Abraliain. Lincoln
TT is a remarkable tribute to the stamina of Lineoln'S fame that Mr. Carl Sandburg's work on the great President should be followed within two or three years by Senator Beveridge's study, an achievement of even ampler ProPortions.* Sandburg,. in Well over a thouSand pages, got no further than Lineoln's first election to the White Houk in 1860. Senator Beveridge in over thirteen hundred had arrived only at the Lineoln-DOuglaS debates of 1858, when his sudden death brOught. to close at the end of his second volume a work that was to haye been completed in four. " • . In writing of Mr, "Sandburg's book, Iyentured to say that it might come to be regarded as the first great epic of the American people. I still 'think that ;" and' yet I have just read Senator Beveridge's` monumental volumes .without feeling that they are in any way 'a .superfluity. It Might well have seemeirthat 'what had been done so finely could not be thine again even tolerably , • • . • .• for at least another generation: But against all the „ , Odds, a. new mind has almoSt simultaneously applied itself to the same task, and made an unequivocal suctess of it.
Yet not, perhaps, quite unequivocal. Ccimparisons' in so rare a case'as 'this need not be avoided ; they should, indeed, be enlightening. Mr. Sandburg, 'in- his 'Lincoln, displayed an indefatigable gift for detail. ' But Mi. Sandburg is also a poet' of original if somewhat diffidult genius. The idiom that he employed in his Lincoln book demanded sonic adjustment Of our minds 'before We were able to accept it ; but once this Was made, we found his vastly unconfined scheMe 'revealing the Unity that" infornis a work of art—and his boa" was conViricingly 'that —a great work of art. -A poet had -eonceived' and imposed 'Upon its creation a Strict and memorable design.
Senator Beveridge was not a poet, and with Mr. Sand- burg's example inevitably in Mind, the limitation asserts itself in. one essential' respect as we read this new study. Senator Beveridge " deyoted years of infinite painsto the work, making an entirely fresh investigation of the immense documentary' and oral- evidence available. - • His aim was to pregeilt the facts, the almost inexhaustible facts, and to let them. speak 'for' theMielvd.- -He accordingly contrived, with- masterly' determination, toerpolate hardly an observationobservationof his own • int• • Abraham Lincoln, By Albert J. Beveridge. cols. (Gal. lanes. 50s. - - - • - - in his narrative. And his narrative, for all its length, is absorbing, such is the magnetism of his subject,. and• such the candour and clarity with which _he ap- proaches it. Nevertheless, we do. feel now and again that it is too long. The crowded detail that.- somehow Mr. 'Sandburg subdued to an artistic end, occasionally slips out of Senator Beveridge's control and sprays off into an indeterminate mist. It is difficult, it may be impossible, to illustrate the feeling by specific example, but the, feeling is there. I can only say that. while I found myself tied throughout to Mr. Sandburg's story line .by line, there have been pages—not many pages, but some—of Senator Beveridge's. that .I have turned over at a glance.
This reservation made, nothing is left but to admire, and since Lincoln is a theme of the first importance in our modern world, it is difficult to think of any intellec-. tual way in which a modern reader could more profitably lay out fifty shillings than in the purchase of these enthral- ling volumes. And Mr. Sandburg or no Mr. Sandburg, Senator Beveridge has points very decidedly of his own. The early years of Lincoln's life, the log-cabin and Kentucky-pioneering and Illinois-trekking years are on the whole given more beautifully by Mr. Sandburg, though Senator BeVeridge deals with them convincingly and on a large scale. Also, from the time that Lincoln began to be known as a political figure of importance in Illinois, with faint presages of national stature, the honours are, perhaps, with the poet. But the profoundly significant and formative period when Lincoln was a circuit lawyer shaping a hope of which he was himself hardly aware, and of which the world—even the little world of Springfield—knew nothing whatever, Senator Beveridge has given us an account that easily supersedes any that has been given before. And since to this period he devoted a large part of the two volumes that he had completed at his death, we may say that he his made an addition of capital importance to the literature of the most arresting topic in American history.
It was in 1832, when Lincoln was twenty-three years old, , that he issued his first address to the electors of Sangamon County in Illinois, asking their support in his candidature for the State legislature. At the moment he was out of a_ job, having hitherto earned a scanty living as store-clerk, day labourer, boatman, anything that turned up. He had nothing to recommend him but native wit and character, a little book learning that he was diligently augmenting, and a local reputation for honesty. It was not enough to secure election for him at the first attempt, but he was already something of a figure in the pioneer society of which he was to prove himself the most notable. product.
