There has been a lively inquiry after the primeval man. Wanted, a man
who would satisfy the conditions of the miocene environment, and yet
would be good enough for an ancestor. We are not particular about our
ancestors, if they are sufficiently remote; but we must have something.
Failing to apprehend the primeval man, science has sought the primitive
man where he exists as a survival in present savage races. He is, at
best, only a mushroom growth of the recent period (came in, probably,
with the general raft of mammalian fauna); but he possesses yet some
rudimentary traits that may be studied.
It is a good mental exercise to try to fix the mind on the primitive man
divested of all the attributes he has acquired in his struggles with
the other mammalian fauna. Fix the mind on an orange, the ordinary
occupation of the metaphysician: take from it (without eating it) odor,
color, weight, form, substance, and peel; then let the mind still dwell
on it as an orange. The experiment is perfectly successful; only, at the
end of it, you haven't any mind. Better still, consider the telephone:
take away from it the metallic disk, and the magnetized iron, and the
connecting wire, and then let the mind run abroad on the telephone.
The mind won't come back. I have tried by this sort of process to get a
conception of the primitive man. I let the mind roam away back over
the vast geologic spaces, and sometimes fancy I see a dim image of him
stalking across the terrace epoch of the quaternary period.
But this is an unsatisfying pleasure. The best results are obtained by
studying the primitive man as he is left here and there in our era,
a witness of what has been; and I find him most to my mind in the
Adirondack system of what geologists call the Champlain epoch. I suppose
the primitive man is one who owes more to nature than to the forces of
civilization. What we seek in him are the primal and original traits,
unmixed with the sophistications of society, and unimpaired by the
refinements of an artificial culture. He would retain the primitive
instincts, which are cultivated out of the ordinary, commonplace man.
I should expect to find him, by reason of an unrelinquished kinship,
enjoying a special communion with nature,--admitted to its mysteries,
understanding its moods, and able to predict its vagaries. He would be a
kind of test to us of what we have lost by our gregarious acquisitions.
On the one hand, there would be the sharpness of the senses, the keen
instincts (which the fox and the beaver still possess), the ability to
find one's way in the pathless forest, to follow a trail, to circumvent
the wild denizens of the woods; and, on the other hand, there would be
the philosophy of life which the primitive man, with little external
aid, would evolve from original observation and cogitation. It is our
good fortune to know such a man; but it is difficult to present him to
a scientific and caviling generation. He emigrated from somewhat limited
conditions in Vermont, at an early age, nearly half a century ago, and
sought freedom for his natural development backward in the wilds of the
Adirondacks. Sometimes it is a love of adventure and freedom that sends
men out of the more civilized conditions into the less; sometimes it is
a constitutional physical lassitude which leads them to prefer the rod
to the hoe, the trap to the sickle, and the society of bears to town
meetings and taxes. I think that Old Mountain Phelps had merely the
instincts of the primitive man, and never any hostile civilizing intent
as to the wilderness into which he plunged. Why should he want to slash
away the forest and plow up the ancient mould, when it is infinitely
pleasanter to roam about in the leafy solitudes, or sit upon a mossy log
and listen to the chatter of birds and the stir of beasts? Are there not
trout in the streams, gum exuding from the spruce, sugar in the maples,
honey in the hollow trees, fur on the sables, warmth in hickory logs?
Will not a few days' planting and scratching in the “open” yield
potatoes and rye? And, if there is steadier diet needed than venison
and bear, is the pig an expensive animal? If Old Phelps bowed to the
prejudice or fashion of his age (since we have come out of the tertiary
state of things), and reared a family, built a frame house in a
secluded nook by a cold spring, planted about it some apple trees and a
rudimentary garden, and installed a group of flaming sunflowers by the
door, I am convinced that it was a concession that did not touch his
radical character; that is to say, it did not impair his reluctance to
split oven-wood.
He was a true citizen of the wilderness. Thoreau would have liked him,
as he liked Indians and woodchucks, and the smell of pine forests; and,
if Old Phelps had seen Thoreau, he would probably have said to him, “Why
on airth, Mr. Thoreau, don't you live accordin' to your preachin'?”
You might be misled by the shaggy suggestion of Old Phelps's given
name--Orson--into the notion that he was a mighty hunter, with the
fierce spirit of the Berserkers in his veins. Nothing could be farther
from the truth. The hirsute and grisly sound of Orson expresses only his
entire affinity with the untamed and the natural, an uncouth but gentle
passion for the freedom and wildness of the forest. Orson Phelps has
only those unconventional and humorous qualities of the bear which
make the animal so beloved in literature; and one does not think of Old
Phelps so much as a lover of nature,--to use the sentimental slang of
the period,--as a part of nature itself.
