When I read those lines, I found myself murmuring, “I wonder”; and then “I wonder why I wonder.” All readers of The Old Maid will say “I’ll say she was there,” and indeed Dr. Barton says so in the fourth chapter, which is devoted to the Hankses and the Sparrows.
Dr. Barton strangles the Mary Shipley myth. The Shipleys now fade out of the Lincoln picture. Abraham Lincoln, the pioneer who went to Kentucky from Virginia, was alleged to have married twice; first in leisure to Bathsheba Herring; then in haste to Mary Shipley. It is not true. Bathsheba was his one and only wife. Everything that has been found out about her is to her credit. Her fourth child, Thomas, was selected by Providence to father him who was to purge the world of slavery. He had no idea that he had been selected, but had he known, he could not have improved on his selection of Nancy Hanks; from her, Lincoln got his heart and his humour. His other great possession, his capacity to learn by experience, he got from the Bathsheba. The Lincolns only passed on the chromosomes, but it is now forever settled that they did that and for it they shall be glorified eternally.
Dr. Barton gives Nancy and Thomas good characters. The former was serious, but emotional, industrious, a good housekeeper and a better mother. The latter was not the shiftless, improvident migratory vacillator that he has been reputed to be, but he liked water better than land. He did not have an uncontrollable urge for work, nor did he starve himself or his family to swell a savings bank account. “He accepted his situation, and when his day’s work was done, he rested and visited and took life as comfortably as he was able.” To be sure he was evicted from Knob Creek farm, but that was due to a failure which he had in common with many others: foresight inferior to hindsight. Of Abraham Lincoln’s childhood at Knob Creek little is known. Dr. Barton indulges in some pleasant conjectures and it is known that the future saviour of the Nation did write verse in his youth. So his biographer may also be right in these surmises.
An illuminating and convincing chapter is entitled “Lincoln’s Kentucky,” for it shows that the slavery question was brought frequently and dramatically to the plastic mind of Abraham, and it reveals a people of primitive prejudices, of intense antipathies, of violent intolerance, of cowardly superstitions. Abraham Lincoln may have laid the foundation of his fair-mindedness, tolerance, kindliness, sympathy and sanity in those years; built the structure in Indiana and furnished it in Washington. Lincoln was nine years old when his mother died, but he was of a maturer mind than many boys of fourteen. A year later, he was given a stepmother. “She transformed the home of the cheerless widower into a spot of pleasant associations and happy memories.” That epitaph should satisfy any stepmother. Lincoln’s schooling is an old story. Retelling it does not improve it. Mrs. Allen Gentry’s recollections that were given to Herndon are still the most interesting. It is safe to assume that the world will always be interested in Abraham Lincoln’s love affairs, but until the ideas of George Bernard Shaw are accepted and we have acquired, like the French, an acceptable sex language, we shall not be able to appease the interest. Even then the story will have to be told by some one who had limitations and experiences similar to Lincoln’s or by some one to whom privileged communications are made—and who is invested with the power of inspiring confidence.
Dr. Barton’s treatment of John McNamar, who was the first to fan Ann Rutledge’s amatory smouldering fire into flame, will be approved by his readers. John was a poor thing and it is a pity his path ever crossed Ann’s. Posterity has aureoled the love of Ann and Abraham and time does not tarnish it, indeed brightens it. The permanency of love is a lost illusion. Even had Ann lived to marry her lover, their love might not have lasted their years. I can think of few subjects that lend themselves to discussion with less grace than “did Abraham Lincoln love Mary Todd when he proposed to her and when he married her?” I do not know—nor do I know any one who does know, but reams have been written about it. I have an opinion, but like so many others it is valueless to any one but myself. If he was in love either with Mary Owens or Mary Todd, he had strange ways of showing it. His love letters to the former, especially those indicating willingness to marry, are masterpieces of frigidity and would put out any heart-fires that were ever ignited; and the person who, reading any account of Lincoln’s conduct the day set for his marriage with Mary Todd, can say he was in love certainly never has been in love himself nor has he even observed at close range any one in the throes of the divine passion. Whether he “went crazy as a loon” when he bolted the expectant bride, as his friends alleged, or whether his heart failed him is beside the question. Sane men in love sometimes act as he acted. I doubt if there is a neurologist whose professional experience does not encompass an example of such conduct. It is astonishing the thoughts and convictions that come to sensitive, self-conscious men confronted with the obligation of obeying God’s first Command. Partisans of his head may say that he was not in love, of his heart that he was not sane.
