by John Breithaupt

John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage” tells the stories of eight United States Senators who risked their political careers for the good of the nation. The book begins and ends with general reflections on the meaning and importance of courage for our democracy.

I first read the book when I was in junior high school.  I liked it very much, but I never reread it, fearing that it might not live up to my first enchanted impressions. 

And since I first read the book, I have probably read as many words about the book as the book contains.  How much of the book did Kennedy himself write?  How much was written by his able word-smith Ted Sorensen?  These questions have their importance, but they are not the questions I am interested in now.  I am taking the book as a given and now ask only whether it is, in fact, a good book.

And my growing awareness of the silent celerity of time, to borrow a phrase from Dr. Johnson, tells me not to postpone things.  So I reread it, and  I found it to be well worth reading, and unlike any other book — unless you harken back to Plutarch, who wrote the lives of ancient heroes with the explicit purpose of edifying modern readers.

The writing, first of all, is distinguished — as good at least as the writing in other books that won the Pulitzer Prize in history — as good, for example, as the writing in Carl Van Doren’s classic biography of Benjamin Franklin, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1938.

But the book’s main value lies in its being an antidote to the facile cynicism that condemns all political life in this country as hopelessly corrupt, and all politicians as self-serving liars. Of course, there are plenty of reasons to be disillusioned with the current state of democracy in America.  For example, a series of Supreme Court decisions  has held that bribing members of Congress is a Constitutionally protected form of free speech.  The situation is so depressing that many people refuse to vote for candidates of either party, and are waiting for a demagogue to arrive on the scene and begin tearing down the whole rotten structure of government, replacing it with something superior to what was there before–namely himself.  This may,  indeed, have happened already.

But is it really the case that there are no men — or women — of courage in   public life today? In the introduction to his book, Kennedy wrote:

“1 am convinced that the complication of public business and the competition for the public’s attention have obscured innumerable acts of political courage—large and small—performed almost daily in the Senate Chamber. I am convinced that the decline—if there has been a decline—has been less in the Senate than in the public’s appreciation of the art of politics, of the nature and necessity for compromise and balance, and of the nature of the Senate as a legislative chamber.”

Kennedy’s purpose in writing the book, then, was to demonstrate that our country, even during its most difficult and demoralized periods, has managed to produce leaders with courage and integrity — leaders whose example we can follow out of our ethical morass.

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The first four of Kennedy’s heroes — John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, Thomas Hart Benton, and Sam Houston were born in the eighteenth century and grew up in the afterglow of the revolution. Like so many other men and women of their generation, they were fiercely nationalistic and unshakeably devoted the union.

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Two of Kennedy’s heroes took their stands on principle in the bitter aftermath of the Civil War:

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Kennedy included two Senators, both men of demonstrated courage, whom I might have excluded from the book, for they were lacking in other qualities that might have kept their courage all right.

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Who would be an ideal reader of Profiles in Courage? Anyone who is interested in American history and who relishes good prose will certainly enjoy the book. But its ideal reader, I think, must be a young person, still in high school, who picks the book up out of boredom or curiosity and finds himself or herself enthralled by these stories out of our country’s past — a young person now destined someday to be a courageous senator, or maybe an historian, or maybe just a lifelong dedicated reader of our country’s history.

 

 
Director Christopher Nolan has managed to make a real living movie out of the protean, magical, subtle, complex thing known as Homer’s Odyssey. That’s what everyone is saying. I haven’t seen it, but I hope to soon.

In the meanwhile, I have some advice to offer to people who have seen it or intend to. I am offering advice, not only because I am an old man and offering advice is what old me do. I am also sort of qualified to be offering advice about this matter. In college, I majored in classics in order to learn to read Homer in the original Greek. I did not become a classical scholar — far from it — but I gained some familiarity with Homer’s great poems as they were first written.

Here’s my advice:

If you plan to see the movie but haven’t read the Odyssey, read the Odyssey first.

If you have seen the movie but haven’t read the Odyssey, read the Odyssey.

