“Your sincere admirer,
“Archibald A. Alexander.”
One could add to these indefinitely. A minister in the northwest, a lover of flowers and a true woodsman, has a fine program for a canoeing trip on Minnesota rivers and lakes; a farmer’s wife writes to ask direction to some simple manual which will help her copy flowers in color, and encloses some examples of her simple work; an admiring poet sends some verses which will not scan, and will be glad to have her adulations published,—and remuneration secured; another admirer insists that he is not an autograph fiend,—but he would like a letter in reply to his praises; an impecunious poet suggests an immediate loan of ten dollars; a mother in a western state sends some admirable sketches done by her daughter and wishes his judgment upon their merits. People felt his kindly nature in his writings and in his pictures. It was a virtue that went out of him, and drew like a loadstone.
Nowhere, perhaps, outside the charmed and privileged circle of the “Gunnery” boys,—they were always “boys” and “girls” to one another!—was he more welcome or more warmly cherished than at the Authors Club. He counted it a great honor to be chosen into that favored circle, and as he was one of its earliest members, so he was one of its most constant and loyal supporters. Whenever he could he joined in its social conclaves and its decorous revels; and his presence was always a guarantee of good fellowship, unconstrained, talkative, and sparkling. In the earliest home of the Club in East Fifteenth St.; in its rooms in West Twenty-fourth St.; later in the West Twenty-third St. quarters; and finally in the soaring apartments to which it attained, Gibson’s was one of the familiar figures, as it was one of those most commonly sought out of strangers. But it was never a figure with “a certain solitariness,” as seen by his imaginative critic. Wherever Gibson sat or stood, there was sure to be a group. Men gathered about him as birds flock to the banks of a rippling stream. Nor was he any slower in coming to the side of others. He sought companionship as frankly as he gave it. He was always running over with bright, attractive talk; but he had a willing ear. He was conscious of his power to attract; but it never bred in him the slightest condescension toward others. He was passionately fond of wit, and humor, and all the honest fun of life; but he never showed a particle of coarseness, and he never confounded fun with foulness. He was as much at home with the largest minds and characters as he was with the simple farmers and rustics, he delighted to describe; for he met all men on the ground of their common brotherhood,
The Edge of the Woods
From a Painting
and had no absurd consciousness of external condition and accidental differences to embarrass him. His reverence and his religiousness were profound elements of his nature. He was no formalist. Probably he did not set a very high value upon some of the externals of spiritual life which seem so important to many men. He was, indeed, a loyal supporter of religious works and enterprises, as he was a member of the visible church; and he paid the highest respect to all that pertained to what is commonly demanded as a mark of Christian life and interest. But he had a life in the Spirit which was larger and broader than all that. He felt and he loved the Divine Life in all that he saw, and heard, and studied, and tried to draw and paint, in the world around him. To his thinking it was all the expression of God; as such he reverenced the creation. Through this world of nature he was always seeing and feeling the Father. His letters breathe a note of honest devoutness which passes all lip-service. And scattered through his pages are frequent expressions of a spirituality deeper than any words or phrases which so easily become cant. There is a deep revelation of the heart of the man in a passage in “Woodnotes.” Listen to his soul pouring itself out in these words:
“Sitting alone in the woods I have sometimes known a moment of such supreme exaltation that I have almost questioned my sanity—a spirit and an impulse which I would no more attempt to frame into words than I should think to define the Deity himself—‘I am glad to the brink of fear.’ My own identity is a mystery. The presence of the dearest friend on earth would be an unwelcome intrusion. The pulses of the woods beat through me. The joyous flight of bird brings buoyant memories, the linnet’s song now seems swelling in my own throat. Happy Donatello in the garden of the Borghese is no longer a myth, though even he knew no such joy as this. At such times—and are they not vouchsafed to every true ‘Holy-Lander’?—I am conscious of an unwonted sympathy in nature—a strange, double, paradoxical existence, which, while lifting me to the clouds, still holds me to the earth.”
It was this inner soul of nature as it filled the inner soul of the man, which he felt a growing power to express in art. But before he could speak his message he passed from our presence.