His appearance at the time when as a “guide” he began to come into
public notice fostered this impression,--a sturdy figure with long body
and short legs, clad in a woolen shirt and butternut-colored trousers
repaired to the point of picturesqueness, his head surmounted by a limp,
light-brown felt hat, frayed away at the top, so that his yellowish hair
grew out of it like some nameless fern out of a pot. His tawny hair was
long and tangled, matted now many years past the possibility of being
entered by a comb.
His features were small and delicate, and set in the frame of a reddish
beard, the razor having mowed away a clearing about the sensitive mouth,
which was not seldom wreathed with a childlike and charming smile.
Out of this hirsute environment looked the small gray eyes, set near
together; eyes keen to observe, and quick to express change of thought;
eyes that made you believe instinct can grow into philosophic judgment.
His feet and hands were of aristocratic smallness, although the latter
were not worn away by ablutions; in fact, they assisted his toilet to
give you the impression that here was a man who had just come out of
the ground,--a real son of the soil, whose appearance was partially
explained by his humorous relation to-soap. “Soap is a thing,” he said,
“that I hain't no kinder use for.” His clothes seemed to have been
put on him once for all, like the bark of a tree, a long time ago.
The observant stranger was sure to be puzzled by the contrast of this
realistic and uncouth exterior with the internal fineness, amounting to
refinement and culture, that shone through it all. What communion had
supplied the place of our artificial breeding to this man?
Perhaps his most characteristic attitude was sitting on a log, with a
short pipe in his mouth. If ever man was formed to sit on a log, it
was Old Phelps. He was essentially a contemplative person. Walking on
a country road, or anywhere in the “open,” was irksome to him. He had
a shambling, loose-jointed gait, not unlike that of the bear: his short
legs bowed out, as if they had been more in the habit of climbing
trees than of walking. On land, if we may use that expression, he was
something like a sailor; but, once in the rugged trail or the unmarked
route of his native forest, he was a different person, and few
pedestrians could compete with him. The vulgar estimate of his
contemporaries, that reckoned Old Phelps “lazy,” was simply a failure
to comprehend the conditions of his being. It is the unjustness of
civilization that it sets up uniform and artificial standards for all
persons. The primitive man suffers by them much as the contemplative
philosopher does, when one happens to arrive in this busy, fussy world.
If the appearance of Old Phelps attracts attention, his voice, when
first heard, invariably startles the listener. A small, high-pitched,
half-querulous voice, it easily rises into the shrillest falsetto; and
it has a quality in it that makes it audible in all the tempests of the
forest, or the roar of rapids, like the piping of a boatswain's whistle
at sea in a gale. He has a way of letting it rise as his sentence goes
on, or when he is opposed in argument, or wishes to mount above other
voices in the conversation, until it dominates everything. Heard in the
depths of the woods, quavering aloft, it is felt to be as much a part
of nature, an original force, as the northwest wind or the scream of the
hen-hawk. When he is pottering about the camp-fire, trying to light
his pipe with a twig held in the flame, he is apt to begin some
philosophical observation in a small, slow, stumbling voice, which seems
about to end in defeat; when he puts on some unsuspected force, and the
sentence ends in an insistent shriek. Horace Greeley had such a voice,
and could regulate it in the same manner. But Phelps's voice is not
seldom plaintive, as if touched by the dreamy sadness of the woods
themselves.
When Old Mountain Phelps was discovered, he was, as the reader has
already guessed, not understood by his contemporaries. His neighbors,
farmers in the secluded valley, had many of them grown thrifty and
prosperous, cultivating the fertile meadows, and vigorously attacking
the timbered mountains; while Phelps, with not much more faculty of
acquiring property than the roaming deer, had pursued the even tenor
of the life in the forest on which he set out. They would have been
surprised to be told that Old Phelps owned more of what makes the value
of the Adirondacks than all of them put together, but it was true. This
woodsman, this trapper, this hunter, this fisherman, this sitter on a
log, and philosopher, was the real proprietor of the region over
which he was ready to guide the stranger. It is true that he had not a
monopoly of its geography or its topography (though his knowledge was
superior in these respects); there were other trappers, and more deadly
hunters, and as intrepid guides: but Old Phelps was the discoverer of
the beauties and sublimities of the mountains; and, when city strangers
broke into the region, he monopolized the appreciation of these delights
and wonders of nature. I suppose that in all that country he alone
had noticed the sunsets, and observed the delightful processes of
the seasons, taken pleasure in the woods for themselves, and climbed
mountains solely for the sake of the prospect. He alone understood what
was meant by “scenery.” In the eyes of his neighbors, who did not know
that he was a poet and a philosopher, I dare say he appeared to be
a slack provider, a rather shiftless trapper and fisherman; and his
passionate love of the forest and the mountains, if it was noticed, was
accounted to him for idleness. When the appreciative tourist arrived,
Phelps was ready, as guide, to open to him all the wonders of his
possessions; he, for the first time, found an outlet for his enthusiasm,
and a response to his own passion. It then became known what manner
of man this was who had grown up here in the companionship of forests,
mountains, and wild animals; that these scenes had highly developed in
him the love of beauty, the aesthetic sense, delicacy of appreciation,
refinement of feeling; and that, in his solitary wanderings and musings,
the primitive man, self-taught, had evolved for himself a philosophy and
a system of things. And it was a sufficient system, so long as it was
not disturbed by external skepticism. When the outer world came to
him, perhaps he had about as much to give to it as to receive from it;
probably more, in his own estimation; for there is no conceit like that
of isolation.
