Why Lincoln Laughed Part 7

And I resoomed my jerney.

HIGH-HANDED OUTRAGE AT UTICA

In the Faul of 1856, I showed my show in Utiky, a trooly grate sitty in the State of New York.

The people gave me a cordyal recepshun. The press was loud in her prases.

1 day as I was givin a descripshun of my Beests and Snaiks in my usual flowry stile what was my skorn disgust to see a big burly feller walk up to the cage containin my wax figgers of the Lord's Last Supper, and cease Judas Iscarrot by the feet and drag him out on the ground. He then commenced fur to pound him as hard as he cood.

"What under the son are you abowt?" cried I.

Sez he, "What did you bring this p.u.s.s.ylanermus cuss here fur?" and he hit the wax figger another tremenjis blow on the hed.

Sez I, "You egrejus a.s.s, that air's a wax figger--a representashun of the false 'Postle."

Sez he, "That's all very well for you to say, but I tell you, old man, that Judas Iscarrot can't show hisself in Utiky with impunerty by a darn site!" with which observashun he kaved in Juda.s.sis bed. The young man belonged to 1 of the first famerlies in Utiky. I sood him, and the Joory brawt in a verd.i.c.k of Arson in the 3d degree.

Chapter VII: Why Lincoln Loved Laughter

Only once in the course of our long and rambling conversation did Lincoln refer to the war. That was when he asked me how the soldiers' spirits were keeping up. He said he had been giving out so much cheer to the generals and Congressmen that he had pumped himself dry and must take in a new supply from some source at once. He declared that his "ear bones ached" to hear a good peal of honest laughter. It was difficult, he said, to laugh in any acceptable manner when soldiers were dying and widows weeping, but he must laugh soon even if he had to go down cellar to do it. He asked me if I had thought how sacred a thing was a loving smile, and how important it often was to laugh. Then he told how some Union officers in reconnoitering had heard the Confederates laughing loudly over a game, and returned cast down with fear of some sudden and successful attack by the cheerful enemy. That laughter actually postponed a great battle for which the Union soldiers had been prepared.

When, as I later ascertained, I had been with the President for almost two hours, he suddenly straightened up in his chair, remarked that he "felt much better now," and with a friendly but firm, "Good morning," turned back to the papers before him on the table. This sounds abrupt as it is told, but there was a homeliness and simplicity about everything Lincoln did which robbed the action of any suspicion of discourtesy. One does not shake hands with a member of his own family on merely quitting a room, and I felt that a ceremonious dismissal would have been equally uncalled for in this case. Perhaps I really should say that is the way I feel now; at the time I did not think of the matter at all because what was done seemed perfectly natural and proper.

In the anteroom the crowd was greater, if anything, than when I had gone in. Among those callers there were certain to be some who would bring trouble and vexation aplenty to the President. It was in preparation for this that he had been resting himself, like a boxer between the rounds of a bout. One would make a great error by supposing that Lincoln's normal manner was that which he had exhibited to me. He could be soft and tender-hearted as any woman, but within that kindly nature there lay gigantic strength and the capacity for the most decisive action. He could speak slowly and weigh his words when occasion demanded, but his usual manner was vigorous and prompt--so much so that at times his speech had a quality which might fairly be described as explosive.

This was because he always knew exactly what he wanted to say. He thought out each problem to the end and decided it; then he left that and did not trouble his mind about it any more, but took up something else. This habit of disciplined thinking gave him a great advantage over most people, who mix their thinking and try to carry on a dozen mental processes all at once.

Lincoln realized the importance of mental discipline and he gave to humor a high place as an aid to its attainment. I have already told how, in discussing Artemus Ward with me, he said Ward was really an educator, for he understood that the purpose of education was to discipline the mind, to enable a man to think quickly and accurately in all circ.u.mstances of life.

I hope the reader will bear with me if I repeat some of the points which Lincoln made then, because they show so clearly why he valued humor.

Lincoln said that much of Ward's humor was of the educational sort. It aroused intellectual activity of the finest kind, and he mentioned Ward's constant use of riddles as an ill.u.s.tration. Then he spoke of the ancient Samson riddle and the fables of aesop, and called attention to the fact that they employed a joke to train the mind by the study of keen satire.

He said Ward was like that. It seems that Tad came to Ward at the table one day after he had heard somewhere a joke about Adam in Eden. So he said to Mr. Ward, "How did Adam get out of Eden?"

