DELVING one day among
miscellaneous papers that had been brought to me from the silent and
deserted home of John Muir in the Alhambra Valley, near Martinez,
California, I found a sketch of his life which led me to hope that a
difficult part of my biographical task had been made easy. Just then my eye
caught the laconic comment, "A strange, bold mixture of Muirs!" penciled
across the manuscript in his own familiar flowing hand. Apparently the
sketch had been sent to Muir by the admiring author, who, finding himself in
need of an ancestry worthy of his subject, had made short shrift of facts to
get one. Taking a survey of Muirs available in biographical reference works,
he selected as father for John Muir a distinguished Scotch Sanscritist of
the same name, gave him as an uncle an equally eminent Scotch Arabist, and
for good measure added, as a younger brother, a well-known Scotch chemist.
Given the conviction that genius must spring from genius, the would-be
biographer had done his best to provide his hero with an adequate pedigree.
But while John Muir's origin
was humbler than this invention, the mixture of elements need abate nothing
either in strangeness or in boldness. Although unfortunately it is not
possible to trace back far the tangled thread of his descent, one feels
instinctively that marked ancestral traits and faculties must have gone into
the making of a personality so unusual and so fascinating. His name he
appears to have taken from his paternal grandfather, a Scotchman by the name
of John Muir. Beyond the latter our knowledge of this line of Muirs ceases,
and it may be doubted whether a search of Scotch parish records, even, would
reveal more than another bare name.
Of this ancestral John Muir
we know only that he was a soldier by profession; that he married an English
woman by the name of Sarah Higgs; that she bore him two children— Mary and
Daniel; that his wife died when the second child was only nine months old;
and that he followed her to the grave three months later. The orphaning of
Mary and Daniel Muir at so tender an age may account for the fact that the
American family tradition of the Muirs has little to report about John Muir,
the soldier, and his wife Sarah Higgs Muir, except the tragedy of their
untimely deaths. All knowledge of their birthplaces and parentage, tastes,
accomplishments, and dispositions is lost in oblivion.
Our detailed knowledge of the
family really begins with Daniel Muir, the younger of the two orphans and
the only male link in the Muir pedigree at this point. He it was who in due
time became the father of John Muir, the naturalist, and to the latter's
brief sketch of his father's life, written as an obituary notice, we owe
practically all our extant information about the early life of Daniel Muir.
The latter was born in Manchester, England, in 1804. His sister Mary Muir
was his senior by about eleven years, and when their parents had died she
"became a mother to him and brought him up on a farm that belonged to a
relative in Lanarkshire, Scotland." From an aged daughter of Mary Muir,
Grace Blakley Brown, the writer ascertained the fact that the above
mentioned farm was situated at Crawfordjohn, about thirty-five miles
southeast of Glasgow. If it is true, as alleged, that it was one of his
mother's people to whom the farm belonged, we are probably not far wrong in
supposing that John Muir, the elder, also came from this region, and met
Sarah Higgs in Crawfordjohn.
How much importance one may attach to ante-natal
influences exerted upon one's forbears by the physical characteristics of a
country is a debatable question. "Some of my grandfathers," John Muir once
wrote in playful mood to a friend, "must have been born on a muirland, for
there is heather in me, and tinctures of bog juices, that send me to
Cassiope, and, oozing through all my veins, impel me unhaltingly through
endless glacier meadows, seemingly the deeper and danker the better." Did he
have in mind some family tradition of a Scotch Highland ancestry? We do not
know; but if any of his ancestors came from the country of Lanark there is
aptness in the hyperbole. The parish of Crawford consists chiefly of
mountains and moors. Coulter Fell, Tinto, Green Louther, Five Cairn Louther,
and other summits in the immediate vicinity of Crawfordj ohn rise grandly
out of the high moorlands that constitute most of the area in the eastern
and southern parts of the county. Hard by the village flows Duneaton Water,
one of the numerous rushing, songful streams that feed the River Clyde. The
highest inhabited land in Scotland is said to lie at Leadhills, on the banks
of Glengonner Water, not many miles south of Crawlordjohn.
