From my own experience and observation I should say that every boy, who
is ready enough in spelling, grammar, geography, and arithmetic, is
appalled when he is commanded to write what is termed "a composition."
When he enters college the same fear follows him and the Professor of
Rhetoric is a more terrible personage to his imagination than the
Professors of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, and Moral and Intellectual
Philosophy. Both boys at school and young men in college show no lack of
power in speaking their native language with a vehemence and fluency
which almost stuns the ears of their seniors. Why, then, should they
find such difficulty in writing it? When you listen to the animated talk
of a bright school-boy or college student, full of a subject which
really interests him, you say at once that such command of racy and
idiomatic English words must of course be exhibited in his
"compositions" or his "themes"; but when the latter are examined, they
are commonly found to be feeble and lifeless, with hardly a thought or a
word which bears any stamp of freshness or originality, and which are so
inferior to his ordinary conversation, that we can hardly believe they
came from the same mind.
The first quality which strikes an examiner of these exercises in
English composition is their _falseness_. No boy or youth writes what he
personally thinks and feels, but writes what a good boy or youth is
expected to think or feel. This hypocrisy vitiates his writing from
first to last, and is not absent in his "Class Oration," or in his
"Speech at Commencement." I have a vivid memory of the first time the
boys of my class, in a public school, were called upon to write
"composition." The themes selected were the prominent moral virtues or
vices. How we poor innocent urchins were tormented by the task imposed
upon us! How we put more ink on our hands and faces than we shed upon
the white paper on our desks! Our conclusions generally agreed with
those announced by the greatest moralists of the world. Socrates and
Plato, Cicero and Seneca, Cudworth and Butler, could not have been more
austerely moral than were we little rogues, as we relieved the immense
exertion involved in completing a single short baby-like sentence, by
shying at one companion a rule, or hurling at another a paper pellet
intended to light plump on his forehead or nose. Our custom was to begin
every composition with the proposition that such or such a virtue "was
one of the greatest blessings we enjoy"; and this triumph of accurate
statement was not discovered by our teacher to be purely mechanical,
until one juvenile thinker, having avarice to deal with, declared it to
be "one of the greatest evils we enjoy." The whole thing was such a
piece of monstrous hypocrisy, that I once timidly suggested to the
schoolmaster that it would be well to allow me to select my own subject.
The request was granted; and, as narrative is the natural form of
composition which a boy adopts when he has his own way, I filled, in
less than half the time heretofore consumed in writing a quarter of a
page, four pages of letter-paper with an account of my being in a ship
taken by a pirate; of the heroic defiance I launched at the pirate
captain; and the sagacity I evinced in escaping the fate of my
fellow-passengers, in not being ordered to "walk the plank." The story,
though trashy enough, was so much better than any of the moral essays of
the other pupils, that the teacher commanded me to read it before the
whole school, as an evidence of the rapid strides I had made in the art
of "composition."
This falseness of thought and feeling is but too apt to characterize the
writing of the student, after he has passed from the common school to
the academy or the college. The term "Sophomorical" is used to describe
speeches which are full of emotion which the speaker does not feel, full
of words in four or five syllables that mean nothing, and, in respect to
imagery and illustrations, blazing with the cheap jewelry of
rhetoric,--with those rubies and diamonds that can be purchased for a
few pennies an ounce. The danger is that this "Sophomorical" style may
continue to afflict the student after he has become a clergyman, a
lawyer, or a legislator.
Practical men who may not be "college educated" still have the great
virtue of using the few words they employ as identical with facts. When
they meet a man who has half the dictionary at his disposal, and yet
gives no evidence of apprehending the real import and meaning of one
word among the many thousands he glibly pours forth, they naturally
distrust him, as a person who does not know the vital connection of all
good words with the real things they represent. Indeed, the best rule
that a Professor of Rhetoric could adopt would be to insist that no
student under his care should use an unusual word until he had _earned
the right to use it_ by making it the verbal sign of some new advance in
his thinking, in his acquirements, or in his feelings. Shakspeare, the
greatest of English writers, and perhaps the greatest of all writers,
required fifteen thousand words to embody all that his vast exceptional
intelligence acquired, thought, imagined, and discovered; and he had
earned the right to use every one of them. Milton found that eight
thousand words could fairly and fully represent all the power, grandeur,
and creativeness of his almost seraphic soul, when he attempted to
express his whole nature in a literary form. All the words used by
Shakspeare and Milton are _alive_; "cut them and they will _bleed_." But
it is ridiculous for a college student to claim that he has the mighty
resources of the English language at his supreme disposal, when he has
not verified, by his own thought, knowledge, and experience, one in a
hundred of the words he presumptuously employs.
