The Poets' Lincoln Part 2

By ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Four score and seven years ago Our fathers brought forth on this continent A new nation, Conceived in liberty, And dedicated to the proposition That all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, Testing whether that nation, Or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, Can long endure.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war.

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field As a final resting-place For those who here gave their lives That that nation might live.

It is altogether fitting and proper That we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, We cannot dedicate-- We cannot consecrate-- We cannot hallow-- This ground.

The brave men, living and dead, Who struggled here, Have consecrated it far above our poor power To add or detract.

The world will little note nor long remember What we say here, But it can never forget What they did here.

It is for us, the living, rather, To be dedicated here to the unfinished work Which they who fought here have so n.o.bly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated To the great task remaining before us-- That from these honored dead We take increased devotion to that cause For which they gave the last full measure of devotion; That we here highly resolve That these dead shall not have died in vain; That this nation, under G.o.d, Shall have a new birth of freedom; And that government of the people, By the people, and for the people Shall not perish from the earth.

Lincoln attained this cla.s.sic perfection of ordered thought, and with it, as an inevitable accompaniment this cla.s.sic beauty of expression, only by great struggle. He became a poet of the first rank only by virtue of his moral spirit. He was continually correcting deficiencies in his character, which were far greater than is generally received, owing to the tendency of American historians of the tribe of Parson Weems to find by force ill.u.s.trations of moral heroism in the youth of our great men. Thus Lincoln is represented as a n.o.ble lad, who, having allowed a borrowed book to be ruined by rain, went to the owner and offered to "pull fodder" to repay him, which the man ungenerously permitted him to do. The truth is, that the neighbor, to whom the book was a cherished possession, required him to do the work in repayment, and that Lincoln not only did it grudgingly, but afterwards lampooned the man so severely in satiric verse that he was ashamed to show himself at neighborhood gatherings. All the people about Gentryville feared Lincoln's caustic wit, and disliked him for it, although they were greatly impressed with his ability exhibited thereby. Lincoln recognized his moral obliquity, and curbed his propensity for satire, which was a case of that "exercise of natural faculty" which affects all gifted persons. And when he left that region he visited all the neighbors, and asked pardon of those whom he had ridiculed. The true Lincoln is a far better example to boys than the fict.i.tious one, in that he had more unlovely traits at first than the average lad, yet he reformed, with the result that, when he went to new scenes, he speedily became the most popular young man in the neighborhood. He was one of those who

"rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things."

The reformation of his character by self examination and determination not to make the same mistake again seems to have induced similar effects and methods for their attainment in the case of his intellectual development. Whatever the connection, both regenerations proceeded apace. Lincoln at first was a shallow thinker, accepting without examination the views of others, especially popular statesmen, such as Henry Clay, whose magnetic personality was drawing to himself the high-spirited young men of the West. Some of the political doctrines which Lincoln then adopted he retained to the end, these being on subjects such as taxation and finance whose moral bearing was not apparent, and therefore into which he never inquired closely, for Lincoln's mind could not be profoundly interested in any save a moral question. When he found that a revered statesman was weak upon a crucial moral issue, he repressed his innate tendency to loyalty and rejected him. Thus, after a visit to Henry Clay in Kentucky, when the slavery question was arising to vex the country despite the efforts the aged statesman had made to settle it by the compromise of 1850, Lincoln returned disillusioned, having found that the light he himself possessed on the subject was clearer than that of his old leader. The eulogy which he delivered on the death of Clay, which occurred shortly afterward (in 1852), is the most perfunctory of all his addresses.

