A QUICK SUCCESS
From this time forward, Gibson’s success as an artist was assured. And
not very long after, he was induced to try his hand at authorship, with
results quite as convincing. During the summer of 1878 he spent his
vacation, in company with his wife, in the old homes at Newtown and at
Washington, Connecticut. Returning to the city in the autumn, and
recounting his delightful experiences to Mr. Alden, the editor of
“Harper’s Magazine,” the latter insisted that Gibson should put them
into an article which he should also illustrate. But even with the
practice which he had given himself, in the brief articles he had
furnished with many of his drawings, he distrusted his own capacity for
literary work. He had no such innate sense of power to write as made him
so confident with his pencil. He demurred at the proposition; but Mr.
Alden was firm and persistent. “Write it just as you have told it to
me,” was his encouraging word. His suggestion was followed, and in the
August number of the monthly appeared an affectionate sketch of the old
boyhood homes, under the title, which was but a thin disguise,
“Hometown and Snug Hamlet.” It proved an instant success. The note
struck was genuine and pleasing. The illustrations won the public eye.
The canny editor suggested a similar article which should cover the
winter phases of country life in the same vein. It was prepared, and
appeared in the number for March, 1880; and had a reception as
enthusiastic as his former venture. The idea of completing the cycle of
the seasons was inevitable, and in June there followed the article on
“Spring-Time,” which was pronounced “the most attractive paper” of this
number of the magazine, whose “rhythmic prose” was not less highly
commended than its illustrations, which another critic called “almost as
good as spring itself.” In November the series was rounded out with “An
Autumn Pastoral,” which led a reviewer to say “Mr. Gibson is a great
artist, and has a great future before him.”
In 1879 he furnished illustrations for E. P. Roe’s “Success with Small
Fruits,” which appeared serially in “Scribner’s Magazine,” and which
opened the way to an intimate friendship with the author. He made the
designs for the poems of the Goodale sisters, “In Berkshire with the
Wild-flowers.” But these were mere incidents in the work he was turning
off, for half the firms in New York City, and on all sorts of subjects
having to do with nature, with animal life, with flowers, and with
fruits. In the spring he made a visit to “Roeland” to sketch, and he
divided his August vacation between Connecticut and the White
Mountains, where he gathered material for a year’s hard work. He busied
himself, too, with work in water color, steadily keeping his ideals in
mind, and his own art-training in hand.
In the fall of 1880, the four papers which had appeared in “Harper’s
Magazine” were collected and published in a sumptuous volume, entitled
“Pastoral Days.” It was a book which yesterday would have been called
“epoch-making”; to-day it would only be called “record-breaking.” The
simple truth about it is that it really touched the high-water mark in
the history of nature-illustration by means of wood-engraving. It was
everywhere hailed as exhibiting the very best work of its kind ever
achieved. The praise which fell to Gibson himself was twofold; for it
was an enthusiastic recognition of his talent both as author and as
artist. His engravers were applauded for the skill and spirit with which
they interpreted his designs. His publishers were commended for the
unstinted generosity which had balked at no pains or cost. Even the
printer received a curtain-call. For the “Evening Post” with great
discrimination insisted that much of the success of the work was due to
“another artist, whose name is nowhere given. That artist’s name is
David Lewis and he passes his days in the press-room of Harper Brothers,
amid the clatter of the printing-machines, engaged in the grimy work of
his office.” The “Evening Mail” expressed the unanimous verdict of art
circles when it declared: “Writers on art spoke of the days of Bewick
with a sort of despair, as though no one like him might ever be expected
again. It has been reserved for the United States to show that wood has,
for the purposes of engraving, capacities of which Bewick never dreamed,
and to produce a school of artists who in treating landscape, at least
upon wood, have surpassed everything on the other side of the ocean. In
the first rank of these artists stands Mr. William Hamilton Gibson.” The
London “Times” in a long notice spoke of his having “the rare gift of
feeling for the exquisitely graceful forms of plant life and the fine
touch of an expert draughtsman which enable him to select and to draw
with a refinement which few artists in this direction have ever shown.”
Even the “Saturday Review” in a notice a column and a half in length,
confessing its ignorance of Mr. Gibson and his work, declared that his
drawings were so full of delicate fancy and feeling, and his writing so
skilful and graceful, that it hoped “to hear more of him soon, in either
function or both.” In hardly more than two years from the time of his
first illustrations Gibson had made his way to the very front rank of
the world’s illustrators. His position was truly of his own achieving;
and he never fell back from the eminence he had so fairly won. His
friend Mr. Charles N. Hurd of the Boston “Transcript” does the
situation no more than simple justice in a letter written upon reading
the “Saturday Review” article:
“TRANSCRIPT OFFICE,
“324 WASHINGTON STREET, COR. MILK STREET,
“BOSTON, _May 18, 1881_.
