TO be well-born is half of the battle of life; and to have an environment which helps the life of the child and the youth is a good fraction of the other half. So that the man whose parentage and whose education are good is fortunate above his fellows, and well-assured of a successful issue to his life. Heredity and early environment—these are what the scientists call them—are as the building and the rigging of the ship. The best sailing-master can do little with an ill-built, ill-rigged vessel. There is much in the stock from which William Hamilton Gibson came, much in his education and early association, which explains his life and the way in which he lived it. He was born in Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut, in a region where the lower Berkshire mountain-ranges break into irregular and crowded hills, green, picturesque, and restful. He has himself left a charming description of the old home and its immediate surroundings, in the chapter called “Summer” in “Pastoral Days.” “Hometown (Sandy Hook), owing to some early faction, is divided into two sections, forming two distinct towns. One Newborough (Newtown), a hilltop hamlet, with its picturesque long street, a hundred feet in width, and shaded with great weeping elms that almost meet overhead; and the other, Hometown proper (Sandy Hook), a picturesque little village in the valley, cuddling close around the foot of a precipitous bluff, known as Mt. Pisgah. A mile’s distance separates the two centers. The old homestead is situated in the heart of Hometown, fronting on the main street. The house itself is a series of after-thoughts, wing after wing, gable after gable having clustered around the old nucleus as the growth of new generations necessitated new accommodation. Its outward aspect is rather modern, but the interior with its broad open fireplace and accessories in the shape of crane and firedogs, is rich with all the features of typical New England; and the two gables of the main roof enclose the dearest old garret imaginable.... Looking through the dingy window between the maple-boughs, my eye extends over lawns and shrubberies three acres in extent,—a little park, overrun with paths in every direction, through ancient orchard and embowered dells, while far beyond are glimpses of the wooded knolls, the winding brook, and meadows dotted with waving willows, and farther still, the undulating farm.” In such a spot Gibson was born October the fifth, 1850. His father was originally a Boston man, who finally removed to Brooklyn, though maintaining the home in the country, at Newtown. The Gibson ancestry is one of no little interest, embracing as it does, in various branches, some of the most distinguished names in Eastern Massachusetts. The first American bearer of the name was John Gibson of Cambridge, whose coming to this country was at least as early as 1634, and who died in Cambridge in 1694 at the age of ninety-three years. His descendants remained for the most part in Massachusetts for several generations. Thomas Gibson of Townsend, Massachusetts, the grandfather of William Hamilton, by marriage with Frances Maria Hastings brought into the family line the famous Dana family, a connection of which his descendants were justly proud. The original Dana ancestor was also a Cambridge settler, Richard by name, who married Anne Bullard. His grandson, by his son Daniel (who married Naomi Crosswell), was Mr. Justice Richard Dana, whose death in 1772 deprived the patriots of those stormy days of one of their foremost and ablest leaders. Justice Dana was unquestionably at the head of the Massachusetts bar, an authority on the precedents in American cases more quoted by Story than any other pleader of his time. He is one of the figures in Hawthorne’s sketch, given in his “Grandfather’s Chair,” of the episode in “You ask whether I am a New Englander. Let me set your heart at rest by telling you that I am a way-back Puritan. The race has been petering out from old John Cotton down through a long list of historical men whom I am glad to own as ancestors. (I don’t count some of the earlier Lords and Ladies to whom I trace my lineage—they are a pretty bad lot to my thinking.) I honor the humble names of several of my progenitors who lived and died in the love and respect of their fellow men, and have some reason to feel a little pride in being able to allude to Justice Richard Dana, of Massachusetts, as my great-great-grandfather, and a lineage which embraces the names of Washington Allston, Ellery Channing, and others From the old country home and its surroundings the lad of ten years went to a school which was probably as well-adapted to his temper and tastes as any which could have been selected. At any rate it was a school to which he became profoundly attached, and whose master he was to count among the dearest and closest friends of a lifetime. The “Gunn School,” or the “Gunnery,” as it came to be called, was one of the famous institutions of this country, a school which left its indelible mark upon many a boy whose maturity was to be eminent and useful in the national life. It was a school unique in its theory and without rivals in its practice. Its founder and head was Frederick W. Gunn, a native of Washington, Connecticut, where he spent his life, did his great and good work, and died in a ripe old age. He was a man of rare character and gifts. Large-hearted and large-minded, with a religious and ethical nature of the most positive kind, he was a man predestined to influence others, and mold the lives of youth. Though he was an “abolitionist” in days when that term carried with it intensest odium and social proscription, and a dissenter from conventional orthodoxy in a time when “When Mr. Gunn called the school which his genius had established ‘a home for boys’ he stated the simple and exact truth.... Mr. and Mrs. Gunn both