull reduction of the ocean contained that which could properly be termed “scenery.” At the mouth of the Niagara River, however, after a three hours’ sail, scenery really begins, and very soon crowds upon you in force. The steamer puts into the narrow channel of the stream, and heads upward between high embankments. From this point, I think, you really enter into relations with Niagara. Little by little the elements become a picture, rich with the shadows of coming events. You have a foretaste of the great spectacle of color which you enjoy at the Falls. The even cliffs of red-brown earth are now crusted, now spotted, with autumnal orange and crimson, and laden with this ardent boskage plunge sheer into the deep-dyed green of the river. As you proceed, the river begins to tell its tale—at first in broken syllables of foam and flurry, and then, as it were, in rushing, flashing sentences and passionate interjections. Onwards from Lewiston, where you are transferred from the boat to the train, you see it from the cope of the American cliff, far beneath you, now superbly unnavigable. You have a lively sense of something happening ahead; the river, as a man near me said, has evidently been in a row. The cliffs here are immense; they form genuine vomitoria worthy of the living floods whose exit they protect. This is the first act of the drama of Niagara; for it is, I believe, one of the commonplaces of description that you instinctively harmonize and dramatize it. At the station pertaining to the railway suspension-bridge, you see in mid-air beyond an interval of murky confusion produced by the further bridge, the smoke of the trains, and the thickened atmosphere of the peopled bank, a huge far-flashing sheet which glares through the distance as a monstrous absorbent and irradiant of light. And here, in the interest of the picturesque, let me note that this obstructive bridge tends in a way to enhance the first glimpse of the cataract. Its long black span, falling dead along the shining brow of the Falls, seems shivered and smitten by their fierce effulgence, and trembles across the field of vision like some mighty mote in an excess of light. A moment later, as the train proceeds, you plunge into the village, and the cataract, save as a vague ground-tone to this trivial interlude, is, like so many other goals of aesthetic pilgrimage, temporarily postponed to the hotel.
With this postponement comes, I think, an immediate decline of expectation; for there is every appearance that the spectacle you have come so far to see is to be choked in the horribly vulgar shops and booths and catchpenny artifices which have pushed and elbowed to within the very spray of the Falls, and ply their importunities in shrill competition with its thunder. You see a multitude of hotels and taverns and shops, glaring with white paint, bedizened with placards and advertisements, and decorated by groups of those gentlemen who flourish most rankly on the soil of New York and in the vicinage of hotels; who carry their hands in their pockets, wear their hats always and every way, and, although of a sedentary habit, yet spurn the earth with their heels. A side-glimpse of the Falls, however, calls out one’s philosophy; you reflect that this is but such a sordid foreground as Turner liked to use; you hurry to where the roar grows louder, and, I was going to say, you escape from the village. In fact, however, you don’t escape from it; it is constantly at your elbow, just to the right or the left of the line of contemplation. It would be paying Niagara a poor compliment to say that, practically, she does not hurl off this chaffering by-play from her cope; but as you value the integrity of your impression, you are bound to affirm that it hereby suffers appreciable abatement. You wonder, as you stroll about, whether it is altogether an unrighteous dream that with the slow progress of culture, and the possible or impossible growth of some larger comprehension of beauty and fitness, the public conscience may not tend to ensure to such sovereign phases of nature something of the inviolability and privacy which we are slow to bestow, indeed, upon fame, but which we do not grudge at least to art. We place a great picture, a great statue, in a museum; we erect a great monument in the centre of our largest square, and if we can suppose ourselves nowadays building a cathedral, we should certainly isolate it as much as possible and subject it to no ignoble contact. We cannot build about Niagara with walls and a roof, nor girdle it with a palisade, but the sentimental tourist may muse upon the chances of its being guarded by the negative homage of empty spaces and absent barracks and decent forbearance. The actual abuse of the scene belongs evidently to that immense class of iniquities which are destined to grow very much worse in order to grow a very little better. The good humor engendered by the main spectacle bids you suffer it to run its course.