“MY DEAR GIBSON:
“I congratulate you from the very bottom of my heart on the
magnificent article on ‘Pastoral Days’ in the Saturday Review,
which, you will see by the papers I send, I have copied into the
Transcript. Nothing could have been more gracefully done, and then,
in the Saturday Review, one of the very hardest to please of all
the British journals! Why, my dear fellow, they never said half so
much before of any literary American, living or dead. And there
isn’t an ‘if’ in the whole article! I feel as rejoiced about it as
if I had some personal share in the glory. If you haven’t a right
now to carry your chin high on Broadway then nobody in New York
has. I tell you, it’s a great thing to be appreciated; to get
praise where you feel that it rests wholly and altogether upon the
merits of your work, and has in it no spark of flattery. I can
imagine how long the way home seemed that night, and how happy you
two were in reading over what the two-thousand-mile-away critic had
written. It is worth a good many years’ hard pulling to have one
such day.”
One great and decisive reason why he moved on so steadily was his
constant ambition to improve upon what he had done. One might easily be
misled by the tone of his confidential letters to his mother and others
into thinking him overconfident in himself, and a little puffed up by
his quick and overwhelming success. But the thought would be absolutely
unfair. He was not vain; he was never self-satisfied; he never rested in
what he had achieved. After the rousing reception of “Pastoral Days,” he
could write to Colonel Gibson in quiet Fryeburg: “I have just finished
the last of my White Mountain illustrations--four months’ work--and am
beginning a new series of original articles which shall ‘knock spots’
out of all past work. You ask in a previous letter, ‘Can you beat
“Pastoral Days”’? Good gracious! The book is so full of shortcomings to
me that I wonder at the astonishing appreciation of it. There are a few
illustrations in it that I hardly expect to improve very much upon; but
as to the average excellence I can ‘see it’ and ‘go a hundred better.’
Perhaps the result will not be as popular. Can’t tell. But I can do
better work.” That was the key-note of his life. To do something better
next time was the rule of his endeavor. To do something different each
time, to turn some new page, follow some new trail, record some new
traits of his favorite world, was another characteristic of his
purposes. And it kept him from becoming repetitious and tiresome, as he
repeatedly piqued curiosity with his novel enterprises in nature-study.
In the late summer of 1880 he spent six weeks in sketching among the
White Mountains, whence he went to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for
another six weeks of rest. He came home laden with sketches and with
photographs, which were at once utilized in making the illustrations for
Drake’s “Heart of the White Mountains.” He worked at these with
diligence, as we have seen, never a day, apparently, passing without its
picture; but it was far into the following spring before the series was
finished. The volume was issued in 1881, but before its appearance he
was well along with the text and the illustrations for the new articles
in the magazine, in the same vein as “Pastoral Days.” In expanded form
they were published in the fall of 1882 under the title “Highways and
Byways.” It would have seemed improbable that the reception given to his
first volume could be repeated. Novelty does so much with Americans to
arouse enthusiasm, and they are so quick to compare the later with the
former effort, that it might have been predicted that a second volume
striking the same note as Gibson’s first success would not be so warmly
praised. But the public liked the note, and it pronounced the new book
better than the old. The press notices of ’82 and ’83 are in the same
strain of unaffected admiration and delight as those of two years
before. Perhaps he had most reason to be proud of the approval the new
book won from the staid London “Academy” and from Mr. Philip Gilbert
Hamerton’s “Portfolio.” The former, though a little late in discovering
him was ingenious in its sweeping approval. “Fancy to yourself” said the
“Academy,” “a Thoreau who has read both Darwin and Ruskin, and who has
learned to use the pencil of Birket Foster. To this add the finest
workmanship of the American school of wood-engraving, and all the luxury
of the richest paper and the clearest type, and you may form some idea
of the handsome book now before us. At first it attracted only by the
rare delicacy of its drawings, which reproduce with unrivaled truth the
exquisite tracery of vegetation, and the ‘ebon and ivory’ of Nature’s
shadows. But when we discovered that the artist is also the author, we
began to read; and we found ourselves unable to stop till we got to the
end.” “We feel that we have here far more than in most American books, a
genuine product of the soil.” Mr. Hamerton credits the new book with “a
love of nature that is Wordsworthian in its reverence, the close and
patient observation of an artist, the peculiar humor of a genial
American in the study of men and things.” To such expressions as these,
Mr. George William Curtis, voicing the sentiment of his own countrymen,
said of him: “Mr. William Hamilton Gibson’s reputation as one of the
first of modern artists for wood-engraving, is established and secure.”
“It is hard to believe that the blended softness, vigor, and
individuality of the art could go further than in the illustrations of
this choice volume.”