In any case, it was amid these surroundings,
according to John Muir's sketch, that his father "lived the life of a farm
servant, growing up a remarkably bright, handsome boy, delighting in
athletic games and eager to excel in everything. He was notably fond of
music, had a fine voice, and usually took a leading part in the merry
song-singing gatherings of the neighborhood. Having no money to buy a
violin, when he was anxious to learn to play that instrument, he made one
with his own hands, and ran ten miles. to a neighboring village through mud
and rain after dark to get strings for it."
In the course of time his sister Mary married a
shepherd-farmer of Crawfordjohn by the name of Hamilton Blakley, whereupon
her new home became also that of Daniel Muir. A Scottish peasant's life in a
country village, remote from populous centers, must have afforded only
narrow opportunities for education and self-improvement. John Muir was
accustomed to ascribe the rigidity of his father's prejudices and
convictions to the deficient quality of his early education. But it must be
admitted that the making of a violin by a boy, who had grown up amid the
handicaps of such surroundings, indicates the possession on his part of
uncommon native resources of skill and ingenuity. An achievement of this
kind suggests the probability that there were other products of his manual
craftsmanship, and the remarkable inventive power and "whittling" skill
which his son John developed as a young man doubtless were not unconnected
with his father's example and ability.
"While yet more boy than man," continues the
sketch, "he suddenly left home to seek his fortune with only a few shillings
in his pocket, but with his head full of romantic schemes for the benefit of
his sister and all the world besides. Going to Glasgow and drifting about
the great city, friendless and unknown, he was induced to enter the British
army, but remained in it only a few years, when he purchased his discharge
before he had been engaged in any active service. On leaving the army he
married and began business as a merchant in Dunbar, Scotland. Here he
remained and prospered for twenty years, establishing an excellent
reputation for fair dealing and enterprise. Here, too, his eight children
were born, excepting the youngest who was born in Wisconsin." It is strong
evidence of his energy and love of adventure that he closed out his business
in Dunbar in 1849 and "emigrated to the wilds of America" at the mature age
of forty-five years. His original intention was to go to the backwoods of
Upper Canada, but he was diverted from this purpose by fellow emigrants who
told him that the woods of Canada were so dense and heavy that an excessive
amount of labor was required to clear land for agriculture. From Milwaukee
he made his way by wagon into the central part of southern Wisconsin, where
he bought, cleared, and brought under cultivation, successively, two large
farms. They were situated about ten miles from Kingston and were known
respectively as the Fountain Lake and the Hickory Hill farms.
When the second one also was thoroughly subdued
and under cultivation, and his three sons had gone to seek their fortunes
elsewhere, he sold it and devoted himself solely to religious work. As an
evangelist he went from place to place in Wisconsin, Canada, and Arkansas,
distributing books and tracts at his own cost, and preaching the gospel in
season and out of season with a firm sustained zeal.
Nor was this period of religious activity
restricted to those later years, for throughout almost his whole life as a
soldier, merchant, and farmer, as well as evangelist, he was an enthusiastic
believer and upholder of the gospel, and it is this burning belief that
forms the groundwork of his character and explains its apparent
contradictions. He belonged to almost every Protestant denomination in turn,
going from one to another, not in search of a better creed, for he was never
particular as to the niceties of creeds, but ever in search of a warmer and
more active zeal among its members with whom he could contribute his time
and money to the spread of the gospel.
Though suffering always under the disadvantage
of an imperfect education, he never failed in any important undertaking and
never seemed to feel himself overtasked, but by sheer force of will and
continuous effort overcame all difficulties that stood in his way. He was
successful in business and bestowed much of his earnings on churches and
charities. His life was
singularly clean and pure. He never had a single vice excepting, perhaps,
the vices of over-industry and over-giving. Good Scripture measure, heaped
up, shaken together, and running over, he meted out to all, lie loved little
children, and beneath a stern face, rigid with principle, he carried a warm
and tender heart. He seemed to care not at all what people would think of
him. That never was taken into consideration when work was being planned.
The Bible was his guide and companion and almost the only book he ever cared
to read. His last
years, as he lay broken in body, waiting for rest, were full of calm divine
light. Faith in God and charity to all became the end of all his teachings,
and he oftentimes spoke of the mistakes he had made in his relation toward
his family and neighbors, urging those about him to be on their guard and
see to it that love alone was made the guide and rule of every action. . . .
