t that has come
down to us, first hand. Lincoln's humor has become a tradition. Like
everything else in his outward life, it changed gradually with his slow
devious evolution from the story-teller of Pigeon Creek to the author
of the Gettysburg Oration. It is known chiefly through translation. The
"Lincoln Stories" are stories someone else has told who may or may not
have heard them told by Lincoln. They are like all translations, they
express the translator not the original--final evidence that Lincoln's
appeal as a humorist was in his manner, his method, not in his
substance. "His laugh was striking. Such awkward gestures belonged to no
other man. They attracted universal attention from the old sedate down
to the schoolboy."(4) He was a famous mimic.

Lincoln is himself the authority that he did not invent his stories.
He picked them up wherever he found them, and clothed them with the
peculiar drollery of his telling. He was a wag rather than a wit. All
that lives in the second-hand repetitions of his stories is the
mere core, the original appropriated thing from which the inimitable
decoration has fallen off. That is why the collections of his stories
are such dreary reading,--like Carey's Dante, or Bryant's Homer. And
strange to say, there is no humor in his letters. This man who
was famous as a wag writes to his friends almost always in perfect
seriousness, often sadly. The bit of humor that has been preserved
in his one comic speech in Congress,--a burlesque of the Democratic
candidate of 1848, Lewis Cass,--shorn as it is of his manner, his tricks
of speech and gesture, is hardly worth repeating.(5)

Lincoln was deeply humiliated by his failure to make a serious
impression at Washington.(6) His eyes opened in a startled realization
that there were worlds he could not conquer. The Washington of the
'forties was far indeed from a great capital; it was as friendly to
conventional types of politician as was Springfield or Vandalia. The man
who could deal in ideas as political counters, the other man who knew
the subtleties of the art of graft, both these were national as well as
local figures. Personal politics were also as vicious at Washington as
anywhere; nevertheless, there was a difference, and in that difference
lay the secret of Lincoln's failure. He was keen enough to grasp the
difference, to perceive the clue to his failure. In a thousand ways,
large and small, the difference came home to him. It may all be