Born in 1809 and dying in 1865, Mr. Lincoln was the contemporary of
every distinguished man of letters in America to the close of the war;
but from none of them does he appear to have received literary impulse
or guidance. He might have read, if circumstances had been favorable,
a large part of the work of Irving, Bryant, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson,
Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Longfellow, and Thoreau, as it came from the
press; but he was entirely unfamiliar with it apparently until late in
his career and it is doubtful if even at that period he knew it well
or cared greatly for it. He was singularly isolated by circumstances
and by temperament from those influences which usually determine,
within certain limits, the quality and character of a man's style.
And Mr. Lincoln had a style,--a distinctive, individual,
characteristic form of expression. In his own way he gained an insight
into the structure of English, and a freedom and skill in the
selection and combination of words, which not only made him the most
convincing speaker of his time, but which have secured for his
speeches a permanent place in literature. One of those speeches is
already known wherever the English language is spoken; it is a classic
by virtue not only of its unique condensation of the sentiment of a
tremendous struggle into the narrow compass of a few brief paragraphs,
but by virtue of that instinctive felicity of style which gives to the
largest thought the beauty of perfect simplicity. The two Inaugural
Addresses are touched by the same deep feeling, the same large vision,
the same clear, expressive and persuasive eloquence; and these
qualities are found in a great number of speeches, from Mr. Lincoln's
first appearance in public life. In his earliest expressions of his
political views there is less range; but there is the structural
order, clearness, sense of proportion, ease, and simplicity which give
classic quality to the later utterances. Few speeches have so little
of what is commonly regarded as oratorial quality; few have approached
so constantly the standards and character of literature. While a group
of men of gift and opportunity in the East were giving American
literature its earliest direction, and putting the stamp of a high
idealism on its thought and a rare refinement of spirit on its form,
this lonely, untrained man on the old frontier was slowly working his
way through the hardest and rudest conditions to perhaps the foremost
place in American history, and forming at the same time a style of
singular and persuasive charm.
There is, however, no possible excellence without adequate education;
no possible mastery of any art without thorough training. Mr. Lincoln
has sometimes been called an accident, and his literary gift an
unaccountable play of nature; but few men have ever more definitely
and persistently worked out what was in them by clear intelligence
than Mr. Lincoln, and no speaker or writer of our time has, according
to his opportunities, trained himself more thoroughly in the use of
English prose. Of educational opportunity in the scholastic sense, the
future orator had only the slightest. He went to school "by littles,"
and these "littles" put together aggregated less than a year; but he
discerned very early the practical uses of knowledge, and set himself
to acquire it. This pursuit soon became a passion, and this deep and
irresistible yearning did more for him perhaps than richer
opportunities would have done. It made him a constant student, and it
taught him the value of fragments of time. "He was always at the head
of his class," writes one of his schoolmates, "and passed us rapidly
in his studies. He lost no time at home, and when he was not at work
was at his books. He kept up his studies on Sunday, and carried his
books with him to work, so that he might read when he rested from
labor." "I induced my husband to permit Abe to read and study at home
as well as at school," writes his stepmother. "At first he was not
easily reconciled to it, but finally he too seemed willing to
encourage him to a certain extent. Abe was a dutiful son to me always,
and we took particular care when he was reading not to disturb
him,--would let him read on and on until he quit of his own accord."
The books within his reach were few, but they were among the best.
First and foremost was that collection of literature in prose and
verse, the Bible: a library of sixty-six volumes, presenting nearly
every literary form, and translated at the fortunate moment when the
English language had received the recent impress of its greatest
masters of the speech of the imagination. This literature Mr. Lincoln
knew intimately, familiarly, fruitfully; as Shakespeare knew it in an
earlier version, and as Tennyson knew it and was deeply influenced by
it in the form in which it entered into and trained Lincoln's
imagination. Then there was that wise and very human text-book of the
knowledge of character and life, "Æsop's Fables"; that masterpiece of
clear presentation, "Robinson Crusoe"; and that classic of pure
English, "The Pilgrim's Progress." These four books--in the hands of a
meditative boy, who read until the last ember went out on the hearth,
began again when the earliest light reached his bed in the loft of the
log cabin, who perched himself on a stump, book in hand, at the end of
every furrow in the plowing season--contained the elements of a
movable university.