His youthful enthusiasm burned on to the end, his mind glowing like a fire
beneath all its burden of age and pain, until at length he passed on into
the land of light, dying like a summer day in deep peace, surrounded by his
children.
On his mother's side John Muir was descended from the old Scottish stock of
the Gilderoys whose deeds won a place in the Border lore of Scotland. There
is, for instance, the fine old ballad "Gilderoy," but the possibility that
its thirteen stanzas may celebrate a member of this branch of the family
must remain as remote as it is romantic. In a manuscript copy of the ballad,
made for John Muir years ago by a Scotch relative of the Gilroy line, the
opening stanzas run as foflows:
"Gilderoy was a bonnie boy,
Had roses till his shoon;
His stockings were of silken soy,
Wi' garters hanging doon;
It was, I ween, a comely sight,
To see sae trim a boy;
He was my joy and heart's delight,
My winsome Gilderoy.
"Oh! sic twa charming een he had,
A breath as sweet as rose;
He never ware a Highland plaid,
But costly silken clothes.
He gained the love of ladies gay,
Nane e'er to him was coy.
Ahi wae is me! I mourn this day,
For my dear Gilderoy!" etc.
In Thompson's "Orpheus Caledonius" (1733) the
hero of the poem is represented as contemporary with Mary, Queen of Scots.
But a later authority, describing this Gilderoy as "the Robin Hood of
Scottish minstrelsy," identified him with the leader of a band of
freebooters that three centuries ago roamed over the Highlands of Perthshire
until both he and his band fell victims to the Stewarts of Athol in 1638.
According to a Muir family tradition John's
maternal great-grandfather, James Gilderoy, had three sons who took
respectively the names Gilderoy, Gilroy, and Gilrye. Inquiry of descendants
in Scotland has failed to bring to light the first of these. But a James
Gilderoy' was resident at Wark in Northumberland, on the Border, in 1765. He
is known to have had at least two sons John and David. The former, born in
1765, took the Gilroy form of the family name and was alternately a
professional gardener and a "land agent." David, who was born July 15, 1767,
is the "grandfather Gilrye" of Muir's "My Boyhood and Youth." Both boys
appear to have gradually moved northward along the border, and an old Scotch
family Bible, in the possession of a granddaughter of John Gilroy, invests
with the importance of an event the arrival of David Gilrye at Dunbar,
Scotland, on December 20, 1794.
David was no longer in the first flush of youth
when he settled in Dunbar. He was twenty-seven years old, and in his years
of wandering, if we knew something about them, we probably should find no
lack of hardship and adventure. Love of gardens and of landscapes, not
improbably, gave direction sometimes to his footsteps, for John Muir more
than a century later told how his earliest recollections of the country were
gained on short walks in company with Grandfather Gilrye, who also loved to
take him to Lord Louderdale's gardens. There is something pleasingly
suggestive in the picture of seventy-five-year-old David Gilrye leading his
three-year-old grandson into the paths that were to bring fame to the one,
and rescue from oblivion to the other.
Perhaps it was Margaret Hay who confided to her
Bible the date of David's arrival at Dunbar. She had good reason to remember
the event, for six months later he led her to the altar and made her his
wife. Through Grand-mother Gilrye, John Muir thus shared the good Scotch
blood of the Hays, a numerous clan, that has produced men and women of
distinction both in Europe and in America. A relative of Margaret Hay is
said to have suffered martyrdom in the days when the Covenanters were hunted
down for their sturdy opposition to "popery and prelacy."
A numerous offspring came to enliven the
household of David and Margaret Hay Gil- rye - three sons and seven
daughters. But death, also, was a tragically persistent visitor. All the
sons and three of the daughters died between the ages of seventeen and
twenty-six -a fearful toll of life exacted by the white plague. Since two
other daughters had died at a tenderer age, only Margaret, the eldest, and
Ann, the seventh of the Gilrye sisters, lived to survive their parents and
round out a good old age. The tragedy of such a series of untimely deaths is
likely to have had an intensifying influence upon the religious
sensibilities of the family. In 1874, when her sister Margaret died at the
ripe age of seventy-eight, Ann Gilrye, then the wife of Daniel Muir,
described herself as "the last remnant of a numerous family." "My mother,"
she wrote to her son John, "was just seventy-eight years old when she died,
and my father eighty-eight. My parents have mouldered in the dust over
twenty years, but Christ is the resurrection and the life, and if we believe
in him our souls will never die."