A good translation reads easily and smoothly. The syntax is simple and uninvolved.

Good prose translations:  George Herbert Palmer’s (Robert Frost’s favorite translation); Samuel Butler’s.  Both of these are available in inexpensive paperback editions. Walter Schwering’s prose translation is both accurate and readable, and it is printed with his interesting essay on the problems of translating the Odyssey and of translation in general.

Good verse translations:  William Cullen Bryant’s, Alexander Pope’s, Robert Fagles’

Translations to avoid:

Chapman’s. A vigorous Elizabethan version whose eccentricities seem tiresome after a while.

Richmond Lattimore’s. He is as faithful to the original as it is possible to be, given the immense difference between English and Homeric Greek in almost any respect. That makes his translation useful to the student who is parsing his way through the original Greek.  It also conveys the impression that Homer’s language is awkward, even tortured — which is as far from being the case as it could be.

Emily Wilson”s.  I’ve read only excepts from her translation, but she seems to be trying too hard to shield her readers from anything that is unfamiliar, exotic, taxing. In so doing, leaves the Odyssey rather flavorless and bland.

Note: It has been said, and I think truly, that every human being is a philosopher. That is, we all fashion explanations and reasons to smooth our ways through life. Most of these explanations and reasons are pretty shoddy patched up jobs — but people know what they need to believe to get from sunrise to sunrise. Here is my philosophy, which I don’t offer as being better than anyone else’s.

” Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie”, wrote Blaise Pascal, thereby qualifying as a modern. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.”

And our world, with its Beethoven and Shakespeare and Buddy Holly and the Keystone Cops and all its incredible outpouring of the incidental — is all staggeringly improbable. The difference between this degree of improbability and impossibility is small enough to be regarded as non-existent.

We and our world are impossible. And yet we exist — and we exist alone because the almost infinite improbability of our existing effectly rules out other such beings as us.

Immensely powerful telescopes sweep the skies listening for patterns in the buzz of electromagnetic radiation that would appear to have been imposed on the radiation by intelligent beings in order to carry messages from one place to another. The telescopes have detected nothing of the sort — only random noise.

This does not mean that there is no intelligent life out there — only that there is no sign of intelligent life having imposed patterns on electromagnetic radiation for some purpose or other.

We ask ourselves, if intelligent life happened here, why couldn’t it have happened elsewhere? The answer must be that the chances pf a world coming into being in which one intelligent being composes The Marriage of Figaro to create something called pleasure in other intelligent beings, is so crushingly freakishly small that we are justified in saying that there is no chance at all.

We are alone. We must accordlingly regard ourselves with awe — if indeed our freakish being can ever know what “must” means. Whatever it means, we are the ones who created the meaning.

Le silemce eternel de ces espaces infinie . . .

So what do we make of our aloneness? I’s better not to think about it. Another Frenchman said “Il faut cultiver son jardin.” One must tend to one’s garden. Those two saying are the bookends that embrace all our wisdom.

Note: This post is intentionally left in a jumbled first draft state because it is best to acknowledge one’s disarray when confronting these questions.

Baby boomers are starting to die. They are dying because they are reaching the natural limits in time set for their species by biology. But as they draw near the terminus toward which all their lines of endeavor lead, a terminus, moreover, which was always in plain view, they panic. Why hasn’t someone done something about this before now? How could this have been allowed to happen?

Of course, they know all about death. They know all about everthing. They read “The Death of Ivan Ilch” by Tolstoy and “A Dreary Story” by Checkhov.

“Yes, death was a bitter pill to swallow before we, well, fixed things. But it’s ridiculous that we should have to die like the ignorant masses.

“We are the exception!””

There are several good reasons to read old books. But “books get better with age” is not one of them. They don’t. Books are not wine. A couple of decades in the coolness and darkness of a wine cellar can transform a good vintage into something extraordinary. A crappy best seller is going to be crappy twenty years from now — except that it will no longer sell.

Old books — the best of them, at any rate — can be worth reading because of the truth of something that Bertrand Ruseell once said. He said that modern man is parochial in time.

