MR. GIBSON was characteristically American in his habits of work and in his love of it. He wrought with a zeal and a passion which are characteristic of the race from which he came. And the early, abrupt, and untimely close of his brilliant career must be charged almost wholly to this fiery passion for work, this ardor in doing.

One comes upon traces of this characteristic very early in his career. His own letters as well as the letters of his friends written in his youth show that, very soon after leaving “The Gunnery” at any rate, he acquired the habit of continuous application, and became an expert at it. No sooner had he made up his mind what he would do in life, than he began to do it with all his might. He felt the pressure of need, and responded to it promptly and vigorously. He lost no time, he spared no pains to train himself for his career. He realized his lack of education in art, and that he had to furnish out of himself both discipline and knowledge. There was in his mind evidently but one way to supply the defects of technical education, which to so many would have seemed insuperable obstacles. He could overcome everything by work. He knew how to “toil terribly.” He spared no time, no trial, no tasking of himself. After he had done a good day’s work in the things he was under contract to do for his employers, he would turn to work again for himself and upon schemes of his own, and would spend hours more in the most absorbing labor. If any student of his work should wonder how his swift success was won, and how he so soon made good his defects of education and training, they may find their answer in that one word—work. It was his talisman. That he had gifts, power, genius, he believed most implicitly. It was that which gave him courage; but he knew, too, that genius without work is an engine without steam. A letter which he wrote to his mother during the progress of his first drawing for the “Aldine,” of the Inness landscape is his own confession of excessive industry, and gives a glimpse at the same time of the fiery zeal and undoubting courage which possessed him.

“I had intended writing to you during the early part of the week, as I had a message to send you; but I have been so excessively busy that I could find no moment of time.... I have worked very hard during the past few weeks, not only during the day, but in the evenings also, yea, even until the morning on several occasions. The object of my labors you of course understand is the Inness picture. Well, it is finished and has been universally admired. I have drawn nearly the whole of it in the night-time here at home, as my days have been occupied by O. J. & Co.’s work. I have (with reason) been very anxious over this ‘Aldine’ picture of mine. Everybody has told me that I was too headstrong to attempt such a large drawing for my first start in landscape, and no one imagined that I would succeed. Roberts told me that he knew I would not succeed and that I ought to have commenced on something smaller at first. Others have said: ‘It’s a pretty big start to commence with a full page in the finest American illustrated journal.’ But I have commenced and my drawing has been admired, accepted and paid for by Mr. Sutton, and is to appear in the ‘Aldine’ in the course of a few months. I am going to study very hard on landscape henceforth, as I feel convinced of success.... I have received congratulations on all sides, for it is not a small thing to get a drawing accepted in the ‘Aldine.’ I, of course, am very much encouraged and am determined that my next drawing shall be an improvement on my last.”

While he was writing those lines his mother was writing to him, in warning and caution against his undue application:

“I hope your picture will be done before long, so that you will not have to work at night. Depend upon it you will lose strength and eyesight by unwise application. I am uneasy to find that you are trying your strength to its utmost limit. Do be advised.”

Receiving the news of his success with his work, she sends him her congratulations, and renews her motherly—and timely—cautions. It is all very interesting reading in the light of what followed; for it is to be remembered that all these letters were written in 1872, when Gibson was but twenty-two,—a mere stripling just entering the lists!

Seven years later, in 1879, his wife in a letter to his mother reveals the same habit, and prophesies, alas! too truthfully, the inevitable result. She says:

“Will, I believe, will always be busy day and night until he breaks down in health. I think that would be the only thing (except, perhaps, a fortune) which would put a stop to his midnight work. I certainly thought he would be ill after his last strain. He was so weak after remaining in the house so long, and using his brain so continuously, that when the last day came and he was copying his manuscript, he nearly fainted. Only a few more strains like that will be necessary to weaken his constitution seriously.”