Though hereabouts so much is great, distances are small, and a ramble of two or three hours enables you to gaze hither and thither from a dozen standpoints. The one you are likely to choose first is that on the Canada cliff, something above the suspension bridge. The great fall faces you, enshrined in the surging increase of its own resounding mists. The common feeling just here, I believe, is one of disappointment at its want of height; the vision grasps less in quantity than it had been prompted to expect. My own sense, I confess, was absolutely gratified from the first; and, indeed, not the bulk and volume of the matter, but its exquisite expression, seemed to me paramount. You are, moreover, at some distance, and you feel that with the lessening interval you will not be cheated of your chance to be dizzied with pure size. Already you see the world-famous green, baffling painters, baffling poets, clear and lucid on the lip of the precipice; the more so, of course, for the clouds of silver and snow into which it drops transformed. The whole picture before you is admirably simple. The Horseshoe gleams and glares and boils and smokes from the centre to the right, drumming itself dim with vapors; in the centre, the dark pedestal of Goat Island divides the double flood; to the left booms and smokes the minor thunder of the American Fall; and, on a level with the eye, above the still crest of either cataract, appear the white faces of the uttermost rapids. The circle of weltering froth at the base of the Horseshoe, emerging from the dead white vapors—absolute white, as moonless midnight is absolute black—which muffle impenetrably the final crash of the plunge, melts slowly into the powerful green of the lower river. It seems a mighty drama in itself, this blanched survival and recovery of the stream. It stretches away like a tired swimmer, struggling from the snowy scum and the silver drift, and passing slowly from an eddying foam-sheet, touched with green lights, to a cold stony green, streaked and marbled with trails and wild arabesques of foam. This is the beginning of that air of unforgotten trouble which marks the river as you meet it at the lake. The ultimate green I speak of is of admirable hue—the clearest, the greenest, the coldest of all greens—a green as sombre and steady as most greens are light and inconstant. So it shifts along, with a sort of measured pride, deep and lucid, and yet of immense body, the most stately, the least turbid of torrents. Its movement, its sweep, and progression are as admirable as its color, but as little as its color to be made a matter of words. These things are but part of a spectacle in which nothing is imperfect. As you draw nearer and nearer, on the Canada cliff, to the right arm of the Horseshoe, the mass begins in all conscience to be large enough. You are able at last to stand on the very cope of the shelf from which the leap is taken, bathing your boot-toes, if you like, in the side-ooze of the glassy curve. I may say, in parenthesis, that the importunities one suffers here, amid the central din of the cataract, from hackmen and photographers and venders of gimcracks, are simply hideous and infamous. The road is lined with little drinking-shops and warehouses, and from these retreats their occupants dart forth in competition upon the hapless traveller with talk of their pigmy sideshows. I can but ask—need such things be? You purchase release at last by a great outlay of the small coin of dogged “No’s,” and stand steeped in long looks at the most beautiful object in the world.
II.
The pure beauty of elegance and grace is the grand chara
cteristic of the Fall. It is not in the least monstrous. It is supremely artistic—a harmony, a conception, a masterpiece; it beats Michael Angelo. One may seem at first to say the least, but the delicate observer will admit that one says the most, in saying that it is pleasing. There are, however, so many more things to say about it—its multitudinous features crowd so upon the vision as one looks—that it seems absurd for me to attempt to handle details. The main feature, perhaps, is the incomparable loveliness of the immense line of the river and its lateral abutments. It neither falters, nor breaks, nor stiffens, but maintains grandly from wing to wing its consummate curve. This noble line is worthily sustained by mighty pillars of alternate emerald and marble. The famous green loses nothing, as you may imagine, on a nearer view. A green more gorgeously cool and pure it is impossible to conceive. It is to the vulgar greens of earth what the blue of a summer sky is to our mundane azures, and is, in fact, as sacred, as remote, as impalpable as that. You can fancy it the parent-green, the head-spring of color to all the verdant water-caves and all the clear, sub-fluvial haunts and bowers of naiads and mermen in all the streams of the earth. The lower half of the watery wall is shrouded in the steam of the boiling gulf—a veil never rent nor lifted. At its core, this eternal cloud seems fixed and still with excess of motion—still and intensely white; but, as it rolls and climbs against its lucent cliff, it tosses little whiffs and fumes and pants of snowy smoke, which betray the furious tumult of its dazzling womb. In the middle of the curve, at the apex of the gulf, the converging walls are ground into finest powder, and hence arises a huge mist-column, and fills the upper air with its hovering drift. Its summit far overtops the crest of the cataract, and, as you look down along the rapids above, you see it hanging over the averted gulf like some far-flowing ensign of danger. Of these things some vulgar verbal hint may be attempted; but what words can render the rarest charm of all—the clear-cut brow of the Fall, the very act and figure of the leap, the rounded turn of the horizontal to the perpendicular? To call it simple seems a florid over-statement. Anything less combined and complicated never appealed to the admiration of men. It is carved clean as an emerald, as one must say and say again. It arrives, it pauses, it plunges; it comes and goes for ever; it melts and shifts and changes, all with the sound as of a thousand thunderbolts; and yet its pure outline never lapses by a bubble’s value from its constant calm. It is as gentle as the pouring of wine from a flagon—of melody from the lip of a singer. From the little grove beside the American Fall you catch superbly—better than you are able to do at the Horseshoe—the very profile of this full-flooded bend. If the line of beauty had vanished from the earth elsewhere, it would survive on this classic forehead. It is impossible to insist too strongly on the prodigious elegance of the great Fall, as seen from the Canada cliff. You fancy that the genius who contrived it was verily the prime author of the truth that order, measure, and symmetry are the conditions of perfect beauty. He applied his faith among the watching and listening forests, long before the Greeks proclaimed theirs in the shining masonry of the Acropolis. Rage, confusion, chaos, are grandly absent; dignity, grace, and leisure ride upon the crest; it flows without haste, without rest, with the measured majesty of a motion whose rhythm is attuned to eternity. Even the roll of the white batteries at the base seems fixed and poised and ordered, and in the vague middle zone of difference between falling flood and rising cloud you imagine a mystical meaning—the passage of body to soul, of matter to spirit, of human to divine.