He had found time during the year for no little study and work in
water-color, and even began to essay painting in oils. Despite a long
illness of eight months he contributed to several exhibitions and
finished a number of new pictures. His goal was always to be a painter.
In all the heat of his endeavor and the intoxication of his success he
never forgot his ideals, never slackened his march toward the highest
art in the most approved forms and mediums.
In May, 1883, his first child was born, and he was soon writing to “Dear
Mother Gunn,” in answer to her importunate inquiries, all about the
new-comer. “Hamilton Gibson then is his name I understand, though not a
gift from me, but simply because I have not the heart to refuse anything
to my precious wife just now. So she has christened him as above in
spite of much foreboding on my part, as to the probable curtailment of
his cognomen among the contemporaneous specimens of his genus in the
days which will soon be upon us. I have waited so long for this little
angel to come, that I hardly dare realize to the full the happiness
which has befallen me lest I awake in bitterness to find it all a
tantalizing dream.... But ere long I suppose the reality will be brought
home to me more effectually,--a few hours’ perambulating in the ‘wee
sma’ hours’ every night for a week or two would dispel all doubts or
fears, and place the experience on the basis of solid prosaic reality.
At present writing, however, I can truthfully say, as every antecedent
pa has done, that he is the best baby alive, quiet, absorbent, and
somnolent to a degree of perfection which leaves nothing to be desired.
Only last night, after taking his meal, (at least that is what I
understand they feed him on) he was placed upon his pillow at ten
o’clock and slept like a chrysalis till half-past five this morning.
During the day to be sure he is not quiescent for quite so long a
period, as then nature seems to ‘abhor the vacuum’ more than ever.”
The year 1883 was devoted to the illustration of E. P. Roe’s “Nature’s
Serial Story,” a work into which he entered with heartiness and
sympathy. Much time, too, was given to the preparation of the “Memorial”
of Mr. Gunn, a volume issued under the direction of an association of
his old pupils, commemorative of his striking personality and of the old
days in the school at Washington. This book was finely illustrated by
the hand of his loving pupil, who also wrote the introduction which was
to have been written by Mr. Beecher, whose death occurred while the
[Illustration: _God’s Miracle_
_By permission of the Curtis Publishing Company_]
work was in progress. The summer vacation was spent, as usual, in hard
work, the scene of his labors being in the White Mountains, at Lake
George, ending with two weeks in Washington, where he took many
photographs and made many sketches for the “Memorial.” There was much
painting in water-color for exhibitions here and there, with many sales
at good prices. From time to time in 1885 and 1886 he furnished more of
the charming articles which the public had learned to look for and to
love. “Harper’s Magazine” for October, 1886, contained a surprise and a
new delight to his readers in the shape of the famous “Back-Yard
Studies,” in which he challenged the belief of the average man, and even
astonished himself with the story of the variety of wild-flowers which
he found growing in his city yard. A friend had expressed a longing to
study wild flowers, but felt that there was no hope of gratifying
herself as long as she lived in the city. Gibson advised her to utilize
her back-yard, and ventured the guess that he could gather twenty-five
different species of plants in his grass-patch, as the harvest of the
seed sown by the breezes, the insects, and occasional birds. The next
morning he made a count, and was himself surprised to see his “finds”
running up to a total of sixty-four different species. The description
of his wild garden in these sordid and unromantic surroundings made him
new friends and strengthened his old ones in the assurance that he
would never fail them in nature-wisdom or originality of vein. For he
showed, as he himself maintained, how the back-yard “may become a means
of grace, and with its welcome, peaceful symbols of the woodside and the
hay-field, the wood-path, pasture, and the farmyard, serve to reawaken
and console the latent yearnings of our unfortunate metropolitan exile.”
In the fall of 1886 the new volume appeared, to greet a larger public
than ever, enthusiastic in its praise and appreciation. One of his
reviewers linked his name most happily with some of the favorites of an
earlier day. “At the Christmas season of the last generation there was a
general anticipation of a new holiday book from Dickens and Thackeray,
and the expectation was rewarded year after year. We are coming to
cherish the same hope of a Christmas book from William Hamilton Gibson.”
With equal fitness this writer assigned him that place which the popular
consensus had now begun to allot him, saying, “Mr. Gibson must take his
place, as an acute and delightful observer of nature, with Gilbert
White, and Henry Thoreau, and John Burroughs.” His niche was secure, his
right to it now unquestioned; and all qualified judges saw that he had
in himself a quality quite his own, a temperament, a gift, a
qualification to sound his own note and deliver a fresh message.
The next months ensuing Gibson spent in working up material for the
illustration of a series of papers prepared by Mr. Charles Dudley
Warner and Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, descriptive of life and nature in
the South. In March, 1886, he had left New York to join Mr. Warner in
New Orleans. They made a tour, two months in length, covering Georgia,
Alabama, and Louisiana, in which he took over five hundred photographs
and accumulated much material in notes and sketches. A bright and
picturesque letter to his wife gives a fine reminiscence of this
delightful trip.
