CHAPTER VIII.
THE HUMOROUS SIDE OF HIS CHARACTER.
No one knew better than Mr. Lincoln that genuine humor is "a plaster that heals many a wound;" and certainly no man ever had a larger stock of that healing balm or knew better how to use it. His old friend I. N. Arnold once remarked that Lincoln's laugh had been his "life-preserver." Wit, with that illustrious man, was a jewel whose mirth-moving flashes he could no more repress than the diamond can extinguish its own brilliancy. In no sense was he vain of his superb ability as a wit and story-teller.
Noah Brooks says in an article written for Harper's Monthly, three months after Mr. Lincoln's death, that the President once said, that, as near as he could reckon, about one sixth only of the stories credited to him were old acquaintances,—all the others were the productions of other and better story-tellers than himself. "I remember," said he, "a good story when I hear it; but I never invented anything original. I am only a retail-dealer." No man was readier than he to acknowledge the force of Shakespeare's famous lines,
"A jest's prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it; never in the tongue
Of him that makes it."
Mr. Lincoln's stories were generally told with a well-defined purpose,—to cheer the drooping spirits of a friend; to lighten the weight of his own melancholy,—"a pinch, as it were, of mental snuff,"—to clinch an argument, to expose a fallacy, or to disarm an antagonist; but most frequently he employed them simply as "labor-saving contrivances." He believed, with the great Ulysses of old, that there is naught "so tedious as a twice-told tale;" and during my long and intimate acquaintance with Mr. Lincoln I seldom heard him relate a story the second time. The most trifling circumstances, or even a word, was enough to remind him of a story, the aptness of which no one could fail to see. He cared little about high-flown words, fine phrases, or merely ornamental diction; and yet, for one wholly without scholastic training, he was master of a style which was remarkable for purity, terseness, vigor, and force. As Antenor said of the Grecian king, "he spoke no more than just the thing he thought;" and that thought he clothed in the simplest garb, often sacrificing the elegant and poetic for the homely and prosaic in the structure of his sentences.
In one of his messages to Congress Mr. Lincoln used the term "sugar-coated." When the document was placed in the hands of the public printer, Hon. John D. Defrees, that officer was terribly shocked and offended. Mr. Defrees was an accomplished scholar, a man of fastidious taste, and a devoted friend of the President, with whom he was on terms of great intimacy. It would never do to leave the forbidden term in the message; it must be expunged,—otherwise it would forever remain a ruinous blot on the fair fame of the President. In great distress and mortification the good Defrees hurried away to the White House, where he told Mr. Lincoln plainly that "sugar-coated" was not in good taste.
"You ought to remember, Mr. President," said he, "that a message to the Congress of the United States is quite a different thing from a speech before a mass meeting in Illinois; that such messages become a part of the history of the country, and should therefore be written with scrupulous care and propriety. Such an expression in a State paper is undignified, and if I were you I would alter the structure of the whole sentence."
Mr. Lincoln laughed, and then said with a comical show of gravity: "John, that term expresses precisely my idea, and I am not going to change it. 'Sugar-coated' must stand! The time will never come in this country when the people will not understand exactly what 'sugar-coated' means."
Mr. Defrees was obliged to yield, and the message was printed without amendment.