Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday Part 26

Strange mingling of mirth and tears, of the tragic and grotesque, of cap and crown, of Socrates and Rabelais, of aesop and Marcus Aurelius, of all that is gentle and just, humorous and honest, merciful, wise, laughable, lovable and divine, and all consecrated to the use of man; while through all, and over all, an overwhelming sense of obligation, of chivalric loyalty to truth, and upon all the shadow of the tragic end.

Nearly all the great historic characters are impossible monsters, disproportioned by flattery, or by calumny deformed. We know nothing of their peculiarities, or nothing but their peculiarities. About the roots of these oaks there clings none of the earth of humanity.

Was.h.i.+ngton is now only a steel engraving. About the real man who lived and loved and hated and schemed we know but little. The gla.s.s through which we look at him is of such high magnifying power that the features are exceedingly indistinct. Hundreds of people are now engaged in smoothing out the lines of Lincoln's face--forcing all features to the common mold--so that he may be known, not as he really was, but, according to their poor standard, as he should have been.

Lincoln was not a type. He stands alone--no ancestors, no fellows, and no successors. He had the advantage of living in a new country, of social equality, of personal freedom, of seeing in the horizon of his future the perpetual star of hope. He preserved his individuality and his self-respect. He knew and mingled with men of every kind; and, after all, men are the best books. He became acquainted with the ambitions and hopes of the heart, the means used to accomplish ends, the springs of action and the seeds of thought. He was familiar with nature, with actual things, with common facts. He loved and appreciated the poem of the year, the drama of the seasons.

In a new country, a man must possess at least three virtues--honesty, courage and generosity. In cultivated society, cultivation is often more important than soil. A well executed counterfeit pa.s.ses more readily than a blurred genuine. It is necessary only to observe the unwritten laws of society--to be honest enough to keep out of prison, and generous enough to subscribe in public--where the subscription can be defended as an investment. In a new country, character is essential; in the old, reputation is sufficient. In the new, they find what a man really is; in the old, he generally pa.s.ses for what he resembles. People separated only by distance are much nearer together than those divided by the walls of caste.

It is no advantage to live in a great city, where poverty degrades and failure brings despair. The fields are lovelier than paved streets, and the great forests than walls of brick. Oaks and elms are more poetic than steeples and chimneys. In the country is the idea of home.

There you see the rising and setting sun; you become acquainted with the stars and clouds. The constellations are your friends. You hear the rain on the roof and listen to the rhythmic sighing of the winds.

You are thrilled by the resurrection called Spring, touched and saddened by Autumn, the grace and poetry of death. Every field is a picture, a landscape; every landscape, a poem; every flower, a tender thought; and every forest, a fairy-land. In the country you preserve your ident.i.ty--your personality. There you are an aggregation of atoms, but in the city you are only an atom of an aggregation.

Lincoln never finished his education. To the night of his death he was a pupil, a learner, an inquirer, a seeker after knowledge. You have no idea how many men are spoiled by what is called education. For the most part, colleges are places where pebbles are polished and diamonds are dimmed. If Shakespeare had graduated at Oxford, he might have been a quibbling attorney or a hypocritical parson.

Lincoln was a many-sided man, acquainted with smiles and tears, complex in brain, single in heart, direct as light; and his words, candid as mirrors, gave the perfect image of his thought. He was never afraid to ask--never too dignified to admit that he did not know. No man had keener wit or kinder humor. He was not solemn. Solemnity is a mask worn by ignorance and hypocrisy--it is the preface, prologue, and index to the cunning or the stupid. He was natural in his life and thought--master of the story-teller's art, in ill.u.s.tration apt, in application perfect, liberal in speech, shocking Pharisees and prudes, using any word that wit could disinfect.

He was a logician. Logic is the necessary product of intelligence and sincerity. It cannot be learned. It is the child of a clear head and a good heart. He was candid, and with candor often deceived the deceitful. He had intellect without arrogance, genius without pride, and religion without cant--that is to say, without bigotry and without deceit.