Now Daniel Webster passed safely through all the stages of the
"Sophomoric" disease of the mind, as he passed safely through the
measles, the chicken-pox, and other eruptive maladies incident to
childhood and youth. The process, however, by which he purified his
style from this taint, and made his diction at last as robust and as
manly, as simple and as majestic, as the nature it expressed, will
reward a little study.
The mature style of Webster is perfect of its kind, being in words the
express image of his mind and character,--plain, terse, clear, forcible;
and rising from the level of lucid statement and argument into passages
of superlative eloquence only when his whole nature is stirred by some
grand sentiment of freedom, patriotism, justice, humanity, or religion,
which absolutely lifts him, by its own inherent force and inspiration,
to a region above that in which his mind habitually lives and moves. At
the same time it will be observed that these thrilling passages, which
the boys of two generations have ever been delighted to declaim in their
shrillest tones, are strictly illustrative of the main purpose of the
speech in which they appear. They are not mere purple patches of
rhetoric, loosely stitched on the homespun gray of the reasoning, but
they seem to be inwoven with it and to be a vital part of it. Indeed we
can hardly decide, in reading these magnificent bursts of eloquence in
connection with what precedes and follows them, whether the effect is
due to the logic of the orator becoming suddenly morally impassioned, or
to his moral passion becoming suddenly logical. What gave Webster his
immense influence over the opinions of the people of New England was,
first, his power of so "putting things" that everybody could understand
his statements; secondly, his power of so framing his arguments that all
the steps, from one point to another, in a logical series, could be
clearly apprehended by every intelligent farmer or mechanic who had a
thoughtful interest in the affairs of the country; and thirdly, his
power of inflaming the sentiment of patriotism in all honest and
well-intentioned men by overwhelming appeals to that sentiment, so that,
after convincing their understandings, he clinched the matter by
sweeping away their wills.
Perhaps to these sources of influence may be added another which many
eminent statesmen have lacked. With all his great superiority to average
men in force and breadth of mind, he had a genuine respect for the
intellect, as well as for the manhood, of average men. He disdained the
ignoble office of misleading the voters he aimed to instruct; and the
farmers and mechanics who read his speeches felt ennobled when they
found that the greatest statesman of the country frankly addressed them,
as man to man, without pluming himself on his exceptional talents and
accomplishments. Up to the crisis of 1850, he succeeded in domesticating
himself at most of the pious, moral, and intelligent firesides of New
England. Through his speeches he seemed to be almost bodily present
wherever the family, gathered in the evening around the blazing hearth,
discussed the questions of the day. It was not the great Mr. Webster,
"the godlike Daniel," who had a seat by the fire. It was a person who
talked _to_ them, and argued _with_ them, as though he was "one of the
folks,"--a neighbor dropping in to make an evening call; there was not
the slightest trace of assumption in his manner; but suddenly, after the
discussion had become a little tiresome, certain fiery words would leap
from his lips and make the whole household spring to their feet, ready
to sacrifice life and property for "the Constitution and the Union."
That Webster was thus a kind of invisible presence in thousands of homes
where his face was never seen, shows that his rhetoric had caught an
element of power from his early recollections of the independent,
hard-headed farmers whom he met when a boy in his father's house. The
bodies of these men had become tough and strong in their constant
struggle to force scanty harvests from an unfruitful soil, which only
persistent toil could compel to yield any thing; and their brains,
though forcible and clear, were still not stored with the important
facts and principles which it was his delight to state and expound. In
truth, he ran a race with the demagogues of his time in an attempt to
capture such men as these, thinking them the very backbone of the
country. Whether he succeeded or failed, it would be vain to hunt
through his works to find a single epithet in which he mentioned them
with contempt. He was as incapable of insulting one member of this
landed democracy,--sterile as most of their acres were,--as of insulting
the memory of his father, who belonged to this class.
