THERE is a curious notice of Gibson’s work, written for a leading New York publication in 1882, which is calculated to fill the minds of his friends with wonder, not unmingled with amusement. The writer attempts a portrait of Gibson’s soul, and does it, as the Irishman made his chopping-block, “out of his own head.” “In some way,” he (or she) says, “Mr. Gibson has never classed himself in our mind with the profession of illustrators, but has seemed rather to stand apart, to work in his own ways, to avoid association, to prefer lonely walks, to follow his own bent, no matter where it leads, and irrespective of any who come after him. These impressions have given a certain solitariness to his figure, so that we fancy him wandering alone up and down the earth, a man of silence, a man of keen and penetrating eye, of ear attent, of swiftly susceptible feelings, who searches out nature in her recesses, and coyest moods, is on the friendliest terms with her, to whose delicate touch she lends herself with an indulgence which coarser lovers are denied”! That extraordinary sketch of the personality of the man is a most felicitous antithesis of the real Gibson. It happily describes what he was not. It is a capital portrait of somebody else. Just where the writer got his materials for such a description, it would be hard to tell. Certainly not from personal contact with the subject. It sounds like a far-off account of Thoreau; as if he had been taken as the likeliest type of a thoroughgoing nature lover, and the lines drawn after the similitude of his strange nature. But it would be hard to find two men in more total contrast than Thoreau and Gibson. The former may have loved “to stand apart, to work in his own ways, to avoid association, to prefer lonely walks.” But the latter loved to touch elbows with his fellow-men; to cultivate friendships and share the joys of society; to walk with a company of congenial spirits, from whom he was always learning something, unless they were those to whom he could always teach something. He was not the least bit of a recluse. A hermitage would have had no charms for him. For he was, in the highest sense, “a man of the world,” who loved his kind, and loved to live with them. There was no “solitariness” about him. He was eminently social. So far was he from “wandering alone up and down the world,” that he always drew a crowd about him, wherever he went. He was no McGregor, to usurp the head of the table; but wherever Gibson was, there was the center of the circle. And, far from being “a man of silence,” he was the freest and easiest of talkers, accessible, communicative, as genial as sunshine, as fluent as a brook.

The nature which was in him began to express itself from the earliest years. In his school-days he was anything but the shy, retiring child which would be the father of such a man as our critic described; and his love and yearning for companionship and the expression of affection come out in almost every one of his juvenile letters. It is so seldom that a boy’s letters really express the boy’s life that one does not feel that they have any permanent interest. But the boy Gibson wrote letters which deserve to be preserved. They are as quaint as if they were fictitious. They could not have been truer to life if they had been made out of whole cloth. It would be hard to match the following, written when he was twelve years old, from the “Gunnery”; its quaint and naÏve boyishness is delicious:

“Washington, March 1, 1863.

“Dear Mother:

“I received your letter for the first in three weeks and was as happy as a king and I am now. you may expect a letter from me every week.

“Only till the latter part of this month before the Exhibition, and then comes vacation which I long for very much. Every Friday the boys act a drama; the last one was ‘Love in ’76,’ and it was perfectly splendid and the one before that was ‘Romance under Difficulties,’ and that was better than the last. I wish you could send me up some small dramas because I would like to read them.

“The principal thing among the boys is catching mice with little box traps, (like the one that Grandpa made two or three summers ago) which we make ourselves. One of the boys took some hoopskirt and made a cage to keep his mice in and I made two and have got four traps. The boy that made the first trap made the first cage and he is a very ingenious boy his name is Charley Howard he is a nice boy and is liked throughout this whole great institution as well as the other boys too.

“It is a very unpleasant day first in the morning it snowed and next it rained and now it is snowing again and looks as if it would snow a long while it is dark dismal and foggy.

“I am very sorry that Cotty has so many boils, because I can imagine how they feel but you must tell him he must try to be as patient as Job if he can. The other evening I touched the tip end of my nose to the stove pipe the stove pipe being hot burnt the tip of my nose off so now everywhere I go I am laughed at. It don’t hurt me any to be laughed at if they leave my nose alone that is all I ask.

“The other day I was sliding out in the grove on the ice and I slipped and fell and struck on my sore knee and now it cracks just like it did first, only it don’t hurt me so much, but I guess I will get over it before long. I am known in this school by the name of Fatty and Pussy and am so used to it that I take it as my own name.