Indeed, not till the time of the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1854, which brought Lincoln back into politics by its overthrow of what he regarded as the const.i.tutional exclusion of slavery from the Territories, did he rise to his highest powers as a thinker and speaker. Lincoln had been defeated for reelection to Congress because of his opposition, though not highly moral in character, to the popular Mexican war, and, regarding himself as a political failure, he had devoted himself to law. His most notable speech in the House of Representatives, a well composed satirical arraignment of President Polk for throwing the country into war, had failed utterly of its intended effect, probably because of its tr.i.m.m.i.n.g partisan tone. In 1854 he was relieved of the trammels of party, the Whigs having gone to smash. Anti-slavery had become a great moral movement, and he was drawn into its current. Almost at once he became its Western leader.

His speech against the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise which had been effected by his inveterate antagonist, Senator Stephen A.

Douglas, was his first cla.s.sic achievement in argumentative oratory.

While in the greater aspect of artistic composition, the form of the address as a whole, his master was Euclid, in minor points the influence of Shakespeare, of whom Lincoln had become a great reader, was apparent, as indicated by a quotation from the dramatist, and an application to Senator Douglas of the scene of Lady Macbeth trying to wash out the indelible stain upon her hand. Also the Bible was the source of strong and telling phrases and figures of speech. Thus he denominated slavery as "the great Behemoth of danger," and asked, "shall the strong grip of the nation be loosened upon him, to intrust him to the hands of his feeble keepers?"

And, in the following pa.s.sage, characteristic of the new Lincoln, I think that either Shakespeare and the Bible had combined to inspire him with graphic description of character and moral indignation, or they enforced these native powers.

"Again, you have among you a sneaking individual of the cla.s.s of native tyrants known as the 'Slave-Dealer'. He watches your necessities, and crawls up to buy your slave at a speculative price.

If you cannot help it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door. You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children. If you are obliged to deal with him you try to get through the job without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands with the men you meet, but with the slave-dealer you avoid the ceremony--instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact."

Of Lincoln's critical appreciation of Shakespeare Frank B. Carpenter, the artist of the "First Reading of the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation"

(see ill.u.s.tration on page 206), writes in his "Six Months at the White House with Abraham Lincoln" as follows:

"Presently the conversation turned upon Shakspeare, of whom it is well known Mr. Lincoln was very fond. He once remarked, 'It matters not to me whether Shakspeare be well or ill acted; with him the thought suffices.' Edwin Booth was playing an engagement at this time at Grover's Theatre. He had been announced for the coming evening in his famous part of _Hamlet_. The President had never witnessed his representation of this character, and he proposed being present. The mention of this play, which I afterward learned had at all times a peculiar charm for Mr. Lincoln's mind, waked up a train of thought I was not prepared for. Said he,--and his words have often returned to me with a sad interest since his own a.s.sa.s.sination,--'There is one pa.s.sage of the play of "Hamlet" which is very apt to be slurred over by the actor, or omitted altogether, which seems to me the choicest part of the play. It is the soliloquy of the King, after the murder.

It always struck me as one of the finest touches of nature in the world.'

"Then, throwing himself into the very spirit of the scene, he took up the words:--

"'O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon't, A brother's murder!--Pray can I not, Though inclination be as sharp as will; My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent; And, like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect. What if this cursed hand Were thicker than itself with brother's blood?

Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy But to confront the visage of offence; And what's in prayer but this twofold force-- To be forestalled ere we come to fall, Or pardoned, being down? Then I'll look up; My fault is past. But O what form of prayer Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder?-- That cannot be; since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murder,-- My crown, my own ambition, and my queen.

May one be pardoned and retain the offence?

In the corrupted currents of this world, Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law; but 'tis not so _above_.

There is no shuffling; there the action lies In its true nature; and we ourselves compelled, Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To give in evidence. What then? What rests?

Try what repentance can; what can it not?

Yet what can it when one cannot repent?

O wretched state! O bosom black as death!

O bruised soul that, struggling to be free, Art more engaged! Help, angels, make a.s.say!

Bow, stubborn knees! And heart with strings of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe; All may be well!'

"He repeated this entire pa.s.sage from memory, with a feeling and appreciation unsurpa.s.sed by anything I ever witnessed upon the stage.