Phelps loved his mountains. He was the discoverer of Marcy, and caused
the first trail to be cut to its summit, so that others could enjoy
the noble views from its round and rocky top. To him it was, in noble
symmetry and beauty, the chief mountain of the globe. To stand on it
gave him, as he said, “a feeling of heaven up-h'istedness.” He heard
with impatience that Mount Washington was a thousand feet higher, and he
had a childlike incredulity about the surpassing sublimity of the Alps.
Praise of any other elevation he seemed to consider a slight to Mount
Marcy, and did not willingly hear it, any more than a lover hears the
laudation of the beauty of another woman than the one he loves. When he
showed us scenery he loved, it made him melancholy to have us speak of
scenery elsewhere that was finer. And yet there was this delicacy about
him, that he never over-praised what he brought us to see, any more than
one would over-praise a friend of whom he was fond. I remember that when
for the first time, after a toilsome journey through the forest, the
splendors of the Lower Au Sable Pond broke upon our vision,--that
low-lying silver lake, imprisoned by the precipices which it reflected
in its bosom,--he made no outward response to our burst of admiration:
only a quiet gleam of the eye showed the pleasure our appreciation
gave him. As some one said, it was as if his friend had been admired--a
friend about whom he was unwilling to say much himself, but well pleased
to have others praise.
Thus far, we have considered Old Phelps as simply the product of the
Adirondacks; not so much a self-made man (as the doubtful phrase has it)
as a natural growth amid primal forces. But our study is interrupted
by another influence, which complicates the problem, but increases its
interest. No scientific observer, so far as we know, has ever been able
to watch the development of the primitive man, played upon and fashioned
by the hebdomadal iteration of “Greeley's Weekly Tri-bune.” Old Phelps
educated by the woods is a fascinating study; educated by the woods
and the Tri-bune, he is a phenomenon. No one at this day can reasonably
conceive exactly what this newspaper was to such a mountain valley as
Keene. If it was not a Providence, it was a Bible. It was no doubt owing
to it that Democrats became as scarce as moose in the Adirondacks. But
it is not of its political aspect that I speak. I suppose that the most
cultivated and best informed portion of the earth's surface--the Western
Reserve of Ohio, as free from conceit as it is from a suspicion that
it lacks anything owes its pre-eminence solely to this comprehensive
journal. It received from it everything except a collegiate and a
classical education,--things not to be desired, since they interfere
with the self-manufacture of man. If Greek had been in this curriculum,
its best known dictum would have been translated, “Make thyself.” This
journal carried to the community that fed on it not only a complete
education in all departments of human practice and theorizing, but the
more valuable and satisfying assurance that there was nothing more to be
gleaned in the universe worth the attention of man. This panoplied its
readers in completeness. Politics, literature, arts, sciences, universal
brotherhood and sisterhood, nothing was omitted; neither the poetry of
Tennyson, nor the philosophy of Margaret Fuller; neither the virtues of
association, nor of unbolted wheat. The laws of political economy and
trade were laid down as positively and clearly as the best way to bake
beans, and the saving truth that the millennium would come, and come
only when every foot of the earth was subsoiled.
I do not say that Orson Phelps was the product of nature and the
Tri-bune: but he cannot be explained without considering these two
factors. To him Greeley was the Tri-bune, and the Tri-bune was Greeley;
and yet I think he conceived of Horace Greeley as something greater than
his newspaper, and perhaps capable of producing another journal equal
to it in another part of the universe. At any rate, so completely did
Phelps absorb this paper and this personality that he was popularly
known as “Greeley” in the region where he lived. Perhaps a fancied
resemblance of the two men in the popular mind had something to do with
this transfer of name. There is no doubt that Horace Greeley owed his
vast influence in the country to his genius, nor much doubt that he owed
his popularity in the rural districts to James Gordon Bennett; that is,
to the personality of the man which the ingenious Bennett impressed upon
the country. That he despised the conventionalities of society, and was
a sloven in his toilet, was firmly believed; and the belief endeared him
to the hearts of the people. To them “the old white coat”--an antique
garment of unrenewed immortality--was as much a subject of idolatry as
the redingote grise to the soldiers of the first Napoleon, who had seen
it by the campfires on the Po and on the Borysthenes, and believed that
he would come again in it to lead them against the enemies of France.