Russell meant, I think, that the present moment is always a hick town with one traffic light, where the same gossip goes around and around and a certain way of looking at life was long ago agreed upon and that is that.

Now I would extend what Russell said to say that every moment in history is a hick town. Periclean Athens was one. So was Elizabethan England. So was the Russia of Dostoyevski. But they were different from the hick town that we live in.

Their being different means, at the very least, that different gossip is circulating among the resident of those towns.

But at certain moments in the past, the gossip that was circulating was of a very superior kind; this was certainly the case in the historic moments of Pericles, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevski.

What does it do for a person to hear gossip that is different from or superior to the gossip that he has been hearing in his native moment? I’m talking about gossip such as Pericles’ Funeral Oration, or “Hamlet” or “The Brothers Karamazov”.

I would like to be able to write that hearing different and superior gossip will make you a better or happier person. I can’t say that reading “Hamlet” has made me happier or better. But it has given me many hours of absorbing pleasure — unlike any other that I have known.

And it just might be that the gossip circulating in a hick town other than your own embodies wisdom that you never would have heard had you stayed home, waiting fot the traffic light to turn from red to green.

My interest in the Battle of Shiloh is a personal one. In this battle, my great-great-grandfather, George R. Conard, received a wound in his ankle bone (then known as the “astragalus”) that withdrew him from the war and very likely saved his life, for his company suffered almost 100% casualties before the fighting ended. Thus, I owe my existence and my identity to a Confederate marksman who took aim at my grandfather, intending to kill him, but only crippling him for life.

Note: The information in this post comes from two sources: genealogical records handed down to me by my Uncle Bob over 25 years ago, and a letter, written by 1st Lieutenant F. M. Posegate, now online, describing the first hours of the battle. Because I am not writing for scholarly publication, I have not foot noted any of my statements. The source for any particular statement should be obvious, however.

Early in the morning of April 6, 1862, Corporal George R. Conard and the other soldiers of Company A of the 48th Regiment of Ohio Volunteer Infantry, were sitting down to breakfast and looking forward to a quiet Sabbath. The 48th Regiment was part of the Army of the Tennessee, commanded by General Ulysses Grant. A Confederate army, commanded by General Albert Sidney Johnston, was only several miles away. There had been skirmishes between the two armies, but Grant did not believe that there would be a battle that day.

Suddenly, the men of Company A heard the Long-Roll off to the right, followed by the sound of muskets being fired rapidly. They ran to get their weapons and after several minutes their regiment was ready to fight.

It was the beginning of a battle that horrified the nation, very nearly ended Grant’s military career, and in its scale and savagery prefigured some of the major battles of the First World War.

Company A began to suffer casualties almost immediately. Lieutenant Posegate wrote:
“Just at this time David Morgan, [Corp.] George Conard, and David Woosley, all of our Company, came limping past, all wounded. Morgan thro’ the bowels, and the two latter in the feet. Geo is pretty seriously wounded, and it will be some time before he will be able to use his foot.” David Morgan died the next day. Ten soldiers from Company A were wounded, “Geo. Conard and myself the most seriously”, the Lieutenant added.

Some time later — it is not clear when — George Conard was loaded into an ambulance with two other men and taken to a remote location where the men’s medical needs could be attended.

The likelihood of infection made George Conard’s wound life-threatening. A Confederate minny ball had shattered the astragalus bone in his left foot. Known today as the “ankle bone”, the astragalus bone distributes weight from above to the other bones in the foot. Without an astragalus bone, the affected foot cannot bear weight. George walked with a cane for the rest of his life.

When news of George’s wounding reached his father, Benjamin Conard, in Cincinnati, he immediately boarded ship for Tennessee, found George, and brought him home. George was now desperately ill, suffering from both “camp dysentery” and a gangrenous infection in his wounded foot.

I do not know what Benjamin did to treat George for these diseases; he must have been an exceptional caregiver to have saved not only his son’s life, but also his foot.  