But not only did he overdraw upon the hours he ought to have spent in sleep. He was always at it while he was awake. He was not a fitful workman, busy by turns, but taking equal turns at idleness. He could not be idle. All times were work-times, the odds-and-ends of the day, the intervals between tasks, the moments of interruption and of waiting, he turned to the most valuable account. Among the drawings which he made for his projected botany he left a memorandum, which shows his incessant watchfulness for subjects of study, and the prompt industry which made him always ready to secure his material. He was always loaded for the game that turned up. And no scantiness of materials or of tools in the least daunted or deterred him. This is his memorandum as he wrote it:

“Leaf. Impression with soot at hotels everywhere; intricate details in a few seconds.”

“Seeds from spider-webs and bird’s-nests.”

Let indolence meditate this matter.

Not even the working hours seem to have been sufficient for him. He also trenched upon the term sacred to sleep, and in one instance, at least, did his planning in his dreams. For a time before the publication of the “Sharp Eyes” articles was begun in Harper’s “Young Folks,” Gibson was casting about for some new idea for a book, some hint or inspiration or theme which should serve to focalize his thoughts and materials. One morning he said to his wife: “I dreamed out a whole book last night. I never had such a vivid dream. The whole scheme came to me, and I know just what I will do. I am going over to Harpers’ to talk it over with them.” This he immediately did, offering them fifty-two articles, to serve as a sort of naturalist’s almanac. The contract was agreed upon and he began work immediately. He often thereafter referred to his “lucky dream.” It was, perhaps, the most popular of his books, and, whatever its origin, was certainly in itself a very wide-awake volume.

His note-books are witnesses of the same character and tenor. They show, of course, his thorough study of every project on which his mind was engaged. They show also how his brain teemed with new projects and outlined new schemes, before he was done with old ones. His purposes were always far outrunning his capacity to perform. Yet if ever a man could do two or three things at a time, he was the one. At least his motto might well have been that remorseless pledge to continual industry, “Nulla dies sine linea.” One of his note-books dates from April, 1877, and runs to June 12, 1896, a month before he died, covering thus a period of nineteen years. In it is a record of every day’s work in all that time; and if there was not a line drawn every day, on some days he drew enough to fully make good the deficit and fulfil the very letter of the proverb. Sometimes the entries record every item of his work, like the following, taken at random:

So the pages run, by scores and by hundreds. But elsewhere he condenses the story of a season’s continuous work into a few lines. After the date May 18, 1887, he wrote:

“Left for Hilltop—

“A very busy summer. Made many drawings for two prospective articles on ‘Midnight Rambles,’ and ‘Insect Botanists,’ beside many flower studies, and a number of water-colors. Very busy on the memorial volume of Mr. Gunn. Made a large number of drawings for Botany.”

Then follow pages of entries recording the sketches, designs, water-colors, illustrations, which in part constituted the details of that “busy summer.” The following year he made a similar condensation of a European trip. It is but a note, yet the single item which refers to “three hundred photographs,” tells the story of his busy days:

“Trip to Europe. Left New York in April, returned in June. Visited England, France, Holland, Switzerland, including a fortnight each in London and Paris. Brought home over 300 instantaneous photographs, taken under all conditions by my detective camera. Went direct to Hilltop, and settled down to magazine work.”

These note-books carry the evidence of his faithfulness to his various aims and lines of interest. While he was at work as the artist, he never hesitated to do something for himself as either naturalist or author. He was never so preoccupied with his sketching that his ear could not catch a new bird-note, or his eye perceive an event in the insect-world. His color box often did duty as a botanist’s case, or bore home a load of cocoons and beetles. And when he sat down to record his impressions or outline his plans he revealed his triple interest in every line. Once he began certain memoranda which he headed “Night-Notes.” In the margin, by a dozen hasty lines with his pen he made a design for a title-page,—a lighted candle with moths flying about it. Then he wrote into his text ideas which should interest the future reader of some article, upon the scientific side, in sentences which suggest at once the illustrations and the text itself:

“Moths creeping up screen outside window, their presence marked only by their luminous eyes. The lamp the center of a whirling maze of all sorts of nocturnal insects. A rare treat spread on the table before me. Exquisite hints for the colorist, decorator, or illustrator. Here a dainty mite of a moth with the most delicate of sage-green, flat-open wings, crossed by bands of cream-color. Another with steeple-roofed wings (at rest) glistening like satin, decorated with faint contrast of pale pink and faded olive.” And so on for pages together.