“Please ask Julie and Henry if they think that they are big enough to read letters, and if they say yes tell them I will write to them you tell me in your next letter. In your answer let Hubie write as he did in one of your letters.

“And now as I have written you a long letter I will stop. Sending love to you all and give them all a kiss for me.

Sometime during this same year he wrote in quite a different vein to his mother. He shows a spirit “strenuous” enough to suit the most aggressive, and as tender as strenuous. There are two or three points of school ethics which appear with much force in his account of the trouble:

Other letters written in these delightful school-days show him at the time when the boy-mind begins to realize the importance of dress and of personal adornment. The episode of the diamond pin is told with characteristic frankness and vivacity. But another paragraph from the letter shows a most commendable fondness for his old hat—a marked evidence of the genuine sentiment of the boy’s nature. The description of the football field and its unfailing perils carries a contemporaneous interest; and a boy’s account of his studies is always fascinating reading. The brief story of the prayer-meeting in “Willie Beecher’s” room and his confidence in the leader who “can explain about any passage in the Bible” must close these glimpses into the real heart of an unspoiled and ingenuous boy. They are a key to his nature,—its frankness, heartiness, enjoyment of simple things, a self-confidence that was destined to help him touch the goal of a great success, singularly combined with a humility which kept him always open to reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness. They show his warm and affectionate nature, which never changed but to deepen and sweeten as he matured. They reveal his earnestness and sincerity; traits which underlie all his qualities like the bedrock of the continent, and on which his fun and frolic grew as naturally as grass and foliage out of the soil which masks and clothes the granite:

“Washington, Conn.,
“Jan. 22, 1865.

“My dear Mother:

“Are you getting better, I hope so. I am very anxious about you, & you must not think that I forget you, because I think of you all the time, and pray for you every night.

“Willie Beecher has a prayer-meeting in his room every saturday night, & a great many boys attend. I am one of them, and I am liked more this term than any yet. Willie is superintendent and he can explain, about any passage in the bible, to us, so that we can perfectly understand it.”

But the poor boy did not always keep his lofty and self-approving mood. Near the close of the same year he had occasion to realize how hard it is to tread the right line of virtue. His wrath at one of the boys and his doings got the better of his good feeling, and he vented himself in some strong language written to one of the boys at home. This, being brought to his mother’s attention, drew down a sharp reprimand, which was quite effectual,—almost too effectual one feels, on reading dear Mrs. Gunn’s calm and wise view of it. But the quick, passionate grief of the repentant boy shows his warm and wholesome heart:

“He that calleth his brother a fool is in danger of hell fire. I will remember this.”

When this letter went to his mother Mrs. Gunn sent the following with it.

In a letter written a week later he comes back to the subject in the same tone of grief and honest penitence; and he gives another glimpse at his real nature. For when a boy tells you what he thinks about after he has gone to bed at night, he has taken you very much into his confidence.

“Washington, Conn., Dec. 15, 1863.

“Dear Mother:

“You can’t realize how sorry I feel for that great misconduct that happened about a week ago and I want to be forgiven. Will you forgive me this time.

“Christmas is now near at hand and I have concluded to stay here and I suppose you had rather have me to. Mrs. Gunn has just got through reading ‘Eric or little by little’ and the boys were delighted with it only they didn’t like to have the ‘hero’ of the story die. They expected to have it turn out that he would be a great man: But it didn’t. You know that he died on hearing that his Mother was very sick and might die. It ended up very sad and scarcely a boy ceased to cry. It is a beautiful book and impressed several things on the hearts of some of our boys and I realy believe it has done them some good and if it hasn’t done them any I think it has me. Often in bed I think of ‘Eric’ and hope that I will never do some of the bad things he did; but, on the other hand if I turn out to be as good a boy as he turned out to be I will be satisfied and I guess you will to.”

Out of such a frank, hearty, kindly boyhood, there matured its natural and necessary fruit. The boy was father to the man. The mature Gibson was no disappointment to the hopes of those who had known him in youth. He had all the charm of a perfectly natural and wholesome nature, developing along lines which strengthened constantly all that was noblest and most admirable in it. He was able to express himself fully in his work; and his self-expression constantly broadened and deepened his best qualities.