Daniel Muir, coming to Dunbar as a recruiting
sergeant, met there his first wife by whom he had one child. She was a woman
of some means and enabled him to purchase his release from the army in order
to engage in the conduct of a business which she had inherited. Their
happiness together was of brief duration, for both she and the child were
snatched away by a premature death, leaving him alone.
It seems to have been early in 1833 that Daniel,
now a widower with a prospering business, became a familiar caller in the
Gilrye family - now also sadly depleted in number. Margaret had been married
thirteen years earlier to James Rae and had established her own home. It was
Aunt Rae's precious lily garden that. later excited the childish admiration
of little Johnny Muir and made him wonder whether, when he grew up, he
"should ever be rich enough to own anything like so grand." Twenty-year-old
Ann and her sixteen-year-old brother David were the only ones left under the
parental roof. All the rest were lying side by side in the Dunbar
churchyard, whither also the last male scion of the family was to be carried
the following year. On
the 28th of November, 1833, Ann Gilrye became the wife of Daniel Muir, and
moved across the street into the old house which John Muir has described in
his boyhood recollections. A lively brood of children soon came to make
their home there. Margaret, Sarah, John, David, Daniel, Mary, and Anna were
born there in the given order, Joanna being the only one who was born in
Wisconsin. John Muir, third in succession and the eldest boy, was born on
the 21st of April, 1838.
The bond of affectionate intimacy which always
existed between him and his mother would make a characterization of her from
his pen of more than ordinary interest. But we have to content ourselves
with one sentence from a fragmentary autobiographical sketch. "She was a
representative Scotch woman," he wrote, "quiet, conservative, of pious,
affectionate character, fond of painting and poetry." To this we may add the
interesting information, contained in one of his letters, that his mother
wrote poetry in her girlhood days.
It is quite apparent from her letters that she
shared with him that msthetic appreciation of nature which is so
characteristic an element in his writings. While most of her letters concern
home affairs and are full of maternal solicitude for his health and comfort,
they are seldom without that additional touch which reveals kinship of soul
as well as of blood. Referring to descriptions in one of his early
California letters, she writes, "Your enjoyment of the beauties of
California is shared by me, as I take much pleasure in reading your
accounts." Underneath
the maternal solicitude for his health and safety one may also detect at
times the Scotch Covenanter's concern for his spiritual welfare. "Dear
John," she writes in 1870, "I hope your health is good - so that you will be
able really to enjoy and admire all the vast magnificence with which you are
daily surrounded. I know it is far beyond any conception of mine, but we can
unite in praising and serving our Heavenly Father who is the maker and
supporter of this wonderful world on which we live for a time. But time is
short, and we must live forever. I trust we have a good hope, through grace,
of spending eternity in mansions of glory everlasting."
The glacial studies with which her son began to
busy himself during the seventies must have tried at times her Covenanter
faith in so far as it involved a conception of the age and origin of the
world different from that which she had learned in her youth. But she
continues to write cheerfully about summers and autumns that make rambles in
the woods a deepening joy. "The trees and flowers and plants looked more
beautiful to me than ever before. . . . I presume you are quite busy with
your studies, writing your book. I feel much interested in all that
interests you, although in many of your studies you leave me far behind. Yet
I rejoice in all your joy, and hopes of future advancement.... You were much
talked about and thought about at our last Christmas gathering. Many were
the kind wishes and loving thoughts wafted to the valley of Yosemite."
Almost to the last year of her life she was accustomed to go to the woods in
April in order to gather and send to him with her birthday wishes a few of
his favorite Wisconsin spring flowers. These little acts reveal, even more
than anything she said, the poetic strain in her blood which kept fresh for
her and her eldest boy, until he was nearly sixty and she over eighty, the
vernal blossoms they had picked together long ago.
