Part 2

"The existence of a great man," says Victor Cousin, the French philosopher, "is not the creation of arbitrary choice; he is not a thing that may, or may not, exist; he is not merely an individual; too much, or too little, of individuality are equally destructive to the character of a great man. On the one hand, individuality of itself is an element of what is pitiful and little, because particularity, the contingent and the finite, tends unceasingly to division, to dissolution, and to nothingness. On the other hand, every general tends to absolute unity. It possesses greatness but it is exposed to the risk of losing itself in abstractions. The great man is the harmonious combination of what is particular with what is general. This combination constitutes the standard value of his greatness, and it involves a two-fold condition: first, of representing the general spirit of his nation, because it is in his relation to that general spirit that his greatness consists; and, secondly, of representing the general spirit which confers upon his greatness in his own person, in a real form, that is, in a finite, positive, visible, and determinate form; so that what is general may not suppress what is particular; and that which is particular may not dissipate and dissolve what is general--that the infinite and the finite may be blended together in that proportion which truly constitutes human greatness."

All which applies to Lincoln.

"Conceive a great machine," wrote Guizot, the historian, "the design of which is centred in a single mind, though its various parts are entrusted to various workmen, separated from, and strangers to, each other. No one of them understands the work as a whole, nor the general result which he concerts in producing; but every one executes with intelligence and freedom, by rational and voluntary acts, the particular task assigned to him. It is thus that by the hand of man the designs of Providence are wrought out in the government of the world. It is thus that the two great facts, which are apparent in the history of civilisation, come to co-exist. On the one hand, those portions of it which may be considered as fated, or which happen without the control of human knowledge or will; on the other hand, the part played in it by the freedom and intelligence of man and what he contributes to it by means of his own knowledge and will."

_His Miraculous Progress_

One of the most searching biographers of Lincoln maintains that between the ages of fourteen and twenty-eight he displayed no sign of embryonic or assured greatness.

If this be true, it means that none of Lincoln's early friends were intuitive enough to discover his greatness. Even the best writers who have dealt with this fascinating subject have failed to see all the facts, all the influences, all the correlated powers, in connection with what looks to many like a life of miracle. Intelligence and power are not attained by any mental hocus-pocus or metaphysics. Diamonds in the rough are still diamonds, or no one would think of having them polished. The same law works in nature as in human nature. The great man is born, but he is not born with all his faculties developed, and he, like others, must pass through stages of progressive development. There is not one law for genius and another for mere talent.

A distinguished writer says:--

"Lincoln achieved greatness, but can the genesis of the mystery be analysed?"

Certainly not by the ordinary process of ordinary philosophers and scientists. What all writers up to the present have failed to see is that Lincoln's powers were a combination of the normal-practical and the practical-supernatural. His supernaturalism was positive, mathematical, and absolute. The only things which Lincoln had to learn as he went were the modes of application. He had to learn system and method, as was natural, but the principle came into the world with him. Everything that is concrete appears simple. The various qualities and elements that produce what we call mental illumination are hidden from the crowd and even from those who most profess to understand.

Jesse Dubois wrote to Judge Whitney that "after having been intimately associated with Lincoln for twenty-five years I now find that I never knew him."

The great man had unconsciously deceived his friends because of his outward simplicity. And this outward freedom was backed by his simplicity of speech and direct logic. It was all too simple. They were fooled by the outward material because the inward mystical took that form. His friends liked the man and worked to elect him principally for that reason, and this is why they were astonished later on when the practical mystic rose clear above all systems of politics and all the accepted philosophies, and accomplished the miraculous. The impossible happened. The President had to go more than half way through the Civil War before the real Lincoln became manifest to observing critics.

_A Prophetic Witness_

In his book, "Life on the Circuit with Lincoln," Judge Whitney comments:--

"As early as 1856, independent of all contemporary opinion, I conceived the idea that Mr. Lincoln was a prodigy of intellectual and moral force. Others associated with us deemed him superlatively great, but still human. I went farther; my view was definite and pronounced, that Lincoln was ordained for a greater than a merely human mission, and I avowed this belief as early as that time.

"His character as a lawyer was controlled and moulded by his character as a man. He understood human nature thoroughly and was an expert in the cross-examination of witnesses. If a witness told the truth without evasion Lincoln was respectful and patronising to him, but he would score a perjured witness unmercifully. He took no notes but remembered everything quite as well as those who did so. I remember once we all, Court and lawyers, except Lincoln, insisted that a witness had sworn so-and-so, but it turned out that Lincoln was correct and that he recollected better than the united bench and bar. But with all his candour, there was a method and shrewdness which Leonard Swett well understood and which he has thus forcibly expressed: 'As the trial progressed, where most lawyers object, he would say he "reckoned" it would be fair to admit this in, or that; and sometimes when his adversary could not quite prove what Lincoln knew to be the truth, he would say he "reckoned" it would be fair to admit the truth to be so-and-so. When he did object to the Court, when he heard his objections answered, he would often say, "Well, I reckon I must be wrong."'

