II. Three of Our Conquerors
The Poetical Cult of Lincoln
When Secretary Stanton at the bedside of Lincoln declared that the dead man now belonged to the ages, he had a vision which was probably not without melodrama, not without the large pomp and plumage which went in the sixties with the expectation of renown. He must have seen rows of ample bronze statues in innumerable parks, where togaed or equestrian Lincolns would look blandly down, mindful of the dignity of history, upon a reverent people hushed in part by the very weight of the metal which commemorated the great man. It is after all too much to have hoped from Stanton that he could foresee how familiar fame would be with Lincoln, how colloquially it would treat him on the one hand, and on the other how quickly it would make him out not an iron demigod, or a wooden hero, but a friendly saint, an immanent presence, a continual comforter. Richard Henry Stoddard, in his Horation Ode written almost at the first news, was not even sure that Lincoln was great: he saw in him a curious epitome of the people, a genius who had risen from them yet safely stood above their variable antipathies and affections. A consciousness of class sounds also in Lowell’s more impassioned lines, though the Commemoration Ode perceives the nation not as divided within itself into grades and ranks but as united upon a common ground of simple humanity against the ingenuities and insubstantialities of feudal caste. It remained for Whitman to disregard all thought of Lincoln’s modest origins and to utter, without argument or doctrine, the intimate grief of the great American poet of the age for the great American leader, the cautious-handed, gentle, plain, just, resolute, the sweetest, wisest soul, the natural captain who had brought in the victor ship from her fearful voyage.
No such memorable utterance rendered at the moment, or has rendered since, proper tribute to the aspects of Lincoln which on the whole have most touched the daily memories of his fellow-countrymen: his habit of humour and his habit of pardons. Everywhere in the North, but particularly on his own frontier, he was, even in 1865, reputed for his mirth—for his illuminating repartee and his swift, homely, pertinent apologues. Lincoln stories multiplied, many of them gathered year by year in tolerant volumes which paid no attention to any canon; and still others, often too indelicate for type, clustered about his name through their casual ascription to him by narrators who wanted the effect of his authority. Our folk-lore is permeated with anecdotes of this description. And side by side with them go other tales of a sentimental sort, tales of wives who went begging to him for the lives of their husbands under military sentence, and of plain, dull, sad old mothers who pled—never in vain by the popular records—for sons who had slept on sentry post almost in the face of the enemy. Of all folk-heroes Lincoln most strikingly unites a reputation for wit with a reputation for mercy. The American folk has done nothing more imaginative, and nothing more revealing, than to build up this tender, merry myth.
In the hands of our newest poets, however, the myth is changing both outlines and dimensions. Lincoln’s laughter has lost something of its rusticity since we have ceased to live so close to frontier conditions. To Edwin Arlington Robinson, who has cut as in steel his conception of Lincoln the smiling god, the laconic Olympian, that laughter was only a cryptic mirth with which a sage met the rancour of blind gentlemen, sullen children who had to be taught what they could not understand until it should be too late to acknowledge that their master had after all been right and they pitifully wrong. The homespun mantle which Lincoln originally wore in the myth has entirely fallen away, as Mr. Robinson perceives him; and with it have gone both the buffoonery of so much of the popular tradition and the sentimental humanitarianism. What survives is the elemental, ancient matter of heroic genius and wisdom. By this sense of the cosmic elements which shaped his hero Mr. Robinson stands in the centre of the latest Lincoln cult, a cult which has the distinction of bringing the most revolutionary and most reactionary poets together to pay equal honours to the sole American whom they all agree to honour.
Lowell struck this note tentatively when he spoke of the sweet clay from the West out of which nature had chosen to fashion the new hero who should be less a lonely mountain-peak than a broad, genial, friendly prairie. Edwin Markham more fully analyzed him: the tried clay of the common road, warmed by the earth, and dashed through with prophecy and laughter; the colour and tang and odour of primal substances, with a dozen virtues caught from external nature. This rhetoric John Gould Fletcher translates into a subtler language in his massive image of Lincoln as a gaunt, scraggly pine which has its roots so deep down in the very foundations of human life, in the old unshakable wisdom and knowledge and goodness and happiness, that wind and weather cannot hurt it and that a nation of men may safely rest in its shade.
The image is finely illustrative of a common attitude taken toward Lincoln during the late war, when men constantly turned to him, more by far than most people realized, for words which would quiet their bitter fears and doubts, and for instructions how to act in a time so nearly parallel to his. He was the symbol and seal of American unity; he was the American proof that greatness may emerge from the people; he was the American evidence that supreme nobility may come very close to normal love and comprehension. Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln’s own Springfield, gave true voice to this feeling in the poem which speaks of Lincoln as so stirred even in death by the horrors which alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down through the midnight streets, mourning and brooding over the violent dangers as in the days when he himself bore the burden of a similar, however smaller, strife. It is precisely thus, in less critical ages, that saints are said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the waves or turn the arrow aside. These more vulgar manifestations Mr. Lindsay naturally did not use. Lincoln as he walks at midnight is only the desire of living hearts realized, the apparition for a moment in its bodily vesture of a spirit too precious ever to have become merely a memory. He lives as the father of every cult lives, in the echoes of his voice on many tongues and the vibrations of his presence in many hearts. For poetry such a cult offers an enormous future as yet only just suspected. Our poets have a folk-hero who to the common folk-virtues of shrewdness and kindness adds essential wit and eloquence and loftiness of soul. Perhaps the disposition just now to purge him of all rankness and to make him out a saint and mystic may not last for ever, but obviously it is a step in his poetical history analogous to those steps which ennobled Charlemagne and Arthur and canonized Joan of Arc.