The Greeley of the popular heart was clad as Bennett said he was clad.
It was in vain, even pathetically in vain, that he published in his
newspaper the full bill of his fashionable tailor (the fact that it was
receipted may have excited the animosity of some of his contemporaries)
to show that he wore the best broadcloth, and that the folds of his
trousers followed the city fashion of falling outside his boots. If this
revelation was believed, it made no sort of impression in the country.
The rural readers were not to be wheedled out of their cherished
conception of the personal appearance of the philosopher of the
Tri-bune.
That the Tri-bune taught Old Phelps to be more Phelps than he would
have been without it was part of the independence-teaching mission of
Greeley's paper. The subscribers were an army, in which every man was a
general. And I am not surprised to find Old Phelps lately rising to
the audacity of criticising his exemplar. In some recently-published
observations by Phelps upon the philosophy of reading is laid down this
definition: “If I understand the necessity or use of reading, it is to
reproduce again what has been said or proclaimed before. Hence, letters,
characters, &c., are arranged in all the perfection they possibly can
be, to show how certain language has been spoken by the original author.
Now, to reproduce by reading, the reading should be so perfectly like
the original that no one standing out of sight could tell the reading
from the first time the language was spoken.”
This is illustrated by the highest authority at hand: I have heard
as good readers read, and as poor readers, as almost any one in this
region. If I have not heard as many, I have had a chance to hear nearly
the extreme in variety. Horace Greeley ought to have been a good reader.
Certainly but few, if any, ever knew every word of the English language
at a glance more readily than he did, or knew the meaning of every mark
of punctuation more clearly; but he could not read proper. 'But how
do you know?' says one. From the fact I heard him in the same lecture
deliver or produce remarks in his own particular way, that, if they had
been published properly in print, a proper reader would have reproduced
them again the same way. In the midst of those remarks Mr. Greeley took
up a paper, to reproduce by reading part of a speech that some one else
had made; and his reading did not sound much more like the man that
first read or made the speech than the clatter of a nail factory sounds
like a well-delivered speech. Now, the fault was not because Mr. Greeley
did not know how to read as well as almost any man that ever lived, if
not quite: but in his youth he learned to read wrong; and, as it is
ten times harder to unlearn anything than it is to learn it, he, like
thousands of others, could never stop to unlearn it, but carried it on
through his whole life.
Whether a reader would be thanked for reproducing one of Horace
Greeley's lectures as he delivered it is a question that cannot detain
us here; but the teaching that he ought to do so, I think, would please
Mr. Greeley.
The first driblets of professional tourists and summer boarders who
arrived among the Adirondack Mountains a few years ago found Old Phelps
the chief and best guide of the region. Those who were eager to throw
off the usages of civilization, and tramp and camp in the wilderness,
could not but be well satisfied with the aboriginal appearance of this
guide; and when he led off into the woods, axe in hand, and a huge
canvas sack upon his shoulders, they seemed to be following the
Wandering Jew. The contents--of this sack would have furnished a modern
industrial exhibition, provisions cooked and raw, blankets, maple-sugar,
tinware, clothing, pork, Indian meal, flour, coffee, tea, &c. Phelps was
the ideal guide: he knew every foot of the pathless forest; he knew all
woodcraft, all the signs of the weather, or, what is the same thing, how
to make a Delphic prediction about it. He was fisherman and hunter, and
had been the comrade of sportsmen and explorers; and his enthusiasm for
the beauty and sublimity of the region, and for its untamable wildness,
amounted to a passion. He loved his profession; and yet it very soon
appeared that he exercised it with reluctance for those who had neither
ideality, nor love for the woods. Their presence was a profanation amid
the scenery he loved. To guide into his private and secret haunts a
party that had no appreciation of their loveliness disgusted him. It was
a waste of his time to conduct flippant young men and giddy girls who
made a noisy and irreverent lark of the expedition. And, for their part,
they did not appreciate the benefit of being accompanied by a poet and
a philosopher. They neither understood nor valued his special knowledge
and his shrewd observations: they didn't even like his shrill voice;
his quaint talk bored them. It was true that, at this period, Phelps
had lost something of the activity of his youth; and the habit
of contemplative sitting on a log and talking increased with the
infirmities induced by the hard life of the woodsman. Perhaps he would
rather talk, either about the woods-life or the various problems of
existence, than cut wood, or busy himself in the drudgery of the camp.