Very different was the attitude which Daniel
Muir assumed toward the interests and enthusiasms of his son. Being an
extreme literalist as far as the Bible was concerned, he could not look
without suspicion upon his scientific studies, because they went "beyond
what was written." Whenever he saw an issue arising between his traditional
interpretation of the world's origin according to Genesis on the one side,
and the facts of geology and glaciation, on the other, he was accustomed to
say, "Let God be true and every man a liar." John's passion for exploration,
and the adventures incidental thereto, he regarded as little less than
sinful. That there were different levels of development within the Bible,
involving the displacement of earlier and cruder ideas of God and the world
by higher and more intelligent ones, never entered his mind. Nor did it ever
occur to him, apparently, that the facts of nature are likewise a part of
the manuscripts of God, and that he who endeavors to read them accurately
may be rendering his fellow men a religious as well as an intellectual
service. He sincerely believed that his son was cheating the Almighty in
devoting his time to such interests and enjoyments. "You are God's
property," he wrote to him once. "You are God's property, soul and body and
substance give those powers up to their owner!" Even the most painsfaking
naturalist, he maintained, could not discover anything of value in the
natural world that the believer did not see at one glance of the eye. These
views went hand in hand with a naïve credulity that accepted unquestioningly
the pious marvels related in the tracts which he was distributing, and of
which he kept sending selected ones, with comments, to his son John.
Perhaps the reader will receive a clearer and
truer impression of the differing attitudes of his father and mother toward
his nature studies if we offer at this point a typical letter of Daniel Muir
in which the underscored words are indicated by italics. A note on the enve-
lope, in Joim's handwriting, says "written after reading the account of my
storm night on Shasta."
PORTAGE CITY, March 19th, 1874
MY VERY DEAR JOHN:
Were you as really happy as my wish would make
you, you would be permanently so in the best sense of the word. I received
yours of the third inst. with your slip of paper, but I had read the same
thing in "The Wisconsin," some days before I got yours, and then I wished I
had not seen it, because it harried up my feelings so with another of your
hair-breadth escapes. Had I seen it to be God's work you were doing I would
have felt the other way, but I knew it was not God's work, although you seem
to think you are doing God's service. If it had not been for God's boundless
mercy you would have been cut off in the midst of your folly. All that you
are attempting to show the Holy Spirit of God gives the believer to see at
one glance of the eye, for according to the tract I send you they can see
God's love, power, and glory in everything, and it has the effect of turning
away their sight and eyes from the things that are seen and temporal to the
things that are not seen and eternal, according to God's holy word. It is of
no use to look through a glass darkly when we have the Gospel and its
fulfillment, and when the true practical believer has got the Godhead in
fellowship with himself all the time, and reigning in his heart all the
time. I know that the world and the church of the world will glory in such
as you, but how can they believe which receive honor one of another and seek
not the honor that cometh from God only John 5, 44. You cannot warm the
heart of the saint of God with your cold icy-topped mountains. O, my dear
son, come away from them to the spirit of God and his holy word, and He will
show our lovely Jesus unto you, who is by His finished work presented to
you, without money and price. It will kindle a flame of sacred fire in your
heart that will never go out, and then you will go and willingly expend it
upon other icy hearts and you will thus be blessed infinitely in tribulation
and eternally through Jesus Christ, who is made unto us of God wisdom,
righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. I Cor. 1, 30, 31. And the
best and soonest way of getting quit of the writing and publishing your book
is to bum it, and then it will do no more harm either to you or others. And
then, like Paul, look to the cross of Christ and glory in it, and as in the
sight of God and in Jesus Christ, my only Lord and Master, I hereby say Amen
to it. I expect, my God
willing, to leave Portage City for Hamilton, Toronto, on the last day of
this month. I bought a house last October there and without my family, at
present, I mean to go in the way of God's providence to spend all my time in
His service and wholly by His grace to glorify Him. I shall be glad to hear
from you there any time. I will get your letters at the post-office there.
We are all well. Your dear mother sends her love
to you. Your
affectionate father in Christ
DANIEL MUIR
The meaning of the last paragraph of the letter
will be found in some, to John, disquieting news contained in a letter of
Mrs. Daniel Muir, Sr., under date of February 26, 1872. "We were surprised,"
she writes, "to hear your father say that he has decided to sell the
[Hickory Hill] farm, and everything he has on it, by auction. So he is at
present engaged in putting up bills of sale, the sale to take place on
Tuesday, the 5th of March. He says he will not decide on where he will go
until the sale is over." The purpose he had in view in coming to this sudden
decision is revealed in one of John's letters to his brother David. Daniel
Muir's religious fanaticism had in John's view reached a point where it was
necessary to ask his brother and his brother-in-law to interfere in the
interest of their sisters and their mother.
