Rocky Headland. (Mt. Desert, Nahant.)
The Sporting Shoal. Porpoises.
The Vasty Deep. Limitless Mid-ocean.
The Return of the Waters. Waterspout. Earth and Heaven. Finis. A link completing the cycle. Tailpiece.
CHAPTER VIII
THE PERSONAL SIDE
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.