. It is easy. for us, who know, to see shadowy outlines of the matured Lincoln in the youth of twenty-three. A few more furrows in the face already marked by weather and ,endurance and contemplation, a little heavier stoop in, the loose-limbed athletic frame, and we have the man who twenty-six years later was trailing Douglas through Illinois, and being noted by an ardent young Republican thus :— " Lincciln wore a somewhat battered stove-pipe hat. His neck emerged, long and sinewy, from a white collar turned down over a thin black necktie. His lank ungainly body was clad in a rusty black dress-coat with sleeves that should have been longer. . . . His black trousers, too, permitted a very full view of his large feet. On his left arm he carried a gray woollen shawl, which evidently served him for an overcoat in chilly weather. His left hand held cotton umbrella of the bulging kind, and also a black satchel that bore the marks of long and hard usage."
In the gift of nimble repartee that always drew a highly diverted company whenever " Abe"- was in his gossip, we see shaping the wit that was later to serve him so per- fectly in debate, as, for example, when he said of the method used by his opponent in argument that it was of the kind by which you could prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse. . In the moods of abstraction that already caused his friends sometimes to speak of him as " peculiarsome,". we see, thus early, signs of the almost supernatural melancholy that was to be remarked by all observers in the days of his greatness, and already, too, we find these moods broken by sudden bursts of horse- play humour. And, finally, in the homely and logical sincerity with which this boy was able to hold the hard-. bitten, settlers of Sangamon County, we see intimations, of the astonishing power that caused Herndon, in speaking of one of his great speeches in the late 'fifties, to exclaim that " Lincoln that day was seven feet high."
Though Lincoln failed in his first candidature, his ambitions from that time were fixed on politics. Through the long term of his successful practice as a lawyer, he never allowed business necessities to obscure the hope that one day he might take a part in government—indeed, he frequently allowed the hope to obscure the necessities. It is in the development of this theme that Senator Beveridge achieves a masterpiece of analysis, and genuinely throws a new light on Lincoln's character. The Illinois prairie boy made his first little political adventure in .1832 ; it was not until 1858 that he began to emerge as an influence in national politics. He then attracted notice as an influential voice on the stump of the new Republican party ; and two years later he became President of the United States. In the intervening twenty-eight years he knew a few electioneering triumphs, but many severe reverses, and he frequently fell into a dejected assurance that his political career was at an end. As late as 1858, his defeat by Douglas for the Senate -left him with* better hope than to " fight in the ranks " of Republicanism; and no more than a fancy that perhaps sooner or later his work 'might Come to something. The real value. of Senator Beveridge's work is-that it shows, in admirably 'arranged detail, the processes by which Lincoln's mind gradually found its way through the • intrigues and jealousies and narrowness of small town politics to the_ profound and disinterested statesmanship • that was to give to the modern world one of its least vulnerable heroes.
• - Senator Beveridge, in one of his rare 'generalizations, gives us the key to Lincoln's political mind in a single • illuminating sentence " He neither led nor retarded mass-movements, but accurately registered them." That sees right to thetruth of the matter ; it was as the great moderate, passionately realizing the extremes between which he himself remained so steadfastly fixed, that Lincoln ruled and represented his age in America. But the path to this position was strewn with vicissitudes, spiritual no less than material. There was a fine and eager breath of creative courage in the pioneer world from which Lincoln' sprang, and in which he spent all but the closing years of his life, and there was a generous display of human _virtues in the rough. But as this society began to organize itself to the political modes of current civilization, it caught the vices of those modes . in their worst form. The story that Senator Beveridge tells of crossing and dotible-crossing, malice, terrorism, and treachery in the State factions among which Lincoln got his political education,. is one that makes very un- lovely reading. And as we follow it we realize, on evidence that Senator Beveridge presents • ConclusiVely, that for many years Lincoln took his part in this unworthy gaine according to its deplorable rulea: It is true that all the time there was something about him that distinguished him from most of his rivals' and . . • . • . colleagues, • The fact that he Was " honest " Abe Lincoln was; in that environment, so striking as to become in time the most effective election cry- raised by his national following. But even the honesty sometimes took on an unfamiliar hue. At one early period of his career Lincoln, was an adept at writing anonymous letters to a Springfield journal on which he had influence, therein prosecuting his campaigns with quite indefensible personalities. Every- body who had the chance did the same thing, no doubt and it was only when he received a severe and humiliating reproof that Lincoln began to wonder whether the prac- tice was quite honourable. Once he considered the question he decided that it was not, and never lent himself to it again. Our opinion of Lincoln is not lessened by such circumstances, but they are significant. They show that he was not a perfectly equipped hero from the first, Standing in lonely moral eminence above the more squalid aspects of the society into which he was born. When he reached his full stature, and had survived the controversies upon State rights and slavery with a spirit that could devise the Second Inaugural, his was, perhaps, the most wholly uncontaminated political intelligence of modern times. If there was ever a saint in political office it was the Lincoln of 1863. But he came to his apotheosis by no easy way. It was only after a long struggle with mean and little things, in which the dirt of sordid conflict not seldom clung to his own labouring soul, that he came through to the serene vision and utter selflessness of his closing years. It is the winning of this victory that Senator Beveridge tells as it has not been told before, and every reader will lament that the author did not live to carry his great work through to the end.
JOHN DRINKWATER.
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