Jonathan Yardley on 'Lincoln'

Kaplan -- emeritus professor of English at Queens College and author of well regarded biographies of Mark Twain, Henry James and Charles Dickens, among others -- meticulously analyzes how Lincoln's steadily maturing prose style, "projecting a persona of dignified but amiable authenticity," enabled him to come to grips with slavery and, as his own views evolved, to express his deepening opposition to it. In 1854, not long after Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which permitted slavery's westward expansion, Lincoln tartly exposed what Kaplan calls the "flawed and dangerous" logic of slavery's adherents. Then, the next year, he exploded:

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ' all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equals, except Negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy."

Five years later he was elected president. We know the rest of the story, and Kaplan devotes far less space to it than to Lincoln's education as a writer, for by then -- just in time -- that education was complete. In one of the finest passages in this fine, invaluable book, Kaplan sets him on the road to Washington:

"If intellectual readiness is everything, he was ready, as he well knew when he said goodbye to his Springfield world, having prepared himself over a lifetime to become a well-read master of the human narrative. If that narrative was to have its tragic dimension in Lincoln's failure, despite his talents, to prevent the South's secession, shorten the inevitable war, or alleviate Northern racism, it was to be an object lesson in the limitations of language rather than a failure in preparation. At the same time, the unfortunate givens of the narrative provided the context for his two greatest achievements, the Gettysburg Address and the second inaugural address, in which he did what great writers do: create useful texts from which readers can derive inspiration, literary pleasure, and universalizing direction."

Amen. ·

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.