Mr. Webster is properly selected as the representative of the
best sense, and highest wisdom, and most consummate dignity, of
the politics and oratory of the present times, because his great
intelligence has continued to be so finely sensitive to all the
influences that stir the action and speculation of the country.
With elements of reason, definite, absolute, and emphatic; with
principles settled, strenuous, deep and unchangeable as his being;
his wisdom is yet exquisitely practical: with subtlest sagacity it
apprehends every change in the circumstances in which it is to act,
and can accommodate its action without loss of vigor, or alteration
of its general purpose. Its theories always "lean and hearken" to
the actual. By a sympathy of the mind, almost transcendental in
its delicacy, its speculations are attracted into a parallelism
with the logic of life and nature. In most men, that intellectual
susceptibility by which they are capable of being reacted upon by the
outer world, and having their principles and views expanded, modified
or quickened, does not outlast the first period of life; from
that time they remain fixed and rigid in their policy, temper and
characteristics; if a new phase of society is developed, it must
find its exponent in other men. But in Webster this fresh suggestive
sensibility of the judgment has been carried on into the matured and
determined wisdom of manhood. His perceptions, feelings, reasonings,
tone, are always up to the level of the hour, or in advance of it;
sometimes far, very far in advance, as in the views thrown out in his
speech at Baltimore, on an international commercial system, in which
he showed that he then foresaw both the fate of the tariff and the
fallacy of free-trade. No man has ever been able to say, or now can
say, that he is before Webster. The youngest men in the nation look to
him, not as representing the past, but as leading in the future.
This practicalness and readiness of adaptation are instinctive,
not voluntary and designed. They are united with the most decided
preference for certain opinions and the most earnest averseness to
others. Nothing can be less like Talleyrand's system of waiting
for events. He has never, in view of a change which he saw to be
inevitable, held himself in reserve and uncommitted. What Webster is
at any time, that he is strenuously, entirely, openly. He has first
opposed, with every energy of his mind and temper, that which, when
it has actually come, he is ready to accept, and make the best of. He
never surrenders in advance a position which knows will be carried; he
takes his place, and delivers battle; he fights as one who is fighting
the last battle of his country's hopes; he fires the last shot. When
the smoke and tumult are cleared off, where is Webster! Look around
for the nearest rallying point which the view presents; there he
stands, with his hand upon his heart, in grim composure; calm,
dignified, resolute; neither disheartened nor surprised by defeat.
"Leaving the things that are behind," is now the trumpet-sound by
which he rallies his friends to a new confidence, and stimulates them
to fresh efforts. It is obvious that Webster, when contending with
all his force for or against some particular measure, has not been
contemplating the probability of being compelled to oppose or defend a
different policy, and, so, choosing his words warily, in reference to
future possibilities of a personal kind: yet when the time has come
that he has been obliged to fight with his face in another direction,
it has always been found that no one principle had been asserted, no
one sentiment displayed, incompatible with his new positions. This
union of consistency with practicability has arisen naturally from
the extent and comprehensiveness of his views, from the breadth and
generality with which the analytical power of his understanding has
always led him to state his principles and define his position. From
the particular scheme or special maxim which his party was insisting
upon, his mind rose to a higher and more general formula of truth.
Owing to the same superior penetration and reach of thought, the gloom
of successive repulses has never been able to paralyze the power
which it has saddened. The constitution has been so often invaded
and trampled upon, that to a common eye it might well seem to have
lost all the resentments of vitality. But Webster has distinguished
between the constitution and its administration. He has seen that the
constitution, though in bondage, is not killed; that the channels
of its life-giving wisdom are stuffed up with rubbish, but not
obliterated. He has been determined that if the rulers of the country
will deny the truth, they shall not debauch it; if they depart from
the constitution, they shall not deprave it. He has been resolved,
that when this tyranny of corruption shall be overpast, and the
constitution draws again its own free breath of virtue, truth and
wisdom, it shall be found perfect of limb and feature, prepared to
rise like a giant refreshed by sleep.
Mr. Griswold, we suppose, is quite right in suggesting that the only
name in modern times to which reference can with any fitness be made
for purposes of analogy or comparison with Webster is that of Burke.
In many respects there is a correspondence between their characters;
in some others they differ widely. As a prophet of the truth of
political morals, as a revealer of those essential elements in the
constitution of life, upon which, or of which, society is constructed
and government evolved, Burke had no peer. In that department he rises
into the distance and grandeur of inspiration; _nil mortote sonans_.
Nor do we doubt that the Providence of God had raised him up for the
purposes of public safety and guidance, any more than we doubt the
mission of Jeremiah or Elisha, or any other of the school of the
Lord's prophets. But leaving Burke unapproached in this region of
the nature and philosophy of government, and looking at him, in his
general career, as a man of intellect and action, we might indicate an
analogy of this kind, that the character, temper and reason of Burke
seem to be almost an image of the English constitution, and Webster's
of the American. To get the key to Burke's somewhat irregular and
startling career, it is necessary, to study the idea of the old whig
constitution of the English monarchy: viewing his course from that
point of view, we comprehend his almost countenancing and encouraging
rebellion in the case of the American colonies; his intense hostility
to Warren Hastings' imperial system; his unchastised earnestness
in opposition to French maxims in the decline of his life. The
constitution of the United States, that most wonderful of the
emanations of providential wisdom, seems to be not only the home of
Webster's affections and seat of his proudest hopes, but the very type
of his understanding and fountain of his intellectual strength:
----"hic illius arma;----
Hic currus."
The genius of Burke, like the one, was inexhaustible in resources,
so composite and so averse from theory as to appear incongruous, but
justified in the result; not formal, not always entirely perspicuous.
