'Very Close to the Caliber of Mark Twain'

I found a 2001 interview with Shelby Foote in The American Enterprise. The author of the three volumes of The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-1974) was asked by Bill Kauffman about the scarcity of politicians who are today capable of formulating their own coherent let alone eloquent sentences. Foote replied: 

“Lincoln’s speeches were mostly by himself, but the ‘better angels of our nature’ was [soon-to-be Lincoln’s secretary of state William H.] Seward. I said Lincoln was a political genius; he’s other kinds of geniuses, too. He’s a writer very close to the caliber of Mark Twain.” 

We’ve grown so accustomed to politicians being inarticulate bumblers, unable to craft their own speeches and equally unable to speak the words written for them by others, that the notion of a Twain-class American president sounds like one of Lincoln’s tall tales. I’ve started brief, one-way arguments with the simple statement that Lincoln belongs on the short list of the greatest American writers. The late poet Helen Pinkerton in 2013 asked me in an email: “How did this country ever manage to produce that man?” It’s not a question of “literary” versus “non-literary.”  

The day I found the Foote interview I took home from the library Farnsworth’s Classical English Style (2020) by Ward Farnsworth, who begins his preface with these simple declarative sentences, thus bolstering the theme of his book: “Abraham Lincoln wrote more beautifully and memorably than anyone in public life does now. So did Winston Churchill; so did Edmund Burke; so did many others, none of whom sound quite alike but all of whom achieved an eloquence that seems foreign to our times. What did they know that we don’t?”  

Farnsworth offers a partial answer to his question: “[W]riters of lasting stature still make the best teachers.” We read and reread the masters to learn how to write, speak and think. In sixth grade, Mrs. Whistler had us memorize the 267 words of the Gettysburg Address. (Sixty years later, I pity her having to listen to us stammer.) Not only the words but their rhythms are still with me. Lincoln delivered his brief speech at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863. Characteristically, he mingles humility and audacity when he says, “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here . . .”  

Speaking almost a quarter-century ago, Foote said in the interview: “I have found that children are no longer required to memorize the Gettysburg Address in school, and that dismays me to think of young people wandering around without those rhythms in their brain. Memory work is frowned on now in schools: that’s crazy.”  

Memorization is the core of education. The words of Lincoln, Churchill, Burke and others are a compass and a consolation. In Reading with Lincoln (2007), Robert Bray concludes that Lincoln, born on the American frontier in 1809, read Bunyan, Burns, Byron, Cowper, Defoe, Euclid, Gibbon, Gray, Poe, Pope and much Shakespeare (nine Englishmen, one American and a Greek). Bray writes:  

“From boyhood on, Lincoln’s habit of reading concentrated a naturally powerful mind; and reading provided models of voice and diction to one who had inborn talent as a storyteller and a near-flawless memory and therefore needed only the stimulus of literary greatness, and emulative practice, to emerge as a great writer himself.” 

Farnsworth includes the text of the Gettysburg Address in his anthology and looks at Lincoln’s use of Saxon-derived and Latinate words. He writes:  

“The beauty and power of Lincoln’s wording lies not in a relentless use of Saxon words but in the movement between earthy language and airier words and phrases that elevate. . . . The Saxon words create feeling and convey simplicity and sincerity. They hit home. The Latinate words evoke thought and connect the images to concepts and ideals. The sound and tone of each balances the sound and tone of the other.”