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 symbolized by a closing detail of his stay.  An odd bit of incongruity was the inclusion of his name in the list of managers of the Inaugural Ball of 1849.  Nothing of the sort had hitherto entered into his experience.  As Mrs. Lincoln was not with him he joined “a small party of mutual friends” who attended the ball together.  As one of them relates, “he was greatly interested in all that was to be seen and we did not take our departure until three or four o’clock in the morning."(7) What an ironic picture—­this worthy provincial, the last word for awkwardness, socially as strange to such a scene as a little child, spending the whole night gazing intently at everything he could see, at the barbaric display of wealth, the sumptuous gowns, the brilliant uniforms, the distinguished foreigners, and the leaders of America, men like Webster and Clay, with their air of assured power, the men he had failed to impress.  This was his valedictory at Washington.  He went home and told Herndon that he had committed political suicide.(8) He had met the world and the world was too strong for him.