Such passages as these from his own notes, never meant for the public eye, and therefore absolutely conclusive of his sincerity and his real spirit, show how truly he was an observer at first hand. He saw things for himself. There was not a trace of cant in what he had to say about original observation of nature, her wonders and her beauties. The thing he tried to lead others to do he had already done himself. A friend, who is himself a keen observer of nature, wrote of Gibson, at his death:

“It was to the habit of observation more than to any endowment that he owed the prosperity of his work,—for his life was a successful one. It enabled him to see clearly, without a teacher, what others find it hard to see at all. He acquired his art practically without instruction, and indeed against opposition, simply taking his pencil and brush into the field and drawing and painting what he saw there. The greatest painters are those who have pursued this method. As a writer and lecturer he showed the advantage of a good scholastic education; yet his themes were those he had chosen and worked out for himself. He was as well-informed on botany, entomology, ornithology, and allied studies as almost any professors of these sciences that could be named; yet it was in the woods and fields rather than in books that he acquired his knowledge.”

Gibson’s own words, in the preface to “Sharp Eyes,” confirm his friend’s reflection: “The facts in the following pages are almost entirely drawn from individual experience, largely gathered in boyhood, the apparently random selection being based upon a desire for the greatest variety possible within a limited range of the minor flora and fauna. The dates are apportioned from careful notes verified through a record of many years.”

It was this close and personal observation of nature which gave him his rare power in drawing and in composition. He never wished to make his pictures with the models, the objects he was drawing, before him. He studied them in sketches, and mastered every detail of their construction and appearance. This impression, clear-cut, exact, truthful, he carried in his memory. And when he wished to draw it, he worked from memory, refreshed, perhaps, by the memorandum of the sketch; but his picture would be suffused by the glow of his own imagination, idealized

by that imperceptible increment which is merely the self, the personal temperament of the artist, lighting up his subject. His memory furnished the anatomy of his subject, and his imagination infused it with life. It was the thing as it was, and something more. Because it was the thing as he saw it. His view of the function of the sketch, and, indeed, his theory of art, condensed into small compass, is well put by himself, in a paragraph from “The Squirrel’s Highway”:

“Humility is the only attitude that wins the heart of nature. It yields the glow that lights the vision of the ‘inward eye,’ beside which all other eyes are blind. Audacity and impressionism have their importance and place in art, but they are not its pinnacle; the one yields helpful courage for the encounter, the other is the useful short-hand system which often comes to the artist’s rescue, and without whose aid many of nature’s most rare and subtle expressions would elude him, and be lost. But its function is realized in the sketch or motive, which is rarely a picture, but more often a rough draft, a hieroglyph, a stenographic note, which like others of its class is fully intelligible alone to its author, and whose only rational excuse for being is in its latent possibilities of ultimate translation and perfection.”

That was the method of the artist; and it grew naturally and logically from the nature of the man. He agreed at bottom with the impressionists, because he painted and drew only what he saw. His point of difference with them was that he painted and drew far more than they would sanction, because he saw so much more. If the canon of the impressionists is admitted, they must be prepared frequently to see it apparently violated by some man who, while painting only what he actually sees, and getting “broad effects” and “values,” sees so much more than the average observer, and notes as “values” so many things which even the ordinary trained eye slips over as insignificant, that he seems to be “descending” to details. Gibson could never have painted to suit this class, because he saw and felt so much more than they did. Yet he was as true as the most orthodox of them to the very method he seemed to defy. He had been speaking (“Highways and Byways,” p. 68) of the seed-pods of the fireweed, and their hidden floss, “a warp of woven sunshine, with a woof of ether,” and reasons thus about it:

“It is always awe-inspiring and wonderful to me; it is beautiful beyond description; and when I see those snowy forms take wing and fly heavenward, it is more than beautiful, it is divine. And yet it would seem that there are those among her students who are above the influence of such a revelation as this in Nature. Disciples of a rampant superficial school of art, who in seeking to portray Nature ‘in her breadth’ would feel that they can put the straight jacket upon her and readily ignore so small and trivial a thing as this. The landscape to their half-blind and unsympathetic eyes resolves itself into a map, a relative opposition of so many ‘masses’ and ‘values’ of form and color. In the mastery of these lies their end and aim while Nature in her ‘detail’ is worthy only of the scientist and ‘has no place in art.’