Ward had never heard the conundrum and did not give the answer Tad expected, but he had one of his own, for he exclaimed "Adam was 'snaked'

out." It took Tad some little time to fathom this reply and gave him some splendid mental exercise. Mr. Lincoln said he did not see why they did not have a course of humor in the schools. It was characteristic of his great modesty that whenever he referred to school or to college Lincoln always tried to limit himself by saying that, as he did not know what they did learn there, he was not an authority on the subject, but that such-and-such a thing was just "his notion."

If discipline was a subjective purpose in Lincoln's use of humor, it may be said with equal certainty that the ill.u.s.trative power of a well-told story was the princ.i.p.al objective use to which he put it. Lincoln seems never to have told a story simply to relate it; everyone he told had an application aside from the story itself. There is something profoundly elemental about this; it is like the use of the parable in the teachings of Christ.

Astute minds, capable of grasping the meaning of facts without ill.u.s.tration, sometimes resented this habit of the President's; some of the sharpest criticism, as might be expected, came from within the Cabinet itself; but there can certainly be no just foundation for the statement that Lincoln detained a full session of the Cabinet to read them two chapters in Artemus Ward's book. He was not frivolous or shallow. His reverence for great men, for great thoughts, and for great occasions was most sensitively acute. He recognized the fact that "brevity is the soul of wit," and would not have done more than use a condensed and brief reference to Ward, at most. We know that on another occasion he made most effective use at a Cabinet meeting of Ward's burlesque on Shaw patriotism when he quoted Ward as saying that he "was willing, if need be, to sacrifice all his wife's relations for his country."

An even better example of the President's use of humor is the following story which he once told to ill.u.s.trate the military situation existing at the time. A bull was chasing a farmer around a tree. The farmer finally got hold of the bull's tail, and both started off across the field. The farmer could not let go for fear he would fall and break his head, but he called out to the bull, "Who started this mess, anyway?" Lincoln said he had gotten hold of the bull by the tail and that while the Confederacy was running away he dared not let go. This summed up the situation in a way the whole country could understand.

It is an interesting fact, and one not generally known, that Lincoln committed almost every good story he heard to writing. If his old notebooks could be found they would make a wonderful volume, but, unfortunately, they have never come to light. Perhaps he felt ashamed of them, as he did of his rough draft of the Gettysburg address, which he had scribbled on the margin of a newspaper in the morning while riding to Gettysburg on the train.

There was one source of Lincoln's humor--and perhaps it was the chief one--which flowed from the very bedrock of his nature. That was the desire to bring cheer to others. When he was pa.s.sing through the very Valley of the Shadow after the tragic end of the single love affair of his youth a true friend told him that he had no right to look so glum--that it "was his solemn duty to be cheerful," to cheer up others. Young Abe took the lesson to heart, and he never forgot it. Incidentally, it was the means of restoring him to health and probably of preserving his sanity--as the old saint who gave him the lecture no doubt intended that it should.

In their common experience of an awful grief and in their ability to rise above its devastation purged of selfishness and devoted to a career of service, each according to his own gifts, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Farrar Browne had followed the same path, and it was from this that there sprang that deep and true bond of sympathy between the two men which mystified so many even of those who considered themselves Lincoln's intimates. Where another saw but the cap and bells, Lincoln saw and reverenced the tortured, struggling soul within.

During our memorable talk on that December day in 1864 when the cares of state were pressing so sorely upon him, the President told me that he was greatly relieved in times of personal distress by trying to cheer up somebody else. He spoke of it as being both selfish and unselfish. He said he had been accused of telling thousands of stories he had never heard of, but that he told stories to cheer the downhearted and tried to remember stories that were cheerful to relate to people in discouraged circ.u.mstances. He reminded me that his first practice of the law was among very poor people. He tried to tell stories to his clients who were discouraged, to give them courage, and he found the habit grew upon him until he had to "draw in" and decline to use so many stories.

Bob Burdett, writing for the Burlington _Hawkeye_ shortly after the President's death on April 15, 1865, said that Abraham Lincoln's humorous anecdotes would soon die, but that Lincoln's humor, like John Brown's soul, would be ever "marching on." No printed story which he told ever expressed the soul of Lincoln fully. His own partial description of humor as "that indefinable, intangible grace of spirit," is not to be found exemplified in his published speeches. It is in the spirit which animated them rather than in the works themselves that we must look for the vital principle of Lincoln's humorous sayings.