“NEW IBERIA, LA.
“_May 12/86_.
“MY DEAR WIFE:--
“I have just returned from a trip in the outlying country to find
your two letters awaiting me. Since leaving New Orleans I have been
gadding about the country north, east, south and west, and am not
yet done. The Téche country is mightily interesting if one can only
live through it. The days come and go and are filled with
enjoyment, but as to the night no man knoweth what may be in store
for him. My hotel experiences would interest you, but I cannot
write them. I left New Orleans with a Mr. William King as a
companion, a young man who knows the country thoroughly and whose
company Mr. Warner recommended I should request, as Warner was
obliged to leave for the north. By the time we reach New Orleans
again about five days hence, we shall have traveled together over
one thousand miles of the Téche and other Louisiana territory. The
weather has been charming, no hot weather which has not been
deliciously tempered by the never failing breeze from the gulf.
Cool breezy nights.
“We have driven for a whole day over a prairie peopled with all
sorts of wild things in the way of birds. Meadow larks, plover,
snipe, white and blue herons, buzzards, egrets, many birds so tame
that they could easily be killed by a cut of my whip. We drove
through acres and acres of blue flag in blossom, and for miles
pursued the shaded roads through dense woods draped in the
ever-present festoons of moss--in this country seen in its fullest
perfection, every tree being laden with it, hanging like heavy
trailing curtains, sometimes twenty feet in length. The effect in a
breeze is indescribably beautiful. The Téche Country is the
paradise of Louisiana, and comes as a welcome contrast to the filth
and squalor of the city of New Orleans with which I was so
nauseated. To-night we leave for the Averys’. We shall arrive there
to-night and I anticipate a fine time visiting Jefferson’s Island
and making trips up the various bayous. We shall try to get away
from there Friday evening in time to get the steamer ‘Iberia’ here
by which we shall return, through a sail of about 300 miles by
lake, bayou, and Mississippi River to New Orleans. Thereat I shall
spend about three days and then start for the homeward trip,
stopping over at Mobile for a day or so. I will be home about June
1 as I originally approximated.
“Of course you know that I am anxious to be at home again. The only
way that I can keep my spirits is to throw my mind into the work
and interest myself with my surroundings. In the main my health has
been good, in fact, excellent, in spite of starvation cookery and
God-forsaken hostelries which anywhere else under heaven would be
considered good material for bonfires and their proprietors hung.
“A beautiful country and full of interest, if, forsooth, one might
exist without a stomach. Everything is Creole--Creole cows, Creole
milk, Creole eggs--even the ‘niggers’ are Creoles, and all speak
French. My limited vocabulary of pure Parisian French has stood a
heavy drain and has occasionally precipitated upon my hearers
consequences which I feared would prove serious;--item--Night
before last we stopped in a hamlet of shanties and at last found
the ‘Hotel,’ kept by a talkative, voluble French idiot and his
wife. The only guest bed in the shebang I occupied, and Mr. King
slept on a mattress on the floor in another room. I was tired and
suffering from an attack of nervous dyspepsia, from the greasy grub
which I had been forced to eat in the face of starvation
(everything here even a boiled egg is taught to swim in hot fat,
and is only rescued therefrom by the famished boarder, who
sometimes is obliged to bolt it after scraping off the congealed
lard). It was with difficulty that I could get to sleep on the
night in question, owing to my indisposition, together with a
certain nervous apprehension as to the census of my immediate
surroundings. I had barely dropped off into a snooze when I was
startled by the movement of the window shutter near my bed, when
looking, I observed a mule who was making a meal of a table-cloth
near my bed. Once more after lying awake an hour I had begun to
congratulate myself on prospects of slumber, when a shrill piercing
note of a mocking-bird struck up its piccolo in the dead of night,
another and another joined in the chorus, and kept this up for an
hour before it dawned upon me that the birds were in cages on the
farther side of the very partition of my room. On which discovery
you may perhaps imagine how the limited French vocabulary at my
command was exhausted and reinforced, but to no purpose. I raved
and swore in Dutch, French, and Pidgeon English and was at length
compelled to yell my colored servant (driver, servant, and
interpreter) from his slumbers and make him translate a short
address to the French idiot (who snorted in blissful sleep in
concert with his spouse in another quarter of the shanty) to the
effect that the offending birds be immediately chucked out of
doors, beheaded, or strangled. The shrieking trio was finally
removed to the rear but my sleep was ruined for that night. Only
toward morning after dawn had just begun to lighten the east did I
begin to feel drowsy, but at this point the ‘moqueurs’ were again
restored to their original places and I was compelled to have them
again removed, and by this time Monsieur and Madame were up and
about preparing our morning ‘grease’ which they seemed to be doing
by sheer force of lungs and belaboring of pans and kettles.