When George had recovered enough strength to move around, Benjamin had him enrolled in Miami University, Oxford, Ohio (where my father would enroll eighty years later), and then in the local medical school. 

By the war’s end, he was an army doctor, preparing sick and wounded Union soldiers to go home. The horror of war that he had missed seeing by being removed from the fighting on the morning of first day of battle, he now saw up close; and he not only saw it, but was responsible for alleviating and curing it. The war could never afterwards have been far from his thoughts.

Nor could the war ever be far from him physically.  My Uncle Bob, who visited him several times when he was a child, told me that he moved slowly and stiffly, with the help of a cane, and that his ankle made a crunching noise whenever he flexed it.  His disability did not, however, prevent him from marching in the annual Grand Army of the Republic parade on the Fourth of July.

In a nation that celebrates youth and endows it with attributes of invulnerability, he knew otherwise. He had once stepped forward to save his country; late in life, he stepped forward to save his country’s youth.  He petitioned the legislature of the state of Ohio to outlaw football as a collegiate sport, testifying that it exposed the young men who played it to too great a risk of suffering catastrophic brain injury. 

He died around 1920 — I’ll have to look it up.

On our honeymoon in Maine, in July, 1982, my wife Lorraine and I noticed a large building on Route 1 in Wells, with a sign out front that said Douglas N. Harding Books Maps Prints. We stopped and made the acquaintance of Mr. Harding, and explored his collection of used books, which was large and of the highest quality. We left after about an hour, each with an armload of good things to read. Over the next 40 years, we stopped at Douglas N. Harding Books Maps Prints at least twice a year, when we were in Maine on day trips or vacationing in Kennebunkport. That would make around 80 visits. Sounds about right.

Douglas N. Harding died on June 11, 2026. He was 88 years old.

I don’t know how much of a reader he was himself, but he could distinguish good books from bad. There was little of the junk on his shelves that takes up so much space on the shelves in other second hand bookstores.

His demeanor was gruff and that scared some customers away. He was not all gruffness. I remember making my way through a crowd of mourners to talk to him at the memorial service for one of his former employees — a young woman whose job it had been to ensure that the books were in proper order on the shelves and that everything in the store was neat. She was charming but she was not the most reliable of employees; her periodic life crises led her to move out of state, and then to move back, and to ask Doug if she could have her old job back. He always took her on again. Anyway when I approached him at the memorial service, he made no sign of recognizing me. He was staring straight ahead. His eyes were filled with tears.

He traveled to find books, often driving across the country, stopping at estate sales, library book sales, and other spots where good second hand books were to be found. He knew where to look. He mailed the books back to Maine as he went along. His quest for books even took him to Newfoundland several times, where occasionally a professor at the university in St. John’s would die leaving a house full of books.

Running a second hand bookstore is hard work and the rewards — other than that of uniting readers with books — are uncertain. It is certain that people have been buying fewer books as the Age of the Internet wears on, and Douglas N. Harding Books Maps Prints became less profitable every year. It made for a sad end of a useful and honorable career, uniting people with the books that will delight, instruct, and inform them, for untold years to come. Requiescas in pace, Douglas N. Harding. You did well.

P.S.  The bookstore’s website says that it is closed permanently.

palinode, n: 1. An ode or poem that recants or retracts something said in an earlier poem, 2. a recantation

By a stroke of good luck for students of the Civil War, Walter Bagehot, one of Victorian England’s most brilliant economists, essayists, and political thinkers, became editor of the London business journal The Economist in the autumn of 1860, not long before Abraham Lincoln became President of the United States. As editor of the Economist, Bagehot would freqently need to comment on American affairs; even then the English and Americans were deeply involved with each other both politically and economically. The twenty commentaries on American affairs that Bagehot eventually wrote provide a valuable historical record of the evolution of the views of a first rate mind on the momentous events in America and on the statesmanship of the chief actor in those events, Abraham Lincoln.

