Lincoln | Page 9

land not far from a great highway, the Ohio, it illustrated in its
rude prosperity a transformation that went on unobserved in many such
settlements, the transformation of the wandering forester of the lower
class into a peasant farmer. Its life was of the earth, earthy; though it
retained the religious traditions of the forest, their significance was
evaporating; mysticism was fading into emotionalism; the
camp-meeting was degenerating into a picnic. The supreme social
event, the wedding, was attended by festivities that filled twenty-four
hours: a race of male guests in the forenoon with a bottle of whisky for
a prize; an Homeric dinner at midday; "an afternoon of rough games
and outrageous practical jokes; a supper and dance at night interrupted
by the successive withdrawals of the bride and groom, attended by
ceremonies and jests of more than Rabelaisian crudeness; and a noisy
dispersal next day."[3] The intensities of the forest survived in hard
drinking, in the fury of the fun-making, and in the hunt. The forest
passion for storytelling had in no way decreased.
In this atmosphere, about eighteen and nineteen, Abraham shot up
suddenly from a slender boy to a huge, raw-honed, ungainly man, six
feet four inches tall, of unusual muscular strength. His strength was one
of the fixed conditions of his development. It delivered him from all
fear of his fellows. He had plenty of peculiarities. He was ugly,
awkward; he lacked the wanton appetites of the average sensual man.
And these peculiarities without his great strength as his warrant might
have brought him into ridicule. As it was, whatever his peculiarities, in
a society like that of Pigeon Creek, the man who could beat all
competitors, wrestling or boxing, was free from molestation. But
Lincoln instinctively had another aim in life than mere freedom to be
himself. Two characteristics that were so significant in his childhood
continued with growing vitality in his young manhood: his placidity

and his intense sense of comradeship. The latter, however, had
undergone a change. It was no longer the comradeship of the wild
creatures. That spurt of physical expansion, the swift rank growth to his
tremendous stature, swept him apparently across a dim dividing line,
out of the world of birds and beasts and into the world of men. He took
the new world with the same unfailing but also unexcitable curiosity
with which he had taken the other, the world of squirrels, flowers,
fawns.
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