"He was wise as a serpent in the trial of a case, but I have got too many scars from his blows to certify that he was harmless as a dove. When the whole thing is unravelled the adversary begins to see that what he was so blandly giving away was simply what he couldn't get and keep. By giving away six points and carrying the seventh he carried his case, and, the whole case hanging on the seventh, he traded everything which would give him the least aid in carrying that. Any one who took Lincoln for a simple-minded man would very soon wake up on his back, in a ditch."

_Lincoln's Simplicity_

There are two kinds of simplicity--one is without reason or discrimination, that believes all that is seen and heard if presented under the guise of honesty; the other is the kind that penetrates beneath manner, dress, verbiage, and meets all subterfuge, artifice, and sophistry with statements and facts at once logical and irrefutable. Lincoln was the most simple man in dress, in speech, in manners, in looks, that ever stood before the world in so great a rôle, but his intellect was anything but simple. He was never deceived by cunning devices and cunning manoeuvres. Bacon has an essay showing the difference between cunning and wisdom, and it may be said that Lincoln's knowledge took the form of wisdom as distinguished from cunning. His management of a law case was that of a seer. The points he made were not made for personal gratification but for love of truth and justice. Not only he did not want to risk being deceived, he took every precaution to insure against deception. Here is where his welding of reason and logic produced in his marvellous intellect a kind of clairvoyance which his friends at the bar felt but could not analyse. The combination was unheard of! The lawyers and the judges could only reason from their own experience, they could only cite examples in their own lives, and this man Lincoln was unlike all that had been and all that was.

Lincoln's simplicity seemed to the casual observer of a character so trusting and so naïf that it deceived all the members of his Cabinet during the first two years of the war. They were used to smart men, clever men, academical men. They called for the routine of respectability and official dignity. To their minds the President seemed pliable and willing, and they set about instructing him in the a, b, c of high politics and the first principles of statesmanship. The President was in no way frustrated. He understood them in advance, having weighed them in the balance of his own judgment. He had found them honest but inexperienced, sincere but saucy. He knew they were living in an atmosphere of low visibility. At the proper moment he would turn on the searchlights and give them their bearings. Some of them expected to act as the President's pilot, while others expected to be captain of the ship-of-state with the President as pilot.

It took them more than two years to find out that this pioneer of the West was captain, pilot, and master of charts on a political sea the like of which they little dreamed existed. In one sense, he wore out their obstinacy by his patience. In another, he awaited opportunities to attest their errors and show his judgment, but matters proceeded with such calm that they could not understand with what power he acted, with what prescience he divined.

What mystified them was the combination of the practical with the spiritual, the clear vision with the maxims of ordinary business affairs, the penetration of the future while working in seeming darkness.

_Lincoln's Clairvoyant Wit_

Lincoln was not deceived by an outward show of religion. A Southern woman begged the President to have her husband released from a Northern prison, "for," she said, "although he is a Rebel he is a very religious man." Lincoln replied: "I am glad to hear that, because any man who wants to disrupt this Union needs all the religion in sight to save him."

He treated with indifference people who commandeered. A haughty woman came to Lincoln and demanded a colonel's commission for her son. "I demand it," she said, "not as a favour but as a right. Sir, my grandfather fought at Lexington, my father fought at New Orleans, and my husband was killed at Monterey."

"I guess, Madam," was Lincoln's reply, "your family has done enough for the country. It is time to give some one else a chance."

When Hugh McCullough, Secretary of the Treasury in Lincoln's second term, presented a delegation of New York bankers at the White House, McCullough said: "These gentlemen of New York have come on to see the Secretary of the Treasury about our new loan. As bankers, they are obliged to hold our national securities. I can vouch for their patriotism and loyalty, for, as the good Book says, 'Where the treasure is there will the heart be also.'"

To which Lincoln replied: "There is another text, Mr. McCullough, I remember, that might equally apply, 'Where the carcass is there will the eagles be gathered together.'"

Lincoln condemned as tedious a certain Greek history. When a diplomat present said: "The author of that history, Mr. President, is one of the profoundest scholars of the age; no one has plunged more deeply into the sacred fount of learning."

"Yes," replied Lincoln, "or come up drier."

When in Chicago in 1860, the mayor, John Wentworth, asked Lincoln why he did not get some astute politician to _run_ him, Lincoln replied that "events and not a man's own exertions made presidents."

To Henry C. Whitney, Lincoln remarked: "Judd and Ray and those fellows think I don't see anything, but I see all around them. I see better what they want to do with me than they do themselves."

They were deceived, not by Lincoln, who never cared what individuals thought, but by Nature, which often sets a trap for people who live in a world of their own illusions. Nature, the medium through which the Divine mind manifests, is, so to speak, a mask through which egoists cannot penetrate and by which the cunning are led to destruction. Lincoln let them talk and even act, knowing that they themselves were the tools for their own undoing. While the ward politicians and others, who thought themselves far superior, laid their plans, schemed, and intrigued, the man of clear vision awaited unperturbed the events which he knew would put them all in their proper places. Little did they dream that they were mere incidents among the million of incidents that go to the making of one epoch-making event.

The practical mystic is little concerned with incidents. The multitude do not know in what direction they are going, moved and influenced as they are by the incidental, the accidental, the shifting illusions in which they live, but the man who knows why they are influenced also knows why he is influenced.

Lincoln was patient with the men who considered him a sort of political accident. He understood their point of view. He did not entertain feelings of revenge. Hundreds of men, like John Wentworth, are only mentioned to-day because of some passing incident which connected them with the man whom they regarded as a failure in politics.

_A Prophetic Vision of Hades_

That William Blake was a mystic of the practical kind there can be no question. In art and in poetry he had that illumination which Lincoln had in statesmanship.

The New York _Times_ says:--

"That a century has failed to heap the dust of oblivion over England's 'Greatest Mystic,' William Blake, is exemplified by the reproduction in a recent issue of _Country Life_ of one of Blake's engravings for Dante's _Inferno_, in which four fiends with cruel faces are torturing a soul in Hell."

The face of the chief devil, who is not actually engaged in the torture, but is an eager and interested spectator, might easily be taken for a portrait of the German Emperor. As suggested by W. F. Boudillon, the familiar, upturned moustachios must have puzzled Blake in his vision. He represented them as tusks growing from the corners of the mouth--it is to be noted that this fiend alone among the four has the tusks.

It is recorded of Blake, as a lad, that his father would have apprenticed him to Rylands, the Court Engraver--a man much liked and in great prosperity at the time--but Blake objected, saying: "Father, I do not like his face; he looks as if he would live to be hanged." Twelve years later Rylands committed forgery, and the prophecy came true.

Blake's visions, startling though they be, are not more startling than many prophecies made by Lincoln, as, for instance, his prophecy of prohibition, woman's rights, and the end of slavery, not to mention his visions concerning himself. The practical mystic sees _through_, the scientific materialist sees only, the surface. Eternity is the everlasting now. Blake drew a faithful portrait of the Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany long before the Kaiser was born, and Tycho Brahe predicted the birth of a Swedish conqueror and what he would accomplish.

In these things there is no place for chance, nor is it true that the practical mystic is limited to poetry, or to art, or to music, or to religion, politics, and philosophy. Neither is the practical mystic confined to any particular social class or any creed.

Abraham Lincoln could not have directed affairs had he been a recluse. Before he became an adept in the direction of material affairs he had to be familiar with the practical ways of the world, and as a lawyer he passed through a school that left no place for vague theories or vain illusions. He frequently stripped others of their illusions, but being free of illusions himself he had none to lose. This made him invulnerable. His enemies were swayed by theories; nothing short of knowledge sufficed for this man, who reduced his adversaries to the position where they were kept constantly on the alert to know what manoeuvre to employ next. They moved in a region of guess-work where there was no law except that of their own confusion and discomfiture.

_Shakespeare and Lincoln_

"Lincoln," says Judge Whitney, "was one of the most heterogeneous characters that ever played a part in the great drama of history, and it was for this reason that he was so greatly misjudged and misunderstood; that he was, on the one hand, described as a mere humourist--a sort of Artemus Ward or Mark Twain--that it was thought that, by some 'irony of Fate,' a low comedian had got into the Presidential chair, and that the nation was being delivered over to conflagration, while this modern Nero fiddled upon its ruins.

"One of his peculiarities was his inequality of conduct, his dignity, interspersed with freaks of frivolity and inanity; his high aspiration and achievement, and his descent into the most primitive vales of listlessness."

In the chief drawer of his cabinet table all the current joke books of the time were in juxtaposition with official commissions, lacking only the final signature, applications for pardons from death penalties, laws awaiting executive action, and orders which, when launched, would control the fate of a million men and the destinies of unborn generations. "Hence it was that superficial persons, who expected great achievements to be ushered in with a prologue, could not understand or appreciate that this great man's administration was a succession of acts of grand and heroic statesmanship, or that he was a prodigy of intellect and moral force."

The mystic Shakespeare and the mystic Lincoln have a connecting link in their wit and humour. Had Shakespeare left us only two dramas--_Macbeth_ and _Othello_--no one would have dreamed of a creation like Falstaff emanating from the same mind, yet it is because of the union of the tragic and the humorous that Shakespeare is universally human, worldly wise as well as spiritual and metaphysical.

Shakespeare makes of the gravedigger in _Hamlet_ a sort of clown with a spade, and throughout all his dramas wit and humour, pathos and tragedy, go hand in hand. Without his humour Shakespeare would have been little more than an English Racine. With Lincoln, humour was made to serve a high, psychic purpose. By its means he created a new atmosphere and new conditions through which he could all the more freely work and act. He brought humour into play for his own good as well as that of others. He was not a theorist, or a dreamer of dreams; he was a practical mystic.

_A Prophecy Fulfilled_

In a letter written from Springfield, Illinois, August 15th, 1855, to the Hon. George Robertson, of Lexington, Kentucky, Lincoln said:--

"The Autocrat of all the Russias will proclaim his subjects free sooner than will our American Masters voluntarily give up their slaves."

On the day before Lincoln's first inauguration as President of the United States the "Autocrat of all the Russias," Alexander the Second, by Imperial decree emancipated his serfs, while six weeks after the inauguration the "American Masters," headed by Jefferson Davis, began the great war of secession to perpetuate and spread the institution of slavery. This is only one of Lincoln's prophecies which proved true. In stating them he did not pass into an abnormal state. He spoke as one would speak of the coming weather. He did not consult the stars, nor any person, before making a prophetic statement. Seeing clearly was as natural to him as eating or sleeping. He was not a psychic machine, uttering thoughts which seemed strange and enigmatical to himself, because his intellectual and spiritual powers were part of himself.

Men of genius are not instruments in the vulgar meaning of the word. They do not act in ignorance of what they are doing and saying. Lincoln, more than any other, could give deliberate reasons for what he did and said, and it is exceedingly difficult to name another in history who was under such logical and commanding control of all the moral and intellectual faculties. When he seemed to the superficial observer to be dreaming, he was reasoning, calculating, comparing, analysing, weighing, turning things upside down and inside out, until he satisfied the dictates of his conscience and his sense of moral responsibility.

He placed no reliance on halfway measures and palliatives, no faith in the workings of chance. He therefore was not, and could never have been, a passive instrument in the hands of some unknown power. When it was said of a certain musician that he composed his operas under the direct influence of Mozart, the answer was: "Then who influenced Mozart?"

Great originality belongs to the mystical unity of the Supreme Intelligence. Had Lincoln imitated Henry Clay, whom he so much admired as a statesman and thinker, what would have become of Lincoln and the country he governed?

He who originates is authoritative, and, as Carlyle said, "All authority is mystical in its origin." In no single thing of importance did Lincoln copy any one's methods or systems. His trend of thought was at variance with the prevailing trend, even of those who were supposed to know the most.

_The Ordinances of Heaven_

"Canst thou bind the sweet influence of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven?"--Job.

Phenomena that arrive with the days, months, seasons, centuries, are accompanied by events of corresponding significance in the human world, for everything is related to everything else.

In 1858 a new party came into being, headed by the prophet from the wilderness, who was as much a phenomenon in the human world as the comet of that year was in the starry heavens--an apparition first observed by the Florentine astronomer, Donati. Some scientific authorities give Donati's comet an orbit of two thousand, others three thousand years. Its advent was as unexpected as was the advent of Lincoln. Its immense orbit, the splendour of its train, its seeming close proximity to the earth, the presentiments which it inspired in millions of the people, corresponded with the sentiments and sensations inspired by the phenomenal progress of Lincoln, the avatar of democratic freedom and justice. The following description is taken from "The Valley of Shadows":--

"After a long period of cloudy weather the sky cleared, and when darkness closed in the night came with a revelation. Never had such a night been witnessed by living man, for a great comet hung suspended in the shimmering vault like an immense silver arrow dominating the world and all the constellations. An unparalleled radiance illumined the prairie, the atmosphere vibrated with a strange, mysterious glow, and as the eye looked upward it seemed as if the earth was moving slowly towards the stars.

"The sky resembled a phantasmagoria seen from the summit of some far and fabulous Eden. The Milky Way spread across the zenith like a confluence of celestial altars flecked with myriads of gleaming tapers, and countless orbs rose out of the luminous veil like fleecy spires tipped with the blaze of opal and sapphire.

"The great stellar clusters appeared as beacons on the shores of infinite worlds, and night was the window from which the soul looked out on eternity."

Such was the celestial apparition that ushered in the new party which was to support Abraham Lincoln and send him to the White House.