The late Mr. Peter Harvey used to tell with much zest a story
illustrating the hold which these early associations retained on
Webster's mind throughout his life. Some months after his removal from
Portsmouth to Boston, a servant knocked at his chamber door late in an
April afternoon in the year 1817, with the announcement that three men
were in the drawing-room who insisted on seeing him. Webster was
overwhelmed with fatigue, the result of his Congressional labors and his
attendance on courts of law; and he had determined, after a night's
sleep, to steal a vacation in order to recruit his energies by a
fortnight's fishing and hunting. He suspected that the persons below
were expectant clients; and he resolved, in descending the stairs, not
to accept their offer. He found in the parlor three plain, country-bred,
honest-looking men, who were believers in the innocence of Levi and
Laban Kenniston, accused of robbing a certain Major Goodridge on the
highway, and whose trial would take place at Ipswich the next day. They
could find, they said, no member of the Essex bar who would undertake
the defence of the Kennistons, and they had come to Boston to engage the
services of Mr. Webster. Would he go down to Ipswich and defend the
accused? Mr. Webster stated that he could not and would not go. He had
made arrangements for an excursion to the sea-side; the state of his
health absolutely demanded a short withdrawal from all business cares;
and that no fee could tempt him to abandon his purpose. "Well," was the
reply of one of the delegation, "it isn't the fee that we think of at
all, though we are willing to pay what you may charge; but it's justice.
Here are two New Hampshire men who are believed in Exeter, and Newbury,
and Newburyport, and Salem to be rascals; but we in Newmarket believe,
in spite of all evidence against them, that they are the victims of some
conspiracy. We think you are the man to unravel it, though it seems a
good deal tangled even to us. Still we suppose that men whom we know to
have been honest all their lives can't have become such desperate rogues
all of a sudden." "But I cannot take the case," persisted Mr. Webster;
"I am worn to death with over-work. I have not had any real sleep for
forty-eight hours. Besides, I know nothing of the case." "It's hard, I
can see," continued the leader of the delegation; "but you're a New
Hampshire man, and the _neighbors_ thought that you would not allow two
innocent New Hampshire men, however humble they may be in their
circumstances, to suffer for lack of your skill in exposing the wiles of
this scoundrel Goodridge. The _neighbors_ all desire you to take the
case." That phrase "the neighbors" settled the question. No resident of
a city knows what the phrase means. But Webster knew it in all the
intense significance of its meaning. His imagination flew back to the
scattered homesteads of a New England village, where mutual sympathy and
assistance are the necessities, as they are the commonplaces, of village
life. The phrase remotely meant to him the combination of neighbors to
resist an assault of Indian savages, or to send volunteers to the war
which wrought the independence of the nation. It specially meant to him
the help of neighbor to neighbor, in times of sickness, distress,
sorrow, and calamity. In his childhood and boyhood the Christian
question, "Who is my neighbor?" was instantly solved the moment a matron
in good health heard that the wife of Farmer A, or Farmer B, was
stricken down by fever, and needed a friendly nurse to sit by her
bedside all night, though she had herself been toiling hard all day.
Every thing philanthropists mean when they talk of brotherhood and
sisterhood among men and women was condensed in that homely phrase, "the
neighbors." "Oh!" said Webster, ruefully, "if the neighbors think I may
be of service, of course I must go";--and, with his three companions, he
was soon seated in the stage for Ipswich, where he arrived at about
midnight. The court met the next morning; and his management of the case
is still considered one of his masterpieces of legal acumen and
eloquence. His cross-examination of Goodridge rivalled, in mental
torture, every thing martyrologists tell us of the physical agony
endured by the victim of the inquisitor, when roasted before slow fires
or stretched upon the rack. Still it seemed impossible to assign any
motive for the self-robbery and the self-maiming of Goodridge, which any
judge or jury would accept as reasonable. The real motive has never been
discovered. Webster argued that the motive might have originated in a
desire to escape from the payment of his debts, or in a whimsical
ambition to have his name sounded all over Maine and Massachusetts as
the heroic tradesman who had parted with his money only when overpowered
by superior force. It is impossible to say what motives may impel men
who are half-crazed by vanity, or half-demonized by malice. Coleridge
describes Iago's hatred of Othello as the hatred which a base nature
instinctively feels for a noble one, and his assignment of motives for
his acts as the mere "motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity."