had the parental instinct so strong that they really took to their hearts each individual boy, and brooded over him as if he were their own flesh and blood.” This home-school and school-home in one was conducted as a miniature republic; its aim was all-round, symmetrical character; its method grew out of the hearty, wholesome, honest, and loving nature of its head; its spirit was justice and love. Perhaps it was not a school where “marks” counted for a great deal; and the drill in books may not have been as severe and systematic as in some institutions. But the boy who went to the “Gunnery” was pretty sure to imbibe some notions of honor, justice, kindliness, and obedience which he never forgot. As one of the old pupils writes: “We recall an era of uncurbed freedom in a spot hallowed by home affections without home effeminacies; where every bad trait of a boy was systematically assailed and every good trait strengthened, so far as might be, so as to take its final place in an enduring character and robust manhood.” Gibson himself has given a tender and vivid picture of the school which played so large a part in his life, in the pages of “Pastoral Days”: “How lightly did I appreciate the fortunate journey when, twenty summers ago, I followed this road for the first time, when a boy of ten years, on my way to an unknown village, I looked across the landscape to the little spires on that distant hill! Little did I dream of the six years of unmixed happiness and precious experience that awaited me in that little Judea! I only knew that I was sadly quitting a happy home on my way to ‘boarding-school’—a school called the Snuggery, taught by a Mr. Snug, in a little village named Snug Hamlet, about twenty miles from Hometown. “There are some experiences in the life of every one which, however truthful, cannot be told but to elicit the doubtful nod or the warning finger of incredulity. They were such experiences as these, however, that made up the sum of my early life in that happy refuge called in modern parlance a ‘boarding-school’—a name as empty, a word as weak and tame in its significance, as poverty itself; no doubt Most delightfully, too, does he blend an account, in the same chapter, of a return to the old school, in later years, and a picture of the characteristic life of that school as it lies in the memories of many successive generations of boys who passed through its scenes: “It is eight o’clock, and the Snuggery is hushed in the quiet of the study hour, and as we look through the windows we see the little groups of studious lads bending over their books. Turning a corner on the piazza, we are confronted with a tall hexagonal structure “Mr. Snug is leaning back in his easy-chair, and two boys are standing up before him; one of them is speaking, evidently in answer to a question. ‘I called him a galoot, sir.’ ‘You called George a galoot, and then he threw the base-ball club at you—is that it?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ interrupted George; ‘but I was only playing, sir.’ ‘Yes,’ resumed the voice of Mr. Snug, ‘but that club went with considerable force, and landed over the fence, and made havoc in Deacon Farish’s onion-bed; ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘And, George,’ continued Mr. Snug, with deliberate, easy intonation, ‘to-morrow morning, at the same time, you present yourself politely to Deacon Farish, tell him that I sent you, and ask him to escort you to his onion-bed. After which you will go carefully to work and pull out all the weeds. You understand, sir?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ ‘And then you will both report to me as usual.’ And with a pleasant smile, which was reflected in both their faces, the erring youngsters were dismissed. Before the door has closed behind them we are standing in the doorway. Here I draw the curtain; for who but one of its own household could understand a welcome at the Snuggery?” No feature of the “Gunnery” life is more interesting to the old scholar or to outsiders than the ingenious and effective punishments invented by Mr. Gunn “A boy of uncommon diffidence might be sent to call on some village spinster or, worse yet for the blushing youngster, on some comely village lass. A youth too boisterous would be dismissed for a four-mile walk, ordered to hold a chip in his mouth for an hour, or to run a dozen times around the church on the Green, sounding the tin dinner-horn at each corner in rotation. Two small boys caught fighting were often ordered to sit, one in the other’s lap, taking turns thus for an hour or two. Pounding a log with a heavy club was a favorite panacea for superfluous energy in the family sitting-room. Once a mischievous youngster was seen sprinkling a dog’s face with water at the tank behind the Gunnery. The master, who had a tender spot in his heart for animals, stole up behind the offender and ducked him liberally, to give him, as he said afterward, an inkling of the feelings of the dog. At the Gunnery it used to be a custom “Actual wickedness was severely punished by Mr. Gunn, sometimes in the good, old-fashioned way; but his motive in inflicting for minor faults the odd penalties here alluded to seemed to be to take cognizance of the error in a manner that would sufficiently incommode the culprit without hurting his self-respect or leaving an angry smart. The boy appreciated the . . . . . . “He insisted on neatness and order, and often a family meeting was called and made a court of inquiry over a bit of paper found on the lawn, or a peanut-shuck on the stairs. Once there was a question as to the history of several pieces of orange-peel in the grass in front of the house. The forty boys were summoned and made to stand in a row on the long piazza. Mr. Gunn called upon each one to state what he knew about the orange-peel, and at the end of the investigation he