To David Gilrye Muir
YOSEMITE VALLEY
March 1st, 1873
DEAR DAVE:
I answer your letter at once because I want to
urge you to do what you can in breaking up that wild caprice of father's of
going to Bristol and Lord Muller. You and David Galloway are the only
reliable common-sense heads in our tribe, and it is important, when the
radical welfare of our parents and sisters is at stake, that we should do
all that is in our power.
I expected a morbid and semi-fanatical outbreak
of this kind as soon as I heard of his breaking free from the wholesome
cares of the farm. Yet I hoped that he would find ballast in your town of
some Sabbath-school or missionary kind that would save him from any violent
crisis like the present. That thickmatted sod of Bristol orphans, which is a
sort of necessary evil induced by other evils, is all right enough for
Muller in England, but all wrong for Muir in America.
The lives of Anna and Joanna, accustomed to the
free wild Nature of our woods, if transplanted to artificial fields and
dingy towns of England, would wilt and shrivel to mere husks, even if they
were not to make their life work amid those pinched and blinking orphans.
Father, in his present feeble-minded condition,
is sick and requires the most considerate treatment from all who have access
to his thoughts, and his moral disease is by no means contemptible, for it
is only those who are endowed with poetic and enthusiastic brains that are
subject to it. Most
people who are born into the world remain babies all their lives, their
development being arrested like sun-dried seeds. Father is a magnificent
baby, who, instead of dozing contentedly like most of his neighbors, suffers
growing pains that are ready to usher in the dawn of a higher life.
But to come to our work, can you not induce
father to engage in some tract or mission or Sabbath-school enterprise that
will satisfy his demands for bodily and spiritual exercise? Can you not find
him some thicket of destitution worthy of his benevolence? Can you not
convince him that the whole world is full of work for the kind and willing
heart? Or, if you cannot urge him to undertake any independent charity, can
you not place him in correspondence with some Milwaukee or Chicago society
where he would find elbow room for all his importance. An earnest man like
father, who also has a little money, is a valuable acquisition to many
societies of a philanthropic kind, and I feel sure that if once fairly
afloat from this shoal of indolence upon which he now chafes, he would sail
calmly the years now remaining to him.
At all events, tell mother and the girls, that
whether this side the sea or that, they need take no uneasiness concerning
bread.... JOHN MUIR
Their efforts were successful. A new home was
established in Portage, Wisconsin, and from there Daniel Muir went alone on
prolonged evangelistic trips to Canada and parts of the central West. Laid
low by old age and a broken limb, he died in Kansas City, at the home of one
of his daughters, in 1885. His last years were calm and peaceful as John had
foreseen. Eleven years later his wife also followed him into the land of the
leal. Into this
parental and ancestral background, sketched in its more significant
outlines, was born at Dunbar, Scotland, April 21, 1838, the subject of this
biography. Fleeting glimpses of his earliest childhood reveal Johnny Muir as
a vivid, auburn-haired lad with an uncommonly keen and inquiring pair of
blue eyes. His boyhood in Scotland extended over only the first eleven years
of his life (1838-49), but the fifty and more pages which he devotes to
memories of these years in his autobiography reveal the deep impression they
made upon his mind. His school education began early - before he had
completed his third year. But even before that time he had, like his fellow
Scotchman Hugh Miller, learned his letters from shop signs across the
street. In this as in other matters Grandfather Gilrye was his earliest
teacher and guide.
Scotch pedagogical methods in those days were an uncompromising tyranny. So
much is clear from Muir's feeling allusions to the inevitable thrashings, in
school and at home, which promptly followed any failure to commit assigned
lessons to memory. The learning of a certain number of Bible verses every
day was a task which his father superimposed upon the school lessons, and
exacted with military precision. "By the time I was eleven years old,"
wrote the victim of this method, "I had about
three-fourths of the Old Testament and all of the New by heart and by sore
flesh. I could recite the New Testament from the beginning of Matthew to the
end of Revelation without a single stop." Records both written and oral
testify to John's phenomenal feats of memory in reciting chapters from the
Bible and the poetry of Robert Burns.
