“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. But its function is realized in the sketch or motive, which is rarely a picture, but more often a rough draft, a hieroglyph, a stenographic note, which like others of its class is fully intelligible alone to its author, and whose only rational excuse for being is in its latent possibilities of ultimate translation and perfection.” That was the method of the artist; and it grew naturally and logically from the nature of the man. He agreed at bottom with the impressionists, because he painted and drew only what he saw. His point of difference with them was that he painted and drew far more than they would sanction, because he saw so much more. If the canon of the impressionists is admitted, they must be prepared frequently to see it apparently violated by some man who, while painting only what he actually sees, and getting “broad effects” and “values,” sees so much more than the average observer, and notes as “values” so many things which even the ordinary trained eye slips over as insignificant, that he seems to be “descending” to details. Gibson could never have painted to suit this class, because he saw and felt so much more than they did. Yet he was as true as the most orthodox of them to the very method he seemed to defy. He had been speaking (“Highways and Byways,” p. 68) of the seed-pods of the fireweed, and their hidden floss, “a warp of woven sunshine, with a woof of ether,” and reasons thus about it: “It is always awe-inspiring and wonderful to me; it is beautiful beyond description; and when I see those snowy forms take wing and fly heavenward, it is more than beautiful, it is divine. And yet it would seem that there are those among her students who are above the influence of such a revelation as this in Nature. Disciples of a rampant superficial school of art, who in seeking to portray Nature ‘in her breadth’ would feel that they can put the straight jacket upon her and readily ignore so small and trivial a thing as this. 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.’ * * * * *