formed the dozen or more culprits into file, the tallest at the head, and made them march in solemn procession about the yard until they had picked up all the offending scraps, and then to the pig-sty to deposit them in their proper place.” There is a delightful paragraph in a letter which Gibson wrote home to his brothers, in which he tells “One day I and two other boys eat some walnuts in church in the meeting time. Mr. Gunn found it out. He made us three boys take the rest of our walnuts up to the minister. We did so and the minister gave us his thanks for the walnuts, and asked us if we would not have some supper, for it was supper time. We refused and left. He told us not to eat any more.” But Mr. Gunn could administer as sharp reprimands to parents and older folk as he could to the boys who were his pupils. There is a plaintive letter from Gibson to his father, growing yellow now, with age, in which the heart of the little boy is uncovered, and his longing for letters from home is touchingly revealed. And the fatherly, warm-hearted teacher had evidently read it, and his soul burned within him. So he wrote upon the back page of the little note the following admonitory words, which must have elicited a letter by return mail: “My Dear Sir: It seems to me if I had such a dear little son as Willie Gibson, sent away from home to a boarding school, and thrown upon the cold charities of the world, so proverbially heartless and selfish as the ministers say it is, I would require one of the clerks to write to him once or twice a quarter. Willie is happy in his present relations, but somewhat anxious about the friends he left behind him. He presumes These are words like rifle bullets! Of course the students of child psychology will be interested to learn whatever is worth knowing concerning the appearance, in embryo, of the man Gibson in the boy of this period. There is satisfaction for such investigators and there is disappointment as well. There are many intimations, at this period, of the man that is to be. There are traces of peculiarities which wholly disappeared with the years. There were aptitudes and tastes appearing in the school-days at the Gunnery, which no reprimands and no discouragements could subdue; and there were shortcomings and faults which the years were destined utterly to efface. It certainly seems strange to find Mr. Gunn writing to the boy’s mother, “Willie has not yet learned to be spontaneously industrious. I know he will come to it. He improves”; and again to his father, “Willie insists that he is getting along finely in his studies, that he studies very hard, and is doing well. But you must accept this with some grains of allowance for a boy’s favorable judgment of himself. He does not learn as fast as I wish to have him. I think his tendency to take on fat hinders his power of But in other ways, the schoolboy was forecasting the traits of the mature man. There is a mournful letter preserved out of these years, in which the little fellow writes his father after receiving a reprimand for illustrating his letters with pen-and-ink pictures. His inborn faculty would exhibit itself, and the home letters were filled with funny and interesting sketches. But that did not seem to the parental mind a wise use of writing materials. So the embryo artist was warned to curb his passion for illustration. He wrote a few penitent lines in response. “Next comes about the writing. I own that I am very foolish in putting those pictures in my letters, and I won’t do it any more. I never put them in only to the letters home.” Vain promise! It was one more attempt to drive out nature with a pitchfork; and was as unsuccessful—as it So, too, there appeared in these early days the passionate love of nature which was to be a controlling element in his later years. Botany was one of the studies which he insisted upon taking up under Mr. Gunn’s teaching. There was a little family controversy over the matter, growing out of the mother’s fear that the really practical things would be neglected in this passion for nature-study. It sounds strange enough, at this distance in time, with all the light of the boy’s later life, to read the mother’s anxious words: “We wish [Mr. Gunn] to judge and direct in all these things, but I was afraid your own wish and the way I spoke to you about the delight of studying Botany, might have led you to speak so positively in choosing it, that he would suppose it was by our direction. If you really do take up Botany you must expect to find that it is not all play either. There are hard things to remember, and you must make up your mind to work at them bravely and perseveringly if you are determined to make them yours.” A little sentence later in the same letter shows the bent of the boy. His mother, referring to a recent visit of his father to the school, remarks: “I was afraid when your father told me how he found you in the calamus swamp, that you would be sick.” That tells an interesting story of boyish passion for plants. And so do the little fellow’s letters home. Very early in his life at the Gunnery he wrote to his father: “I get along in my studies in Botany very well indeed, and he has described two or three plants, one of which was Marsh-marigold or the Cowslip. He has analyzed the cherry blossom”; and Mr. Gunn wrote a footnote to the same letter saying: “He seems delighted with Botany and makes close observations.” This quality of his mind, cropping out in its earliest essays, appears again and again in these juvenile letters. They are well worth quoting, as early witnesses to the attentive eye, the retentive memory, the descriptive power which were part of his natural and congenital outfit for his life-work. One of them divides its pages between art and natural history: “My paints have given me a great deal of fun. I bought a blank book and copied several pictures in it out of my ‘Harris’s Insects,’ and I also painted them, some from the description and some from the plates. I have one page of beetles, another page of butterflies, etc., etc. I guess when I get it done it will be ‘betterish nische.’ Everybody comes to me lately to have William Hamilton Gibson Age, 13 me draw and paint them a valentine, which of course I do for some of them. I wish that in your next letter you would send me a couple of paint brushes, for the hairs of mine keep coming out all the while. “That same feeling has come over me that I used to have last summer when I was after bugs and butterflies. The other day, it came very strong and I went out to look for cocoons, and I looked and looked, but saw nothing, and gave it up entirely, but as I was coming on my way into the house I saw some small pear-trees and I thought that I would look on them and I did, and saw a bunch of leaves. I looked and saw there was a Cecropia cocoon done up in them which made me feel like an eagle darting at her prey. I grabbed the prize and kept it and have got it yet. We have got a new minister which I told you about. I showed it to him and he told me to call and see him and bring it to him and he then asked me if any boy had a microscope. I told him yes (for Commodore has got a Craig’s Microscope) and the next evening Commodore and I took my ‘Harris’s Insects’ and showed it to him. He was much pleased with it and is going to get one. We did not make a very long call, but it was a nice one.” Another letter to his mother enlists her help in his entomological interests: “I have just found an Imperial moth worm on a maple-tree. Will you please look on one of the small “P. S. That worm that I told you about on the apple-tree, if very large, must be taken off and put into a box with fresh apple leaves every day; if small, do the same.” A letter which he wrote in 1865 bears witness to the trait which his teacher had already noted—his careful observation. He made pen-and-ink drawings to make clear what flower he was trying to identify, which was plainly the false foxglove. “I have been out in several places and have stuck in as much as ten stakes in different places where those beautiful scarlet or crimson lilies grow and when the stalk has gone I will take them up. Saturday I intend to go out in search of some more. There are plenty of them, and sometimes I see them two or three on one stalk. “Do you know what the large trumpet-creeper is “In a garden up here there is a kind of ‘Columbine,’ very large, of two kinds, purple and white and very large. I am welcome to all the seed that I want. I don’t know whether you want any or not, but nevertheless I’ll get you a lot. “Here I must stop. I remain “Your aff. son Willie.” The boy was fortunate in his mother, whose fine nature, trained tastes, and Christian spirit moved and moulded the best there was in him. Her letters to the little pupil are models of maternal sympathy, and reflect very vividly the boy’s strong passion for living things and the study of them. One of her characteristic messages went to him in 1862, and reveals her own interest in the pursuits which were delighting her children and which were destined to mean so much to the boy she was writing to: “How are your friends and dear companions, the worms? I missed them very much after you had gone, and often found myself stepping carefully and looking down to the right and the left in crossing the upper hall, expecting to see some green or brown thing crawling about. The great drawer I gave you, we call ‘the worm drawer’ yet, and I don’t know as I shall ever open it comfortably again. The peaceable and innocent rolls of linen and sewing lie in it now, just as they used before you had it, but sometimes I forget and open the one under it cautiously, expecting to see some of your treasures dropped through again, on my things. Henry and Julie are making collections now also, and Cottie brought home, the other day, the finest, largest specimen I ever saw, of the sort you called ‘Polyphemus’? It was of immense size, and a very bright healthy color, both in its body and in those little tufts that stud it all over. He laid it away very carefully, and left it in peace a few days, and yesterday, behold it had spun a cocoon in its box as large as a butternut, and as strong as linen, of a beautiful reddish brown. We shall expect the moth with great interest. The children are too impatient to hurry up business with their worms. They are forever opening the boxes, and lifting and handling the creatures, so that I should think the poor things would despair of ever getting a chance to set their houses in order, at all.” His relations with his mother were always close and sympathetic. She was a rare nature, refined and cultivated, with a strong literary bent and deep religious feeling. She wrote not a little, contributing to the pages of “The Christian Union” and other publications. She scrupulously kept all the boy’s letters from his schooldays forward through the years. One of the cherished mementos of her life was a little manuscript volume, which bears the inscription: “I leave this book to my son William.” It is a record of her study of the Bible, her grapple with the great problems of ethical and theological thought, prayers in which she has uttered the aspirations of a reverent spirit insistently seeking light through all the confusion and shadow of modern speculation, comment upon the great books which were stirring Christendom and sounding the note of the new thought about Christ and Christianity. To read them is to discover the sources of the son’s deep reverence and broad, unconventional religious life. It is to feel anew the unconscious power of motherhood in shaping the ductile spirit of childhood, and to be certain that the light of such a spirit was a very pillar of fire to the soul of her son. |