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.