He was an orator--clear, sincere, natural. He did not pretend. He did not say what he thought others thought, but what he thought. If you wish to be sublime you must be natural--you must keep close to the gra.s.s. You must sit by the fireside of the heart; above the clouds it is too cold. You must be simple in your speech: too much polish suggests insincerity. The great orator idealizes the real, transfigures the common, makes even the inanimate throb and thrill, fills the gallery of the imagination with statues and pictures perfect in form and color, brings to light the gold h.o.a.rded by memory, the miser--shows the glittering coin to the spendthrift, hope--enriches the brain, enn.o.bles the heart, and quickens the conscience. Between his lips, words bud and blossom.

If you wish to know the difference between an orator and an elocutionist--between what is felt and what is said--between what the heart and brain can do together and what the brain can do alone--read Lincoln's wondrous words at Gettysburg, and then the speech of Edward Everett. The oration of Lincoln will never be forgotten. It will live until languages are dead and lips are dust. The speech of Everett will never be read. The elocutionists believe in the virtue of voice, the sublimity of syntax, the majesty of long sentences, and the genius of gesture. The orator loves the real, the simple, the natural. He places the thought above all. He knows that the greatest ideas should be expressed in the shortest words--that the greatest statues need the least drapery.

Lincoln was an immense personality--firm but not obstinate. Obstinacy is egotism--firmness, heroism. He influenced others without effort, unconsciously; and they submitted to him as men submit to nature, unconsciously. He was severe with himself, and for that reason lenient with others. He appeared to apologize for being kinder than his fellows. He did merciful things as stealthily as others committed crimes. Almost ashamed of tenderness, he said and did the n.o.blest words and deeds with that charming confusion--that awkwardness--that is the perfect grace of modesty. As a n.o.ble man, wis.h.i.+ng to pay a small debt to a poor neighbor, reluctantly offers a hundred-dollar bill and asks for change, fearing that he may be suspected either of making a display of wealth or a pretense of payment, so Lincoln hesitated to show his wealth of goodness, even to the best he knew. A great man stooping, not wis.h.i.+ng to make his fellows feel that they were small or mean.

He knew others, because perfectly acquainted with himself. He cared nothing for place, but everything for principle; nothing for money, but everything for independence. Where no principle was involved, easily swayed--willing to go slowly, if in the right direction--sometimes willing to stop, but he would not go back, and he would not go wrong. He was willing to wait. He knew that the event was not waiting, and that fate was not the fool of chance. He knew that slavery had defenders, but no defense, and that they who attack the right must wound themselves. He was neither tyrant nor slave. He neither knelt nor scorned. With him, men were neither great nor small,--they were right or wrong. Through manners, clothes, t.i.tles, rags and race he saw the real--that which is. Beyond accident, policy, compromise and war he saw the end. He was patient as Destiny, whose undecipherable hieroglyphs were so deeply graven on his sad and tragic face.

Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never abused it, except upon the side of mercy.

Wealth could not purchase, power could not awe this divine, this loving man. He knew no fear except the fear of doing wrong. Hating slavery, pitying the master--seeking to conquer, not persons, but prejudices--he was the embodiment of the self-denial, the courage, the hope, and the n.o.bility of a nation. He spoke, not to inflame, not to upbraid, but to convince. He raised his hands, not to strike, but in benediction. He longed to pardon. He loved to see the pearls of joy on the cheeks of a wife whose husband he had rescued from death.

Lincoln was the grandest figure of the fiercest civil war. He is the gentlest memory of our world.

[Transcriber's Note: Part of this was omitted in original.]

[28] _By permission of Mr. C. P. Farrell._

LINCOLN[29]

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

Hurt was the Nation with a mighty wound, And all her ways were filled with clam'rous sound, Wailed loud the South with unremitting grief, And wept the North that could not find relief.

Then madness joined its harshest tone to strife: A minor note swelled in the song of life Till, stirring with the love that filled his breast, But still, unflinching at the Right's behest Grave Lincoln came, strong-handed, from afar,-- The mighty Homer of the lyre of war!

'Twas he who bade the raging tempest cease, Wrenched from his strings the harmony of peace, Muted the strings that made the discord,--Wrong, And gave his spirit up in thund'rous song.

Oh, mighty Master of the mighty lyre!

