Complete Prose Works
States; thus the four years' war. But the main things come subtly
and invisibly afterward, perhaps long afterward--neither military,
political, nor (great as those are,) historical. I say, certain
secondary and indirect results, out of the tragedy of this death, are,
in my opinion, greatest. Not the event of the murder itself. Not that
Mr. Lincoln strings the principal points and personages of the
period, like beads, upon the single string of his career. Not that his
idiosyncrasy, in its sudden appearance and disappearance, stamps this
Republic with a stamp more mark'd and enduring than any yet given by
any one man--(more even than Washington's;)--but, join'd with these,
the immeasurable value and meaning of that whole tragedy lies, to me,
in senses finally dearest to a nation, (and here all our own)--the
imaginative and artistic senses--the literary and dramatic ones. Not in
any common or low meaning of those terms, but a meaning precious to the
race, and to every age. A long and varied series of contradictory
events arrives at last at its highest poetic, single, central, pictorial
denouement. The whole involved, baffling, multiform whirl of the
secession period comes to a head, and is gather'd in one brief flash of
lightning-illumination--one simple, fierce deed. Its sharp culmination,
and as it were solution, of so many bloody and angry problems,
illustrates those climax-moments on the stage of universal Time, where
the historic Muse at one entrance, and the tragic Muse at the other,
suddenly ringing down the curtain, close an immense act in the long
drama of creative thought, and give it radiation, tableau, stranger than
fiction. Fit radiation--fit close! How the imagination--how the student
loves these things! America, too, is to have them. For not in all
great deaths, nor far or near--not Caesar in the Roman senate-house,
or Napoleon passing away in the wild night-storm at St. Helena--not
Paleologus, falling, desperately fighting, piled over dozens deep with
Grecian corpses--not calm old Socrates, drinking the hemlock--outvies
that terminus of the secession war, in one man's life, here in our
midst, in our own time--that seal of the emancipation of three million
slaves--that parturition and delivery of our at last really free
Republic, born again, henceforth to commence its career of genuine
homogeneous Union, compact, consistent with itself.
Nor will ever future American Patriots and Unionists, indifferently over
the whole land, or North or South, find a better moral to their lesson.
The final use of the greatest men of a Nation is, after all, not with
reference to their deeds in themselves, or their direct bearing on their
times or lands. The final use of a heroic-eminent life--especially of a
heroic-eminent death--is its indirect filtering into the nation and the
race, and to give, often at many removes, but unerringly, age after age,
color and fibre to the personalism of the youth and maturity of that
age, and of mankind. Then there is a cement to the whole people,
subtler, more underlying, than any thing in written constitution, or
courts or armies--namely, the cement of a death identified thoroughly
with that people, at its head, and for its sake. Strange, (is it not?)
that battles, martyrs, agonies, blood, even assassination, should so
condense--perhaps only really, lastingly condense--a Nationality.
I repeat it--the grand deaths of the race--the dramatic deaths of every
nationality--are its most important inheritance-value--in some respects
beyond its literature and art--(as the hero is beyond his finest
portrait, and the battle itself beyond its choicest song or epic.) Is
not here indeed the point underlying all tragedy? the famous pieces of
the Grecian masters--and all masters? Why, if the old Greeks had had
this man, what trilogies of plays--what epics--would have been made
out of him! How the rhapsodes would have recited him! How quickly that
quaint tall form would have enter'd into the region where men vitalize
gods, and gods divinify men! But Lincoln, his times, his death--great
as any, any age--belong altogether to our own, and our autochthonic.
(Sometimes indeed I think our American days, our own stage--the actors
we know and have shaken hands, or talk'd with--more fateful than
anything in Eschylus--more heroic than the fighters around Troy--afford
kings of men for our Democracy prouder than Agamemnon--models of
character cute and hardy as Ulysses--deaths more pitiful than Priam's.)
When, centuries hence, (as it must, in my opinion, be centuries hence
before the life of these States, or of Democracy, can be really written
and illustrated,) the leading historians and dramatists seek for some
personage, some special event, incisive enough to mark with deepest
cut, and mnemonize, this turbulent Nineteenth century of ours, (not only
these States, but all over the political and social world)--something,
perhaps, to close that gorgeous procession of European feudalism, with
all its pomp and caste-prejudices, (of whose long train we in America
are yet so inextricably the heirs)--something to identify with terrible
identification, by far the greatest revolutionary step in the history of
the United States, (perhaps the greatest of the world, our century)--the
absolute extirpation and erasure of slavery from the States--those
historians will seek in vain for any point to serve more thoroughly
their purpose, than Abraham Lincoln's death.
Dear to the Muse--thrice dear to Nationality--to the whole human
race--precious to this Union--precious to Democracy--unspeakably and
forever precious--their first great Martyr Chief.
