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
pass a word with, or watch him, personally, perhaps twenty or thirty
times), added to and annealed my respect and love at the passing
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
class--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 spaciousness 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?" Washington was modeled on the best Saxon and Franklin of the
age of the Stuarts (rooted in the Elizabethan period)--was essentially
a noble 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 circumstances, 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 passion or infatuation in the man was the
passion 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._