. . . . . .

“That Nature’s landscape does, to those who seek therefor, resolve itself into so-called masses and values, is an important truth; but equally and more deeply true are the infinity and spirit of her breadth. The value of the broad gray mass of yonder sloping meadow will find its truest interpreter (assuming an equality of technical skill) in him who knows by heart its elements of life and color, who has seen its ‘violet by a mossy stone,’ who has plucked its grasses from their purple maze and knows the scent of those endless subtle variations of tender russets, greys, and greens, and cloudy films of smoky color that spread among its herbage. The true significance and ‘value’ of that massive bank of oaks will be most deeply felt and understood, and therefore most truly rendered, by him who has learned the beauty of its vernal buds of scarlet velvet, its swinging catkins, and the contour of its perfect leaf; who has stood beside its boughs, and seen the blue of sky and gray of passing cloud in turn reflected from the polished foliage.

“The impress of that knowledge and the sympathy and companionship it implies will send its impulse quivering to his brush-tip, in a spontaneous enthusiasm that shall subdue the pigment to a medium for thought, and shall hold it in its place as the means rather than the end. And while the misguided apostle of the new school who shows us ‘Nature in her breadth’ shall revel in his values of turpentine, and paint and brush-marks, the transcript of his more humble brother-worker, while not less broad, shall palpitate with life and feeling, and through some secret intangible testimony of its own, shall conjure up in the beholder the heart-memories of Nature, and shall breathe her spirit from the canvas.”

Perhaps it is worth while just here to rescue from oblivion the exceedingly funny account of some newspaper writer, whose story of Mr. Gibson’s methods is widely at variance with that we are telling, and what Gibson himself told, but which has a certain weird charm of its own. Commenting upon the “marvelous skill” ascribed to Gibson, he proceeds to say that nothing could be simpler than his method. “When Mr. Gibson sets out on a walk he always takes a camera with him, and when an especially interesting twig or fern attracts his attention, he promptly snaps at it. On his return home the plates are sent to the nearest photographer to be developed and from the negatives thus obtained, ‘bleach prints’ are made. Mr. Gibson then proceeds to draw very carefully on these prints, following of course the outline, shading, etc., of the photograph. After the drawings are finished, all traces of the photograph are quickly bleached out by immersing them in a simple solution of chemicals, leaving only the drawings on white paper.” After such a graphic and veracious account of the way in which the foremost American illustrator made his pictures, one is not surprised to have the writer add the brave statement that “it may be said without fear of contradiction that whatever excellence may exist in Mr. Gibson’s published work, is due to the careful work of the photographer and the engraver.” Such is the sort of stuff which some metropolitan newspapers serve up as “art criticism.” The writer might indeed declare that he spoke without fear of contradiction; for nobody would take the trouble to contradict an account so ridiculous. How refreshing, after such a tissue of absurdities, to read the letter of Henry Marsh, foremost among the wood-engravers of his day, the estimate, by a real artist, of another artist:

Thackeray somewhere says that there are no people who so love their work as the artists do, unless it be the actors, who when they are not playing themselves are always at the theater. Even the holiday of the artist is generally devoted to work in a different locality from the home studio; so that it amounts to nothing more than a change of scene without any abatement of business. Gibson himself was one of the worst offenders in this way. He never seemed to rest, while in health, save in and by a change in the place and character of his task. In the pages of “Pastoral Days,” in which he describes—in the chapter upon “Summer”—his visit to “Hometown and Snug-Hamlet,” he confesses his propensity for thus using his vacation.