“At breakfast I drank the proprietor’s health.
“‘Monsieur, votre santé! Votre hospitalité est magnifique! Votre
table est bien gré! Votre moqueur--! _Ah! Votre moqueur!_ (a pause
with dramatic enthusiasm, then continuing) vous procurez deux,
trois, quatre plus moqueurs! et votre hôtel est perfection!’
“This eloquent outburst greatly amused the Madame, but the old man
seemed ‘busting’ with suppressed emotion, which probably, had he
then been in pocket for his bill, would have shown some outward
token.
“We left this place for the day and after settling the bill, we
told them that we would leave our satchels until we returned in the
evening, whereupon ‘la madame’ through my interpreter, asked me if
she should prepare a meal for us for evening. I asked her in reply
if she would cook anything I wished, to order. She replied ‘Oui!
anything I can get.’ Whereupon I ordered ‘_three moqueurs on
toast_!’ much to her discomfiture, and she grumbled to herself as
she left us, which grumble being translated would signify, ‘My God!
three mocking birds! that feast would cost you thirty dollars!’”
The rest of the year was spent in working up the material thus gathered,
and much of the following winter and spring. The summer of 1887 was
passed in Washington, Connecticut, where, as a note in his journal tells
us, he “spent a very busy season. Made many drawings for two prospective
articles on ‘Midnight Rambles’ and ‘Insect Botanists,’ besides many
flower-studies and a number of water-colors. Very busy on the ‘Memorial’
volume to Mr. Gunn. Made a large number of drawings for botany.” The
last remark refers to a large scheme which now possessed his teeming
brain, a plan to write an illustrated botany. He never dropped his
purpose,--indeed, abandoned plans were unknown in his life-history,--and
before his death he had accumulated over 1500 drawings toward such a
work. There have been many such undertakings put forth, successful and
valuable. But it is impossible to think without a pang of the wonderful
work he would have made out of his accurate knowledge and his matchless
art!
The “Memorial” was published in 1887, and he went on with the articles
and the water-colors, busy all the time, and always laying out work in
advance of his swiftest execution. The spring of 1888 brought the
opportunity for a trip to Europe, which included a tour in Great
Britain, France, Holland, and Switzerland, with a fortnight in London
and another in Paris. His camera and his pencil were both busy, but the
new experiences made only an episode in his busy life. He was interested
in all the art he saw, and the life of the people appealed to him there,
as it did at home. A letter describing his impressions of Holland shows
the spirit in which he traveled and the things he elected to see.
“Since last writing you I have enjoyed a week (or more I fear) of rare
incident and experience, my days being so full and my evenings so tired
that I have failed again in my good intentions as to frequency of
letters.
“I hurried your last letter into the mail and am somewhat in doubt
whether it reached the Queenstown post in time. Since that writing we
(which means a party of Van Ingen, Willis, Roberts, McGrath, Dunthorne
and myself) have visited successively Flushing, Rotterdam, The Hague,
Dordrecht, Scheveningen, Amsterdam and Brussels. Of course our visit has
been brief as the period of time represented has been but four days. The
picture galleries have received most of our attention at these places,
but at Dordrecht and Scheveningen we found the living pictures
unmatched by any in the respective art exhibitions. Dort is a perfect
treasure of a place, pictorially considered, and I shall live in hopes
of revisiting it in the future more at my leisure and with an eye to
‘material.’ You would have been charmed with the quaintness of this old
Dutch village with its Venice-like canals, its queer inhabitants, its
hundreds of wind-mills and picturesque old boats. We hired a boat and
guide and rowed for hours upon one of these meandering waterways--under
arched bridges beneath which we had to stoop; beneath overhanging
balconies bright with flowering plants and with an occasional saucy or
coquettish face half disclosed between the Venetian blinds at the
windows, occasionally with a giggle accompaniment or a handkerchief
manœuvered in a manner which would have done credit to a French or
Spanish coquette. The little Dutch ‘yongen’ or Deutscher ‘pups’ saluted
us with questionable slang or with stones or what-not, at every private
quay or alley-way opening on the canal and altogether our turnout with
its noisy exclamatory cargo was a great center of attraction to
contiguous neighborhoods whose windows were usually filled with curious
spectators mostly on a broad grin of Dutch proportions and typical
comeliness, and ’tis true occasionally relieved by a disclosure which
our Scotch friend Roberts assured us was ‘bonny’ and which commentary I
was pleased to verify, and which moreover was the signal of a chorus of
‘ah’s’ from our bateau that would have done credit to a West Brighton
populace at the ‘busting’ of a rocket. Our trip was occasionally varied
by a landing at some quaint quay or alley, and a rummaging visit to some
musty old bric-a-brac den or junk shop. The streets were of the queerest
in architecture and life--queer old women with brass headgear and huge
sabots or wooden shoes, and voices like a fog-horn, peddling their green
goods, their eggs, milk or whatever, their treasures suspended from
yokes, and borne with apparent pleasure. I have bought one of their huge
brass milk cans and a few other of their distinguishing paraphernalia
for our front parlor over the mantel--(a part of the foregoing was
penned late last night but I was so utterly tired that I had to quit in
the midst of a sentence which I presume you can detect by examination).
