Every time I happen to turn to the Gettysburg Address I am saddened to
find that, after many years of practice, my own literary style is still
strikingly inferior to that of Lincoln at his best. The fact was first
brought home to me during my sophomore year.
(Incidentally I would remark that the opportunities for consulting the
Gettysburg Address occur frequently in a newspaper office. Every little
while, in the lull between editions, a difference of opinion will arise
as to what Lincoln said at Gettysburg. Some maintain that he said, "a
government of the people, for the people, by the people"; some declare
he said, "a government by the people, of the people, for the people";
some assert that he said, "a government by the people, for the people,
of the people." Obviously the only way out is to make a pool and look
up Nicolay and Hay. When we are not betting on Lincoln's famous phrase,
we differ as to whether the first words in Cæsar are "Gallia omnis est
divisa," or "Omnis Gallia est divisa," or "Omnis Gallia divisa est." We
all remember the "partes tres.")
In my sophomore year we used to write daily themes. We were then at the
beginning of the revolt from the stilted essay to the realistic form of
undergraduate style. Instead of writing about what we had read in De
Quincey or Matthew Arnold, we were asked to write about what we had seen
on the Elevated or on the campus. I presume this literary method has
triumphed in all the colleges, just as I know that the new school of
college oratory has quite displaced the old. Instead of arguing whether
Greece had done more for civilisation than Rome, sophomores now debate
the question, "Resolved, that the issue of 4-1/2 per cent. convertible
State bonds is unjustified by prevailing conditions in the European
money market." So with our daily themes. We did not write about
patriotism or Shakespeare's use of contrast. We wrote about football,
about the management of the lunch-room, about the need of more call-boys
in the library.
The underlying idea was sensible enough. But it was disheartening to
have a daily theme come back drenched in red ink to show where one's
prose rhythm had broken down or the relative pronouns had run too thick.
Our instructors were good men. They did not content themselves with
pointing out our sins against style; they would show us how much more
skilfully the English language could be used. When I wrote: "That the
new improvements that have been made in the new gymnasium that has just
been inaugurated are all that are necessary," my instructor would pick
up the Gettysburg Address and read out aloud: "But in a larger sense, we
cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground."
Sometimes he would pick up the Bible and read out aloud:
For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have
slept: then had I been at rest,
With kings and counsellors of the earth, which built desolate
places for themselves.
Sometimes he would read from Keats's "Grecian Urn," or ask me, by
implication, why I could not frame a concrete image like "Look'd at each
other with a wild surmise, Silent upon a peak in Darien."
Even then I laboured under a sense of injustice. I could not help
thinking that the comparison would have been more fair if I had had a
chance to speak at Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln had had to write about
the new gymnasium. I thought how the red ink would have splashed if I
had ended a sentence with a comma like Job, or had said "kings and
counsellors which." Are there still sophomores whom they drill in
writing about the prospects of the hockey team and to whom they read
"The Fall of the House of Usher," as an example of what can be done with
the English language? And do some of them do what some of us, in
desperation, used to do? We cheated. We worked ourselves up into
ecstasies of false emotion over the hockey team or pretended to see
things in Central Park which we never saw. I always think of Central
Park with bitterness. We were to write a description of what we saw as
we stood on the Belvedere looking north. I wrote a faithful catalogue of
what I saw, and the instructor picked up "Les Misérables" and read me
the story of the last charge over the sunken road at Waterloo. I should
have done what one of the other men did. He never went to Central Park.
He stayed at home and, looking straight north from the Belvedere, he saw
the sun setting in the west, and Mr. Carnegie's new mansion to the east,
and the towers of St. Patrick directly behind him. He saw it all so
vividly, so harmoniously, that they marked him A. I got C+. Is it any
wonder that I cannot even now read the Gettysburg Address without a
twinge of resentment?
And yet we were fortunate in one way. In those days they read the
Gettysburg Address to us as a model, and in spite of our resentment our
sophomore hearts caught the glory and the awe of it. But in those days
the art of text-book writing had not attained its present perfection,
and the Gettysburg Address had not yet been edited as a classic with
twenty pages of introduction and I don't know how many foot-notes. Am I
wrong in supposing that somewhere in the high schools or the colleges
this is what the young soul finds in the Gettysburg Address?:
Fourscore and seven years[1] ago our fathers[2] brought forth on
this continent[3] a new nation,[4] conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition[5] that all men are created equal.[6]
Now we are engaged in a great civil war,[7] testing whether that
nation,[8] or any nation so conceived and so dedicated,[9] can
long endure. We are met on a great battlefield[10] of that war.