His critics went so far as to say, “Old Phelps is a fraud.” They would
have said the same of Socrates. Xantippe, who never appreciated the
world in which Socrates lived, thought he was lazy. Probably Socrates
could cook no better than Old Phelps, and no doubt went “gumming” about
Athens with very little care of what was in the pot for dinner.
If the summer visitors measured Old Phelps, he also measured them by
his own standards. He used to write out what he called “short-faced
descriptions” of his comrades in the woods, which were never so
flattering as true. It was curious to see how the various qualities
which are esteemed in society appeared in his eyes, looked at merely
in their relation to the limited world he knew, and judged by their
adaptation to the primitive life. It was a much subtler comparison than
that of the ordinary guide, who rates his traveler by his ability to
endure on a march, to carry a pack, use an oar, hit a mark, or sing
a song. Phelps brought his people to a test of their naturalness and
sincerity, tried by contact with the verities of the woods. If a person
failed to appreciate the woods, Phelps had no opinion of him or his
culture; and yet, although he was perfectly satisfied with his own
philosophy of life, worked out by close observation of nature and study
of the Tri-bune, he was always eager for converse with superior minds,
with those who had the advantage of travel and much reading, and, above
all, with those who had any original “speckerlation.” Of all the society
he was ever permitted to enjoy, I think he prized most that of Dr.
Bushnell. The doctor enjoyed the quaint and first-hand observations of
the old woodsman, and Phelps found new worlds open to him in the wide
ranges of the doctor's mind. They talked by the hour upon all sorts
of themes, the growth of the tree, the habits of wild animals, the
migration of seeds, the succession of oak and pine, not to mention
theology, and the mysteries of the supernatural.
I recall the bearing of Old Phelps, when, several years ago, he
conducted a party to the summit of Mount Marcy by the way he had “bushed
out.” This was his mountain, and he had a peculiar sense of ownership in
it. In a way, it was holy ground; and he would rather no one should
go on it who did not feel its sanctity. Perhaps it was a sense of some
divine relation in it that made him always speak of it as “Mercy.” To
him this ridiculously dubbed Mount Marcy was always “Mount Mercy.” By a
like effort to soften the personal offensiveness of the nomenclature
of this region, he invariably spoke of Dix's Peak, one of the southern
peaks of the range, as “Dixie.” It was some time since Phelps himself
had visited his mountain; and, as he pushed on through the miles of
forest, we noticed a kind of eagerness in the old man, as of a lover
going to a rendezvous. Along the foot of the mountain flows a clear
trout stream, secluded and undisturbed in those awful solitudes, which
is the “Mercy Brook” of the old woodsman. That day when he crossed it,
in advance of his company, he was heard to say in a low voice, as if
greeting some object of which he was shyly fond, “So, little brook, do I
meet you once more?” and when we were well up the mountain, and emerged
from the last stunted fringe of vegetation upon the rock-bound slope,
I saw Old Phelps, who was still foremost, cast himself upon the ground,
and heard him cry, with an enthusiasm that was intended for no mortal
ear, “I'm with you once again!” His great passion very rarely found
expression in any such theatrical burst. The bare summit that day was
swept by a fierce, cold wind, and lost in an occasional chilling cloud.
Some of the party, exhausted by the climb, and shivering in the rude
wind, wanted a fire kindled and a cup of tea made, and thought this the
guide's business. Fire and tea were far enough from his thought. He had
withdrawn himself quite apart, and wrapped in a ragged blanket, still
and silent as the rock he stood on, was gazing out upon the wilderness
of peaks. The view from Marcy is peculiar. It is without softness or
relief. The narrow valleys are only dark shadows; the lakes are bits
of broken mirror. From horizon to horizon there is a tumultuous sea of
billows turned to stone. You stand upon the highest billow; you command
the situation; you have surprised Nature in a high creative act; the
mighty primal energy has only just become repose. This was a supreme
hour to Old Phelps. Tea! I believe the boys succeeded in kindling a
fire; but the enthusiastic stoic had no reason to complain of want of
appreciation in the rest of the party. When we were descending, he told
us, with mingled humor and scorn, of a party of ladies he once led to
the top of the mountain on a still day, who began immediately to talk
about the fashions! As he related the scene, stopping and facing us in
the trail, his mild, far-in eyes came to the front, and his voice rose
with his language to a kind of scream.
“Why, there they were, right before the greatest view they ever saw,
talkin' about the fashions!”
Impossible to convey the accent of contempt in which he pronounced the
word “fashions,” and then added, with a sort of regretful bitterness, “I
was a great mind to come down, and leave 'em there.”
