Comics sometimes seem to be like nihilists who will do anything for a laugh. But Rhoda and Seymour Fisher found that they are, in fact, usually obsessed by moral and ethical dilemmas. “A central theme in the comedian’s life,” the Fishers write, “is whether he is good or evil.” Comics also often describe themselves as healers. Jackie Mason’s first career was as a rabbi. At a congregation in North Carolina, he started to introduce humor into his sermons—“to lighten the burden,” he explained, of “all the misery.”
There is meaning to Lincoln’s humor as well. He wasn’t just melancholy and funny. He used his humor to respond to his melancholy, and drew on his melancholy to fashion a worldview rooted largely in humor. Lincoln frequently joked about people at the mercy of great forces. In court once, Lincoln told a story of an Irish sailor who had been overtaken at sea by a heavy storm. The sailor thought he ought to pray, but didn’t know how. So he fell to his knees and said, “Oh Lord! You know as well as meself that it’s seldom I bodder ye, but if ye will only hear me and save me this time, bedad it will be a long time before I bodder ye again.” The point of these stories was to get a laugh, and a break. They were his “medicine,” Lincoln said, and he insisted that other people needed them as much as he did. But even in his diversions Lincoln often revealed his tendency to search for beauty and meaning. As president, he explained why he would pardon soldiers who deserted for cowardice: “It would frighten the poor devils to death to shoot them.” Humor brought Lincoln relief while it brought him closer to the nub of life. “For a sense of humor,” writes the Lincoln biographer Benjamin Thomas, “connotes an intimate acquaintance with human nature and life, a sense of proportion, and thus of disproportion, a realization of the petty conceits, the affectations, the foibles and weaknesses of men.”
Lincoln’s other principal therapy grew from the same instincts. On the circuit, after spending much of his day telling stories, Lincoln often turned to poetry at night. He would go to his room, strip off his coat, lie down on the bed, and read by the light of a candle. In the early 1840s, shortly after its publication, Lincoln read Poe’s “The Raven.” He loved it, recalled John Stuart. He carried a copy around on the circuit and “repeated it over and over.” “He never read poetry as a thing of pleasure, except Shakespeare,” Stuart said. “He read Poe because it was gloomy.” Even with Shakespeare, Lincoln preferred the tragedies. “Some of Shakespeare’s plays I have never read,” he noted, “while others I have gone over perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.”
Nearly everyone who spent substantial time with Lincoln after 1845 knew his favorite piece of verse. One powerful story of him reciting the poem comes from Lois Newhall, a member of the Newhall Family troupe of singers. In the fall of 1849, they were on tour in central Illinois, doing “‘one night stands’ in thriving towns.” Lois was one of three sisters in the group, which also featured their father, mother, and brother. A week into the tour, just as the family arrived at a hotel, they saw three men approach on horseback. They were politicians, in town for an event of their own. “As we were in a way public characters,” Lois said, “we introduced all around, and that evening—these gentlemen having held their political meeting in the afternoon, attended our concert in one of the local churches.” For the next eight days, Lincoln, his colleagues, and the Newhall Family followed the same path, down the same roads and through the same small towns. They came to hear him speak, and he went to hear them sing. After their eighth and final day together, the crowd retired to a tavern. They sat up late in the parlor, singing songs and telling stories. The family sang every song they knew, with Lois playing a melodeon.
“Now Abe,” one of Lincoln’s colleagues called to him, “you have been listening to these young women for more than a week, and I think it only fair that you should sing them some of your songs.”
Lincoln demurred, saying that he never sung a note in his life. But both of his companions stayed on him. “Why over on the Sangamon,” one said, “Abe has a great reputation as a singer. It is quite a common thing over there to invite him to farm auctions and have him start off the sale of stock with a good song.”
“Naturally,” recalled Lois, “we became very eager to have Mr. Lincoln sing.” Lincoln looked embarrassed. He stood to leave. “You fellows are trying to make a fool of me,” he said, “and I am going to bed.” As he walked out, he passed by Lois and she pointed to the melodeon. “Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “if you have any song that you can sing I know that I can play the accompaniment for it so as to aid you. If you will just tell me what it is, I can follow you even if I am not familiar with it.”
“Why, Miss Newhall,” Lincoln answered, “if it was to save my soul from hell, I couldn’t imitate a note that you would touch on that. I never sung in my life and never was able to. Those fellows are simply liars.”