Whatever may be thought of the wisdom of 1 this
educational method, there can be no doubt that it resulted in forming the
boy's literary taste and in giving him a rare training in the use of English
undefiled. The dignity and rich quality of his diction, and his arrestingly
effective employment of Biblical metaphors disclose the main sources of his
literary power in familiarity with the King James Version, the only one
available in his boyhood.
The severest kind of pedagogical weather) was
encountered when he left the old Davel Brae school for the grammar school.
Old Mungo Siddons, who presided over the former, seems to have been a man
possessed of human sympathies, for he managed to make himself gratefully
remembered for the gooseberries and currants, at least, with which he
sweetened the closing exercises when vacation days arrived. But Mr. Lyon,
the master of the grammar school, was a disciplinarian of the most
inflexible kind. "Under him," Muir writes, "we had to get three lessons
every day in Latin, three in French, and as many in English, besides
spelling, history, arithmetic, and geography. Word lessons in particular,
the wouldst-couldstshouldst-have-loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike
thrashing, until I had committed the whole of the French, Latin, and English
grammars to memory, and in connection with reading-lessons we were called on
to recite parts of them with the rules over and over again, as if all the
regular and irregular incomprehensible verb stuff was poetry."
Some of the textbooks he used have survived the
accidents of time and travel and furnish illuminating examples of the severe
demands that were made upon children in the Dunbar grammar school. One of
these is Willymot's "Selections from the Colloquies of Corderius," which he
began to study when he was nine years old, and which would be a severe tax
on the wits of most Freshmen of our day. It must have seemed little less
than mockery to the pupils that the "Argumenturn" of the very first
"Colloquium" calls it an "exemplum ad parvuks blande et comiter in schola
traclondos, ne severitate disciplina absterreantur." "Kind and gentle
treatment of youngsters lest they be frightened away by severity of
discipline" - that was no serious concern of schoolmaster Lyon.
"Old-fashioned Scotch teachers," wrote Muir in describing his school days,
"spent no time in seeking short roads to knowledge, or in trying any of the
new-fangled psychological methods so much in vogue nowadays. There was
nothing said about making the seats easy or the lessons easy. We were simply
driven point-blank against our books like soldiers against the enemy, and
sternly ordered 'Up and at 'em. Commit your lessons to memory.' If we failed
in any part, however slight, we were whipped; for the grand, simple,
all-sufficing Scotch discovery had been made that there was a close
connection between the skin and the memory, and that irritating the skin
excited the memory to any required degree."
Though John was compelled at this time to store
his memory with many things which in his mature judgment were mere "cinders
and ashes," the mental discipline at least was a permanent gain. His
knowledge of French was sufficient to open for him the treasures of French
literature. A considerable section of his library was composed of French
works on travel, exploration, and natural science. The Latin he had acquired
so drastically from Corderius' "Colloquies" and Turner's "Exercises to the
Accidence," etc., proved useful in botanical and paleontological studies.
Besides, the habit, formed early, of committing to memory choice passages
from English literature was kept up by him till far into middle life and was
commended to his children as a valuable means of education. In a letter to
his daughter Wanda, on the occasion of his first visit to Dunbar, forty-four
years after he had left his native town, he wrote: "You are now a big girl,
almost a woman, and you must mind your lessons and get in a good store of
the best words of the best people while your memory is retentive and then
you will go through life rich. Ask mother to give you lessons to commit to
memory every day, mostly the sayings of Christ in the gospels, and
selections from the poets. Find the hymn of praise in Paradise Lost, 'These
are thy glorious works, Parent of good, Almighty!' and learn it well."
If in these formal elements of John's early
education profit and loss were often doubtfully balanced, it was not so with
the lessons he learned from Nature. He would have agreed with Henry Adams
that life was a series of violent contrasts which gave to life their
relative values. Winter and summer, cold and heat, town and country, school
and vacation, force and freedom, marked two widely different modes of life
and thought. What is more, they all registered their effects in the sum
total of what we call education. On the one hand was the wintry,
storm-beaten town with its restraint, confinement, and school discipline; on
the other, the country with its penetrable hedges, daisied fields,
bird-song, and nest- hunting expeditions. There, in particular, were
skylarks and mavises, the most universally beloved of all the birds of
Scotland. John tells how he and his companions used to stand for hours on a
broad meadow near Dunbar listening to the singing of the larks; or how they
lay on their backs in competitive tests of keensightedness, each trying to
outdo the other in keeping a soaring singer in sight.