TWO LETTERS
I
TO -- -- -- LONDON, ENGLAND
_Camden, N.J., U.S. America, March 17th, 1876._ DEAR FRIEND:--Yours of
the 28th Feb. receiv'd, and indeed welcom'd. I am jogging along still
about the same in physical condition--still certainly no worse, and I
sometimes lately suspect rather better, or at any rate more adjusted to
the situation. Even begin to think of making some move, some change of
base, &c.: the doctors have been advising it for over two years, but I
haven't felt to do it yet. My paralysis does not lift--I cannot walk
any distance--I still have this baffling, obstinate, apparently chronic
affection of the stomachic apparatus and liver: yet I get out of doors
a little every day--write and read in moderation--appetite sufficiently
good--(eat only very plain food, but always did that)--digestion
tolerable--spirits unflagging. I have told you most of this before, but
suppose you might like to know it all again, up to date. Of course, and
pretty darkly coloring the whole, are bad spells, prostrations,
some pretty grave ones, intervals--and I have resign'd myself to the
certainty of permanent incapacitation from solid work: but things may
continue at least in this half-and-half way for months, even years.
My books are out, the new edition; a set of which, immediately on
receiving your letter of 28th, I have sent you, (by mail, March 15,)
and I suppose you have before this receiv'd them. My dear friend, your
offers of help, and those of my other British friends, I think I fully
appreciate, in the right spirit, welcome and acceptive--leaving the
matter altogether in your and their hands, and to your and their
convenience, discretion, leisure, and nicety. Though poor now, even to
penury, I have not so far been deprived of any physical thing I need or
wish whatever, and I feel confident I shall not in the future. During my
employment of seven years or more in Washington after the war (1865-'72)
I regularly saved part of my wages: and, though the sum has now become
about exhausted by my expenses of the last three years, there are
already beginning at present welcome dribbles hitherward from the sales
of my new edition, which I just job and sell, myself, (all through this
illness, my book-agents for three years in New York successively, badly
cheated me,) and shall continue to dispose of the books myself. And that
is the way I should prefer to glean my support. In that way I cheerfully
accept all the aid my friends find it convenient to proffer.
To repeat a little, and without undertaking details, understand, dear
friend, for yourself and all, that I heartily and most affectionately
thank my British friends, and that I accept their sympathetic generosity
in the same spirit in which I believe (nay, know) it is offer'd--that
though poor I am not in want--that I maintain good heart and cheer; and
that by far the most satisfaction to me (and I think it can be done, and
believe it will be) will be to live, as long as possible, on the sales,
by myself, of my own works, and perhaps, if practicable, by further
writings for the press.
W. W.
I am prohibited from writing too much, and I must make this candid
statement of the situation serve for all my dear friends over there.
II
TO -- -- -- DRESDEN, SAXONY
_Camden, New Jersey, U.S.A., Dec. 20, '81._ DEAR SIR:--Your letter
asking definite endorsement to your translation of my "Leaves of Grass"
into Russian is just received, and I hasten to answer it. Most warmly
and willingly I consent to the translation, and waft a prayerful God
speed to the enterprise.
You Russians and we Americans! Our countries so distant, so unlike at
first glance--such a difference in social and political conditions,
and our respective methods of moral and practical development the
last hundred years;--and yet in certain features, and vastest ones, so
resembling each other. The variety of stock-elements and tongues, to
be resolutely fused in a common identity and union at all hazards--the
idea, perennial through the ages, that they both have their historic and
divine mission--the fervent element of manly friendship throughout
the whole people, surpass'd by no other races--the grand expanse of
territorial limits and boundaries--the unform'd and nebulous state of
many things, not yet permanently settled, but agreed on all hands to
be the preparations of an infinitely greater future--the fact that both
Peoples have their independent and leading positions to hold, keep, and
if necessary, fight for, against the rest of the world--the deathless
aspirations at the inmost centre of each great community, so vehement,
so mysterious, so abysmic--are certainly features you Russians and
we Americans possess in common. As my dearest dream is for an
internationality of poems and poets binding the lands of the earth
closer than all treaties and diplomacy--as the purpose beneath the rest
in my book is such hearty comradeship, for individuals to begin with,
and for all the nations of the earth as a result--how happy I should be
to get the hearing and emotional contact of the great Russian peoples.
To whom, now and here, (addressing you for Russia and Russians and
empowering you, should you see fit, to print the present letter, in your
book, as a preface,) I waft affectionate salutation from these shores,
in America's name.
W. W.
NOTES LEFT OVER
NATIONALITY--(AND YET) It is more and more clear to me that the main
sustenance for highest separate personality, these States, is to come
from that general sustenance of the aggregate, (as air, earth, rains,
give sustenance to a tree)--and that such personality, by democratic
standards, will only be fully coherent, grand and free, through the
cohesion, grandeur and freedom of the common aggregate, the Union. Thus
the existence of the true American continental solidarity of the future,
depending on myriads of superb, large-sized, emotional and physically
perfect individualities, of one sex just as much as the other, the
supply of such individualities, in my opinion, wholly depends on
a compacted imperial ensemble. The theory and practice of both