The room grew quiet. Lincoln was near the door that led to the stairwell, but he didn’t leave. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do for you,” he said after a pause. “You girls have been so kind singing for us. I’ll repeat to you my favorite poem.” Leaning against the doorjamb, which looked small behind his lanky frame, and with his eyes half closed, Lincoln recited a poem from memory.
O[h] why should the spirit of mortal be proud!
Like a swift, fleeting meteor—a fast-flying cloud—
A flash of the lightning—a break of the wave—
He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.
The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,
Be scattered around, and together be laid;
And the young and the old, and the low and the high
Shall molder to dust and together shall lie.
Lincoln first came across the poem—titled after its first line, “Oh why should the spirit of mortal be proud!”—in the early 1830s. Then, in 1845, he saw it in a newspaper, cut it out, and quickly committed it to memory. He didn’t know who wrote it, as it had been published without attribution. He repeated the lines so often that people suspected they were his own. “Beyond all question, I am not the author,” he wrote. “I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is.” When he was president, Lincoln learned that the poem had been written by William Knox, a Scotsman who died in 1825. Knox self-consciously imitated Ecclesiastes, perhaps the most artful lamentation in the Bible. Compare Ecclesiastes 1:9—
The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be;
And that which is done is that which shall be done;
And there is no new thing under the sun.
—to Knox’s ninth stanza:
For we are the same thing that our fathers have been
We see the same sights that our fathers have seen
We drink the same stream, and we feel the same sun,
And we run the same course our fathers have run.
The last two verses of the poem were Lincoln’s favorites:
Yea! Hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,
Are mingled together in sun-shine and rain;
And the smile and the tear, and the song and the dirge,
Still follow each other, like surge upon surge.
‘Tis the wink of an eye, ‘tis the draught of a breath,
From the blossoms of health, to the paleness of death.
From the gilded saloon, to the bier and the shroud
Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!
When Lincoln finished, the room was still. “I know that for myself,” recalled Lois Newhall, “I was so impressed with the poem that I felt more like crying than talking.” She asked, “Mr. Lincoln, who wrote that?” He told her he didn’t know, but that if she’d like, he would write out a copy of the poem for her. She was eating pancakes the next morning when she felt something behind her. A great big hand came around her left side and covered hers. Then, with his other h
and, Lincoln laid a long piece of blue paper beside her.
Suffering and futility were pervasive themes in American literature of the early nineteenth century. Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne emerged in this period, as well as many lesser artists, whose work tended toward the lachrymose and maudlin. Melancholy, then, can be considered a cultural, not just an individual, “condition.” Still, even among people whose tastes ran to the dark, Lincoln stood out. Knox’s poem, one colleague observed, was “a reflex in poetic form of the deep melancholy of his soul.” “The music of Lincoln’s thought,” another colleague noted, “was always in the minor key.” Other artists who influenced Lincoln included Thomas Gray, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., one of whose verses, in the poem “The Last Leaf,” Lincoln often recited:
The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has pressed
In their bloom;
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
“For pure pathos,” Lincoln said, “in my judgment, there is nothing finer than those six lines in the English language.” From him, this was a grand compliment.
Lincoln also tried his hand at writing poetry. He may have written a great deal of it, and even published some of it—as shown by the recent discovery of the anonymously published “Suicide’s Soliloquy.” The one sustained effort we know of grew out of a trip Lincoln took to southern Indiana in October 1844. The Whigs had nominated Henry Clay to run for president. “Thinking I might aid some to carry the State for Mr. Clay,” Lincoln wrote, “I went into the neighborhood in that State in which I was raised . . . where my mother and only sister were buried, and from which I had been absent about fifteen years.” Lincoln gave a speech in Rockport, an Ohio River town about ten miles from the Lincoln farm. He also visited Gentryville, the town nearest to Little Pigeon Creek. He saw old neighbors, including Nathaniel Grigsby, whose brother had married Lincoln’s sister, and the Gentry family, after whom the town had been named.
The trip stuck with Lincoln. On the one hand, he found the area where he had spent his teenage years entirely uninspiring. “That part of the country,” he wrote, “is, within itself, as unpoetical as any spot of the earth.” Yet the landscape stirred something in him. “Seeing it,” he said, “and its objects and inhabitants aroused feelings in me which were certainly poetry; though whether my expression of those feelings is poetry is quite another question.”
