ntly 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