Let us now get back to that room in the White House again. After Lincoln
had finished reading from Ward's book we talked about the author.
The two stories long accredited to Ward at which Mr. Lincoln laughed most
heartily that day included the anecdote of the gray-haired lover who hoped
to win a young wife and who, when asked by a neighbor how he was
progressing with his suit, answered, with enthusiasm, "All right."
When the neighbor then asked, "Has she called you 'Honey' yet?" the old
man answered, "Well, not exactly that, but she called me the next thing to
it. She has called me 'Old Beeswax'!"
Another story which Lincoln accredited to Ward had to do with a visit the
latter was supposed to have made in his country clothes and manners to a
fashionable evening party. Ward, not wishing to show the awkwardness he
felt, stepped boldly up to an aristocratic lady and said, "You are a very
handsome woman!" The woman took it to be an insulting piece of rude
flattery and replied, spitefully, "I wish I could say the same thing of
you!" Whereupon Ward boldly remarked, "Well, you could if you were as big
a liar as I am!"
Ward once stated that Lincoln told him that he was an expert at raising
corn to fatten hogs, but, unfortunately for his creditors, they were his
neighbor's hogs.
During this conversation the President sat leaning back in his desk chair
with one long leg thrown over a corner of the Cabinet table. He had
removed his right cuff--I presume to be better able to sign his name to
the various documents with which the table was littered--and he did not
trouble to put it on again. He wore a black frock coat very wrinkled and
shiny, and trousers of the same description. His necktie was black and
one end of it was caught under the flap of his turnover collar. Yet his
appearance did not give one an impression of disorder; rather he looked
like a neat workingman of the better sort.
As I sat talking with the President a strong light flooded the Cabinet
Room through the great south windows. Outside one could see the Potomac
River sparkling in the bright winter sunshine. This strong illumination
revealed the deep lines of the President's face. He looked so haggard and
careworn after his long vigil (he had been at work since two o'clock in
the morning) that I said:
"You are very tired. I ought not to stay here and talk to you."
"Please sit still," he replied, quickly. "I am very tired and I can get
rested; and you are an excuse for not letting anybody else in until I do
get rested."
So I understood the reason, or perhaps it would be fairer to say the
excuse, for granting me this remarkable privilege.
Somehow the subject of education came up, and when Lincoln asked me if I
was a college man I told him I had left Yale College Law School to go to
war. Then he recounted an amusing experience which he once had in New
Haven. He went to the old New Haven House to spend the night, and was
given a room looking out on Chapel Street and the Green. Students were
seated on the rail of the fence across the street, singing. Mr. Lincoln
said that all he could remember of Yale College as a result of that visit
was a continual repetition in the song they were singing:
"My old horse he came from Jerusalem, came from Jerusalem, came from
Jerusalem, leaning on the lamb."
He said whimsically that he thought this was a good sample of college
education as he had found it. Yet the President did not belittle the
advantages to be gained by a college education properly and seriously
applied. He said he often felt that he had missed a great deal by his
failure to secure these advantages even though he thought the usual
college education was inadequate and very impractical. He had found in his
experience with the army that it took army officers from college just as
long to learn military science as it did a young man from a farm.
Then the President asked me how I, as a poor farmer's boy, got along at
Yale. I told him I taught music in Yale to earn part of my living--dug
potatoes in the afternoon, and taught music in the evening. Then he got up
and walked up and down the room with his hands behind him, while he gave
me quite a discourse on his opinion of music, and especially of church
music.
He said the inconsistency of church music was something that astonished
him: that if you go to any place other than a church the music is always
appropriate for the place and time. In the theater, for example, they
sing songs which have some connection with the acting. (Perhaps that
example would not apply to-day.) But in church very often there did not
seem to be any relation whatever between what the congregation or the
choir sings and the sermon. Then he told me about some "highfalutin'
songs" he had heard in church, which he said would be ridiculous if it was
not in church; he was disgusted with the lack of sacred art and of
appropriateness in church music. He finished by saying that he did not
favor "dance music at a funeral." There is a good deal of common sense in
that!
I do not now recall just how the subject was introduced, but Lincoln
talked to me about dreams, and he said that while he could not see any
scientific reason for believing in dreams, nevertheless that he did in a
measure believe in them, although he could not explain why. He said that
they had undeniably influenced him.
Then he spoke of dreams he had "since the war came on," which had
influenced him a great deal. He said, "There might not be much in dreams,
but when I dream we have been defeated it puts me on my nerve to watch out
and see how things are. Men may say dreams are of no account, but they are
suggestive to me, and in that respect of great account."
When the President spoke of the people who were waiting to see him, I
said:
"No doubt many of them, like myself, are strangers to you. How do you
select those you will let in when you can't see them all?"