I am in the same condition to-night (Friday, May 25th), having spent
seven mortal hours on my feet in the ‘Louvre’ to say nothing of the
exhaustion which the visit has brought to the other end of my person.
Yesterday I was seven hours at the Salon, viewing the miles of pictures
and occasionally imagining myself in a harem or in a feminine quarter of
a Turkish bath by mistake. I shall go again to-morrow, as I did not see
one half of the bathers yesterday and besides there are a few landscapes
that I want to get a peep at, if the fleshly charmers will only give a
fellow half a chance. 5000 pictures!!! to say nothing of about three
acres of statuary!
“I shall spend a week here at Paris and shall then leave for
Switzerland, including Chamounix, Interlaken, Rigi, Lucerne, &c.,
returning after about a week’s trip direct to London there to spend the
few days prior to my return. I shall sail with Van Ingen on the
‘Adriatic’ June 13th and shall be most happy to be with my loved ones
again. How truly do we measure time by voluminousness of incident. Our
Holland trip of 4 days seemed like a month and it seems a half year
since I left you in New York. In my hours--say rather moments--of repose
I am homesick and my tired feeling adds to the nostalgia. Mr. Van Ingen
and McGrath left me in my tracks to-day, and the way I am dispensing my
hybrid French to the natives hereabouts is a case of wilful persecution.
But I get along better than I would have supposed. I have raked up my
old vocabulary and with a reinforcement of grins, gesticulations and
shrugs, it is surprising how quickly my victim succumbs. Once in a while
it is true I chance upon an ass who don’t catch on, but as a rule I
manage to make my patient comprehend my intentions. Everything thus goes
well until _he_ starts in, and the average Frenchman can pronounce three
words at once with most facile ease and evident delight. I generally
wait until he has run through his dictionary from Alfred to Omaha and
then inform him that I haven’t understood a word that he has been
saying and beg of him to begin again and go slow. When he comprehends
that he is to be remunerated by _time_, and not by the _job_, and turns
out words instead of mush, his lingo is not half so overpowering or so
enigmatical. I had the honor to compliment a waiter to-day upon his
excellent French when indulged in moderation, bringing a touching
parable to my rescue, likening his ‘escargot’ speech to my dish of small
isolated boiled potatoes and his ‘chemin du fer’ French to my ‘haricot’
much to his delight and comprehension.”
In 1888 his second son was born, and the happy father writes of the new
baby to Colonel Gibson, excusing himself for not having made him a
visit: “I have found that we cannot always bend circumstances to our
wills, especially when those aforesaid circumstances are materialized in
the shape of bills payable, taxes, insurance, houses, wives (I beg
pardon, _wife_), and babies! Yes, babies! For Hamilton Jr. no longer
runs this establishment; I enclose the counterfeit presentment of a
successor of his who makes us all toe the mark, and bosses the entire
household. Is it possible that his fame has not reached your latitude?
He has his own way hereabouts, and we imagined that the limits of New
England had at least been brought within earshot of his lungs. But he is
a darling, if he does take after his daddy. His name is Dana Gibson;
(not Charles A.) but old Judge Dana, Richard Dana, his ancestor.”
The year 1889 found him busy with the erection of a new story to his
Brooklyn house and his instalment there in a studio which became a
favorite theme for newspaper gossip and description. In Washington, too,
he acquired another studio for his summer days, in the shape of a little
old schoolhouse which was familiar to him in his boyhood. In the autumn
of this year he recorded the idea of a “prospective work ‘Eyes to the
Blind’ to be prepared with a view to book publication. Made proposition
to Harpers who requested me to run the same through the year in ‘Young
People,’ one page each, with about 200 drawings.” This, is of course,
that favorite work which finally took the name of “Sharp Eyes” and
attained such wide popularity. Writing of this new scheme to his friend
Colonel Gibson, in Fryeburg, Maine, he opens his mind and heart in his
own direct and exuberant way. The letter was written in August, 1890.
