Nation: LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

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flourished particularly in the 19th century: Coleridge, who took dope; Blake, who thundered against "old Nobodaddy aloft"; Rossetti, who buried his sonnets with his dead wife and exhumed both later when he needed material to fill a book.

There are those, like Moliere, Cervantes, Twain and Thurber, who assert their position against the world humorously—for everyone can laugh, but only individuals have humor. There are the explorers, discoverers and obsessive questioners; their individuality is not necessarily greater because they chose to die, like Socrates, or smaller because they saved their necks, like Galileo. There are the obscure men who, by an accident of history, are forced to develop individuality or at least strength, like Emperor Claudius and Harry Truman. There are, above all, the unremembered and unknown individuals who take their stand and suffer their small martyrdoms in all places and all ages. With them in mind, Kierkegaard said: "The truly extraordinary man is the truly ordinary man."

But there are also, inevitably, those who must move and drive these ordinary men, the Caesars, Catherines, Napoleons, Gandhis, De Gaulles. The leader may impose his will by force, but more often he must do it by cunning and patience. As Jacob Burckhardt, the great historian of the Renaissance, put it: "Without him the world would seem to us incomplete . . . He appears complete in every situation, but every situation at once seems to cramp him. He does not merely fill it. He may shatter it . . . He beholds the true situation and the means at his command . . . He knows what can be the foundations of his future power. Confronted with parliaments, senates, assemblies, press, public opinion, he knows at any moment how far they are real or only imaginary, and makes frank use of them . . . He will curb his impatience and know no flinching . . . There is no study too toilsome for him."

This description fits no American better than Lincoln.

Sense of Destiny. He was neither a rebel nor a conservative, but a conserver. He was no artist, except in using public language and in using men. His life was an infinitely varied mixture of leading and following, conforming and defying. He could temporize, compromise, and maneuver. But he always held to his own vision and met the exacting definition of an individual set down by French Philosopher Georges Bernanos: "A man who gives himself or refuses himself, but never lends himself."

Above all, Lincoln was an individual in the special double sense that Americans attribute to the word—the common man who is yet uncommon.

The common stamp was indelible on him, whether he was campaigning in Sangamon County, wearing a calico shirt and old straw hat, with six inches of blue socks showing from beneath his pants, or whether he stood at a White House reception, his hands enormous in white gloves that as often as not burst under some diplomat's hand clasp. And yet Lincoln always had a sense of being different and apart. John Hay, his longtime presidential secretary, wrote that it was "absurd to call him a modest man."

Innumerable times he could have settled for what he had. He could have stayed a ferryman on the Ohio, where as a boy he was overwhelmed by earning a dollar in one day. He could have taken up the indolent hunting, fishing and Shakespeare-quoting