John Coleman Adams

“ There have been few men of larger manhood than this poet-artist, this seer and interpreter of nature. He was open-minded and trustful as a child. He loved everything that was manly, and his sense of right was an instinct and a passion. He was tolerant in faith and scorned all narrowness. Reverent, worshipful, a lover of God and man. Not since Gilbert White of Selborne died has there lived one who more minutely discerned nature, and never has there been one more dowried to interpret her. Thoreau had equal skill of vision and perhaps larger grace of literary expression. ”

“ And when we meet them, some day, in the land where we shall know as we are known, we shall have to make acquaintance with them anew, on the basis of the revelation of their real selves. But some there are, whose lives express their souls. Heaven can only make more radiant in them the features that we know already. Will Gibson will be ‘Our Will’ forever, as he is ours to-day, though death has clothed the dear face in the strange, new ‘light that never was on land or sea.’ God be thanked for a transparent life! ”

“ I looked in the morning in the Magazine and there it was promptly ready in the wild days of March. I venture to say that no poet has before been so true to nature as you have been. I thought no man except John Burroughs had seen or heard so much in the woods as I am wont to see; but lo! one of my own boys has seen with keener eyes, has heard with more acute ears, and has had genius and taste to tell it all in words, and to paint it all with a magic brush. Other men don’t know which most to admire in you, the artist or the naturalist. ”

“ It was a primal motif in such a man to love the simplicities, and you will all remember as one vivid phase of it his intense desire to preserve the sweet and unaffected community life which has so long marked this village. He had seen how the wave of fashion and of assertive and ostentatious wealth had overcast those New England towns for which nature had done most, and how the supreme triumph of the French modiste, the babble of the four-o’clock tea, and the vanities of so-called ‘good’ society had come to satirize the summer charms of mountain and river and vale. ”

“ Humility is the only attitude that wins the heart of nature. It yields the glow that lights the vision of the ‘inward eye,’ beside which all other eyes are blind. Audacity and impressionism have their importance and place in art, but they are not its pinnacle; the one yields helpful courage for the encounter, the other is the useful short-hand system which often comes to the artist’s rescue, and without whose aid many of nature’s most rare and subtle expressions would elude him, and be lost. ”

“ Indeed, there was, in all his lectures, the frankest acknowledgment of his indebtedness—of the common debt of all of us—to those pioneers in this fallow field of knowledge. He stinted no praise, no honor to their names, and used their work with hearty acknowledgment. He knew Sprengel, Darwin, Müller, well and, following their lead into the enchanted and enchanting country of new knowledge, soon made himself a student at first hand of the things he had been taught by these great masters.
Gibson was by no means an “easy” writer. ”

“ Such a man could not keep out of the field of color. The feeling in him had to express itself. He must interpret on the canvas what he saw upon the hillside. It was inevitable that he should soon win as hearty praise for his color as he had for his drawing. Of course, the reputation could not be as wide as that he had achieved as illustrator in black and white. Fewer eyes could see his paintings than had been regaled with his illustrations. But when he laid down his brush, to paint no more, he had made a name for himself as one of the foremost American water-colorists. ”

“ We, who have formed our habits of human exclusiveness, cannot say to ourselves in momentary enthusiasm, ‘Let us be as Will Gibson was! Let us begin at once to cultivate the acquaintance of all living things!’ We have outgrown the art. We stand embarrassed in the presence of a squirrel or a bird, and, far from knowing how to attract it, are fain to be satisfied if, by doing nothing at all, we avoid scaring it. ”

“ Here is a key to the very heart of nature, if one will only use it. And I would but add my faint echo in an entreaty for a deeper sense of the infinity of nature’s living tone and palpitating color—a plea for the more intelligent recognition of the elements that yield the tint which we vainly strive to imitate upon the canvas. Such knowledge will give a voice to every pigment on the palette, and to the brush an answering consciousness ”

“ In this phase of his work, Gibson carries the office of the illustrator to its highest possible point, and shows all its dignity and power.
He did all this in his own way. No artist of our generation was more thoroughly individual in his methods and in his aim. He sought what his own spirit loved and longed for. He saw with no eyes but his own. He drew and painted after his own fashion. His originality was absolute. He had none of the mannerisms of any man or any school but his own. He asked no one to tell him the color of the grass, or the fashion in which he should paint the clouds. ”