Webster's mind, like the other, is eminently logical, reduced
into principles, orderly, distinct, reconciling abstraction with
convenience, various in manifestation, yet pervaded by an unity of
character.
Mr. Webster has not merely illustrated a great range of mental powers
and accomplishments, but has filled, in the eye of the nation, on a
great scale, and to the farthest reach of their exigency, a diversity
of intellectual characters; while the manner in which Burke's wisdom
displayed itself was usually the same. We cannot suppose that Burke
could have been a great lawyer. Webster possesses a consummate legal
judgment and prodigious powers of legal logic, and is felt to be
the highest authority on a great question of law in this country.
The demonstrative faculty; the capacity to analyze and open any
proposition so as to identify its separate elements with the very
consciousness of the reader's or hearer's mind; this, which is the
lawyer's peculiar power, had not been particularly developed in Burke,
but exists in Webster in greater expansion and force than in any
one since Doctor Johnson, who, it always appeared to us, had he been
educated for the bar, would have made the greatest lawyer that ever
led the decisions of Westminster-Hall. We should hardly be justified
in saying that Burke would have made a great First Lord of the
Treasury. Mr. Webster, as Secretary of State, proved himself to be
a practical statesman of the highest; finest, promptest sagacity and
foresight that this or any nation ever witnessed. Who now doubts the
surpassing wisdom, who now but reverences the exalted patriotism,
of the advice and the example which he gave, but gave in vain, to
the Whig party at the beginning of Mr. Tyler's administration? His
official correspondence would be lowered by a comparison with any
state papers since the secretaryship of John Marshall. Does the public
generally know what has become of that portentous difficulty about the
Right of Search, upon which England and America, five years ago, were
on the point of being "_lento collisæ duello_." Mr. Webster settled it
by mere force of mind: he dissipated the Question, _by seeing through
it_, and by compelling others to see a fallacy in its terms which
before had imposed upon the understanding of two nations. In the
essential and universal philosophy of politics, Webster is second only
to Burke. After Burke, there is no statesman whose writings might be
read with greater advantage by foreign nations, or would have been
studied with so much respect by antiquity, as Webster's.
In a merely literary point of view, this perhaps may be said of Mr.
Webster, that he is the only powerful and fervid orator, since the
glorious days of Greece, whose style is so disciplined that any of
his great public harangues might be used as models of composition. His
language is beautifully pure, and his combinations of it exhibit more
knowledge of the genius, spirit, and classic vigor of the English
tongue, than it has entered the mind of any professor of rhetoric to
apprehend. As the most impetuous sweeps of passion in him are pervaded
and informed and guided by intellect, so the most earnest struggles
of intellect seem to be calmed and made gentle in their vehemence,
by a more essential rationality of taste. That imperious mind, which
seems fit to defy the universe, is ever subordinate, by a kind of
fascination, to the perfect law of grace. In the highest of his
intellectual flights--and who can follow the winged rush of that eagle
mind?--in the widest of his mental ranges-and who shall measure their
extent?--he is ever moving within the severest line of beauty. No one
would think of saying that Mr. Webster's speeches are thrown off with
ease, and cost him but little effort; they are clearly the result
of the intensest stress of mental energy; yet the manner is never
discomposed; the decency and propriety of the display never interfered
with; he is always greater than his genius; you see "the depth out not
the tumult" of the mind. Whether, with extended arm, he strangles
the "reluctantes dracones" of democracy, or with every faculty called
home, concentrates the light and heat of his being in developing into
principles those great sentiments and great instincts which are his
inspiration; in all, the orator stands forth with the majesty and
chastened grace of Pericles himself. In the fiercest of encounters
with the deadliest of foes, the mind, which is enraged, is never
perturbed; the style, which leaps like the fire of heaven, is never
disordered. As in Guido's picture of St. Michael piercing the dragon,
while the gnarled muscles of the arms and hands attest the utmost
strain of the strength, the countenance remains placid, serene, and
undisturbed. In this great quality of mental dignity, Mr. Webster's
speeches have become more and more eminent. The glow and luster
which set his earlier speeches a-blaze with splendor, is in his
later discourses rarely let forth; but they have gained more, in the
increase of dignity, than they have parted with in the diminution
of brilliancy. We regard his speech before the shop-keepers, calling
themselves merchants, of Philadelphia, as one of the most weighty
and admirable of the intellectual efforts of his life. The range of
profound and piercing wisdom; the exquisite and faultless taste; but
above all, the august and indefectible dignity, that are illustrated
from the beginning to the end of that great display of matured
and finished strength, leave us in mingled wonder and reverence.
There is one sentence there which seems to us almost to reach the
_intellectual_ sublime; and while it stirs within us the depths of
sympathy and admiration, we could heartily wish that the young men of
America would inhale the almost supra-mortal spirit which it breathes:
"I would not with any idolatrous admiration regard the Constitution
of the United States, nor any other work of man; but this side of
idolatry, I hold it in profound respect. I believe that no human
working on such a subject, no human ability exerted for such an end,
has ever produced so much happiness, or holds out now to so many
millions of people the prospect, through such a succession of ages and
ages, of so much happiness, as the Constitution of the United States.
We who are here for one generation, for a single life, and yet in our
several stations and relations in society intrusted in some degree
with its protection and support, what duty does it devolve, what duty
does it _not_ devolve, upon us!" In the name of distant ages, and a
remote posterity, we hail the author of this and similar orations, as
Webster the _Olympian_.
But we leave a subject which we have incidentally touched, sincerely
disclaiming any attempt to estimate the character or define the
greatness of Webster. In reference to him we feel, as Cicero said to
Cæsar, "_Nil vulgare te dignum videri possit._"
* * * * *
[FROM THE ATHENÆUM.]