In common with the Greeks, Old Phelps personified the woods, mountains,
and streams. They had not only personality, but distinctions of sex. It
was something beyond the characterization of the hunter, which
appeared, for instance, when he related a fight with a panther, in such
expressions as, “Then Mr. Panther thought he would see what he could
do,” etc. He was in “imaginative sympathy” with all wild things. The
afternoon we descended Marcy, we went away to the west, through the
primeval forests, toward Avalanche and Colden, and followed the course
of the charming Opalescent. When we reached the leaping stream, Phelps
exclaimed,
“Here's little Miss Opalescent!”
“Why don't you say Mr. Opalescent?” some one asked.
“Oh, she's too pretty!” And too pretty she was, with her foam-white
and rainbow dress, and her downfalls, and fountainlike uprising. A
bewitching young person we found her all that summer afternoon.
This sylph-like person had little in common with a monstrous lady whose
adventures in the wilderness Phelps was fond of relating. She was built
some thing on the plan of the mountains, and her ambition to explore was
equal to her size. Phelps and the other guides once succeeded in raising
her to the top of Marcy; but the feat of getting a hogshead of molasses
up there would have been easier. In attempting to give us an idea of her
magnitude that night, as we sat in the forest camp, Phelps hesitated a
moment, while he cast his eye around the woods: “Waal, there ain't no
tree!”
It is only by recalling fragmentary remarks and incidents that I can put
the reader in possession of the peculiarities of my subject; and
this involves the wrenching of things out of their natural order and
continuity, and introducing them abruptly, an abruptness illustrated by
the remark of “Old Man Hoskins” (which Phelps liked to quote), when one
day he suddenly slipped down a bank into a thicket, and seated himself
in a wasps' nest: “I hain't no business here; but here I be!”
The first time we went into camp on the Upper Au Sable Pond, which has
been justly celebrated as the most prettily set sheet of water in the
region, we were disposed to build our shanty on the south side, so that
we could have in full view the Gothics and that loveliest of mountain
contours. To our surprise, Old Phelps, whose sentimental weakness for
these mountains we knew, opposed this. His favorite camping ground was
on the north side,--a pretty site in itself, but with no special view.
In order to enjoy the lovely mountains, we should be obliged to row out
into the lake: we wanted them always before our eyes,--at sunrise and
sunset, and in the blaze of noon. With deliberate speech, as if weighing
our arguments and disposing of them, he replied, “Waal, now, them
Gothics ain't the kinder scenery you want ter hog down!”
It was on quiet Sundays in the woods, or in talks by the camp-fire, that
Phelps came out as the philosopher, and commonly contributed the light
of his observations. Unfortunate marriages, and marriages in general,
were, on one occasion, the subject of discussion; and a good deal of
darkness had been cast on it by various speakers; when Phelps suddenly
piped up, from a log where he had sat silent, almost invisible, in the
shadow and smoke, “Waal, now, when you've said all there is to be said,
marriage is mostly for discipline.”
Discipline, certainly, the old man had, in one way or another; and years
of solitary communing in the forest had given him, perhaps, a childlike
insight into spiritual concerns. Whether he had formulated any creed or
what faith he had, I never knew. Keene Valley had a reputation of not
ripening Christians any more successfully than maize, the season there
being short; and on our first visit it was said to contain but one
Bible Christian, though I think an accurate census disclosed three. Old
Phelps, who sometimes made abrupt remarks in trying situations, was not
included in this census; but he was the disciple of supernaturalism in a
most charming form. I have heard of his opening his inmost thoughts to
a lady, one Sunday, after a noble sermon of Robertson's had been read
in the cathedral stillness of the forest. His experience was entirely
first-hand, and related with unconsciousness that it was not common to
all. There was nothing of the mystic or the sentimentalist, only a vivid
realism, in that nearness of God of which he spoke,--“as near some-times
as those trees,”--and of the holy voice, that, in a time of inward
struggle, had seemed to him to come from the depths of the forest,
saying, “Poor soul, I am the way.”
In later years there was a “revival” in Keene Valley, the result of
which was a number of young “converts,” whom Phelps seemed to regard
as a veteran might raw recruits, and to have his doubts what sort of
soldiers they would make.
“Waal, Jimmy,” he said to one of them, “you've kindled a pretty good
fire with light wood. That's what we do of a dark night in the woods,
you know but we do it just so as we can look around and find the solid
wood: so now put on your solid wood.”
