The Pittsburgh Press (February 12, 1946)
I DARE SAY —
Flesh into marble
By Florence Fisher Parry
Every time I drive Up Home I pass that statue of Abraham Lincoln erected by the school children of the Wilkinsburg Public Schools. And it doesn’t have to be Lincoln’s Birthday to set me thinking…
What is that quality in a human being which after his death turns his flesh into marble makes him belong to the ages, more living in death than in life, immortal in the hearts of men?
I do not have to look upon the statue of Abraham Lincoln or the bust of Wilham Shakespeare. I can wander about our cemetery Up Home and look upon the inscriptions on the tombstones of our townspeople.
Invisible monuments
Now to us our little family lot holds the dear dust of our own immortals: father, husband, brother … deathless to us, being of our blood, immediate, belonging. And in the neighbors’ lots, their dead, too, immortal only to them.
Yet here and there, dotting the swollen hill, there are stones bearing the names of men and women who. in our small town, belong to its history, belong to the ages as long as our town’s legends live. These are the men and women whose lives extended into the lives of others so strongly, so urgently, as to become indispensable; as to become such an influence that when death came to them they did not die; they lived, enshrined, in the many hearts that had been warmed by their lives.
And the slab or crypt or humble headstone over their dust does not designate the quality of their immortality at all.
Here is the rich and costly mausoleum of Our Town’s wealthiest man. But it is not because of the ornately chiseled granite that he will be remembered. Legend will be interested only in the familiar saga of a poor uneducated boy coming into our valley with a team of horses and a bride his only possessions, and turning golden opportunity into prosperity – not only for himself but for the whole community.
Here lies a modest man who would blush at the mere suggestion that he belonged to our Important Dead. Yet during his life, as editor of a forthright local publication, he bent into the right, the sound direction, the thinking of his readers far and near.
Here lies – if you can find the grave – a man whose eyes were blinded all his life, yet saw more clearly than could a thousand eyes, and whose example in overcoming handicap will never be forgot by those who can remember his solitary independent figure move with quiet certainty along our busy streets.
Here lies a selfless Country Doctor… here a fearless lawyer… here a fruitful woman of vast charity… here a circle of young war dead. They will be remembered. Looking at their graves gives the heart a quiet lift, a reassurance; the thought of them reaffirms one’s faith in humankind. Such persons lived; and others like them are living now; and there will follow others, also noble, none knowing in his life none faintly suspecting, that he is destined to outlive in life, become a Figure in our memory.
The greatest commoner
And in a larger sense, our Lincolns. Especially, especially our LINCOLN, the only the most beloved, GREAT COMMONER of them all.
Did he know, did he sense, the immortality that was to follow? There are men born to History, they are so immediate and intense a part of its making that they MUST sense the immortality that is bound to be theirs.
I think George Washington must have known it and those who helped him fashion this New World I am sure that Woodrow Wilson felt its hand upon his shoulder when he framed the ringing phrases that seemed fashioned expressly for the history books.
But Lincoln?
Yes, I think so He was a mystic and the veil between today and tomorrow was to him no less transparent than between today and yesterday. He was a poet, and knew the vast capacities of the human imagination, and how it clings to the pedestals upon which it places its idols.
But of all the human figures destined to immortality. I believe that Abraham Lincoln possessed of the greatest humility, the most profound sense of awe, at prospect of his place in History. If he was aware of it, he was troubled by it, prayerful over it. Vainglory had no place in his beset spirit.
There is a book just published, “Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man.” I hope you can look through it, and see again the pictures of Abraham Lincoln that Brady made; and note, as you are bound to, the GROWTH IN STATURE of the man Lincoln as he rose to the terrible circumstances of his place in History.
This photographic record is powerful testimony to a phenomenon in human nature which manifests itself in those who are anointed to great tasks. There is within us all this attribute: the capacity for spiritual growth. It has made giants of men who, in less challenging times and roles, might have remained ordinary.
It worked in the man Lincoln so powerfully, so urgently, that it changed a lazy, emotionally unreliable dreamer into an almighty man of thunder and lightning and brooding prophecy, and gave the world its best-remembered savior since Jesus Christ.