Whatever may have been Goodridge's motive in his attempt to ruin the
innocent men he falsely accused, it is certain that Webster saved these
men from the unjust punishment of an imputed crime. Only the skeleton of
his argument before the jury has been preserved; but what we have of it
evidently passed under his revision. He knew that the plot of Goodridge
had been so cunningly contrived, that every man of the twelve before
him, whose verdict was to determine the fate of his clients, was
inwardly persuaded of their guilt. Some small marked portions of the
money which Goodridge swore he had on his person on the night of the
pretended robbery were found in their house. Circumstantial evidence
brought their guilt with a seemingly irresistible force literally "home"
to them. It was the conviction of the leaders of the Essex bar that no
respectable lawyer could appear in their defence without becoming, in
some degree, their accomplice. But Webster, after damaging the character
of the prosecutor by his stern cross-examination, addressed the jury,
not as an advocate bearing down upon them with his arguments and
appeals, but rather as a thirteenth juryman, who had cosily introduced
himself into their company, and was arguing the case with them after
they had retired for consultation among themselves. The simplicity of
the language employed is not more notable than the power evinced in
seizing the main points on which the question of guilt or innocence
turned. At every quiet but deadly stab aimed at the theory of the
prosecution, he is careful to remark, that "it is for the jury to say
under their oaths" whether such inconsistencies or improbabilities
should have any effect on their minds. Every strong argument closes with
the ever-recurring phrase, "It is for the jury to say"; and, at the end,
the jury, thoroughly convinced, said, "Not guilty." The Kennistons were
vindicated; and the public, which had been almost unanimous in declaring
them fit tenants for the State prison, soon blamed the infatuation which
had made them the accomplices of a villain in hunting down two
unoffending citizens, and of denouncing every lawyer who should
undertake their defence as a legal rogue.
The detected scoundrel fled from the place where his rascality had been
exposed, to seek some other locality, where the mingled jeers and curses
of his dupes would be unheard. Some twenty years after the trial, Mr.
Webster, while travelling in Western New York, stopped at an obscure
village tavern to get a glass of water. The hand of the man behind the
bar, who gave it to him, trembled violently; and Webster, wondering at
the cause, looked the fellow steadily in the eye. He recognized
Goodridge, and understood at once that Goodridge had just before
recognized _him_. Not a word passed between the felon and the intrepid
advocate who had stripped his villany of all its plausible disguises;
but what immense meaning must there have been in the swift interchange
of feeling as their eyes met! Mr. Webster entered his carriage and
proceeded on his journey; but Goodridge,--who has since ever heard of
him?
This story is a slight digression, but it illustrates that hold on
reality, that truth to fact, which was one of the sources of the force
and simplicity of Mr. Webster's mature style. He, however, only obtained
these good qualities of rhetoric by long struggles with constant
temptations, in his early life, to use resounding expressions and
flaring images which he had not earned the right to use. His Fourth of
July oration at Hanover, when he was only eighteen, and his college
addresses, must have been very bad in their diction if we can judge of
them by the style of his private correspondence at the time. The verses
he incorporates in his letters are deformed by all the faults of false
thinking and borrowed expression which characterized contemporary
American imitators of English imitators of Pope and Gray. Think of the
future orator, lawyer, and senator writing, even at the age of twenty,
such balderdash as this!
"And Heaven grant me, whatever luck betide,
Be fame or fortune given or denied,
Some cordial friend to meet my warm desire,
Honest as John and good as Nehemiah."
In reading such couplets we are reminded of the noted local poet of New
Hampshire (or was it Maine?) who wrote "The Shepherd's Songs," and some
of whose rustic lines still linger in the memory to be laughed at, such,
for instance, as these:--
"This child who perished in the fire,--
His father's name was Nehemiah."