In the Sunday Bible classes of the period Phelps was a perpetual anxiety
to the others, who followed closely the printed lessons, and beheld
with alarm his discursive efforts to get into freer air and light. His
remarks were the most refreshing part of the exercises, but were outside
of the safe path into which the others thought it necessary to win
him from his “speckerlations.” The class were one day on the verses
concerning “God's word” being “written on the heart,” and were keeping
close to the shore, under the guidance of “Barnes's Notes,” when Old
Phelps made a dive to the bottom, and remarked that he had “thought a
good deal about the expression, 'God's word written on the heart,'
and had been asking himself how that was to be done; and suddenly it
occurred to him (having been much interested lately in watching the work
of a photographer) that, when a photograph is going to be taken, all
that has to be done is to put the object in position, and the sun makes
the picture; and so he rather thought that all we had got to do was to
put our hearts in place, and God would do the writin'.”
Phelps's theology, like his science, is first-hand. In the woods, one
day, talk ran on the Trinity as being nowhere asserted as a doctrine in
the Bible, and some one suggested that the attempt to pack these
great and fluent mysteries into one word must always be more or
less unsatisfactory. “Ye-es,” droned Phelps: “I never could see much
speckerlation in that expression the Trinity. Why, they'd a good deal
better say Legion.”
The sentiment of the man about nature, or his poetic sensibility, was
frequently not to be distinguished from a natural religion, and was
always tinged with the devoutness of Wordsworth's verse. Climbing slowly
one day up the Balcony,--he was more than usually calm and slow,--he
espied an exquisite fragile flower in the crevice of a rock, in a very
lonely spot.
“It seems as if,” he said, or rather dreamed out, “it seems as if the
Creator had kept something just to look at himself.”
To a lady whom he had taken to Chapel Pond (a retired but rather
uninteresting spot), and who expressed a little disappointment at its
tameness, saying, of this “Why, Mr. Phelps, the principal charm of this
place seems to be its loneliness.”
“Yes,” he replied in gentle and lingering tones, and its nativeness. “It
lies here just where it was born.”
Rest and quiet had infinite attractions for him. A secluded opening in
the woods was a “calm spot.” He told of seeing once, or rather being in,
a circular rainbow. He stood on Indian Head, overlooking the Lower Lake,
so that he saw the whole bow in the sky and the lake, and seemed to be
in the midst of it; “only at one place there was an indentation in it,
where it rested on the lake, just enough to keep it from rolling off.”
This “resting” of the sphere seemed to give him great comfort.
One Indian-summer morning in October, some ladies found the old man
sitting on his doorstep smoking a short pipe.
He gave no sign of recognition except a twinkle of the eye, being
evidently quite in harmony with the peaceful day. They stood there a
full minute before he opened his mouth: then he did not rise, but slowly
took his pipe from his mouth, and said in a dreamy way, pointing towards
the brook,--
“Do you see that tree?” indicating a maple almost denuded of leaves,
which lay like a yellow garment cast at its feet. “I've been watching
that tree all the morning. There hain't been a breath of wind: but for
hours the leaves have been falling, falling, just as you see them now;
and at last it's pretty much bare.” And after a pause, pensively: “Waal,
I suppose its hour had come.”
This contemplative habit of Old Phelps is wholly unappreciated by his
neighbors; but it has been indulged in no inconsiderable part of his
life. Rising after a time, he said, “Now I want you to go with me and
see my golden city I've talked so much about.” He led the way to a
hill-outlook, when suddenly, emerging from the forest, the spectators
saw revealed the winding valley and its stream. He said quietly,
“There is my golden city.” Far below, at their feet, they saw that vast
assemblage of birches and “popples,” yellow as gold in the brooding
noonday, and slender spires rising out of the glowing mass. Without
another word, Phelps sat a long time in silent content: it was to him,
as Bunyan says, “a place desirous to be in.”
Is this philosopher contented with what life has brought him? Speaking
of money one day, when we had asked him if he should do differently if
he had his life to live over again, he said, “Yes, but not about money.
To have had hours such as I have had in these mountains, and with such
men as Dr. Bushnell and Dr. Shaw and Mr. Twichell, and others I could
name, is worth all the money the world could give.” He read
character very well, and took in accurately the boy nature. “Tom” (an
irrepressible, rather overdone specimen),--“Tom's a nice kind of a
boy; but he's got to come up against a snubbin'-post one of these
days.”--“Boys!” he once said: “you can't git boys to take any kinder
notice of scenery. I never yet saw a boy that would look a second
time at a sunset. Now, a girl will some times; but even then it's
instantaneous,--comes an goes like the sunset. As for me,” still
speaking of scenery, “these mountains about here, that I see every
day, are no more to me, in one sense, than a man's farm is to him. What
mostly interests me now is when I see some new freak or shape in the
face of Nature.”