Walter Bagehot was born in 1826, into a wealthy family of merchants and bankers. After completing his education at University College, London, with first class honors in economics and moral philosophy, he studied law and worked as manager of the Bristol branch of Stuckey’s bank. At the same time he began publishing articles on history and economics in England’s leading academic and literary journals. The original content and elegant style of these articles were admired by James Wilson, a member of the Palmerston government, who had founded The Economist is 1843. Wilson died in 1860, and Bagehot by pre-arangement became editor of the Economist. Several years after becoming editor, Bagehot married Wilson’s daughter Eliza; the marriage was by all accounts exceptionally happy.Walter Bagehot died in 1873, of complications from pneumonia.

Bagehot also found time to write books — remember, he was a Victorian — two of which were of enduring importance. One is “The English Constitution” a brief overview of the subject that is said to be required reading for the Princes of Wales. The other is “Lombard Street”, about the Bank of England and central banking generally; in this book, he expounds the rule, known as “Bagehot’s dictum”, that in times of financial crisis following the collapse of speculative investments, the central banks should provide unlimited amounts of credit to solvent institutions in order to quell panic and prevent a disastrous contraction of the economy. During the financial crisis of 2008, officials at the United State Federal Reserve Bank frequently referred to Bagehot’s dictum and claimed to be following it in practice.

In his articles about American affairs, Bagehot often wrote about the difficulty of learning what was happening in America and of understanding why. But however baffling and obscure American affairs may have been to Bagehot and his readers, they were of too much consequence to England to be ignored.

For example, Lancashire depended for its prosperity on American cotton, and the north’s embargo on the export of cotton was causing great hardship there.

And for Bagehot in particular — a keen student of forms of government, the functioning of the United States Constitution in this moment of crisis provided almost endless matter for reflection.

Thus, Bagehot’s thoughts were drawn to America willy-nilly, and he formed strong convictions on several fundamental matters:

The south was responsible for the crisis. The election of Lincoln was not the cause of the war, but the long awaited pretext for seccession.

The war would be immensely destructive, and for this reason, he frequently called for a quick end to it through negotiation.

The North in any case would be better off if it were free to go its own way, without the south. It would no longer have a share in the moral shame of slavery. It would be better able to attend to its own business. It would be less feared, but more respected by the countries of Europe, and it would still be destined to become the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.

If the south could be prevented from extending slavery into the territories, the continued cultivation of cotton in the current slave states would eventually exhaust the soil there, making cotton unprofitable to grow and so leading to a gradual and voluntary abolition of slavery. On this point Bagehot seems less impressive than when touching on other points. For the South, slavery was more than a means to an economic end; it was above all, the South’s sole bulwark against an insurrection of blacks against whites. Take that bulwark away, and nothing could prevent the white Southerner’s nightware vision of race war from becoming a reality. But Bagehot can hardly be blamed fo failing to understand Amerian race relations in all their complexity.

The north in any case had little chance of bringing the south back into the union. “The Americans have never faced any great difficulties”, he wrote. They had won their independence from England, not by strength or courage, but only due to the “imbecility” of the Lord North government. Northerners prized the union only because it bolstered their sense of prosperity and power, which “swelled so flatulently and disturbingly in the breast of every citizen of the Atlantic Republic.” Of the northerners’ deep attachment to the union as the realization of the ideals of the founders, Bagehot appears to have had little appreciation.

Adding to the difficulties of the north, Bagehot believed, was its lack of capable leadership. Here the south had the advantage of being led by so capable and experienced men as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. On the other hand, the government of the federal states, Bagehot wrote, “has fallen into the hands of the smallest weakest and meanest set of men who ever presided over the policy of a great nation at the critical epic of its affairs. The president means well, but he does nothing else well. The inexplicable caprice of a forgotten caucus selected Mr. Lincoln as a candidate because no one knew much about him, and therefore scarce anyone could object to him.”

Bagehot further deplored the “ungrammatical prolixity” of Lincoln’s writing style, saying “There is no greater misfortune than for a great nation to be exclusively represented at a crisis far beyond previous example by a person whose words are mean even as his actions are important.”