“This series will run through the year, and you may like to know how it
all came about. Know then that my head gradually got so big with the
muchness of learning that I had to rig up a safety valve of some sort,
or _bust_! This would have been an unpleasant denouement for myself and
especially tough on the immediate surroundings, human or otherwise, and
so I hit upon a plan to put all my goods in the show window and get
credit for a big reinforcement behind the counter! Great scheme! eh!
(that is if they only won’t try to get a look inside!) My note-books,
visible and intangible, have been multiplying from year to year with no
available opportunities of keeping pace with them in my accustomed
magazine facilities. So I concluded to materialize my material in the
form of a dainty book, comprising the more interesting incidents of my
journal, arranging the incidents or episodes chronologically--a timely
item or two for each week in the year, so that the book might serve as a
sort of pictorial reference calendar for the saunterer, affording him at
least some few hints of the rich store of wonders which surround him
unheeded in every field and by every path. I believe there is real true
missionary possibility in such a book as that. My plan completed and a
little material duly prepared I broached the matter to the Harpers. They
jumped at it at once, and much to my astonishment made me the offer to
run it for the entire year of 52 weeks in the ‘Young People,’ an unheard
of thing! and something which I had never dreamed of. By this
arrangement I not only received much more liberal compensation for the
large number of designs than would have been financially possible on the
first basis, but in addition realized generously upon the letter press
which in the original plan would have been furnished gratis on the
customary plan of books paying royalty. In addition to this, inasmuch
as the cost of the entire series would of course be charged to the ‘Y.
P.’ it gave me a bigger margin both in number and scope of the designs,
so that the book as now shaped will be more generously illustrated than
as first planned. The series will end with the Xmas number and will then
begin to take its book form with numerous fresh additions of tail-pieces
and other morceaux, comprising some 300 illustrations. It will not be
issued however until the Christmas of 1891 as I have already on the
press a volume for the coming season.
“The title of this--my fifth book--is ‘Strolls by Starlight and
Sunshine.’ My two midnight articles taking the lead, and followed by my
other magazine papers published during the last two years. ‘Bird-Notes,’
(Harper’s), ‘Bird-Cradles,’ (Scribner’s), ‘Prehistoric Botanists,’
(Century), and ‘Wild Garden,’ (Harper’s), this September (now due).
“You shall see the volume as soon as you are likely to desire it, and
whether you take any stock in it or not you will, I hope, give me credit
of being a well meaning fellow anyhow.
“There! that’s about as big a dose as even your friendship can stand,
and so I’ll come around to my autograph and give you a rest--No--not yet
either! I wonder if you can’t do me a little favor, just for the sake of
old times and in spite of my sins. In addition to all my other work I
have been for years preparing a botany on a new plan, and nearly all the
bloomin’ things that grow in these parts have been victimized in my
enthusiasm.
“There is one plant, perhaps two, which I remember to have seen and
gathered on the sand at Lovell’s pond, but which I never identified,
which perhaps you could now help me to secure. A little low thing with a
few yellow (or pink) blossoms growing on its extremity, and which I saw
in profusion the last time I visited the spot with you. I am afraid that
the season is too late, or will be when I could receive them from you,
but if you can, after about twelve days, or rather about the date of the
third of September gather the plants for me, enclose them in a tin spice
box, no water, and mail them to me here at Washington, Conn., you will
earn my thanks anew. Plants enclosed in tin boxes, with air-tight
covers, will keep fresh for days--indeed for many days longer than the
same plant would keep in a vase of water.
“And now, my dear friend, au revoir! I sincerely wish that we might meet
again if only to clasp hands and exchange greeting, but until another
year at least it seems improbable. To-morrow I leave to visit friends in
the Adirondacks for two weeks returning here to keep my nose to the
grindstone until November when I return to Brooklyn,
“Good bye, regards to all. W. H. G.”
In season for the holidays in 1890 “Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine”
was ready; and Gibson had another surprise for the nature-lovers in the
chapters on “A Midnight Ramble,” and “Night Witchery.” All he had done
was to take his lantern and wander among the grasses and the
wild-flowers as they slept, and to tell the story of what he saw and
heard. But when he had done with them, his readers all felt, at
second-hand, indeed, but keenly enough, as he himself had done, “We have
explored a new world--a realm which we can look in the face on the
morrow, with an exchange of recognition impossible yesterday.” Edmund
Clarence Stedman, suggesting possible choice of material for the
“Library of American Literature,” said of this article,” I scarcely
believe that you or any one has of late written anything more novel or
more poetic than your espionage in the camp of the flowers at midnight.”
All the next year was devoted to work upon “Sharp Eyes,” which appeared
in the late autumn of 1891. The intent and scope of the book has been
told in the author’s letter to his friend. He puts his purpose
succinctly in a paragraph of the introduction, which he quaintly
entitled “Through My Spectacles”: “‘Sharp Eyes,’ then, is, in brief, a
cordial recommendation and invitation to walk the fields and woods with
me and reap the perpetual harvest of a quiet eye, which Nature
everywhere bestows; to witness with me the strange revelations of this
wild _bal masqué_, to laugh, to admire, to study, to ponder, to
philosophize,--between the lines,--to question, and always to rejoice
and give thanks.”
