This democratic spirit is reflected in the works of western authors. It made Mark Twain the champion of the weak, the impartial upholder of justice to the Maid of Orleans, to a slave, or to a vivisected dog. It made him join the school of Cervantes and puncture the hypocrisy of pretension in classes or individuals. The Clemens family had believed in the aristocracy of slavery, but the great democratic spirit of the West molded Mark Twain as a growing boy. All the characters of worth in the great stories of his young life are democratic. The son of the drunkard, the slave mother, the crowds on the steamboats, the far western pioneers, belong to the great democracy of man.
Abraham Lincoln owes his fame in oratory to this democratic spirit, to the feeling that prompted him to say, "With malice toward none; with charity for all." Bret Harte's world-famous short stories picture the rough mining camps. Eugene Field is a poet of that age of universal democracy, the age of childhood. The poetry of James Whitcomb Riley is popular because it speaks directly to the common human heart.
Although the West has already begun a period of greater repose, she has been fortunate to retain an Elizabethan enthusiasm and interest in many-sided life. This quality, so apparent in much of the work discussed in this chapter, is full of virile promise for the future.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1809-1865
[Illustration: ABRAHAM LINCOLN]
Migrating from his birthplace in Kentucky, first to Indiana and then to Illinois, where he helped to clear the unbroken forest, Abraham Lincoln was one of America's greatest pioneers. Shackled by poverty and lack of education, his indomitable will first broke his own fetters and then those of the slave. History claims him as her own, but some of the plain, sincere, strong English that fell from his lips while he was making history demands attention as literature. Passing by his great debates with Douglas (1858), not because they are unimportant, but because they belong more to the domain of politics and history, we come to his Gettysburg Address (1863), which is one of the three greatest American orations. In England, Oxford University displays on its walls this Address as a model to show students how much can be said simply and effectively in two hundred and sixty-nine words. Edward Everett, a graduate of Harvard, called the most eloquent man of his time, also spoke at Gettysburg, although few are to-day aware of this fact.
The question may well be asked, "How did Lincoln, who had less than one year's schooling, learn the secret of such speech?" The answer will be found in the fixity of purpose and the indomitable will of the pioneer. When he was a boy, he seemed to realize that in order to succeed, he must talk and write plainly. As a lad, he used to practice telling things in such a way that the most ignorant person could understand them. In his youth he had only little scraps of paper or shingles on which to write, and so perforce learned the art of brevity. Only a few books were accessible to him, and he read and reread them until they became a part of him. The volumes that he thus absorbed were the Bible, Aesop's Fables, Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, The Pilgrim's Progress, Franklin's Autobiography, Weems's Life of Washington, and two or three textbooks. Without such good reading, which served to guide his practice in writing and speaking, he could never have been President. Later in life he read Shakespeare, especially Macbeth.
Parts of his Second Inaugural Address (1865) show even better than his Gettysburg Address the influence of the Bible on his thought and style. One reason why there is so much weak and ineffective prose written to-day is because books like the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress are not read and reread as much as formerly. Of the North and the South, he says in his Second Inaugural:—
"Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered—that of neither has been answered fully….
"With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds…."