William Hamilton Gibson: artist—naturalist—author

by John Coleman Adams

Upland Meadows

From a Painting

concerning his chosen hunting-grounds, if, indeed, he does not avail himself of that happy aphorism with which Gilbert White was wont to instruct his questioners concerning the natural-history harvest of his beloved Selborne: ‘That locality is always richest which is most observed.’

“With the possession of a back-yard, then, there is still hope for the most case-hardened cit. Let the quickened sod have its freedom of expression, and the grasses and weeds a respite from the sickle. Give the cold shoulder to the gardener, or, if need be, confine his arts to the fence border, and if you would repeat my experience, let the chrysanthemum claim the chief part of his attention. Twenty-five varieties of this plant bloomed in my borders last season, and they won my admiration, not less because of their beautiful display of color, which more than once relieved itself against a background of snow, than for the sterling wisdom they had displayed in biding their time until the rival wildlings of my grass-plot had seen their day.

“Next summer my square of turf shall again contribute to my enjoyment, yea, though I seed the whole community with thistles, tares, and fleabane, and run the gauntlet of the city ordinances.”

Gibson was mindful of the exhortation, “To do good and to communicate, forget not.” He could not contain himself, when he knew so many interesting things. He was a born teacher, a communicator and medium of knowledge. His studies all had a real if unconscious aim. He could not content himself with making them simply as a contribution to the field of facts, nor to the formation of theories. He wanted them to go farther and furnish information to other men. He craved an audience. He needed pupils, or at least auditors. It was not for the sake of being heard by others, or of hearing himself, either; he wanted others to know and to enjoy the great store of wonderful and fascinating things which mother Nature keeps in store for those who love her. He was a genuine missionary of science, an apostle of art, a herald of the wonders and beauties of the world. His social nature, eager for companionships, sought associates in knowledge. He loved to share what he had received. And he took others into his confidence as soon as he had unearthed a new secret of the world around us. He had the same spirit in scientific knowledge that sends men and women to preach the gospel to the ignorant and misguided. Indeed, in one of his letters, outlining the idea of his “Sharp Eyes,” he uses the word “missionary,” which he repeats in the introduction to that volume. The whole paragraph in which it occurs shows Gibson’s feeling toward those who, “having eyes, see not:”

“Recognizing too the evident hunger for information concerning every-day objects in Nature, and that where one individual would write for enlightenment one hundred would wonder in silence and ten thousand would dwell in heedless ignorance, I realized that such a book might also go forth as a missionary to open the eyes of the blind, or at least to quicken a desire for fuller comprehension of the omnipresent marvel and beauty of the commonplace.” One can realize how to such a nature, with such a sense of responsibility to others, a letter like the following would appeal, written by a friend of his who had given much of her time and strength to thought and labor for the interest of working girls:

“It has come to me through my association with these working girls that the meagerness of their lives does not so much mean the lack of things as the lack of thoughts, and I have been planning these talks which have been running through the winter in answer to the question ‘What shall we think about?’ I have asked every one to make the talk simple and plain and I have tried to impress upon them that it is to be only a talk, not a lecture. I have also sought for simple themes, so that they need not be so far above the comprehension of the untrained minds that it would find no answering chord in their desires. If we can take the every-day things which you and I know are full of a wonderful interest, if one but know how to see them, and open their eyes to their wonders, I have believed that one would be opening doors into an undreamed-of fairy land to them. So you see why I come to you. You are one of the door-keepers into that fairy land. Will you open it for us?”

This desire to inform others kept him wholly free from anything like pedantry. He had none of the self-importance of men who try to make a little knowledge go a great way. Nor was he forgetful of the difficulties of less instructed minds. His style in picture and in speech was simple and direct. He had no passion for long words. He did not find it necessary to befog others with the technical speech of the specialists. He was the friend of children and simple country folk and the unlearned everywhere; and they will owe him a debt of gratitude that he spoke in their language and made them understand him. “I wonder,” he once said, “if the time will ever come when a man may read a botanical work without understanding Latin.” It was one of his ambitions to write such a book; he meant to make a botany in English, and illustrate it himself. Over fifteen hundred drawings, as we have seen, are in existence which he had accumulated with this work in view,—one more of the many schemes that fertile mind was projecting, never, alas! to be carried out.