“ And while the misguided apostle of the new school who shows us ‘Nature in her breadth’ shall revel in his values of turpentine, and paint and brush-marks, the transcript of his more humble brother-worker, while not less broad, shall palpitate with life and feeling, and through some secret intangible testimony of its own, shall conjure up in the beholder the heart-memories of Nature, and shall breathe her spirit from the canvas. ”

“ But in addition to this claim on the interest of the public, those who knew him are aware of others;—a personality of singular charm and forcefulness; a career quite marvelous in its swift and sure achievements; a genius as rare as it was versatile; a devotion to art and to study which fairly wore him out in its exactions on his energy; an ideal which instructs while it shames our sordidness and materialism. His personality will surely grow upon the American people as time gives a true perspective to his life and work. ”

“ No less genuine and tender was his devotion to Henry Ward Beecher, his pastor as a boy in Plymouth, his friend and sympathizer always. His frank and open nature was one to which the warm heart of the great preacher would naturally be drawn; and Beecher’s fervid, enthusiastic personality would as inevitably attract and hold the appreciative, impulsive heart of the young artist. There was little danger of misunderstanding between these two. Through all the great sorrow of Mr. Beecher’s life, young Gibson was his enthusiastic champion, his loyal friend. ”

“ It floats about on filmy wings of dragon-fly and butterfly, or glistens in the air on silky seeds. It skips upon the surface of the water, or swims among the weeds beneath; and is noised about in myriads of telltale songs among the reeds and sedges. The swallows and the starlings proclaim it in their flight, and the very absence of these living features is as eloquent as life itself. Even in the simple story of the leaf, the bud, the blossom, and the downy seed, it is told as plainly as though written in prosaic words and strewn among the herbage. ”

“ Gibson’s work conferred upon us all, the dear old Master of the Gunnery, who cherished into flame the spark of his first inspiration, lived, and still lives, to see the reward of his own loving labors.
“But in another and yet higher aspect, this life was a precious gift to us by virtue of its strong support to our faith in immortality. If all men died in old age, and by slow decay of strength and faculty, it might be hard to imagine the new birth and new beginning which should rejuvenate them. ”

“ It would include such names as Stedman and Stoddard, Beard and Murphy, Abbott and Ludlow, Burroughs and Roe and Ellwanger, Parsons and Alden and the Egglestons. His correspondence included men and women from all over the world. His genius appealed to men of all classes and pursuits—to all who had the simple heart of childhood and its open eye. And that genius was so full of the vitality of the individual, so warm with his own personality, that to admire him as artist or naturalist was to be drawn to him as a man. ”

“ We have driven for a whole day over a prairie peopled with all sorts of wild things in the way of birds. Meadow larks, plover, snipe, white and blue herons, buzzards, egrets, many birds so tame that they could easily be killed by a cut of my whip. We drove through acres and acres of blue flag in blossom, and for miles pursued the shaded roads through dense woods draped in the ever-present festoons of moss—in this country seen in its fullest perfection, every tree being laden with it, hanging like heavy trailing curtains, sometimes twenty feet in length. ”

“ It is my nature to enjoy nature, and I mean to do it at every opportunity.” That outburst struck the keynote of Gibson’s life and spirit.
But his love of nature, like his knowledge of it, was broad and catholic. He was not a specialist in any narrow or pedantic sense. He was botanist, ornithologist, entomologist, biologist, all in one. A butterfly had as much interest for him as an evening-primrose, a chipmunk as a nuthatch. ”

“ I am not an art connoisseur and should never dare express my opinion ‘as one having authority,’ but I do love beauty, and some of your beautiful woodland scenes, some ferns or mosses or flowers or birds have power to give ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ You reveal Nature’s very soul and as a most ardent worshipper of Nature and as a child of the Heavenly Father whose thoughts you have so often interpreted, I want to thank you. ”

“ WITH PENCIL AND BRUSH IT is hard to say whether Gibson was first a naturalist and afterwards an artist, or first an artist and afterwards a naturalist. Art was his mode of expression; but his knowledge of nature furnished the material of what he would express. Art was his speech, but nature was his theme. In point of time there was no difference in the development of these two sides of his nature. His boyhood passion seemed to divide between studying nature and drawing pictures. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These and a thousand more I recall, and even the first glimpse of the first day of my happy life at Washington comes up before me with a freshness in decided contrast to the memories of the later years. You well remember ‘Amy’s Grotto’ in the pasture lot. You took me to see it and my eyes were wide open also in those early days. Little thing, as it was,{157} it has impressed itself upon my memory as indelibly as anything in my entire life? I recall its every sprig of green and hear the tuneful drops in the limpid pool. ”