Remaining in thought for a few moments, he continued:--

"'The opening of the play of "King Richard the Third" seems to me often entirely misapprehended. It is quite common for an actor to come upon the stage, and, in a soph.o.m.oric style, to begin with a flourish:--

"'Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York, And all the clouds that lowered upon our house, In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.'

"'Now,' said he, 'this is all wrong. Richard, you remember, had been, and was then plotting the destruction of his brothers, to make room for himself. Outwardly, the most loyal to the newly crowned king, secretly he could scarcely contain his impatience at the obstacles still in the way of his own elevation. He appears upon the stage, just after the crowning of Edward, burning with repressed hate and jealousy. The prologue is the utterance of the most intense bitterness and satire.' Then, unconsciously a.s.suming the character, Mr. Lincoln repeated, also from memory, Richard's soliloquy, rendering it with a degree of force and power that made it seem like a new creation to me.

Though familiar with the pa.s.sage from boyhood, I can truly say that never till that moment had I fully appreciated its spirit. I could not refrain from laying down my palette and brushes, and applauding heartily upon his conclusion, saying, at the same time, half in earnest, that I was not sure but that he had made a mistake in the choice of a profession, considerably, as may be imagined, to his amus.e.m.e.nt. Mr. Sinclair has since repeatedly said to me that he never heard these choice pa.s.sages of Shakspeare rendered with more effect by the most famous of modern actors."

Lincoln's sense of the cla.s.sic phrase seems to have been native with him, for we find it in his earliest utterances. Such a phrase appears in homely proverbial form in his first speech: "My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman's dance." Impaired in rhythm of thought and sound by an awkward, though logical, parenthetical expression, another phrase stands out in a "spread-eagle" pa.s.sage from his first formal address, that on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Inst.i.tutions."

"All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of earth (our own excepted) in its military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force _take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge_ in a trial of a thousand years."

And in a eulogy on Was.h.i.+ngton, Lincoln early achieved a line which in phonetic quality, rhetorical figure and rhythmic cadence is pure poetry, though not of an exceptional order.

"In solemn awe we p.r.o.nounce the name, and in its naked deathless splendor leave it s.h.i.+ning on."

In an article ent.i.tled "Lincoln's Literary Experiments," by John G.

Nicolay, one of Lincoln's two private secretaries, which was published in the Century Magazine for April, 1894, are reproduced Lincoln's notes of one lyceum lecture on "Niagara Falls," and the text of another on "Discoveries, Inventions and Improvements." These, however, detract, if anything, from Lincoln's reputation as a writer, for in choice of subjects and in style of treatment there is seen an almost discreditable stooping of a man of genius, even in his function of teacher, to the low popular taste of the West at the time. In the first lecture Lincoln presented the statistics of the water power of Niagara Falls for each minute, and led his hearers from this base to the "contemplation of the vast power the sun is constantly exerting in the quiet noiseless operation of lifting water up to be rained down again." Yet at this point he stopped short of his duty as an educator, for he made no suggestion as to the utilization of this power. He was satisfied with giving the people what they had come for--the pleasant excitation of a mental faculty, that of the imagination in its primary form of wonder at the grandeur of the material universe. In short, he was acting as a mere entertainer--as so many of our public men do now at "Chautauquas."

In the second lecture he performed this function in a still more discreditable manner, by catering to the unworthy demand of his hearers for obvious and familiar humorous conceptions to grasp which would cause them no mental exertion. Thus, in speaking of the inventions of the locomotive and telegraph, already old enough for the first inevitable similitudes and jocose remarks about them to be current, he said:

"The iron horse is panting and impatient to carry him (man) everywhere in no time; and the lightning stands ready harnessed to take and bring his tidings in a trifle less than no time."