To these must be added many volumes borrowed from more fortunate
neighbors; for he had "read through every book he had heard of in that
country, for a circuit of fifty miles." A history of the United States
and a copy of Weems's "Life of Washington" laid the foundations of
his political education. That he read with his imagination as well as
with his eyes is clear from certain words spoken in the Senate Chamber
at Trenton in 1861. "May I be pardoned," said Mr. Lincoln, "if on this
occasion I mention that way back in my childhood, the earliest days of
my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few
of the members have ever seen,--Weems's 'Life of Washington.' I
remember all the accounts there given of the battle-fields and
struggles for the liberties of the country; and none fixed themselves
upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New
Jersey. The crossing of the river, the contest with the Hessians, the
great hardships endured at that time,--all fixed themselves on my
memory more than any single Revolutionary event; and you all know, for
you have all been boys, how those early impressions last longer than
any others."
"When Abe and I returned to the house from work," writes John Hanks,
"he would go to the cupboard, snatch a piece of corn bread, sit down,
take a book, cock his legs up as high as his head, and read. We
grubbed, plowed, weeded, and worked together barefooted in the field.
Whenever Abe had a chance in the field while at work, or at the house,
he would stop and read." And this habit was kept up until Mr. Lincoln
had found both his life work and his individual expression. Later he
devoured Shakespeare and Burns; and the poetry of these masters of the
dramatic and lyric form, sprung like himself from the common soil,
and like him self-trained and directed, furnished a kind of running
accompaniment to his work and his play. What he read he not only held
tenaciously, but took into his imagination and incorporated into
himself. His familiar talk was enriched with frequent and striking
illustrations from the Bible and "Æsop's Fables."
This passion for knowledge and for companionship with the great
writers would have gone for nothing, so far as the boy's training in
expression was concerned, if he had contented himself with
acquisition; but he turned everything to account. He was as eager for
expression as for the material of expression; more eager to write and
to talk than to read. Bits of paper, stray sheets, even boards served
his purpose. He was continually transcribing with his own hand
thoughts or phrases which had impressed him. Everything within reach
bore evidence of his passion for reading, and for writing as well. The
flat sides of logs, the surface of the broad wooden shovel, everything
in his vicinity which could receive a legible mark, was covered with
his figures and letters. He was studying expression quite as
intelligently as he was searching for thought. Years afterwards, when
asked how he had attained such extraordinary clearness of style, he
recalled his early habit of retaining in his memory words or phrases
overheard in ordinary conversation or met in books and newspapers,
until night, meditating on them until he got at their meaning, and
then translating them into his own simpler speech. This habit, kept up
for years, was the best possible training for the writing of such
English as one finds in the Bible and in "The Pilgrim's Progress." His
self-education in the art of expression soon bore fruit in a local
reputation both as a talker and a writer. His facility in rhyme and
essay-writing was not only greatly admired by his fellows, but
awakened great astonishment, because these arts were not taught in the
neighboring schools.
In speech too he was already disclosing that command of the primary
and universal elements of interest in human intercourse which was to
make him, later, one of the most entertaining men of his time. His
power of analyzing a subject so as to be able to present it to others
with complete clearness was already disclosing itself. No matter how
complex a question might be, he did not rest until he had reduced it
to its simplest terms. When he had done this he was not only eager to
make it clear to others, but to give his presentation freshness,
variety, attractiveness. He had, in a word, the literary sense. "When
he appeared in company," writes one of his early companions, "the boys
would gather and cluster around him to hear him talk. Mr. Lincoln was
figurative in his speech, talks and conversation. He argued much from
analogy, and explained things hard for us to understand by stories,
maxims, tales and figures. He would almost always point his lesson or
idea by some story that was plain and near to us, that we might
instantly see the force and bearing of what he said."