“My wife and I have run away from the city for a month or so. A vacation we call it; but to an artist such a thing is rarely known in its ordinary sense, and often, indeed, it means an increase of labor, rather than a respite. My first week, however, I had consecrated to luxurious idleness. Together we wandered through the old familiar rambles, where as boy and girl in earlier days we had been so oft together.” But the sort of thing which he calls idling comes out a few pages later, when he sums up the doings of that seven days of luxury.

“For a week thus we idled, now on the mountain, now in the meadow, while I with my sketch-book and collecting-box either whiled away the hours with my pencil, or left the unfinished work to pursue the tantalizing butterfly or search for unsuspecting caterpillars among the weeds and bushes.” What a busy-body was this, who knew no distinction between work and play, and to whom the sketch-book and collecting-box were the playthings of the idle hour as well as the tools of the most laborious of professions! Well might the companion of that happy summer say in after years, “He seemed never to spend an idle hour.” Another member of his household circle bears similar testimony. “If he were sitting at the table, chatting and joking with us, as likely as not he would have his pencil in his hand, and before we knew it, would dash off on any scrap of paper, some sketch of a beetle, or a bird, or a butterfly, or perhaps a caricature of somebody in the group.” With this nature, steam was always up, and the fires hardly banked at all. No wonder that the machinery literally wore out prematurely.

There is one legacy of his busy life which seems to have a special interest to those who loved his work and care to know how he did it. For many years he carried in his mind a plan for a new work, which was characteristic of his genius, and would have added a new delight to those he had conferred. He meant some day to write and to illustrate a book which should describe the history of the endless movement of water, from cloud to mountain-top, from the heights to the valleys, from the valleys to the sea, and back to the clouds again. He had made many notes and references, and the scheme was well worked out in its general features. The memoranda which he left are sufficiently full to convey a clear idea of what he proposed; and as one reads them they seem to suggest all the graceful text and the graphic illustration with which his matured skill would have filled them out. While they raise the keenest disappointment in the thought that they never were completed and that American literature and nature-study have missed what they promised, yet they are so full of hints, so stimulating to the imagination, that they seem to belong to that public for which he wrought, and which prizes every thought of his fertile mind.

On the fly-leaf of the blank-book in which these notes are entered, with long blanks for the material yet to be written in, he has written the words “Memoranda; Cycle of the Raindrop.” On the next page follow a number of tentative titles:

“From the Fountain to the Deep Sea.

“The Cycle of the Raindrop.

“From the Rain Cloud to the Sea.

“A Mission of

“A Cycle of

“The Emblematic Cycle. Typical of human life. Soul from heaven. Earthly pilgrimage: dross and impurity and final resurrection in mist.”

“An Eternal Pilgrimage

“A —— Pilgrimage

“The Story without an End.

Then follows a suggestion for a table of contents. He heads it,

Division of Subject

“1. The Rain Cloud and the Fountain. ‘Story of a Fountain.’

“2. The Mountain Brook—(Trout Brook) (Trout Stream).

“3. The Mountain Lake. The Swamp.

“4. The Pastoral Brook. The Pond?

“5. The River.

“6. The Delta and the Deep Sea.”

This is the first and broadest sketch. Upon this ground plan he proceeds to lay out the themes he would treat, evidently having in mind both text and illustrations. Sometimes the note means one, sometimes the other. And the closeness with which the two are associated in his mind is a fine revelation of the manner in which his thought embraced both forms of production in a profound psychological unity.

1. The Rain Cloud and Spring

The birth of the spring; from perpetual snow on mountain peaks; dew; mist and cloud; storm cloud.

Rain Cloud dragging its veil on mountain-top. (See quotation from Ruskin in note-book). Poetic simile of mountain “Light of Asia” (227). Storm on mountain.

Hovering Mist and Cloud. Lifting and creeping in fantastic forms, above the lake. Wild Mountain Pass. Hermit’s Ravine. See reference. Ruskin in literary memorandum. Shelley’s “Cloud.”

Mountain Veterans. Gnarled spruces.

Mountain Flowers. The heath family, clothing the rugged mountains.

Mountain Fruits. “Propitiating the Mountain-gods

The Roxbury Road