第7章 THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH(3)

Here as there,the difference from his mother,deep though their similarities may have been,was sharply evident.Had he been wholly at one with her religiously,the gift of telling speech which he now began to display might have led him into a course that would have rejoiced her heart,might have made him a boy preacher,and later,a great revivalist.His father and elder sister while on Pigeon Creek joined the local Baptist Church.But Abraham did not follow them.Nor is there a single anecdote linking him in any way with the fervors of camp meeting.On the contrary,what little is remembered,is of a cool aloofness.[4]The inscrutability of the forest was his--what it gave to the stealthy,cautious men who were too intent on observing,too suspiciously watchful,to give vent to their feelings.Therefore,in Lincoln there was always a double life,outer and inner,the outer quietly companionable,the inner,solitary,mysterious.

It was the outer life that assumed its first definite phase in the years on Pigeon Creek.During those years,Lincoln discovered his gift of story-telling.He also discovered humor.In the employment of both talents,he accepted as a matter of course the tone of the young ruffians among whom he dwelt.Very soon this powerful fellow,who could throw any of them in a wrestle,won the central position among them by a surer title,by the power to delight.And any one who knows how peasant schools of art arise--for that matter,all schools of art that are vital--knows how he did it.In this connection,his famous biographers,Nicolay and Hay,reveal a certain externality by objecting that a story attributed to him is ancient.All stories are ancient.Not the tale,but the telling,as the proverb says,is the thing.In later years,Lincoln wrote down every good story that he heard,and filed it.[5]When it reappeared it had become his own.Who can doubt that this deliberate assimilation,the typical artistic process,began on Pigeon Creek?Lincoln never would have captured as he did his plowboy audience,set them roaring with laughter in the intervals of labor,had he not given them back their own tales done over into new forms brilliantly beyond their powers of conception.That these tales were gross,even ribald,might have been taken for granted,even had we not positive evidence of the fact.Otherwise none of that uproarious laughter which we may be sure sounded often across shimmering harvest fields while stalwart young pagans,ever ready to pause,leaned,bellowing,on the handles of their scythes,Abe Lincoln having just then finished a story.

Though the humor of these stories was Falstaffian,to say the least,though Lincoln was cock of the walk among the plowboys of Pigeon Creek,a significant fact with regard to him here comes into view.Not an anecdote survives that in any way suggests personal licentiousness.Scrupulous men who in after-time were offended by his coarseness of speech--for more or less of the artist of Pigeon Creek stuck to him almost to the end;he talked in fables,often in gross fables--these men,despite their annoyance,felt no impulse to attribute to him personal habits in harmony with his tales.On the other hand,they were puzzled by their own impression,never wavering,that he was "pureminded."The clue which they did not have lay in the nature of his double life.That part of him which,in our modern jargon,we call his "reactions"obeyed a curious law.

They dwelt in his outer life without penetrating to the inner;but all his impulses of personal action were securely seated deep within.Even at nineteen,for any one attuned to spiritual meaning,he would have struck the note of mystery,faintly,perhaps,but certainly.To be sure,no hint of this reached the minds of his rollicking comrades of the harvest field.It was not for such as they to perceive the problem of his character,to suspect that he was a genius,or to guess that a time would come when sincere men would form impressions of him as dissimilar as black and white.And so far as it went the observation of the plowboys was correct.The man they saw was indeed a reflection of themselves.But it was a reflection only.Their influence entered into the real man no more than the image in a mirror has entered into the glass.