The qualities of his art in which the public delighted and which came to be characteristic of all his work, were refinement, gracefulness, and truth. He saw the finer qualities of nature, sought out her delicate beauties, loved her humbler moods, objects, episodes. He vindicated his own taste in the paragraph with which he prefaced the chapter on “Sap Bewitched,” over the signature of “Plinius Secundus”:
“We wonder at the mighty and monstrous shoulders of Elephants, we marvel at the strong necks of bulls: we keep a wondering at the ravening of tigers, and the shag manes of Lions: and yet in comparison of insects there is nothing wherein Nature and her whole power is more seen, neither sheweth she her might more than in these least creatures of all.”
In the spirit of those words he wrought at his art. “These least creatures of all” found in him a loving exponent. He saw their charm, and he was not above interpreting it to others. The web of a spider, the nest of a bird, the down of the dandelion, the leaf of the jewel-weed, the tangle of grasses in a fence-corner, the vegetable contents of a city back-yard,—Gibson found beauties in all these least things, which he did not disdain to celebrate. He had learned from Thoreau, chief among American students and expositors of nature, the meaning of the proverb, “Natura maxima in minimis.” His devotion to the Concord recluse, and to his methods, appears in his studies. That discipleship affected his artistic life. It inspired him in his choice of themes and it drew his eyes still closer to the lesser objects and humbler horizons. He wrote to a friend in 1888:
“There are few authors whom I love more than Thoreau.... I have read him with love and reverence, and have visited his haunts as sacred ground, and have pictured those haunts in projected compositions, and yet hope to see them realized.”
He had no apologies whatsoever for having elected the field of what men call the minor forms of life. He knew there was no such thing as major and minor in the things of nature. One may go in either direction and find infinity. A telescope is no more effective than a microscope; and it begins to look as if the atoms would be found as marvelous as the universe. Gibson repeatedly preached this doctrine. In one place he said:
“There is often an almost inexhaustible field for botanic investigation even on a single fallen tree. My scientific friend already alluded to recently informed me, on his return from an exploring tour, that he had spent two days most delightfully and profitably in the study of the yield of a single dead
At the Easel
Brooklyn Studio
tree, and had surprised himself by a discovery by actual count of over a hundred distinct species of plants congregated upon it. Plumy dicentra clustered along its length, graceful sprays of the frost-flower, with its little spire of snow crystals, rose up here and there, scarlet berries of the Indian turnip glowed among the leaves, and, with the crowding beds of lycopodiums and mosses, its ferns and lichens, and host of fungous growths, it became an easy matter to extend the list of species into the second hundred. It is something worth remembering the next time we go into the woods.”