THE SYMBOL OF NIAGARA. (Thoughts after reading recent books upon America.)
Thus we must leave America in the flight of appearances and apparitions, the pageantry and phenomena of our time—as in some swift-careering train we leave a mountain-range through whose tunnels and valleys we have just been whirled. We have bathed in flashes of sunlight, let the bright, dishevelled landscapes pour themselves into our souls; we have been plunged into cold shadows and sombre wildernesses. Released into the outer distances, we see the contours more clearly, and perhaps even the glow of dawn or sunset upon the peaks.
Or if the image of a mountain-range be too impersonal, let us leave America as we would leave a new Colossus, bestriding the New World from east to west This Colossus, as we have observed, has feet of gold and iron, but as yet only a head of clay, cloudy, steaming, amorphous, not yet moulded into a clear face. Portentously uprears this Titan in whose hands, Prometheus-like, the fire of freedom once burned.
But this Titan, or—since it is fit to use the feminine for America, the Land above all other lands, of the Woman — this Titaness, whose bronze symbol stands with extinguished torch on her star-shaped prison-pedestal at the entrance to New York harbour, can no longer bring liberty or enlightenment to others. She has, in fact, denied them to herself and to her children, and out of her house of refuge she has made a prison-house. The native and alien manipulators and hucksters of her destiny have tied her down with a thousand cords. Nevertheless still upright stands this Colossa, immense and formidable in mass and outline. But she is blind—or blinded. No veil of mysticism, racial, religious, dynastic or historical, encompasses her—as once the figure of the Russian Cyclops, toppled from his feet of clay. This giantess is of earth and metal. Her flesh is the flesh of machines, her breath elemental energy, her heart a furnace— but not an altar-fire. The law of her being, not of her becoming, is Production — the production of things. Her existence is use, her creed is pragmatism. She has become a monument not so much to man's aspiration towards freedom as to his mechanical genius, or ingenuity. She towers above the horizons of the world, a majestic statue, a vast organism, but as yet without a soul.
Having by injudicious and emotional intervention brought about the collapse of Europe, by the thrust of a brutal fist agitated by an alien will, she is herself once more betrayed—and shackled for a generation or more to the Gibraltar of English imperialism. Thus the great Mother of Use, the Prophetess of the Thing, herself became the Thing, the Tool, the Used One, and exemplified on a stupendous scale the subjection of matter to mind.
But all figures, even the mixed, and all symbols, even the | most patent, are false and feeble as a measure or a frame into which to press the incommensurable; and America is as incommensurable as life itself. Her glory and her meanness, her joy and the terror that arises from her, her shame and her insolence, her ignorance, her desperate fevers, her laughter of machines, the sibilance of her newspaper-hydras, her crass indifference and her impregnable assurance that makes hope itself seem like discouragement, are all accentuated and intensified by the torrential superabundance of this life that lashes her on, through the defiles of instinct and temperament to some far-off goal.
Measured by the values of vitality, she stands first, magnificent though mongrel, among the young nations of the world —America, Germany and Russia —as opposed, and by the same laws of vitality inimicably opposed, to the old, those whose biological course is running to a close, whose orbit of life and power is now a declining spiral.
But I am driven once more to take refuge in a metaphor, a symbol—one I once used to express America in a youth ful and volcanic novel of epic dimensions, which still awaits the corrective hand—the symbol of Niagara. For America is Niagara —is full and overflowing life. He who would essay with naked eyes to outstare the lightning, or with naked hands to clothe the necks of the apocalyptic chargers, might make bold to hover and brood above the onset of these passionate, imperious waters, smooth and relentless as polished obsidian, yet fringed at the awful mouth with oracular foam, as they go rolling like an oceanic cataclysm into this tremendous and eternal vat. Let him hurl his questions into this chaos: "To what end? Wherefore and Whither?"
Perhaps, if he have the prophetic ear he will receive an answer :
"America is Action, and Action too, is an End in Itself!"
Herman George Scheffauer.
“The Symbol of Niagara (Thoughts after reading recent books upon America.)”, in: The Freeman, Vol. 6. No. 144.(December 13, 1922), p.319-320. [Scheffauer Bibliography No. 360]
