美文赏析：林肯的微笑_大学英语阅读

美文赏析：林肯的微笑

In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, when Douglas accused Lincoln of being two-faced, Lincoln replied, referencing his homeliness,6 “Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one?” And, in a way, Lincoln’s face itself tells us much about his sense of humor.

You can comb through7 thousands of photographs of politicians, soldiers, and the like from Lincoln’s time and not find a single smile. Here’s his sourpussed cabinet.8

True, the extended exposures9 required for photographs of that era made smiling difficult. Yet Lincoln alone, as far as I can tell, overcame that difficulty. And though there is only a hint of smile in his photographs, it hints at what Lincoln knew too well: that, as Mark Twain pointed out, “the secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow.”

Interestingly, while having a sense of humor, or at least the appearance of one provided by comedy writers, has become a necessary characteristic for an American President in our time, in the nineteenth century, too much humor was considered a liability.10 And that was the case for Lincoln. A journalist covering the Lincoln-Douglas debates commented that “I could not take a real personal liking to the man, owing to an inborn weakness for which he was even then notorious and so remained during his great public career, he was inordinately fond of jokes, anecdotes, and stories.”11