An even better example of the President’s use of humor is the following story which he once told to illustrate the military situation existing at the time. A bull was chasing a farmer around a tree. The farmer finally got hold of the bull’s tail, and both started off across the field. The farmer could not let go for fear he would fall and break his head, but he called out to the bull, “Who started this mess, anyway?” Lincoln said he had gotten hold of the bull by the tail and that while the Confederacy was running away he dared not let go. This summed up the situation in a way the whole country could understand.
It is an interesting fact, and one not generally known, that Lincoln committed almost every good story he heard to writing. If his old notebooks could be found they would make a wonderful volume, but, unfortunately, they have never come to light. Perhaps he felt ashamed of them, as he did of his rough draft of the Gettysburg address, which he had scribbled on the margin of a newspaper in the morning while riding to Gettysburg on the train.
There was one source of Lincoln’s humor—and perhaps it was the chief one—which flowed from the very bedrock of his nature. That was the desire to bring cheer to others. When he was passing through the very Valley of the Shadow after the tragic end of the single love affair of his youth a true friend told him that he had no right to look so glum—that it “was his solemn duty to be cheerful,” to cheer up others. Young Abe took the lesson to heart, and he never forgot it. Incidentally, it was the means of restoring him to health and probably of preserving his sanity—as the old saint who gave him the lecture no doubt intended that it should.
In their common experience of an awful grief and in their ability to rise above its devastation purged of selfishness and devoted to a career of service, each according to his own gifts, Abraham Lincoln and Charles Farrar Browne had followed the same path, and it was from this that there sprang that deep and true bond of sympathy between the two men which mystified so many even of those who considered themselves Lincoln’s intimates. Where another saw but the cap and bells, Lincoln saw and reverenced the tortured, struggling soul within.
During our memorable talk on that December day in 1864 when the cares of state were pressing so sorely upon him, the President told me that he was greatly relieved in times of personal distress by trying to cheer up somebody else. He spoke of it as being both selfish and unselfish. He said he had been accused of telling thousands of stories he had never heard of, but that he told stories to cheer the downhearted and tried to remember stories that were cheerful to relate to people in discouraged circumstances. He reminded me that his first practice of the law was among very poor people. He tried to tell stories to his clients who were discouraged, to give them courage, and he found the habit grew upon him until he had to “draw in” and decline to use so many stories.
Bob Burdett, writing for the Burlington Hawkeye shortly after the President’s death on April 15, 1865, said that Abraham Lincoln’s humorous anecdotes would soon die, but that Lincoln’s humor, like John Brown’s soul, would be ever “marching on.” No printed story which he told ever expressed the soul of Lincoln fully. His own partial description of humor as “that indefinable, intangible grace of spirit,” is not to be found exemplified in his published speeches. It is in the spirit which animated them rather than in the works themselves that we must look for the vital principle of Lincoln’s humorous sayings.
To attempt the analysis of humor is as if a philosopher should try to put a glance of love into a geometrical diagram or the soul of music into a plaster cast. No one by searching can find it and no one by labor can secure it. Yet so simple, so homely, and withal so shrewd was the humor of Abraham Lincoln that one can easily picture him turning over in his mind the words of his favorite quotation from the “Merchant of Venice”—one of the few classical quotations he ever used—while he reflected, half sadly, upon the cynicism and pettiness of mankind:
“Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time,
Some that will evermore peep through their eyes
And laugh like parrots at a bagpiper;
And others of such vinegar aspect
That they’ll not show their teeth in way of smile
Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable.”