Chapter VIII: Lincoln and John Brown
“This is my friend!” said Lincoln, as he suddenly turned to a pile of books beside him and grasped a Japanese vase containing a large open pond lily. Some horticultural admirer, knowing Lincoln’s love for that special flower, had sent in from his greenhouse a specimen of the Castilia odorata. The President put his left arm affectionately around the vase as he inclined his head to the lily and drew in the unequaled fragrance with a long, deep breath.
“I have never had the time to study flowers as I often wished to do,” he said. “But for some strange reason I am captivated by the pond lily. It may be because some one told me that my mother admired them.”
Sitting at this desk now, looking out on the Berkshire Hills and living over in memory that visit to the White House, I see again the tableau of the President looking down into the face of that glorious flower. He hugged the vase closer and repeated tenderly, “This is my friend!”
In reverie and in dreams I have meditated long, searching for some satisfactory reason why that particular bloom was Lincoln’s dear friend. Yet the reason, whatever it may be, matters not so much as the fact. Lincoln loved the lily and called it his friend. No mere sensuous admiration of beauty, this, but a deep sense of its spiritual significance. By its perfection the lily achieved personality, and that personality, so simple, so pure, so exquisite, struck a responsive chord in the heart of this man whom his cultured contemporaries called uncouth! On the plane of the spirit they met as friends.
Great gifts have their price. From Lincoln’s sensitive tenderness sprang the suffering which he bore, both in his early life and during the living martyrdom of his years in the White House. But as if to offset somewhat this terrible burden was added the divine gift of humor.
It has been often remarked that humor and pathos are closely akin. The greatest humorists are also the greatest masters of pathos. Perhaps Mark Twain’s greatest work was his Joan of Arc, which is almost wholly sad, a study in pathos, while The Gilded Age makes its readers weep and laugh by turns.
As in the expression so also in the source. When Lincoln with tender emphasis said to me that Artemus Ward’s humor was largely “the result of a broken heart,” he was but stating the law of nature that deep sorrow is as essential to humor as winter snows are to the bloom of spring. Charles Lamb’s many griefs, and especially his sorrow over his insane sister, were the black soil from which his genius grew.
Many of Josh Billings’s ludicrous sayings were misspelled through his tears. The traceable outlines of tragedies in the early lives of writers like Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Bob Burdette, and Nasby testify to the rule that a sad night somewhere precedes the dawn of pure wit and inspiring humor.
Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy said, “If there is a hell on earth, it is to be found in the melancholy man’s heart.” But James Whitcomb Riley said that “wit in luxuriant growth is ever the product of soil richly fertilized by sorrow.” As for Lincoln, his first love died of a broken heart; he lived on with one.