VANITY FAIR

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 75, Issue 132, 7 June 1932, Page 2

VANITY FAIR

LINCOLN'S HUMILITY Lincoln had abandoned the illusion of his own peculiar personal imparlance. He had become profoundly and sincerely humble, and his humility was as far as possible from being either a conventional pose or a matter of nervous self-distrust. Il did not impair the firmness of his will. It did not betray him into shirking responsibilities. Although only a country lawyer without executive experience, he did nol flinch from assuming the leadership of a great nation in one of the gravesl crises of its national history . . . . His practice of cherishing and repeating the plaintive little verses which inquire monotonously whether the spirit of mortal has any right to be proud indicates the depth and the highly conscious character of this fundamental moral conviction. He is not only humble himself, but he feels and declares that men have no right to be anything but humble; and he thereby enters into possession of the most fruitful and the most universal of all religious ideas.

Lincoln’s humility, no less than his liberal intelligence and his magnanimous disposition, is more democratic than it is American; but in this, as in so many other cases, his personal moral dignity and his peculiar moral insight did not separate him from his associates. Like them, he wanted professional success, public office, and the ordinary rewards of American life; and, like them, he bears no trace of political or moral purism. But unlike them, he Ms not the intellectual and moral victim of his own purposes and ambitions; and unlike them, his life is a tribute to the sincerity and depth of his moral insight. He never could have become a national leader by the ordinary road of insistent and clamorous self-asser-tion. Had he not been restored to public life by the crisis, he Would have remained in all probability a comparatively obscure and a wholly undeveloped man . . . He became the individual instrument whereby an essential and salutary national purpose Was fulfilled; and the instrument Was admirably efiactive, precisely because it had been silcnilx; and unconsciously tempered and formed for high achievement. ...

In many respects he was, of course, very much like his neighbours and associates. He accepted everything wholesome and useful in their life and behaviour. He shared their goodfcllowship, their strength of will, their excellent faith, and above all their innocence; and he could never have served his country so well, or reached as high a level of personal dignity, in case he had not been good-natured and strong and innocent. But, as all commentators have noted, he Was not only good-natured, strong, and innocent; he had made himself intellectually candid, concentrated, and disinterested, and morally humane, magnanimous, and humble.—Herbert Croly, in "The Promise of American Life."