William Hamilton Gibson: artist—naturalist—author

by John Coleman Adams

Of all the great nature students of our time, Richard Jeffries ranks as the one most closely in touch with the sub-human world, the earth and all the life it bears in and on its bosom. His whole soul seems exquisitely in tune with the cosmos. He breathes with the respirations of the earth; he sighs with the breath of the winds; his senses and his thoughts sway with the bending of the grain and the waving of the tree-tops. “To know him,” says his eulogist, Mr. Ellwanger, “is to approach nearer the heart of the flower, the mystic concave of the sky, and the elusive verge of the horizon.” But in this respect he has a peer in William Hamilton Gibson. No man ever lived on friendlier terms with nature. As close, as accurate, as patient in his observation as any of the classic characters in nature love, he has a distinction all his own, a peculiar personal attitude toward all extra-human life. He feels and he expresses a sort of fellowship with life in other than human form. He accepts the lesser things as little brothers and sisters of the human. He gives the right hand of fellowship to whatever has life. He humanizes, if one may so term it, the life which lies below man’s in the vital scale. What writer since the days of the primeval fairy tales ever brought the worlds of human life and other life so near each other? He seems a modern Siegfried, into whose ears the birds talk, and the grass whispers as it grows. When he comes back from an exploration into the insect realm close to his own doorstep, he reports what he has seen and heard precisely as if he were recounting the talk and doings of his own kind. He translates this life of beetle and spider and bee and ant and bird into the terms of human life and activity. He makes all life seem related to our lives, all being to appear of one substance, all to be worthy of interest, sympathy, love, and reverence. More than any other mind of his generation he leads us to feel that kinship of all life which Drummond has asserted in “The Ascent of Life,” and which Professor Shaler has condensed into a phrase in calling it “The Bond of the Generations.” That was a shrewd and sagacious disclosure of character, as well as a bit of fun, which led his mother to write, in the letter already quoted, “How are your friends and dear companions, the worms?” He was on terms of friendship with all living things. But to any mind at all sensitive to the real and deeper meaning of nature, to its spiritual origin, its profound unity, this underlying affinity of all its forms of life, there was a bit of true philosophy in the mother’s comment. It was certainly truer and wiser than the criticism once made upon his intellectual temperament in the columns of the “Tribune.” “So thoroughly,” said this reviewer, “was he absorbed in the life of the humbler animals and plants that one suspects he was quite out of his element elsewhere. He was incapable of assigning them a relative place. To him they were always supreme. And because they were supreme they were colored and transformed by his humanizing and anthropomorphizing whimseys. He was always reading into them his own charming qualities of mind and heart, at the same time that he was imitating their own quickness and alertness. Indeed, natural life always appealed not so much to his imagination as to his fancy. He was absorbed in nature as a child is absorbed in its playthings. With all his minuteness of knowledge, he never fully and unqualifiedly faced the two great facts of the natural world, the struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest. He exaggerated and instinctively transformed the natural world, and to the using of it as the source and stimulus of his own acute poetic ingenuity, devoted all his energies and interest.” The criticism is brilliant, but superficial; and its kindly temper does not atone for its total injustice and perversion of values. It is pure assumption, in the first place, to call the “struggle for existence, and the survival of the fittest” “the two great facts of the natural world.” Who authorizes the ranking of those facts as prime or principal? Why not assign the highest place to the continuity of life, and the conservation of advantages, and the advance of types? These are quite as impressive facts as those others. And if they are suggestive of quite other inferences neither Gibson nor any nature lover need be disparaged for choosing to dwell upon those inferences. If he, like a growing company of later students and observers, was impressed with the fraternity of all lives, great and small, with the analogies between the human and the dumb creation, and felt the kinship of even insects and birds, with their later and more favored human cousins,—if we may not use a closer term,—why should this keener insight be called a “whimsey,” and this deeper divination a “fancy”? And because he had a nature which thrilled and fired with the delight of knowledge and all the mental activity which it sets in motion, why should he be accused of using his growing store of that knowledge as a wine to warm his fancy and a spur to the making of similes? The fact is, Gibson not only saw and faced the law of struggle and of survival, but he saw a great deal more. And if he did not dwell upon these facts with the lugubrious emphasis which characterized so many of his contemporaries in science, it was not because he saw them out of relation, but in truer and clearer perspective. There has been too little sympathy, too little of the “humanizing and anthropomorphizing” spirit in scientific research. Gibson was a prophet, in advance of his day. What he was doing is fast becoming the dominant spirit of investigators. And many more laws and principles will be laid bare when men come to realize that all living things are of one blood, than are to be discerned through the cold and unsympathetic gaze of old-fashioned science. Gibson’s habit, moreover, was not a “humanizing” of animal and plant life, in the sense of trying to force our life upon theirs, attributing human thoughts and aims and feelings to the lower creation. It was rather an effort to link their life to ours, by insight, sympathy, and study. He simply made men feel the kinship of all living things. In that he was fully in the spirit of the most advanced science. He believed thoroughly in the truth contained in a sentence which he quoted from “the rapt philosopher of Walden”: “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist and look at nature directly. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone.”

How thoroughly he grasped the spirit of the “new botany” which traces the links between the animal and insect worlds one passage will suffice to show.

“What startling disclosures are revealed to the inward eye within the hearts of all these strange orchidaceous flowers! Blossoms whose functions, through long eras of adaptation, have gradually shaped themselves to the forms of certain chosen insect sponsors; blossoms whose chalices are literally fashioned to bees or butterflies; blossoms whose slender, prolonged nectaries invite and reward the murmuring sphinx-moth alone, the floral throat closely embracing his head while it attaches its pollen masses to the bulging eyes, or perchance to the capillary tongue! And thus in endless modifications, evidences all of the same deep vital purpose.

“Let us then content ourselves no longer with being mere ‘botanists’—historians of structural facts. The flowers are not mere comely or curious vegetable creations, with colors, odors, petals, stamens, and innumerable technical attributes. The wonted insight alike of scientist, philosopher, theologian, and dreamer is now repudiated in the new revelation. Beauty is not ‘its own excuse for being,’ nor was fragrance ever ‘wasted on the desert air.’ The seer has at last heard and interpreted the voice in the wilderness. The flower is no longer a simple passive victim in the busy bee’s sweet pillage, but rather a conscious being, with hopes, aspirations, and companionships. The insect is its counterpart. Its fragrance is but a perfumed whisper of welcome, its color is as the wooing blush and rosy lip, its portals are decked for his coming, and its sweet hospitalities humored to his tarrying; and as it finally speeds its parting affinity rests content that its life’s consummation has been fulfilled.”

How closely he observed and how much he read “between the lines” appears in his account of his introduction to the study of entomology, the first awakening of his real interest in what became the object of a consuming passion.

“It was a day in early June, and nature was bursting with exuberance. The very earth was teeming with awakening germs—here an acorn, with its biformed hungry germ—parody on the dual mission of mortal life—one seeking earth, the other heaven; here

“The Bobolink at Home”

(“Strolls by Starlight”)
Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Brothers

an odd little elf of maple, with his winged cap still clinging as he danced upon his slender stem; while numerous nameless green things clove the sod and matted leaves, and slender coils of ferns unrolled in eager grasp from their woolly winter nest.