The blame for the rise of such a person as Lincoln belongs to the constitution’s “gift of unchecked influence to obscure political caucuses and the uninstructed outdoor multitudes”. Bagehot wrote:

“The constitution of the United States was framed upon a vicious principle . . . under the growing influence of democracy, the electoral college had lost its power of independent choice, and now simply ratified the choice of the people,” and this was frequently a “bombastic vulgarian”.

But Bagehot was a student of the actual who never tried to explain away what he saw happening, however unexpected and inexplicable that might be. In the third year of America’s terrible war, the North looked more and more like it might win; the American people unexpectedly showed powers of endurance and a gift for mastering difficulties; and Lincoln appeared more and more to be the leader that the crisis demanded. Bagehot changed his views accordingly. His exceptionally eloquent editorial of April 29, 1865, “The Assassination of Mr. Lincoln”, was his palinode from everything he had written on Lincoln. Bagehot wrote that under the American system of government,

“the head of the Executive may, by an infinitesimal chance, be a man so exactly representative of the people, that his acts always represent their thoughts, so shrewd that he can steer his way amidst the legal difficulties piled deliberately in his path, and so good that he desires power only for the national ends. The chance of obtaining such a man was, as we say, infinitesimal; but the United States, by a good fortune, of which they will one day be cruelly sensible, had obtained him. Mr. Lincoln, by a rare combination of qualities—patience, sagacity, and honesty—by a still more rare sympathy, not with the best of his nation but the best average of his nation, and by a moderation rarest of all, had attained such vast moral authority that he could make all the hundred wheels of the Constitution move in one direction without exerting any physical force. . . .

“. . . The President had, in fact, attained to the very position — the dictatorship — required by revolutionary times. At the same time, this vast authority, not having been seized illegally, and being wielded by a man radically good—who for example really reverenced civil liberty and could tolerate venomous opposition—could never bedirected to ends wholly disapproved by the ways of those who conferred it.”

“. . . We do not know in history such an example of the growth of a ruler in wisdom as was exhibited by Mr. Lincoln. Power and responsibility visibly widened his mind and elevated his character. Difficulties, instead of irritating him as they do most men, only increased his reliance on patience; opposition, instead of ulcerating, only made him more tolerant and determined. The very style of his public papers altered, till the very man who had written in an official despatch about “Uncle Sam’s web feet,” drew up his final inaugural in a style which extorted from critics so hostile as the Saturday Reviewers, a burst of involuntary admiration. A good but benevolent temporary despotism, wielded by a wise man, was the very instrument the wisest would have desired for the United States; and in losing Mr. Lincoln, the Union has lost it. The great authority attached by law to the President’s office reverts to Mr. Johnson, but the far greater moral authority belonging to Mr. Lincoln disappears.”

Bagehot was wrong in supposing that Lincoln’s eloquence was drawn out of him by the pressures he felt as President — the Presidency does not turn inarticulate men into literary artists, as the long dismal turgid flow of presidential speech in our time so clearly demonstrates! But Bagehot’s palinode says more about Lincoln’s greatness than many whole books on the subject have managed to say, and it remains a classic of political commentary.

At the end of the war, the nation was in fact exhausted — physically, emotionally, morally. It did not want to hear about the rights of man, or justice, or freedom. For another 80 years, black Americans would be oppressed and abused in ways barely preferable to what they had experienced as slaves. But Lincoln’s words and his example of faithfulness to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, if they did not make us just, lingered in our minds, keeping us from being even more unjust than we were.

The Library of America is a non-profit foundation that prints well-edited uniformly bound editions of major American writers. The first volumes in the series (works by Melville, Hawthorn, and Whitman) went on sale in 1982, ten years after the death of the critic Edmund Wilson, who had long been agitating for the creation of a foundation such as this — one that would do for American literature what the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade had long since done for French literature: make the works of the country’s best writers available in not-too-expensive editions that are sturdy and legibly printed, and can easily fit in a suitcase or handbag.

