3.A great many recollections of Lincoln attempt to describe him.Except in a large and general way most of them show that lack of definite visualization which characterizes the memories of the careless observer.His height,his bony figure,his awkwardness,the rudely chiseled features,the mystery in his eyes,the kindliness of his expression,these are the elements of the popular portrait.Now and then a closer observer has added a detail.Witness the masterly comment of Walt Whitman.
Herndon's account of Lincoln speaking has the earmarks of accuracy.The attempt by the portrait painter,Carpenter,to render him in words is quoted later in this volume.Carpenter,217-218.Unfortunately he was never painted by an artist of great originality,by one who was equal to his opportunity.My authority for the texture of his skin is a lady of unusual closeness of observation,the late Mrs.M.T.W.Curwen of Cincinnati,who saw him in 1861in the private car of the president of the Indianapolis and Cincinnati railroad.An exhaustive study of the portraits of Lincoln is in preparation by Mr.Winfred Porter Truesdell,who has a valuable paper on the subject in The Print Connoisseur,for March,1921.
4.Herndon,264.
5.Ibid.
6.Ibid.,515.
7.A vital question to the biographer of Lincoln is the credibility of Herndon.He has been accused of capitalizing his relation with Lincoln and producing a sensational image for commercial purposes.Though his Life did not appear until 1890when the official work of Nicolay and Hay was in print,he had been lecturing and corresponding upon Lincoln for nearly twenty-five years.The "sensational"first edition of his Life produced a storm of protest.The book was promptly recalled,worked over,toned down,and reissued "expurgated"in 1892.
Such biographers as Miss Tarbell appear to regard Herndon as a mere romancer.The well poised Lincoln and Herndon recently published by Joseph Fort Newton holds what I feel compelled to regard as a sounder view;namely,that while Herndon was at times reckless and at times biased,nevertheless he is in the main to be relied upon.
Three things are to be borne in mind:Herndon was a literary man by nature;but he was not by training a developed artist;he was a romantic of the full flood of American romanticism and there are traceable in him the methods of romantic portraiture.
Had he been an Elizabethan one can imagine him laboring hard with great pride over an inferior "Tamburlane the Great"--and perhaps not knowing that it was inferior.Furthermore,he had not,before the storm broke on him,any realization of the existence in America of another school of portraiture,the heroic--conventual,that could not understand the romantic.If Herndon strengthened as much as possible the contrasts of his subject--such as the contrast between the sordidness of Lincoln's origin and the loftiness of his thought--he felt that by so doing he was merely rendering his subject in its most brilliant aspect,giving to it the largest degree of significance.A third consideration is Herndon's enthusiasm for the agnostic deism that was rampant in America in his day.
Perhaps this causes his romanticism to slip a cog,to run at times on a side-track,to become the servant of his religious partisanship.In three words the faults of Herndon are exaggeration,literalness and exploitiveness.
But all these are faults of degree which the careful student can allow for.By "checking up"all the parts of Herndon that it is possible to check up one can arrive at a pretty confident belief that one knows how to divest the image he creates of its occasional unrealities.When one does so,the strongest argument for relying cautiously,watchfully,upon Herndon appears.The Lincoln thus revealed,though only a character sketch,is coherent.And it stands the test of comparison in detail with the Lincolns of other,less romantic,observers.
That is to say,with all his faults,Herndon has the inner something that will enable the diverse impressions of Lincoln,always threatening to become irreconcilable,to hang together and out of their very incongruity to invoke a person that is not incongruous.And herein,in this touchstone so to speak is Herndon's value.
8.Herndon,265.
9.Lamon,51.
10.Lincoln,I,35-SO.
11.The reader who would know the argument against Herndon (436-446)and Lamon (486-502)on the subject of Lincoln's early religion is referred to The Soul of Abraham Lincoln,by William Eleazer Barton.It is to be observed that the present study is never dogmatic about Lincoln's religion in its early phases.
And when Herndon and Lamon generalize about his religious life,it must be remembered that they are thinking of him as they knew him in Illinois.Herndon had no familiarity with him after he went to Washington.Lamon could not have seen very much of him--no one but his secretaries and his wife did.And his taciturnity must be borne in mind.Nicolay has recorded that he did not know what Lincoln believed.Lamon,492.That Lincoln was vaguely a deist in the 'forties--so far as he had any theology at all--may be true.But it is a rash leap to a conclusion to assume that his state of mind even then was the same thing as the impression it made on so practical,bard-headed,unpoetical a character as Lamon;or on so combatively imaginative but wholly unmystical a mind as Herndon's.Neither of them seems to have any understanding of those agonies of spirit through which Lincoln subsequently passed which will appear in the account of the year 1862.See also Miss Nicolay,384-386.There is a multitude of pronouncements on Lincoln's religion,most of them superficial.
12.Lincoln,I,206.
13.Nicolay,73-74;N.and H.,1,242;Lamon,275-277.
14.Lamon,277-278;Herndon,272-273;N.and H.,1,245-249.
VI.UNSATISFYING RECOGNITION.
1.N.and H.,I,28~28&
2.Tarbell,1,211.
3.Ibid.,210-211.
4.Herndon,114.
5.Lincoln,II,28-48.
6.Herndon,306-308,319;Newton,4(141).
