Out of such a frank, hearty, kindly boyhood, there matured its natural and necessary fruit. The boy was father to the man. The mature Gibson was no disappointment to the hopes of those who had known him in youth. He had all the charm of a perfectly natural and wholesome nature, developing along lines which strengthened constantly all that was noblest and most admirable in it. He was able to express himself fully in his work; and his self-expression constantly broadened and deepened his best qualities.
His exuberant nature continually overflowed in fun. His seriousness was tempered by an unfailing sense of humor, and his tremendous energy was stopped short of oppressiveness by his capacity for play. He had the secret of perpetual youth. He always kept the heart of boyhood. His letters bubbled with mirth. His talk was bright with it. All his friends have memories of this side of his life which form one of the most delightful legacies from that past. But there is no preserving the effervescence of such a nature. It is never the same on the memorial page. His own spirit was so much a part of it all that without his personality behind the joke it would lose half its point. But whether he made sport for a company, as in his droll stories at the club, or raised the laugh in the flow of personal talk, his touch was sure, his humor was contagious.
Probably no trait in him thus throve and grew as did his enthusiasm, his zest in living, his love of what he did, and what he saw, and what he contributed to other lives. To all who knew him he was a fellow of infinite zest. He enjoyed life. He enjoyed all lives, both great and small, human and sub-human. A friend used to say of him that Gibson was a man who thoroughly enjoyed himself. No doubt he did. For that is only another way of saying that he rejoiced in the things God had given him, the powers which were at once endowment and working capital in his life. No man ever took more keen delight in what is commonly counted the drudgery of toil. He really did not seem to be conscious of the hardship of hard work or the irksomeness of the set task. He so thoroughly loved the thing which he did, that all labor was a labor of love. That took away the sense of bondage to his business, and was one of the secrets of his immense endurance, his elasticity under heavy loads, his exuberance of spirits in situations when most men would have sunk overwhelmed.
He had the trait which marks all such natures, a whole-heartedness in all that he undertook, which made him a difficult man to overcome, to put down, or to defeat. That was obvious in all his hard apprenticeship; in his determined struggle for success; in his loyalty to his own ideals. It came out in some other incidents of his life. His vigorous fight against the spirit of vandalism which threatened the natural beauties of Prospect Park, at the hands of a dense and narrow officialism, was a case in point. In the spring of 1887, Mr. Gibson, in the course of a stroll through the Park, was filled with the consternation and wrath which are inevitable in a real nature-lover when he finds that ignorant and unsympathetic hands—and heads—have been busy destroying the natural beauties which years of artificial culture cannot make good. As he wrote in a communication to one of the most reputable journals of the day: “One of the wildest and most beautiful sections of the Park had been invaded by the butcherly Goths and Vandals known as our Park Commissioners. Chaos reigned on every side—beautiful fresh trees by the score, lying in piles of logs among seas of chips, bonfires of brushwood on every hand, and the beauty of the place otherwise hacked and slashed on all sides.” Gibson at once sounded an emphatic and indignant warning through the columns of the Brooklyn “Eagle.” The Park Commissioners replied through an agent in contemptuous fashion, and declared that all they had been doing was to cut down “a lot of ailanthus trees.” They did not know the caliber of their critic. In a second letter Gibson reiterated his charges and showed as the result of actual count and careful identification, that over two hundred trees had been felled in one small acre, and that these included large and beautiful specimens of white birch, black birch, willow, elm, poplar, sweet-gum, flowering dogwood, hornbeam, European alder, nettle-tree, young maple, and numerous other varieties of the minor sylvae, comprising one of the most beautiful pieces of underwood to be found in any park. The Park Commissioners met this new charge with a square denial. Gibson produced new and indisputable evidence to confute them; induced a committee of gentlemen of the highest standing and intelligence to investigate the premises and the evidences of his accuracy,—including Dr. Charles H. Hall, Dr. Charles C. Hall, Dr. Truman J. Backus, and Dr. Almon Gunnison,—who over their own names verified all his statements. Then the Commissioners were forced to admit his charges (and thus, indirectly, their own untruthfulness), but claimed that what they had done was in the nature of the “improvement” of the Park. Then Gibson challenged the discomfited Commissioners to refer their claim of “improvement” to Samuel Parsons, the Superintendent of Central Park, requesting his expert decision whether this cutting was or was not a justifiable artistic or skilful piece of landscape gardening. The challenge was not accepted. There was no need that it should be. Gibson had roused a vigorous public sentiment which forced the Commissioners to call a halt in their reckless and stupid work; and his absolute honesty, accuracy, and readiness as an advocate had put his adversaries to shame and confusion. The incident is well worth recalling as an evidence of what one honest and vigorous citizen can do in the correction of a public evil. It is even more interesting as an illustration of the thoroughness and grasp of his mind on all subjects of which he claimed any right to speak.
His encounters with his critics were often as amusing as they were interesting, on account of the completeness with which he would effect their refutation and overthrow. His very neat rejoinder to that redoubtable critic, Charles A. Dana, was a piquant instance of the care with which he took a position, as well as of the skill with which he defended it. Mr. Dana had taken Gibson to task in the columns of the “Sun,” for using the form “witch-hazel” instead of “wych-hazel,” which he held to be the correct and original form,—“wych” being an old Saxon word which means “hanging,” and has been applied to foliage with pendent stems. Gibson responded in a very brief letter showing that while both forms of the word had sanction, yet that the oldest and the latest botanists used the form which he had adopted, as well as the most reputable dictionaries of that date. His summing-up, in a letter to the “New York Tribune,” is too well-turned to be translated or abridged.
“Who then are my authorities? The botanical scholars; Thoreau, Tennyson; The Imperial Dictionary, Stormonth’s, Webster’s, and Worcester’s Dictionaries; and I might add, last but by no means least, ‘The American Cyclopedia,’ an able authority which presents conspicuously the questioned form ‘witch-hazel,’ and upon whose title-page, by the way, the name of Charles A. Dana appears significantly as editor.”
Well might an intimate friend write to him, after such an effective “counter”: “Against a literary shot like that, which hits the bull’s eye squarely in the center, no ‘literary sins’ of a minor order can count for much even when they are proved; and no one who has the power to make the shot need be over-modest about his literary ability—he has the essential thing.”
Quite as dramatic in its completeness was the refutation to which he subjected a critic of his illustrations, who had accused him of owing much that there was of merit in his pictures to the skill of his engravers. Gibson’s own letter tells the whole story and exposes his critic in the fewest possible words.
This is the incident referred to in one of Mr. Roe’s letters to Gibson which appears in his memoir (p. 189).
“The Editor of the ‘Tribune.’
“Dear Sir: