I. FALSEHOOD AIDS NO ONE’S TRUTH
James Oppenheim says:
“The greatest are the simplest—
They need be nothing else,
It is the rest who have to play parts,
To seem what they are not.”
War times and periods of great public agitation have always brought forth in every free country the most scurrilous and vicious denunciations and slanders of public men. Such vile vituperation of Washington, Lincoln and others in our stormy periods, if all printed would make many volumes that bear in numerous instances the logical appearance of authentic history. But when sifted down, each to its origin, it is always what some one, long since gone from the possibility of explanation, has said, or been supposed to say, who might have known or might have misunderstood.
Every young man, if not every boy, sooner or later hears, as if indisputable, the most vulgar stories about men whom the world has enrolled as their noblest benefactors. All the moral world then seems to go to pieces as these stories seem to be the truth. But it is a common evidence of the viciousness, the most degenerate and cowardly viciousness, that is thus seen to remain possible in the composition of common minds. Political perversions of the meaning and motives of public men are so common in election times that the only wonder is, the only reassurance is, how little the disease of slander prevails, and yet, alas, we may not see how much injury and despair it has caused and is causing in growing minds. Many delight in making respected people appear filthy. Somehow, it satisfies and excuses their own brains and degenerate character.
Many people vaguely know that an assertion may be wrong, they even more vaguely know what is the right thing, and, when some one appears to state clearly what is wrong, and to give a clear idea of what is right, and a clear vision of the right way, then he becomes the embodiment of the people and they follow him. It was thus that Lincoln was the superbly great man. In the days when Americanism was a mist and a fog in so many high places, Lincoln stood forth as the embodied patriotism and mind of America. When men stormed around him with ideas as diverse as the wind, he was a soul high and clear as the unchanging sun. The storm-makers are gone, but Lincoln remains, unchanged, one of the beacon lights of mankind.
Lincoln’s favorite poem reflects the deep burden of his own soul. It is a long poem written by William Knox, who was a much valued friend of Sir Walter Scott.
Four of the stanzas are as follows:
“Oh! 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.
“So the multitude goes like the flower or the weed,
That withers away to let others succeed;
So the multitude comes—even these we behold,
To repeat every tale that has often been told.
“Yea! hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,
Are mingled together in sunshine and rain;
And the smile and the tear, 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 blossom of health to the paleness of death,
From the gilded salon to the bier and the shroud;
O, why should the spirit of mortal be proud!”