I

CHAPTER I

It Can Give You an Outlet

CAN remember," says Abraham Lincoln,

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'going to my little bedroom after hearing the

neighbours talk of an evening with my father, and spending no small part of the night walking up and down and trying to make out what was the exact meaning of their, to me, dark sayings. I could not sleep, though I often tried to, when I got on such a hunt after an idea, until I had caught it; and when I thought I had got it, I was not satisfied until I had repeated it over and over, until I had put it into language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to comprehend."

Of all the incidents in Lincoln's life this has always seemed to me the most remarkable. That a boy of his years should have felt so keenly the burden of the inexpressible and should have spent sleepless hours in attempting to free himself from this burden seems at first glance to remove Lin

coln from the class of normal men. We think of him as peculiar, as apart from other boys, as not so representative as he would have been if he had gone straight to bed and not bothered himself about putting into definite words the thoughts that were busy in his brain.

But, explain it as we may, the desire for selfexpression in clear words is universal. Lincoln had it to a greater degree than most boys or most men. But all have it. We are often not conscious of it, but as soon as we read or hear our own thoughts better expressed than we could express them, we realize at once that they are our own thoughts and that we are the better and stronger for their adequate expression.

It was this passion for self-expression that made Lincoln one of the great spokesmen of his age. It enabled him to say in many letters and speeches what others were beginning to feel but could not express. It made him one of the great masters of English prose. He became a leader of men because he interpreted them to themselves. He gave back as rain what he received as mist.

Take his Gettysburg speech: "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty,

and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

"But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall

have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Why is this literature and why is Edward Everett's two-hour speech on the same occasion not literature? Let us picture the scene: There were men, women, and children in that audience who had lost brothers, sons, husbands, and fathers on the very ground on which they now stood. It was to them a holy place. It did not suggest to their minds vexed political questions; it suggested memories that were almost too sacred for words. What these people needed was a spokesman who should put into fitting words the dumb emotions that filled every heart, and this is what Lincoln did. He put their emotions into language "plain enough for any boy I knew to comprehend." But he did more. He expressed what all of us feel when we stand on a spot hallowed by heroic self-sacrifice. It may be a battlefield of victory or an equally glorious battlefield of defeat; it may be the birthplace or the grave or the home of a great man. The important thing for us is to feel anew the ennobling, the dedicating influence of the place itself. The man who can put this universal feeling into universal words not only

creates universal literature, but becomes a universal benefactor.

This is just what Edward Everett did not do. He did not speak for the audience, but to them. He entered into a long argument as to the relation of the federal government to the state governments. "Your argument," wrote Lincoln, "was new to me, and, as I think, is one of the best arguments for the national supremacy." Everett replied: "I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion in two hours as you did in two minutes."

Now what Lincoln did for the Gettysburg audience, the great poets and prose writers, the masters of literature, have done for mankind at large. A poet is a man who feels as we feel but has the gift of expression. Literature includes all writings that express for us what we consciously or unconsciously feel the need of saying but cannot. It includes the prose and verse that find us at most points, that take our half-formed thoughts, our suppressed moods, our stifled desires, and lead them out into harmony and completeness.

It is different with arithmetic or geometry.