He married Mary and his treatment of her indicates that he learned to love her, and no wonder if the account Dr. Barton gives of her is true. His conduct in this respect reflected his common sense and uncommon judgment. If Abraham Lincoln’s reputation had depended upon his knowledge of women and his proficiency in the ars amandi, it would not have outlasted his days.
Dr. Barton is a fine example of researcher: patient, industrious, indefatigable, determined. Certain investigations led him to frame a hypothesis about the ancestry of Abraham Lincoln. Then he set to work to prove that the assumptions of the hypothesis were facts. He succeeded to an astonishing degree. If Lord Charnwood will now make a few corrections, interpolate a few facts, it will be an almost perfect biography of Abraham Lincoln, and if Miss Tarbell will do the same and make a few deletions as well, it will be on the whole the most readable.
From the time Lincoln was elected President of the United States, he begins to elude his latest biographer, or perhaps it would be more just to say that Dr. Barton does not make his knowledge of Lincoln’s later motives and conduct so impressive or so convincing as he does when he writes of the twenty pre-and post-natal years. However the last chapter, most infelicitously entitled “Mr. Lincoln,” is a model of catholic taste, commendable restraint and good judgment. Deleted of its last sentence, it would be an ideal summary by a man who makes no claim to being a biologist, psychologist or personality expert and who is neither biographer nor historian by temperament. Here he pitches his pæan of praise in the right key, and he does not distract the listener with gossipy interpolation or jejune ejaculation.
Physicians whose concern it is to estimate and adjudge their fellows’ mental balance find frequently that they get more information from the writings of the individual whose sanity is in question than from his speech. It is more self-revelatory especially if it is thrown off in emotional white heat. Theodore Roosevelt was an intensely emotional man and he was the most prolific letter-writer of his time; and perhaps of all time. His biographer, Mr. Joseph B. Bishop, estimated that he wrote during his public career more than 150,000 letters—an average of more than 10 letters a day. It seemed beyond belief when we were first told, but gradually one gathers credulity as volume after volume of his letters are published. “Writing is horribly hard work to me,” he wrote in a letter dated March 26th, 1887. He liked hard work. He loved few people and it was essential to his happiness and welfare that, with these few, he should share his emotional states and discuss his intellectual preoccupations. Hence, the number of his letters. His friendship with Henry Cabot Lodge did not date from school or college days. In the Spring of 1884, when he was a member of the New York State Legislature, he was addressing him as “My dear Mr. Lodge”; in the Summer as “My Dear Lodge” and telling him he is one of the very few men he really desires to know as a friend! in the Autumn as, “Dear Old Fellow” and assuring him he is the salt of the earth whose people shall one day become cognisant of his savour, and by Winter as “Dear Cabot” and testifying his admiration, affection and spiritual intimacy. A quarter of a century later he wrote “from the Spring of 1884 Cabot Lodge was my closest friend personally, politically, and in every other way, and occupied toward me a relation that no man has ever occupied or ever will occupy.” In his entire political career he maintained that he had never formulated a policy or made an appointment without seeking the counsel and guidance of this friend. The letters in the volumes entitled Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge give ample proof of this friendship and intimacy. Roosevelt poured out his heart and his mind to Lodge and thus furnished us material for estimating the kind of man he was; his conscience, morality, patriotism; his sincerity, affection, hypocrisy; his imagination, intellect, culture; his idealisms and realisms; his body and his soul. Here is first-hand information, awaiting indeed inviting interpretation. Perhaps no one ever better illustrated the fact that basically every mood is the mental transformation of a bodily state than Theodore Roosevelt.