In that phrase lies the secret of the closeness of Mr. Lincoln's words
to his theme and to his listeners,--one of the qualities of genuine,
original expression. He fed himself with thought, and he trained
himself in expression; but his supreme interest was in the men and
women about him, and later, in the great questions which agitated
them. He was in his early manhood when society was profoundly moved by
searching which could neither be silenced nor evaded; and his lot was
cast in a section where, as a rule, people read little and talked
much. Public speech was the chief instrumentality of political
education and the most potent means of persuasion; but behind the
platform, upon which Mr. Lincoln was to become a commanding figure,
were countless private debates carried on at street corners, in hotel
rooms, by the country road, in every place where men met even in the
most casual way. In these wayside schools Mr. Lincoln practiced the
art of putting things until he became a past-master in debate, both
formal and informal.
If all these circumstances, habits and conditions are studied in their
entirety, it will be seen that Mr. Lincoln's style, so far as its
formal qualities are concerned, is in no sense accidental or even
surprising. He was all his early life in the way of doing precisely
what he did in his later life with a skill which had become instinct.
He was educated, in a very unusual way, to speak for his time and to
his time with perfect sincerity and simplicity; to feel the moral
bearing of the questions which were before the country; to discern the
principles involved; and to so apply the principles to the questions
as to clarify and illuminate them. There is little difficulty in
accounting for the lucidity, simplicity, flexibility, and compass of
Mr. Lincoln's style; it is not until we turn to its temperamental and
spiritual qualities, to the soul of it, that we find ourselves
perplexed and baffled.
But Mr. Lincoln's possession of certain rare qualities is in no way
more surprising than their possession by Shakespeare, Burns, and
Whitman. We are constantly tempted to look for the sources of a man's
power in his educational opportunities instead of in his temperament
and inheritance. The springs of genius are purified and directed in
their flow by the processes of training, but they are fed from deeper
sources. The man of obscure ancestry and rude surroundings is often in
closer touch with nature, and with those universal experiences which
are the very stuff of literature, than the man who is born on the
upper reaches of social position and opportunity. Mr. Lincoln's
ancestry for at least two generations were pioneers and frontiersmen,
who knew hardship and privation, and were immersed in that great wave
of energy and life which fertilized and humanized the central West.
They were in touch with those original experiences out of which the
higher evolution of civilization slowly rises; they knew the soil and
the sky at first hand; they wrested a meagre subsistence out of the
stubborn earth by constant toil; they shared to the full the
vicissitudes and weariness of humanity at its elemental tasks.
It was to this nearness to the heart of a new country, perhaps, that
Mr. Lincoln owed his intimate knowledge of his people and his deep and
beautiful sympathy with them. There was nothing sinuous or secondary
in his processes of thought: they were broad, simple, and homely in
the old sense of the word. He had rare gifts, but he was rooted deep
in the soil of the life about him, and so completely in touch with it
that he divined its secrets and used its speech. This vital sympathy
gave his nature a beautiful gentleness, and suffused his thought with
a tenderness born of deep compassion and love. He carried the sorrows
of his country as truly as he bore its burdens; and when he came to
speak on the second immortal day at Gettysburg, he condensed into a
few sentences the innermost meaning of the struggle and the victory in
the life of the nation. It was this deep heart of pity and love in him
which carried him far beyond the reaches of statesmanship or oratory,
and gave his words that finality of expression which marks the noblest
art.
That there was a deep vein of poetry in Mr. Lincoln's nature is clear
to one who reads the story of his early life; and this innate
idealism, set in surroundings so harsh and rude, had something to do
with his melancholy. The sadness which was mixed with his whole life
was, however, largely due to his temperament; in which the final
tragedy seemed always to be predicted. In that temperament too is
hidden the secret of the rare quality of nature and mind which
suffused his public speech and turned so much of it into literature.
There was humor in it, there was deep human sympathy, there was clear
mastery of words for the use to which he put them; but there was
something deeper and more pervasive,--there was the quality of his
temperament; and temperament is a large part of genius. The inner
forces of his nature played through his thought; and when great
occasions touched him to the quick, his whole nature shaped his speech
and gave it clear intelligence, deep feeling, and that beauty which is
distilled out of the depths of the sorrows and hopes of the world. He
was as unlike Burke and Webster, those masters of the eloquence of
statesmanship, as Burns was unlike Milton and Tennyson. Like Burns, he
held the key of the life of his people; and through him, as through
Burns, that life found a voice, vibrating, pathetic, and persuasive.
[3] _By permission of R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill Co._