Perhaps Lincoln’s distinction between “feelings in me” and “expression of those feelings” was polite self-deprecation. Or perhaps he intended to signal that his true feelings were ineffable. It is powerful that he described those feelings as “poetry.” His contemporary Emily Dickinson defined the word this way: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.”
Lincoln said he wasn’t sure he had constructed the poem properly. Indeed, that longing for something elusive, and grappling with the knowledge that it will forever remain so, was the subject of his poem, which began:
My childhood’s home I see again,
And gladden with the view;
And still, as memory crowds my brain,
There’s sadness in it too.
O Memory! thou midway world
‘Twixt earth and paradise,
Where things decayed and loved ones lost
In dreamy shadows rise.
Lincoln worked from a common form, recalling an early home, the distant images of childhood, and the deaths of loved ones. Yet the typical course of amateur poetry was to strain for a sentimental cheer or piety. Lincoln went the other way, emphasizing how his experience in his home village brought him into contact with the idea of death.
I hear the loved survivors tell
How nought from death could save,
Till every sound appears a knell,
And every spot a grave.
I range the fields with pensive tread,
And pace the hollow rooms,
And feel (companion of the dead)
I’m living in the tombs.
The next set of stanzas turned to Matthew Gentry, the young man Lincoln grew up with and watched go insane. We have already examined this poem for the light it sheds on Lincoln’s ideas of madness. But it should also be mentioned in the context of the larger piece.
But here’s an object more of dread
Than ought the grave contains—
A human form with reason fled,
While wretched life remains.
Just as the narrator trod the land of his childhood home and drew closer to death until he felt as though he were living in a tomb, this part of the poem circles around the mind of a madman, drawing closer and closer. As strong as was Lincoln’s attachment to reason, these lines show a lingering taste for the expression of the passions, albeit hewed to the form of art. Lincoln wondered, said his friend Joseph Gillespie, whether “the perceptions were sometimes more unerring than reason and outstripped it.” It is a sign of the tension between passion and reason that the section on Gentry contained two endings. The first emphasized the narrator’s own relationship to the madman:
And now away to seek some sceney
Less painful than the last—
With less of horror mingled in
The present and the past
The very spot where grew the bread
That formed my bones, I see
How strange, old field, on thee to tread
And feel I’m part of thee.
These stanzas tied together Matthew Gentry with his childhood home. The narrator was a part of all this death, all this madness, all this history, all this unknowable, untouchable material that sits on the emotional or spiritual surface of a landscape in southern Indiana. In a second draft, Lincoln deleted those two stanzas, with their sense of intense, morbid intimacy, and he wrote:
O death! Thou awe-inspiring prince,
That keepst the world in fear;
Why dost thou tear more blest ones hence,
And leave him ling’ring here?
This revised ending cuts the tension by distancing the narrator from it. It goes to sympathy (sorrow or pity for another person) rather than empathy (affinity with a person’s sorrow or difficulty), yet it still begs essential questions. Would the narrator be an observer of this kind of pathetic woe, or the subject of it? Was he going to leave that childhood home for some special destiny? Or would he, too, end up mute and inglorious? Matthew Gentry had been “fortune favored”—and look what had happened to him. Lincoln seemed haunted by fears that his destiny was an awful one. Herndon said that Lincoln had told him more than a dozen times, “I fear I shall meet with some terrible end.”
What is striking about Lincoln’s therapies is that they did not dampen, but rather highlighted, the essential tension of his life. Had he chosen to take high doses of opium, he might have found relief from his pain, but at the expense of a great loss of energy. Had he devoted himself to a guru or medical practitioner—spending months each year taking the water cure or attaching himself to a talented mesmerist—he may have found comfort in someone else’s prescription for him, at the cost of a vision that he’d already come to understand—that is, his desire to do something meaningful for which he would be remembered. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, the odds that he would accomplish anything worthy of remembrance looked increasingly small. Lincoln held on to his dreams along with his fears: “Hope and despondency, pleasure and pain, / Are mingled together in sun-shine and rain.”
PART THREE
Chapter 8
Its Precise Shape and Color
IN HIS MID-FORTIES, the dark soil of his melancholy began to bear fruit. When Lincoln threw himself into the fight against the extension of slavery, the same qualities that had lo
ng brought him so much trouble played a role in his great work. The questions that beset him about how he could make his own life meaningful took on a new significance and vitality when applied to the public sphere. The suffering he had endured lent him clarity, discipline, and faith in hard times—perhaps especially in hard times.
Lincoln's Melancholy Page 16