This reveals Lincoln's taste for the characteristic American humor of exaggeration, which was later to afford him relief from the stress and strain of his duties as President in the works of "Petroleum V. Nasby"

and "Artemus Ward," writers, however, with a quaint originality which lifted them and their admirers above the plane of humorous composition and appreciation of the preceding decade. Indeed, Lincoln developed his own power of witty expression to a degree excelling that of the writers he admired, and in quality of product, if not in quant.i.ty (for the greater part of the "funny stories" attributed to him, thank heaven, are apocryphal) he stands in the front rank of the American humorists of his generation.

And as the poet and the wit are near akin through this common appeal to the imagination, Lincoln, had he overcome the obsession of melancholy in his nature which was the mood in which he resorted to poetry, and which early limited his taste for it to verse of a sad and reflective kind, might have become a literary craftsman of the order of Holmes, whose poetry in the main was bright and joyous, and, even when he occasionally touched upon such subjects as death, was, as we have seen, informed with inspiring h.e.l.lenic beauty rather than depressing Hebraic moralization. It was in his sad moments, says Henry C. Whitney, that the mind of Lincoln "gravitated toward the weird, sombre and mystical. In his normal and tranquil state of mind, 'The Last Leaf,' by Oliver Wendell Holmes, was his favorite" (poem). It was Lincoln's happy lot to rise in the realm of oratory by the power of his poetic spirit higher than any American, save probably Emerson, has done in other fields of literature. On the theme of slavery, where his unerring moral sense had free sway, he became our supreme orator, transcending even Webster in grandeur of thought and beauty of its expression. His periods are not as sonorous as the Olympian New England orator's, but their accents will reach as far and resound even longer by the carrying and sustaining power of the ideas which they express. Indeed, it is on the wings supplied by Lincoln that Webster's most significant conception, that of the nature of the Const.i.tution, is even now borne along, because of the uplifting ideality which Lincoln gave it by more broadly applying it to the nation itself as an examplar and preserver to the world of ideal government.

Webster said: "It is, sir, the people's Const.i.tution, the people's Government; made for the people; made by the people; and answerable to the people."

This he made the thesis for an argument which was to be followed by a magnificent peroration ending with a sentiment, calculated for use as a toast at political banquets, and as a patriotic slogan: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"

Lincoln with purer taste, the expression of which, be it said to Webster's credit, had been made possible by the acceptance of the earlier statesman's contention, a.s.sumed the thesis as placed beyond all controversy, and, making it the exhortation of his speech, gave to it the character of a sacred adjuration: "That we here highly resolve ... that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Another example of Lincoln's ability to improve the composition of another writer is the closing paragraph of his first inaugural address. The President-elect had submitted the ma.n.u.script of this most important speech, which would be universally scrutinized to find what policy he would adopt toward the seceded States, to Seward, his chosen Secretary of State, for criticism and suggestion. Mr. Seward approved the argument, but advised the addition of a closing paragraph "to meet and remove prejudice and pa.s.sion in the South; and despondency in the East." He submitted two paragraphs of his own as alternative models.

The second was in that poetic vein which occasionally cropped out in Seward's speeches, and over which Lincoln on better acquaintance was wont good-naturedly to rally him. It is evidence of Lincoln's predilection for poetic language, at least at the close of a speech, that he adopted the latter paragraph. It ran:

"I close. We are not, we must not be, aliens or enemies, but fellow-countrymen and brethren. Although pa.s.sion has strained our bonds of affection too hardly, they must not, I am sure they will not, be broken. The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battlefields and so many patriot graves, pa.s.s through all the hearts and all hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angel of the nation."

Lincoln, by deft touches which reveal a literary taste beyond that of any statesman of his time, indeed beyond that which he himself had yet exhibited, transformed this pa.s.sage into his peroration. His emendations were largely in the way of excision of unnecessary phrases, resolution of sentences broken in construction into several shorter, more direct ones, and change of general and vague terms in rhetorical figure to concrete and picturesque words. He wrote:

"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though pa.s.sion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."