Thank you, President Lincoln

Today, February 12, is Abraham Lincoln's 201st birthday--and I'm freshly grateful for what this man meant for the cause of freedom and democracy not only in the United States, but for the whole world.

I'm also reminded again that President Lincoln was not only a great liberator and leader, but also a profoundly excellent communicator.

Jacques Barzun, in "Lincoln the Writer," captures well Lincoln's greatness in this respect. He speaks of "Lincoln the artist, the maker of a style that is unique in English prose and doubly astonishing in the history of American literature, for nothing led up to it." Barzun praises Lincoln's "singular determination to express his thoughts in the best way.... As a writer he toiled above all to find the true order for his thoughts--order first, and then a lightninglike brevity." Barzun is also impressed that as an artist, Lincoln "undertook to frame his ideas invariably in one idiom, that of daily life"--and that "one superior gift he possessed from the start and developed to a supreme degree" was "the gift of rhythm."

Barzun observes that "Lincoln acquired his power over words in the only two ways known to man--by reading and by writing. His reading was small in range and much of a kind: the Bible, Bunyan, Byron, Burns, Defoe, Shakespeare, and a then-current edition of Aesop's Fables. These are books from which a genius would extract the lesson of terseness and strength."

After citing again "the four main qualities of Lincoln's literary art--precision, vernacular ease, rhythmical virtuosity, and elegance," Barzun concludes this way: "Lincoln's use of his style for the intimate genre and for the sublime was his alone; but his workaday style is the American style par excellence."

I'm grateful to God for giving this nation and the world the talents and voice and wisdom and leadership of Abraham Lincoln.

("Lincoln the Writer" is a chapter in Barzun's book Writing, Editing, and Publishing [University of Chicago Press, 1971, 1986]. It was earlier published as an article entitled "Lincoln the Literary Genius" in the Saturday Evening Post magazine, in honor of Lincoln's 150th birthday in 1959.)