His exuberant nature continually overflowed in fun. His seriousness was tempered by an unfailing sense of humor, and his tremendous energy was stopped short of oppressiveness by his capacity for play. He had the secret of perpetual youth. He always kept the heart of boyhood. His letters bubbled with mirth. His talk was bright with it. All his friends have memories of this side of his life which form one of the most delightful legacies from that past. But there is no preserving the effervescence of such a nature. It is never the same on the memorial page. His own spirit was so much a part of it all that without his personality behind the joke it would lose half its point. But whether he made sport for a company, as in his droll stories at the club, or raised the laugh in the flow of personal talk, his touch was sure, his humor was contagious.

Probably no trait in him thus throve and grew as did his enthusiasm, his zest in living, his love of what he did, and what he saw, and what he contributed to other lives. To all who knew him he was a fellow of infinite zest. He enjoyed life. He enjoyed all lives, both great and small, human and sub-human. A friend used to say of him that Gibson was a man who thoroughly enjoyed himself. No doubt he did. For that is only another way of saying that he rejoiced in the things God had given him, the powers which were at once endowment and working capital in his life. No man ever took more keen delight in what is commonly counted the drudgery of toil. He really did not seem to be conscious of the hardship of hard work or the irksomeness of the set task. He so thoroughly loved the thing which he did, that all labor was a labor of love. That took away the sense of bondage to his business, and was one of the secrets of his immense endurance, his elasticity under heavy loads, his exuberance of spirits in situations when most men would have sunk overwhelmed.

He had the trait which marks all such natures, a whole-heartedness in all that he undertook, which made him a difficult man to overcome, to put down, or to defeat. That was obvious in all his hard apprenticeship; in his determined struggle for success; in his loyalty to his own ideals. It came out in some other incidents of his life. His vigorous fight against the spirit of vandalism which threatened the natural beauties of Prospect Park, at the hands of a dense and narrow officialism, was a case in point. In the spring of 1887, Mr. Gibson, in the course of a stroll through the Park, was filled with the consternation and wrath which are inevitable in a real nature-lover when he finds that ignorant and unsympathetic hands—and heads—have been busy destroying the natural beauties which years of artificial culture cannot make good. As he wrote in a communication to one of the most reputable journals of the day: “One of the wildest and most beautiful sections of the Park had been invaded by the butcherly Goths and Vandals known as our Park Commissioners. Chaos reigned on every side—beautiful fresh trees by the score, lying in piles of logs among seas of chips, bonfires of brushwood on every hand, and the beauty of the place otherwise hacked and slashed on all sides.” Gibson at once sounded an emphatic and indignant warning through the columns of the Brooklyn “Eagle.” The Park Commissioners replied through an agent in contemptuous fashion, and declared that all they had been doing was to cut down “a lot of ailanthus trees.” They did not know the caliber of their critic. In a second letter Gibson reiterated his charges and showed as the result of actual count and careful identification, that over two hundred trees had been felled in one small acre, and that these included large and beautiful specimens of white birch, black birch, willow, elm, poplar, sweet-gum, flowering dogwood, hornbeam, European alder, nettle-tree, young maple, and numerous other varieties of the minor sylvae, comprising one of the most beautiful pieces of underwood to be found in any park. The Park Commissioners met this new charge with a square denial. Gibson produced new and indisputable evidence to confute them; induced a committee of gentlemen of the highest standing and intelligence to investigate the premises and the evidences of his accuracy,—including Dr. Charles H. Hall, Dr. Charles C. Hall, Dr. Truman J. Backus, and Dr. Almon Gunnison,—who over their own names verified all his statements. Then the Commissioners were forced to admit his charges (and thus, indirectly, their own untruthfulness), but claimed that what they had done was in the nature of the “improvement” of the Park. Then Gibson challenged the discomfited Commissioners to refer their claim of “improvement” to Samuel Parsons, the Superintendent of Central Park, requesting his expert decision whether this cutting was or was not a justifiable artistic or skilful piece of landscape gardening. The challenge was not accepted. There was no need that it should be. Gibson had roused a vigorous public sentiment which forced the Commissioners to call a halt in their reckless and stupid work; and his absolute honesty, accuracy, and readiness as an advocate had put his adversaries to shame and confusion. The incident is well worth recalling as an evidence of what one honest and vigorous citizen can do in the correction of a public evil. It is even more interesting as an illustration of the thoroughness and grasp of his mind on all subjects of which he claimed any right to speak.

