第41章 THE STRANGE NEW MAN(3)

Meanwhile,despite all this semblance of indecision,of feebleness,there were signs that the real inner Lincoln,however clouded,was still alive.By way of offset to his fatuous utterances,there might have been set,had the Country been in a mood to weigh with care,several strong and clear pronouncements.And these were not merely telling phrases like that characteristic one about the bookkeeping of the front door.His mind was struggling out of its shadow.And the mode of its reappearance was significant.His reasoning upon the true meaning of the struggle he was about to enter,reached a significant stage in the speech he made at Harrisburg.[8]

"I have often inquired of myself,"he said,"what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy [the United States]so long together.It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland,but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty not alone to the people of the country but hope to all the world for all future time.It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men and that all should have an equal chance.This is the sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence.Now,my friends,can this country be saved on that basis?If it can,Iwill consider myself one of the happiest men in the world,if Ican help to save it.If it can not be saved upon that principle,it will be truly awful.But if this country can not be saved without giving up that principle,I was about to say Iwould rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.

Now,in my view of the present aspect of affairs,there is no need of bloodshed and war.There is no necessity for it I am not in favor of such a course,and I may say in advance that there will be no bloodshed unless it is forced upon the government.The government will not use force unless force is used against it."The two ideas underlying this utterance had grown in his thought steadily,consistently,ever since their first appearance in the Protest twenty-four years previous.The great issue to which all else--slavery,"dominion status,"everything--was subservient,was the preservation of democratic institutions;the means to that end was the preservation of the Federal government.Now,as in 1852,his paramount object was not to "disappoint the Liberal party throughout the world,"to prove that Democracy,when applied on a great scale,had yet sufficient coherence to remain intact,no matter how powerful,nor how plausible,were the forces of disintegration.

Dominated by this purpose he came to Washington.There he met Seward.It was the stroke of fate for both men.Seward,indeed,did not know that it was.He was still firmly based in the delusion that he,not Lincoln,was the genius of the hour.

And he had this excuse,that it was also the country's delusion.There was pretty general belief both among friends and foes that Lincoln would be ruled by his Cabinet.In a council that was certain to include leaders of accepted influence--Seward,Chase,Cameron--what chance for this untried newcomer,whose prestige had been reared not on managing men,but on uttering words?In Seward's thoughts the answer was as inevitable as the table of addition.Equally mathematical was the conclusion that only one unit gave value to the combination.And,of course,the leader of the Republicans in the Senate was the unit.A severe experience had to be lived through before Seward made his peace with destiny.Lincoln was the quicker to perceive when they came together that something had happened.Almost from the minute of their meeting,he began to lean upon Seward;but only in a certain way.This was not the same thing as that yielding to the practical advisers which began at Philadelphia,which was subsequently to be the cause of so much confusion.His response to Seward was intellectual.It was of the inner man and revealed itself in his style of writing.

Hitherto,Lincoln's progress in literature had been marked by the development of two characteristics and by the lack of a third.The two that he possessed were taste and rhythm.At the start he was free from the prevalent vice of his time,rhetoricality.His "Address to the Voters of Sangamon County"which was his first state paper,was as direct,as free from bombast,as the greatest of his later achievements.Almost any other youth who had as much of the sense of language as was there exhibited,would have been led astray by the standards of the hour,would have mounted the spread-eagle and flapped its wings in rhetorical clamor.But Lincoln was not precocious.

In art,as in everything else,he progressed slowly;the literary part of him worked its way into the matter-of-fact part of him with the gradualness of the daylight through a shadowy wood.It was not constant in its development.For many years it was little more than an irregular deepening of his two original characteristics,taste and rhythm.His taste,fed on Blackstone,Shakespeare,and the Bible,led him more and more exactingly to say just what he meant,to eschew the wiles of decoration,to be utterly non-rhetorical.His sense of rhythm,beginning simply,no more at first than a good ear for the sound of words,deepened into keen perception of the character of the word-march,of that extra significance which is added to an idea by the way it conducts itself,moving grandly or feebly as the case may be,from the unknown into the known,and thence across a perilous horizon,into memory.On the basis of these two characteristics he had acquired a style that was a rich blend of simplicity,directness,candor,joined with a clearness beyond praise,with a delightful cadence,having always a splendidly ordered march of ideas.