Earth heard and trembled at thy strains of fire: Earth learned of thee what Heav'n already knew, And wrote thee down among her treasured few!

[29] _By permission of Mrs. Mathilde Dunbar._

THE GRANDEST FIGURE[30]

BY WALT WHITMAN

Glad am I to give even the most brief and shorn testimony in memory of Abraham Lincoln. Everything I heard about him authentically, and every time I saw him (and it was my fortune through 1862 to '65 to see, or pa.s.s a word with, or watch him, personally, perhaps twenty or thirty times), added to and annealed my respect and love at the pa.s.sing moment. And as I dwell on what I myself heard or saw of the mighty Westerner, and blend it with the history and literature of my age, and conclude it with his death, it seems like some tragic play, superior to all else I know--vaster and fierier and more convulsionary, for this America of ours, than Eschylus or Shakespeare ever drew for Athens or for England. And then the Moral permeating, underlying all!

the Lesson that none so remote, none so illiterate--no age, no cla.s.s--but may directly or indirectly read!

Abraham Lincoln's was really one of those characters, the best of which is the result of long trains of cause and effect--needing a certain s.p.a.ciousness of time, and perhaps even remoteness, to properly enclose them--having unequaled influence on the shaping of this Republic (and therefore the world) as to-day, and then far more important in the future. Thus the time has by no means yet come for a thorough measurement of him. Nevertheless, we who live in his era--who have seen him, and heard him, face to face, and in the midst of, or just parting from, the strong and strange events which he and we have had to do with, can in some respects bear valuable, perhaps indispensable testimony concerning him.

How does this man compare with the acknowledged "Father of his country?" Was.h.i.+ngton was modeled on the best Saxon and Franklin of the age of the Stuarts (rooted in the Elizabethan period)--was essentially a n.o.ble Englishman, and just the kind needed for the occasions and the times of 1776-'83. Lincoln, underneath his practicality, was far less European, far more Western, original, essentially non-conventional, and had a certain sort of out-door or prairie stamp. One of the best of the late commentators on Shakespeare (Professor Dowden), makes the height and aggregate of his quality as a poet to be, that he thoroughly blended the ideal with the practical or realistic. If this be so, I should say that what Shakespeare did in poetic expression, Abraham Lincoln essentially did in his personal and official life. I should say the invisible foundations and vertebrae of his character, more than any man's in history, were mystical, abstract, moral and spiritual--while upon all of them was built, and out of all of them radiated, under the control of the average of circ.u.mstances, what the vulgar call horse-sense, and a life often bent by temporary but most urgent materialistic and political reasons.

He seems to have been a man of indomitable firmness (even obstinacy) on rare occasions, involving great points; but he was generally very easy, flexible, tolerant, respecting minor matters. I note that even those reports and anecdotes intended to level him down, all leave the tinge of a favorable impression of him. As to his religious nature, it seems to me to have certainly been of the amplest, deepest-rooted kind.

Dear to Democracy, to the very last! And among the paradoxes generated by America not the least curious, was that spectacle of all the kings and queens and emperors of the earth, many from remote distances, sending tributes of condolence and sorrow in memory of one raised through the commonest average of life--a rail-splitter and flat-boatman!

Considered from contemporary points of view--who knows what the future may decide?--and from the points of view of current Democracy and The Union (the only thing like pa.s.sion or infatuation in the man was the pa.s.sion for the Union of these States), Abraham Lincoln seems to me the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded canvas of the Nineteenth Century.

[30] _By permission of David McKay._

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

BY LYMAN ABBOTT

To comprehend the current of history sympathetically, to appreciate the spirit of the age, prophetically, to know what G.o.d, by His providence, is working out in the epoch and the community, and so to work with him as to guide the current and embody in n.o.ble deeds the spirit of the age in working out the divine problem,--this is true greatness. The man who sets his powers, however gigantic, to stemming the current and thwarting the divine purposes, is not truly great.

Abraham Lincoln was made the Chief Executive of a nation whose Const.i.tution was unlike that of any other nation on the face of the globe. We a.s.sume that, ordinarily, public sentiment will change so gradually that the nation can always secure a true representative of its purpose in the presidential chair by an election every four years.