“ A little pool of rain water lies at the foot of the rock and touching the roots which will give an additional effect of reflection, and what with this, the warm coloring of dried fallen leaves relieved by a group of delicate ferns, and other like growths, together with a strong play of sunlight on the whole, I see no reason why the picture should not be a good success and feel equal to rendering all that my imagination suggests and pictures. ”

“ Washington, Connecticut
brightened by the earthly work which was ended, that it was instantly recognized as at once synopsis and echo of Gibson’s career. Dr. Raymond said:
“I count it a great privilege to stand here this day, and utter the love and sorrow of so many souls. Words are but feeble expedients for such a task; yet there is, in one respect, a significant choice of words. Shall we express grief or gratitude? Shall we measure our loss by the vacancy it has left behind, or count with joy the treasure we have had, giving God thanks that we had it so long and so abundantly? ”

“ He is no Arabian tyrant, to slay them one by one, every morning. Having loved His own, He loves them to the end, and beyond the seeming end—for love is immortality. Our brother, who knew and loved every one of God’s trees on these hills of Washington,—shall he not have access to the Trees of Life, that grow by the River of Life? ”

“ Pity for him whose heart knows no such sensitive and latent chord of sympathy to yield its harmony along the way, lending an inspiration to the present, while sanctifying the past, and drawing from its better memories a renewed delight in living! There is no walk in life, however dull or prosaic, no circumstance so commonplace, that they can stifle this ever-present melody. ”

“ A passing sketch, perhaps, that shall serve to aid the memory in the retirement of the studio, but a careful copy, never! until we can have a tenfold lease of life, and paint with sunbeams. But there is more still in this tantalizing ideal, for a luxuriant wild grapevine,{93} that shuts in the fence near by, sends toward us an adventurous branch that climbs the upright rail, and festoons itself from fence to tree, and hangs its luminous canopy over the crest of the yielding juniper. ”

“ This is not a ‘boarding-school’; it is a household, whose memories moisten the eye and stir the soul; to which its scattered members through the fleeting years look back as to a neglected home, with father and mother dear, whom they long once more to meet as in the tenderness of boyhood days; a cherished remembrance which, like the ‘house upon a hill, cannot be hid,’ but sends abroad its light unto many hearts who in those early days sought the loving shelter; a bright star in the horizon of the past, a glow that ne’er grows dim, but only kindles and brightens with the flood of years. ”

“ One of the most competent critics, in a journal of the first rank, wrote of his prose:
“William Blake is the most noted poet-artist of this century, but not in his work is to be found such unity and harmony between what he does as pictorial and literary artist, as exists in ‘Pastoral Days.’ We have used the words poet-artist advisedly in connection with Mr. Gibson. He is above all a poet-artist. Not a poet alone, nor an artist alone, but the two together, a combination as rare as it is charming.” ”

“ William Hamilton Gibson, distinguished alike as an artist, an author, and an illustrator, had risen by unwonted industry, native talent, and a tireless enthusiasm to a high place in the esteem of the lovers of nature and the admirers of true art. He was recognized as an artist with the pen as well as with the pencil, and entitled to a place among those enthusiastic naturalists who have the skill in words to impart their enthusiasm. ”

“ Once in the open air he is again the free and buoyant youth, preoccupied only by the purposes and the pursuits which belong to the open air, the meadow, and the wood. Indeed it seems as if his early training and experiences, those school-days at the “Gunnery,” the passions there born, the habits{120} there fostered and confirmed, lay at the basis of all his life afield. He himself somewhere said: “To the average observer, if the eye is ever thus to be a means of grace, it must store up its harvest while hearts are light and life is new, when eyes are bright and undimmed. ”

“ The landscape to their half-blind and unsympathetic eyes resolves itself into a map, a relative opposition of so many ‘masses’ and ‘values’ of form and color. In the mastery of these lies their end and aim while Nature in her ‘detail’ is worthy only of the scientist and ‘has no place in art.’
. . . . . .
“That Nature’s landscape does, to those who seek therefor, resolve itself into so-called masses and values, is an important truth; but equally and more deeply true are the infinity and spirit of her breadth. ”