In literature it may be said that Old Phelps prefers the best in the
very limited range that has been open to him. Tennyson is his favorite
among poets an affinity explained by the fact that they are both
lotos-eaters. Speaking of a lecture-room talk of Mr. Beecher's which he
had read, he said, “It filled my cup about as full as I callerlate to
have it: there was a good deal of truth in it, and some poetry; waal,
and a little spice, too. We've got to have the spice, you know.” He
admired, for different reasons, a lecture by Greeley that he once heard,
into which so much knowledge of various kinds was crowded that he said
he “made a reg'lar gobble of it.” He was not without discrimination,
which he exercised upon the local preaching when nothing better offered.
Of one sermon he said, “The man began way back at the creation, and just
preached right along down; and he didn't say nothing, after all. It just
seemed to me as if he was tryin' to git up a kind of a fix-up.”
Old Phelps used words sometimes like algebraic signs, and had a habit
of making one do duty for a season together for all occasions.
“Speckerlation” and “callerlation” and “fix-up” are specimens of words
that were prolific in expression. An unusual expression, or an unusual
article, would be charactcrized as a “kind of a scientific literary
git-up.”
“What is the program for tomorrow?” I once asked him. “Waal, I
callerlate, if they rig up the callerlation they callerlate on, we'll
go to the Boreas.” Starting out for a day's tramp in the woods, he would
ask whether we wanted to take a “reg'lar walk, or a random scoot,”--the
latter being a plunge into the pathless forest. When he was on such an
expedition, and became entangled in dense brush, and maybe a network
of “slash” and swamp, he was like an old wizard, as he looked here and
there, seeking a way, peering into the tangle, or withdrawing from a
thicket, and muttering to himself, “There ain't no speckerlation there.”
And when the way became altogether inscrutable,--“Waal, this is a
reg'lar random scoot of a rigmarole.” As some one remarked, “The
dictionary in his hands is like clay in the hands of the potter.” “A
petrifaction was a kind of a hard-wood chemical git-up.”
There is no conceit, we are apt to say, like that born of isolation
from the world, and there are no such conceited people as those who have
lived all their lives in the woods. Phelps was, however, unsophisticated
in his until the advent of strangers into his life, who brought in
literature and various other disturbing influences. I am sorry to say
that the effect has been to take off something of the bloom of his
simplicity, and to elevate him into an oracle. I suppose this is
inevitable as soon as one goes into print; and Phelps has gone into
print in the local papers. He has been bitten with the literary “git
up.” Justly regarding most of the Adirondack literature as a “perfect
fizzle,” he has himself projected a work, and written much on the
natural history of his region. Long ago he made a large map of the
mountain country; and, until recent surveys, it was the only one that
could lay any claim to accuracy. His history is no doubt original in
form, and unconventional in expression. Like most of the writers of
the seventeenth century, and the court ladies and gentlemen of the
eighteenth century, he is an independent speller. Writing of his work on
the Adirondacks, he says, “If I should ever live to get this wonderful
thing written, I expect it will show one thing, if no more; and that
is, that every thing has an opposite. I expect to show in this that
literature has an opposite, if I do not show any thing els. We could
not enjoy the blessings and happiness of riteousness if we did not
know innicuty was in the world: in fact, there would be no riteousness
without innicuty.” Writing also of his great enjoyment of being in the
woods, especially since he has had the society there of some people he
names, he adds, “And since I have Literature, Siance, and Art all spread
about on the green moss of the mountain woods or the gravell banks of a
cristle stream, it seems like finding roses, honeysuckels, and violets
on a crisp brown cliff in December. You know I don't believe much in the
religion of seramony; but any riteous thing that has life and spirit in
it is food for me.” I must not neglect to mention an essay, continued
in several numbers of his local paper, on “The Growth of the Tree,” in
which he demolishes the theory of Mr. Greeley, whom he calls “one of the
best vegetable philosophers,” about “growth without seed.” He treats
of the office of sap: “All trees have some kind of sap and some kind of
operation of sap flowing in their season,” the dissemination of seeds,
the processes of growth, the power of healing wounds, the proportion of
roots to branches, &c. Speaking of the latter, he says, “I have thought
it would be one of the greatest curiosities on earth to see a thrifty
growing maple or elm, that had grown on a deep soil interval to be two
feet in diameter, to be raised clear into the air with every root and
fibre down to the minutest thread, all entirely cleared of soil, so that
every particle could be seen in its natural position. I think it would
astonish even the wise ones.” From his instinctive sympathy with
nature, he often credits vegetable organism with “instinctive judgment.”
“Observation teaches us that a tree is given powerful instincts, which
would almost appear to amount to judgment in some cases, to provide for
its own wants and necessities.”
Here our study must cease. When the primitive man comes into literature,
he is no longer primitive.