STAN ABRAHAM LINCOLN MASTER OF TH CHAPTER I SPEECHES IN THE ILLINOIS LEGISLATURE By a curious coincidence, William Ewart Gladstone and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, the annus mirabilis, 1809. But beyond the fact that both men became successful party leaders and orators the resemblance between them is confined to this accident of a common birth year. Born in easy circumstances and in the ruling class, attending the aristocratic Eton and Oxford, and entering Parliament in the same year in which Lincoln started his political career in Illinois, Gladstone achieved a brilliant success, not only as 1 statesman and orator, but also as a scholar. And yet, with all the advantages of birth, wealth, education, mental endowment and political influence, Gladstone left not a single piece of writing that has been given a place in the world's literature. During his lifetime thousands listened with delight to the polished periods that were rolled forth by his magnificerit voice and yielded themselves ready captives to the charm of his personality; but now, only a little over a quarter of a century after his death, we may apply to his literary remains the severe words of the English reviewer of a century ago, "Who ever reads Gladstone's speeches?" Lincoln's letter to Mrs. Bixby, on the other hand, may be found on the walls of one of the colleges of Gladstone's own Oxford, placed there as a specimen of the purest English prose, and English schoolboys commit to memory Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" as the finest speech of its kind ever written in the English language. The answer to this apparent puzzle is simple enough. It is the same answer that we give to the question, so difficult to some foolish people, so obvious to most intelligent persons, how Shakespeare, the comparatively unlettered actor, was able to write the only plays of his time that still hold a place on the stage of the world, or how the rude plowboy of Ayrshire came to compose the most beautiful and best loved songs in the English language. Shakespeare and Burns and Lincoln composed classics simply because they had it in them to compose classics and there is no more mystery in the one case than in the other. Or, rather, there is as much mystery in the one case as in the other the sublime mystery of genius. Each of these three men, living in different centuries and under markedly different conditions, had the insight into human nature and the gift of adequate expression that are essential to the production of great literature, whether in the drama, the lyric or the oration. It were idle to consider what would have been the result to literature if Shakespeare's father |