Most of titles printed by the Library of America are reprints, but a number of original titles have been brought out recently. One of the most valuable of these titles is, in my opinion, The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now, edited by Harold Holzer, and published in 1989.

The Lincoln Anthology contains 129 entries, none longer than seven or eight pages. Some entries are by forgotten writers such as James Sloan Gibbons (1810 -1892), author of the patriotic poem “We Are Coming, Father Abraham, 300,000 Strong” and Honoré Willsie Morrow (1880 – 1940), author of a trilogy of historical novels about Lincoln’s life.

Other entries are by some of the great ones of the Earth: Karl Marx, Henrik Ibsen, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy (who thought Lincoln the greatest leader in human history.)

One entry is itself a masterpiece: Walt Whitman’s superb “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed.” In general though, poets do not make a good showing here; for example, Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The Master” is far from the level of this wonderful poet’s best.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remarks at a memorial gathering in Concord several days after Lincoln’s assassination, and Nathanial Hawthorne’s account of his meeting with Lincoln in the White House, are magnanimous and just.  Here are two princes of Yankeedom acknowledging that the finest fruits of the nation’s character may bloom not in New England, but out in the uncouth hinterland. Their remarks do them credit.

Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois, speaking at Gettysburg on the the eighty-eighth anniversary of Lincoln’s address, said that “it is for us, the living, to rekindle the hot, indignanr fires of faith in the free man, free in body, free in mind, free in  spirit, free to hold any opinion, free to search and find the truth for himself; the old faith that is ever new — that burned so brightly here at Gettysburg long ago.”

I’m far from having read all the entries in “The Lincoln Anthology.” But among those that I have read, three stand out for their penetration and their ability to bring Lincoln into focus. These essays are Jacques Barzun’s “Lincoln the Writer” (1959), Reinhold Niebuhr’s “The Religion of Abraham Lincoln” (1965), and Marianne Moore’s “Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word.” (1961)

Reinhold Niebuhr (1982 – 1971) was a reformed Lutheran pastor and theologian whose writings on public affairs have had a profound influence on historians, political scientists, reformers (including Martin Luther King) and politicians (including Barack Obama). By temperament a crusader for social justice, he criticized modern liberal movements for their utopianism, arguing that “original sin is one Christian dogma that is empirically verifiable.” His aphorisms (“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; his inclination to injustice makes it necessary.”) are legendary, and he is thought to be the author of an early form of the “Serenity Prayer”.

Niebuhr admired Lincoln for his grasp of what modern theologians (Karl Barth?) have called the “otherness” of God. In the view of these theologians, men may be instruments of God’s will, but not necessarily in ways they would have guessed or found flattering. In his Second Inaugural Address, delivered at the moment of victory in a terrible war that even friendly observers gave Lincoln’s side little chance of winning, he refused to take victory lap or claim that the North won because it was doing God’s will. Instead, Lincoln said the war may have been a punishment meted out to both sides for their joint complicity in the crime of slavery. That the leader of a great nation should renounce the mantle of righteousness when all the world would have forgiven him for assuming it, Niebhuhr found to be astounding; his call for charity for all, Niebuhr thought, showed that Lincoln’s religion, unorthodox as it may have been, was grounded in profound religious insight.

Jacques Barzun (1907 – 2012), a native of France, was for many years a professor of cultural history at Columbia University. In “Lincoln the Writer”, Barzun said that Lincoln was for him first of all artist, “the maker of a style that is unique in English prose and doubly astonishing in the history of American literature, for nothing led up to it.” I don’t entirely agree that “nothing led up to it”; Daniel Webster, when he was not upholstering his speeches with verbal velvet, at times achieved something like the sinewy argumentative strength that is so characteristic of Lincoln’s best prose. And Lincoln borrowed phrases from the Boston abolitionist, preacher, and scholar, Theodore Parker (1810 — 1860), whose writings he admired. Even so, Barzun is certainly right that there is something unique about Lincoln’s prose — a cadence, an impetuosity of thought, a striving for clarity that make almost every sentence he wrote proclaim its author.