Meantime, he was hard at work pushing the studies for his botany. With
the sketches he was making for this purpose, he was also making more
water-colors, sending them to the various exhibitions, and arranging
sales of his own. He was at work on new articles for the “Young People”
continuing the unexhausted vein he had opened for these pages. For older
readers he was beginning the articles on the cross-fertilization of
flowers which foreshadowed the wonderful charts and lectures with which
he delighted and informed the whole country. He had begun to lecture
too, and he notes in his journal, July 23, 1891, “At Mrs. Van Ingen’s
suggestion, I have concluded to give a series of ten familiar talks on
Nature, covering botany, entomology, and ornithology, two each week.”
This was the beginning of successive series of lectures, covering four
years. From these home talks his work in this field grew and multiplied.
Soon he was lecturing with these amazing charts before the clubs in New
York, before colleges and schools, and finally before popular audiences.
In the winter of 1893-94, he made the venture of a series of six
lectures in Hardman Hall, New York City, which netted him the handsome
sum of eight hundred and fifty dollars, and drew from the veteran
manager, Major Pond, an expression of wonder: “The news of your success
in Hardman Hall is phenomenal. I can assure you that you are the only
man in the United States who could have done such a business.”
Then the calls began to come from all over the country. The same energy,
industry, and genius which he had put into his painting and his writing
he threw with increasing intensity into this new work. In 1894 he
lectured sixty-four times. His success in the new field was instant and
complete. It was as thoroughgoing with scientific folk as it was with
the children and the plain people. The press had nothing but wonder and
commendations. It was an epoch in the popular presentation of scientific
fact and research unequaled since the days of Agassiz.
But somehow, in the midst of this new interest and the engagements it
brought, he found the time to bring out still another book, as novel and
as fascinating as any of its predecessors; and though it dealt with what
at first sight seemed an unlovely theme, it was perhaps the most
beautiful of his volumes. Promptly on calendar time in 1895 came “Our
Edible Mushrooms and Toadstools,” destined to be the forerunner of a
fungus-literature growing with every year. Its accuracy satisfied the
scientific; its information gratified the popular mind; its
illustrations were a joy to the mushroom-hunters. And his originality
in treatment gave a hint to the publishers which they have been quick to
follow and which they will be sure to follow for many a year to come.
Two more books were to be added to the list of his collected writings,
“Eye Spy,” and “My Studio Neighbors,” both volumes in the same vein as
“Sharp Eyes,” and made up of his magazine articles. But before they were
gathered between covers, he had finished his brief career and had passed
on. The last entry in his journal was made on June 12, 1896, to record,
as did all his brief notes, nothing but a new item of work,--“Lecture,
Holiday House.” He was already in the grip of death. The fierce fires of
a relentless industry had burned his forces to a cinder. Through the
summer days he languished and drooped, yet would not wholly give over
work, nor cease his planning. On the 16th of July, among the hills of
Washington, he suddenly died from apoplexy. His overtaxed frame gave
way, and, at the early age of forty-six, he slept the long sleep of the
body, in the beautiful home he had reared for himself, among those
dearest scenes.
Perhaps there is no more fitting close to this hurried sketch of his
career than a reference to this beautiful home which he made for himself
out of the earnings of his toil, and which seems to have embodied the
desires and the noble purposes of his whole life. It was natural,
inevitable, than he should choose Washington as the site of this new
hearthstone. He located it upon a hillside sloping to the river-valley,
with a long and entrancing outlook to distant southern hills. He left
the wild-flowers to grow undisturbed upon his lawns, and the clumps of
low trees which bore their crimson cones in August gave him the right to
call the new estate “The Sumacs.” Here he planted his house, building
first of all a story of stones gathered from the fields and old walls
round-about. Then a “story-and-a-half,” to use New England phraseology,
a tasteful adaptation of old Yankee architecture, with hip roof and low
studding. Broad piazzas surrounded it, a great hall welcomed the guest,
and inviting rooms with enticing prospects through great windows gave a
sense of comfortable space within. To complete the ideal of a home, the
great fireplace stood ready for the winter backlog, or bore a screen of
boughs in summer and in autumn. How bitter the irony of life, in that as
soon as he had reared this shrine for his domestic affections, amid
scenes for which he had been yearning all his days, imprisoned in the
city, among friends of his boyhood, who loved him as few men are
loved--what a strange and baffling lot was his, to be summoned from it
all, and from the larger future which seemed opening before his eager
heart!
[Illustration: _The Sumacs_]