Among the sublimer aspects of Nature that made
an indelible impression upon the boy's mind were those of the stormy North
Sea. Answering the letters of some Los Angeles school children in 1904, he
tells bow the school which they described brought to mind the two schools
which he attended when he was a boy in Scotland. "They," he wrote, "were
still nearer the sea. One of them stood so near that at high tide on stormy
days the waves seemed to be playing tag on our playground wall, running up
the sandy shore and perhaps just touching the base of the wall and running
back. But sometimes in wild storms the tops of the waves came flying over
the wall into the playground, while the finer spray, carried on the wild
roaring flood, drenched the schoolhouse itself and washed it fresh and
clean. These great roaring storms were glorious sights. But we were taught
to pity the poor sailors, for many ships were driven ashore on the stormy
coast almost every year, and many sailors drowned. From the highest part of
the playground we could see the ships sailing past, and often tried to guess
whence they came, where they were bound for, and what they were carrying."
The numerous drawings of ships that decorate the fly-leaves of John's
schoolbooks may be regarded as telltale of what he saw from the windows and
the playground of the Davel Brae school.
But there were many other thrilling experiences
for the by-hours of a boy like Johnny Muir. lie drank in by every pore the
somber wildness of the rugged seashore about his native town, explored the
pools among the rocks where shells, seaweeds, eels, and crabs excited his
childish wonder when the tide was low, and found adventurous recreation by
climbing the craggy headlands. Yet most impressive of all was the roar of
North Sea tempests that, mingling sea and sky, hurled mountainous waves
against the black headland crowned by the ruins of Dunbar Castle. All this
he saw and felt and explored with intense delight.
How ineffaceably these scenes and early
experiences engraved themselves upon his memory is revealed by a passage in
one of his notebooks. He was a day's journey from the Gulf of Mexico, on his
thousand-mile walk through the South, when he suddenly caught a whiff of the
sea, borne upon the wind. It was "the first sea-breeze," he writes, "that
had touched me in twenty years. I was plodding along with my satchel and
plants, leaning wearily forward . . . when suddenly I felt the salt air, and
before I had time to think, a whole flood of long-dormant associations
rolled in upon me. The Firth of Forth, the Bass Rock, Dunbar Castle, and the
winds and rocks and hills came upon the wings of that wind, and stood in as
clear and sudden light as a landscape flashed upon the view by a blaze of
lightning in a dark night."
It is not surprising that John Muir, reflecting
upon his Scotch boyhood, should in his later years have learned to regard
the natural environment of Dunbar as the source of a valuable part of his
early education. The heroic origins of the town are lost in dim traditions
that reach back at least a thousand years. Not the least of its romantic
associations are represented by such names as Black Agnes of Dunbar, Joanna
Beaufort, Earl Bothwell, and Mary, Queen of Scots. Just southeast of the
town was fought the Battle of Dunbar in which Cromwell won a decisive
victory over Leslie. All this, no less than the legends, superstitions, and
folklore, which clung like moss about the surviving ruins of other days,
could not but exert a strong influence upon the imagination of this
active-minded boy. But
the fields and woods exerted by far the strongest attraction upon him. In
spite of sure and severe punishments he and his companions regularly managed
to slip away into the country to indulge their love of that "wildness,"
which, he says, "was ever sounding in our ears. Nature saw to it that
besides school lessons and church lessons some of her own lessons should be
learned, perhaps with a view to the time when we should be called to wander
in wildness to our hearts' content. Oh, the blessed enchantment of those
Saturday runaways in the prime of the spring! How our young wondering eyes
reveled in the sunny, breezy glory of the hills and the sky, every particle
of us thrilling and tingling with the bees and glad birds and glad streams!
Kings may be blessed; we were glorious, we were free, -school cares and
scoldings, heart thrashings and flesh thrashings alike, were forgotten in
the fullness of Nature's glad wildness. These were my first excursions, -
the beginnings of lifelong wanderings." |