His encounters with his critics were often as amusing as they were interesting, on account of the completeness with which he would effect their refutation and overthrow. His very neat rejoinder to that redoubtable critic, Charles A. Dana, was a piquant instance of the care with which he took a position, as well as of the skill with which he defended it. Mr. Dana had taken Gibson to task in the columns of the “Sun,” for using the form “witch-hazel” instead of “wych-hazel,” which he held to be the correct and original form,—“wych” being an old Saxon word which means “hanging,” and has been applied to foliage with pendent stems. Gibson responded in a very brief letter showing that while both forms of the word had sanction, yet that the oldest and the latest botanists used the form which he had adopted, as well as the most reputable dictionaries of that date. His summing-up, in a letter to the “New York Tribune,” is too well-turned to be translated or abridged.

“Who then are my authorities? The botanical scholars; Thoreau, Tennyson; The Imperial Dictionary, Stormonth’s, Webster’s, and Worcester’s Dictionaries; and I might add, last but by no means least, ‘The American Cyclopedia,’ an able authority which presents conspicuously the questioned form ‘witch-hazel,’ and upon whose title-page, by the way, the name of Charles A. Dana appears significantly as editor.”

Well might an intimate friend write to him, after such an effective “counter”: “Against a literary shot like that, which hits the bull’s eye squarely in the center, no ‘literary sins’ of a minor order can count for much even when they are proved; and no one who has the power to make the shot need be over-modest about his literary ability—he has the essential thing.”

Quite as dramatic in its completeness was the refutation to which he subjected a critic of his illustrations, who had accused him of owing much that there was of merit in his pictures to the skill of his engravers. Gibson’s own letter tells the whole story and exposes his critic in the fewest possible words.

This is the incident referred to in one of Mr. Roe’s letters to Gibson which appears in his memoir (p. 189).

Mr. Roe wrote under date of Dec. 29, 1884: “You did indeed win a victory over the ‘incrementitious’ critic. I should think he would wish to crawl into a small hole, and pull the hole in after him. I enjoyed your triumph as much as if it had been my own. It was the neatest thrust under the fifth rib I ever saw, and I fear I shall never have enough of Christian meekness not to enjoy seeing a fellow receive his congÉ when so well deserved. Dr. Abbott and I took part in the ‘wake’ up here.”

Another instance of his trapping the friendly critic is preserved in his correspondence. Colonel Gibson had objected to the “Old Barnyard” as pictured in “Pastoral Days.” “The sloppy slush through which the man is splashing” he wrote, “is almost too faithful. But, my dear fellow,—an apple-tree in a cow-yard!—and loose fence-posts leaning on it!... And do you ever see trees or shrubs on the pond side of a mill?” (referring to the skating scene in the same paper). To which Gibson the artist made answer as follows:

“I have had considerable amusement over my large and most important work at the last display, viz.: ‘Autumn at Knoll Farm,’ bought first day by Henry Ward Beecher, who says that ‘the Colmans, the Giffords, or the Smiths can’t beat it.’ He tells all his friends so, and in his appreciation of it only sounds the universal praise which it met with; but, mark you! Our most high-toned and modern art publication, ‘The Art Review,’ which employs the finest staff of contributors the country affords, contained in its last issue a criticism that ‘did me proud’ and at the same time gave me a jolly laugh at the way I had ‘fooled’ one of our most noted art critics. He went on at the beginning of his ‘critique’ to condemn lightly the body-color school, claimed that it took away from the atmosphere, ‘made mud,’ was always likely to hurt rather than improve a painting. He hedged himself however in the statement that ‘a skilful hand could obtain a finer effect with ‘body color’ than an unskilled hand with wash.’ But he did not see the necessity of using it at all.’ ‘Not even for the most bold subjects is it necessary.’ ... ‘Take for instance Swain Gifford’s (I forget title, but it was a very strong bit of color), rich and full of strength, or even W. H. Gibson’s very strong “Autumn,” all rocks and tree trunks and weeds and admirable sky, all done with pure blots.’ Mark you! Those rocks and tree trunks and weeds were all put in thick with body color, painted over. The result was a rich full texture, that could not have been got in wash without at least much more labor and I doubt even then. Others are deceived in the same way, and I repeat that the result sanctifies the means, and I will guarantee to deceive any critic in the country on the question of body color. I sold

Late October

From a Painting