Mr. Lincoln held the presidential office at a time when public sentiment was revolutionized in less than four years.... It was the peculiar genius of Abraham Lincoln, that he was able, by his sympathetic insight, to perceive the change in public sentiment without waiting for it to be formulated in any legislative action; to keep pace with it, to lead and direct it, to quicken laggard spirits, to hold in the too ardent, too impetuous, and too hasty ones, and thus, when he signed the emanc.i.p.ation proclamation, to make his signature, not the act of an individual man, the edict of a military imperator, but the representative act of a great nation. He was the greatest President in American History, because in a time of revolution he grasped the purposes of the American people and embodied them in an act of justice and humanity which was in the highest sense the act of the American Republic.

LINCOLN THE IMMORTAL

'ADDRESS FOR LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY'

ANONYMOUS

From Caesar to Bismarck and Gladstone the world has had its soldiers and its statesmen, who rose to eminence and power step by step through a series of geometrical progression, as it were, each promotion following in regular order, the whole obedient to well-established and well-understood laws of cause and effect. These were not what we call "men of destiny." They were men of the time. They were men whose career had a beginning, a middle and an end, rounding off a life with a history, full, it may be, of interesting and exciting events, but comprehensible and comprehensive, simple, clear, complete.

The inspired men are fewer. Whence their emanation, where and how they got their power, and by what rule they lived, moved and had their being, we cannot see. There is no explication to these lives. They rose from shadow and went in mist. We see them, feel them, but we know them not. They arrived, G.o.d's word upon their lips; they did their office, G.o.d's mantle upon them; and they pa.s.sed away G.o.d's holy light between the world and them, leaving behind a memory half mortal and half myth. From first to last they were distinctly the creations of some special providence, baffling the wit of man to fathom, defeating the machinations of the world, the flesh and the devil until their work was done, and pa.s.sed from the scene as mysteriously as they had come upon it; Luther, to wit; Shakespeare, Burns, even Bonaparte, the archangel of war, havoc and ruin; not to go back into the dark ages for examples of the hand of G.o.d stretched out to raise us, to protect and to cast down.

Tried by this standard and observed in an historic spirit, where shall we find an ill.u.s.tration more impressive than in Abraham Lincoln, whose life, career and death might be chanted by a Greek chorus as at once the prelude and the epilogue of the most imperial theme of modern times.

Born as low as the Son of G.o.d in a hovel, of what real parentage we know not; reared in penury, squalor, with no gleam of light, nor fair surroundings; a young manhood vexed by weird dreams and visions, bordering at times on madness; singularly awkward, ungainly, even among the uncouth about him; grotesque in his aspects and ways, it was reserved for this strange being, late in life, without name or fame or ordinary preparation, to be s.n.a.t.c.hed from obscurity, raised to supreme command, and entrusted with the destiny of a nation.

The great leaders of his party were made to stand aside; the most experienced and accomplished men of the day, men like Seward and Chase and Sumner, statesmen famous and trained, were sent to the rear; while this comparatively unknown and fantastic figure was brought by unseen hands to the front and given the reins of power. It is entirely immaterial whether we believe in what he said or did, whether we are for him or against him; but for us to admit that during four years, carrying with them such a pressure of responsibility as the world has never witnessed before, he filled the measure of the vast s.p.a.ce allotted him in the actions of mankind and in the eyes of the world, is to say that he was inspired of G.o.d, for nowhere else could he have acquired the enormous equipment indispensable to the situation.

Where did Shakespeare get his genius? Where did Mozart get his music?

Whose hand smote the lyre of the Scottish plowman? and stayed the life of the German priest? G.o.d alone; and, so surely as these were raised up by G.o.d, inspired by G.o.d was Abraham Lincoln, and, a thousand years hence, no story, no tragedy, no epic poem will be filled with greater wonder than that which tells of his life and death. If Lincoln was not inspired of G.o.d, then were not Luther, or Shakespeare, or Burns. If Lincoln was not inspired by G.o.d, then there is no such thing on earth as special providence or the interposition of divine power in the affairs of men.