“Abraham Lincoln and the Art of the Word” by the poet Marianne Moore, seems to me the best account of Lincoln’s style ever written. “The largeness of the life,” she wrote, “entered into the writing, as with a passion he strove to persuade his hearers of what he believed, his adroit ingenious mentality framing an art which, if it is not to be designated poetry, we may call a grasp of eternal grace — in both senses, figurative and literal.”

I’ve often wondered why the knickname “Honest Abe” was affixed to Lincoln so early, and stayed with him to the end. Salmon P. Chase was an honest man; never a breath of scandal about him. But it was Lincoln who was “honest” Abe, and Marianne Moore helps us understand why this was so. Lincoln’s intellectual honesty was evident in everything he wrote. He tried to make what he thought, as well as why he thought it, as clear as possible, in the hope that his hearers would thereby be persuaded. The American people understood that Lincoln was treating them with respect and to their credit repaid him with a fierce devotion.

Reviewing the list of books that Lincoln read, and made part of himself, she found Euclid’s “Elements of Geometry” to be crucial.

In a Euclidean mood, he wrote to James Conkling, “You desire peace, and you blame me that we do not have it. But how can we attain it? There are but three conceivable ways. First, force of arms. . . . Are you for it? A second way is to give up the Union. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly. If not for force, not yet for dissolution of the Union, Compromise. I am against that. I do not believe any compromise is now possible.”

“An architect of justice,” she wrote, “determined and destined to win his ‘case’, he did not cease until he had demonstrated the mightiness of his ‘proposition’. It is a Euclid of the heart.”

This anthology would have done well to include two more items that I can think of:

• The discussion of Jefferson’s language in Carl Becker’s beautifully written book, “The Declaration of Independence” (1922). Jefferson’s language, wrote Becker, is felicitous, and his gifts as a phrase maker are obvious. But it all lacks warmth; it is too entirely of the head. Lincoln’s language, in contrast, appeals to the heart as well as the mind, very much as Marianne Moore would point out.
• Walter Bagehot’s editorial “The Assassination of Mr. Lincoln”, in the April 29, 1865 issue of the Economist is the most profound estimate of Lincoln’s historical achievement that I have ever read. “We do not know in history such an example of the growth of a ruler in wisdom as was exhibited by Mr. Lincoln,” wrote Bagehot. The editorial is particularly gratifying to Yankee sensibilities when read in the light of Bagehot’s previous editorials on American affairs, in which he deplored the “smallness and meanness” of the leadership of the North. I will discuss the evolution of Bagehot’s views on Lincoln and the Civil War in a soon to be published post, titled “Walter Bagehot’s Palinode.”

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Will this country ever again see such a leader as Lincoln? We cannot know. But by studying the qualities of heart and mind that made Lincoln so extraordinary a leader, we can become better able to recognize such qualities in the people who emerge from the American political machine to solicit our favor. It’s a forlorn hope, that there will ever be much to recognize or reward, but then democracy was never anything more than an experiment.

I just watched Casablanca again — I don’t know how many times I’ve watched it. It’s an excellent movie of its kind — well plotted, well paced, full of suspence and wit and romance. It is not profound. Plumb its depths and you will come up with nothing. It is entertainment, and that is all.

But I could enjoy it without having to deny my nature, which is that of a 76 year old man. I am an adult. “Casablanca” was made for adults. And it came toward the end of the times when mass entertainment was made for adults.

I believe that popular entertainment, by and large, stopped being suited for adults shortly after World War II. It began to be suited for adolescents, the reason being that people that age now had money to spend on entertainment. In the newly prosperous America, there were jobs for teenagers — part time, poorly paid, but enough make adolescents the arbiters of taste in mass entertainment. And it is an unhealthy taste.

In the preface to his long poem “Endymion”,  John Keats wrote:

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and all the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.

Mawkishness and bitters, indeed.  It’s the way our world is and will be for who knows how long.  I feel like reading ‘The Spoils of Poynton.”