To attempt the a.n.a.lysis of humor is as if a philosopher should try to put a glance of love into a geometrical diagram or the soul of music into a plaster cast. No one by searching can find it and no one by labor can secure it. Yet so simple, so homely, and withal so shrewd was the humor of Abraham Lincoln that one can easily picture him turning over in his mind the words of his favorite quotation from the "Merchant of Venice"--one of the few cla.s.sical quotations he ever used--while he reflected, half sadly, upon the cynicism and pettiness of mankind:

"Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time, Some that will evermore peep through their eyes And laugh like parrots at a bagpiper; And others of such vinegar aspect That they'll not show their teeth in way of smile Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable."

Chapter VIII: Lincoln and John Brown

"This is my friend!" said Lincoln, as he suddenly turned to a pile of books beside him and grasped a j.a.panese vase containing a large open pond lily. Some horticultural admirer, knowing Lincoln's love for that special flower, had sent in from his greenhouse a specimen of the _Castilia odorata_. The President put his left arm affectionately around the vase as he inclined his head to the lily and drew in the unequaled fragrance with a long, deep breath.

"I have never had the time to study flowers as I often wished to do," he said. "But for some strange reason I am captivated by the pond lily. It may be because some one told me that my mother admired them."

Sitting at this desk now, looking out on the Berkshire Hills and living over in memory that visit to the White House, I see again the tableau of the President looking down into the face of that glorious flower. He hugged the vase closer and repeated tenderly, "This is my friend!"

In reverie and in dreams I have meditated long, searching for some satisfactory reason why that particular bloom was Lincoln's dear friend.

Yet the reason, whatever it may be, matters not so much as the fact.

Lincoln loved the lily and called it his friend. No mere sensuous admiration of beauty, this, but a deep sense of its spiritual significance. By its perfection the lily achieved personality, and that personality, so simple, so pure, so exquisite, struck a responsive chord in the heart of this man whom his cultured contemporaries called uncouth!

On the plane of the spirit they met as friends.

Great gifts have their price. From Lincoln's sensitive tenderness sprang the suffering which he bore, both in his early life and during the living martyrdom of his years in the White House. But as if to offset somewhat this terrible burden was added the divine gift of humor.

It has been often remarked that humor and pathos are closely akin. The greatest humorists are also the greatest masters of pathos. Perhaps Mark Twain's greatest work was his _Joan of Arc_, which is almost wholly sad, a study in pathos, while _The Gilded Age_ makes its readers weep and laugh by turns.

As in the expression so also in the source. When Lincoln with tender emphasis said to me that Artemus Ward's humor was largely "the result of a broken heart," he was but stating the law of nature that deep sorrow is as essential to humor as winter snows are to the bloom of spring. Charles Lamb's many griefs, and especially his sorrow over his insane sister, were the black soil from which his genius grew.

Many of Josh Billings's ludicrous sayings were misspelled through his tears. The traceable outlines of tragedies in the early lives of writers like Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Bob Burdette, and Nasby testify to the rule that a sad night somewhere precedes the dawn of pure wit and inspiring humor.

Burton in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_ said, "If there is a h.e.l.l on earth, it is to be found in the melancholy man's heart." But James Whitcomb Riley said that "wit in luxuriant growth is ever the product of soil richly fertilized by sorrow." As for Lincoln, his first love died of a broken heart; he lived on with one.

"Cheer up, Abe! Cheer up!" was the hourly advice of the sympathetic pioneers among whom he lived. But the sorrowing stranger was, after all, friendless, and he could not cheer up alone. He was an orphan, homeless; he had no sister, no brother, no wife to soothe, advise, or caress him.

The floods of sorrow had swallowed him up and he struggled alone. Few, indeed, are the men or women who have descended so deep and endured to remember it.

Down into the darkness came faint voices saying over and over, "Cheer up, Abe!" If he could muster the courage to do as they said, he would be saved from death or the insane asylum, which is more dreaded than the grave.

Nothing but cheer could be of any use.

One dear old saint told him to remember that his sweetheart's soul was not dead, and that she, undoubtedly, wished him to complete his law studies and to make himself a strong, good man. "For her sake, go on with life and fill the years with good deeds!"

Years afterward he must have thought of that when, in the dark days of General McClelland's failures, he urged the soldiers to "cheer up and thus become invincible." Mr. Lincoln, in 1863, when speaking of his regard for the Bible, said that once he read the Bible half through carefully to find a quotation which he saw first in a sc.r.a.p of newspaper, which declared, "A merry heart doeth good like a medicine." That must have been done in those sad days when the darkness was still upon him.

How little has the world yet appreciated the important maxim given to those who seek success, "to smile and smile, and smile again." It is a very practical and a very useful direction. But it may be a hypocritical camouflage when it has no important reflex influence on the man himself.