He replied that he decided a good deal by names, and then he told me what
seemed a good point to remember, that he had trained his memory in his
youth by determining to remember people's faces and names together. This
he had done when he was first elected to the legislature in Illinois. He
realized at once when he got into the legislature that he could not make a
speech like the rest of "those fellows," college people, but he could get
a personal acquaintance and great influence if he would remember
everybody's face and everybody's name; and so he said he had acted upon
the plan of carrying a memorandum book around with him and setting down
carefully the name of each man he met, and then making a little outline
sketch with his pencil of some feature of the man--his ears, nose,
shoulder, or something which would help him to remember.
Lincoln then told me a story about James G. Blaine when the latter was
first elected to Congress. Blaine afterward repudiated this story, but it
serves to illustrate Lincoln's thought none the less. He said that Blaine
hired a private secretary to help him out in remembering people. His
system was to have the secretary meet all those who entered the reception
room and ask their names, where they lived, what families they belonged
to, and all the information that could be gained about them in a social
way. Then, according to the story, the secretary ran around to the back
door to Mr. Blaine's private office and gave him a full memorandum about
his callers. A few minutes later, when the visitor was ushered in, the
secretary told him to "walk right in to see Mr. Blaine."
He would say in the most casual manner: "Mr. Blaine is in there. You can
go right in."
Mr. Blaine would get up, shake hands with the man, ask him how his
relations were, how long it had been since he was in the legislature,
whether his wife's brother had been successful in the West, etc., until
the visitor came to be perfectly astounded.
As a result of this Mr. Blaine became very famous for his memory of names.
But even if the story about the source of Blaine's "memory" is untrue,
Lincoln was probably ahead of him and, indeed, of any man in this country;
he could remember every person he had ever seen in twenty years' time.
That was one of the things that became evident when I asked him how he
could judge the visitors. In the majority of cases he had seen the man or
heard of him in some connection, perhaps years before. He also said that
he judged strangers by their names because when he heard their names he
would think of other people he did know by that name, and he judged they
might belong to that family and have the same traits.
He admitted that he was sometimes guided by the suggestion of Artemus
Ward, who told him a story of a boys' club in Boston which did not take in
any members who were not Irish. A boy came along and asked to be admitted
to the club, and the members asked, "Are you Irish?"
"Oh yes," replied the boy, "I am Irish."
"What is your name?"
"My name is Ikey Einstein."
Lincoln, smiling, said, "The Irish boys kicked that boy out forthwith."
He said, "Artemus Ward, when telling me that story, confirmed me in my
view that a name _does_ have something to do with the man. But," Lincoln
added, "if it is Smith, I have no way of getting at it." Then he said,
more seriously, that he had to be guided a great deal by an instinctive
impression of the visitor as he came in the door.
"Seldom a person sits down at this table, or desk, but I have formed an
opinion of the man's disposition and traits, by an instinctive
impression."
He acknowledged that he could not always trust to this, but was generally
guided by it and found he got along very well with it. Sometimes, however,
he did make a mistake, as when on one occasion he had talked to a man for
half an hour as though he was a hotel keeper, and found out afterward that
he was a preacher.
Through all this conversation there had run an undercurrent of
whimsicality, partly, no doubt, the conscious effort of a sorely tried
mind to gain a few minutes' respite from its pressing cares, but none the
less showing a keen and deep-seated appreciation of the funny side of
life. Only once did this humor forsake him, and that was when Lincoln
spoke of Tad. The little boy had been playing quietly by himself all the
time--apparently he was as much at home in the Cabinet Room as in any
other part of the White House--and Lincoln told me Tad had been sick and
that it worried him.
Then he put his head in both his hands, looked down at the table, and
said, "No man ought to wish to be President of the United States!"
Still holding his head in his hands, he said to me, "Young man, do not
take a political office unless you are compelled to; there are times when
it is heart-crushing!"
He said he had thought how many a mother and father had lost their
children in the war--just boys.
"And I am so anxious about my Tad, I cannot help but think how they must
feel. If Tad had died--"
He grew very sad; for a few minutes his face was gloomy, and it seemed as
though half a sob was coming up in his throat.
Lincoln was not one of those men who go to the extremes of grief or the
extremes of joy; but other people have told me, as I myself now saw, that
when there came to him that seizure of deep sadness he had to fight
himself for a few minutes to overcome it. This impressed me that day very
deeply. Breaking off abruptly from what he had been talking about--war and
Artemus Ward--and speaking suddenly of Tad, he had dropped down in that
dejected position, and for a few minutes looked so sad I thought something
awful must suddenly have come to his mind. But it seemed, after all, to be
only the fear that Tad, who was not very well, might die. Who can say what
vistas of thought that idea may have opened.