"Napoleon, that great ex_ile_,
Who scoured all Europe like a file."
And Webster's prose was then almost as bad as his verse, though it was
modelled on what was considered fine writing at the opening of the
present century. He writes to his dearest student friends in a style
which is profoundly insincere, though the thoughts are often good, and
the fact of his love for his friends cannot be doubted. He had committed
to memory Fisher Ames's noble speech on the British Treaty, and had
probably read some of Burke's great pamphlets on the French Revolution.
The stripling statesman aimed to talk in their high tone and in their
richly ornamented language, before he had earned the right even to mimic
their style of expression. There is a certain swell in some of his long
sentences, and a kind of good sense in some of his short ones, which
suggest that the writer is a youth endowed with elevation as well as
strength of nature, and is only making a fool of himself because he
thinks he must make a fool of himself in order that he may impress his
correspondents with the idea that he is a master of the horrible jargon
which all bright young fellows at that time innocently supposed to
constitute eloquence. Thus, in February, 1800, he writes thus to his
friend Bingham: "In my melancholy moments I presage the most dire
calamities. I already see in my imagination the time when the banner of
civil war shall be unfurled; when Discord's hydra form shall set up her
hideous yell, and from her hundred mouths shall howl destruction through
our empire; and when American blood shall be made to flow in rivers by
American swords! But propitious Heaven prevent such dreadful calamities!
Internally secure, we have nothing to fear. Let Europe pour her
embattled millions around us, let her thronged cohorts cover our shores,
from St. Lawrence to St. Marie's, yet United Columbia shall stand
unmoved; the manes of her deceased Washington shall guard the liberties
of his country, and direct the sword of freedom in the day of battle."
And think of this, not in a Fourth of July oration, but in a private
letter to an intimate acquaintance! The bones of Daniel Webster might be
supposed to have moved in their coffin at the thought that this
miserable trash--so regretted and so amply atoned for--should have ever
seen the light; but it is from such youthful follies that we measure the
vigor of the man who outgrows them.
It was fortunate that Webster, after he was admitted to the bar, came
into constant collision, in the courts of New Hampshire, with one of the
greatest masters of the common law that the country has ever produced,
Jeremiah Mason. It has been said that Mr. Mason educated Webster into a
lawyer by opposing him. He did more than this; he cured Webster of all
the florid foolery of his early rhetorical style. Of all men that ever
appeared before a jury, Mason was the most pitiless realist, the most
terrible enemy of what is--in a slang term as vile almost as
itself--called "Hifalutin"; and woe to the opposing lawyer who indulged
in it! He relentlessly pricked all rhetorical bubbles, reducing them at
once to the small amount of ignominious suds, which the orator's breath
had converted into colored globes, having some appearance of stability
as well as splendor. Six feet and seven inches high, and corpulent in
proportion, this inexorable representative of good sense and sound law
stood, while he was arguing a case, "quite near to the jury," says
Webster,--"so near that he might have laid his finger on the foreman's
nose; and then he talked to them in a plain conversational way, in short
sentences, and using no word that was not level to the comprehension of
the least educated man on the panel. This led me," he adds, "to examine
my own style, and I set about reforming it altogether."
Mr. Mason was what the lawyers call a "cause-getting man," like Sir
James Scarlett, Brougham's great opponent at the English bar. It was
said of Scarlett, that he gained his verdicts because there were twelve
Scarletts in the jury-box; and Mason so contrived to blend his stronger
mind with the minds of the jurymen, that his thoughts appeared to be
theirs, expressed in the same simple words and quaint illustrations
which they would have used if asked to give their opinions on the case.
It is to be added, that Mason's almost cynical disregard of ornament in
his addresses to the jury gave to an opponent like Webster the advantage
of availing himself of those real ornaments of speech which spring
directly from a great heart and imagination. Webster, without ever
becoming so supremely plain and simple in style as Mason, still strove
to emulate, in his legal statements and arguments, the homely, robust
common-sense of his antagonist; but, wherever the case allowed of it, he
brought into the discussion an element of _un_-common sense, the gift of
his own genius and individuality, which Mason could hardly comprehend
sufficiently to controvert, but which was surely not without its effect
in deciding the verdicts of juries.
It is probable that Webster was one of the few lawyers and statesmen
that Mason respected. Mason's curt, sharp, "vitriolic" sarcasms on many
men who enjoyed a national reputation, and who were popularly considered
the lights of their time, still remain in the memories of his surviving
associates, as things which may be quoted in conversation, but which it
would be cruel to put into print. Of Webster, however, he never seems to
have spoken a contemptuous word. Indeed, Mason, though fourteen years
older than Webster, and fighting him at the Portsmouth bar with all the
formidable force of his logic and learning, was from the first his
cordial friend. That friendship, early established between strong
natures so opposite in character, was never disturbed by any collision
in the courts. In a letter written, I think, a few weeks after he had
made that "Reply to Hayne" which is conceded to be one of the great
masterpieces of eloquence in the recorded oratory of the world, Webster
wrote jocularly to Mason: "I have been written to, to go to New
Hampshire, to try a cause against you next August.... If it were an easy
and plain case on our side, I might be willing to go; but I have some of
your _pounding in my bones yet_, and I don't care about any more till
that wears out."
It may be said that Webster's argument in the celebrated "Dartmouth
College Case," before the Supreme Court of the United States, placed
him, at the age of thirty-six, in the foremost rank of the
constitutional lawyers of the country. For the main points of the
reasoning, and for the exhaustive citation of authorities by which the
reasoning was sustained, he was probably indebted to Mason, who had
previously argued the case before the Superior Court of New Hampshire;
but his superiority to Mason was shown in the eloquence, the moral
power, he infused into his reasoning, so as to make the dullest citation
of legal authority _tell_ on the minds he addressed.
There is one incident connected with this speech which proves what
immense force is given to simple words when a great man--great in his
emotional nature as well as great in logical power--is behind the words.
"It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those
who love it." At this point the orator's lips quivered, his voice
choked, his eyes filled with tears,--all the memories of sacrifices
endured by his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, in order
that he might enjoy its rather scanty advantages of a liberal education,
and by means of which he was there to plead its cause before the supreme
tribunal of the nation, rushed suddenly upon his mind in an overwhelming
flood. The justices of the Supreme Court--great lawyers, tried and
toughened by experience into a certain obdurate sense of justice, and
insensible to any common appeal to their hearts--melted into unwonted
tenderness, as, in broken words, the advocate proceeded to state his own
indebtedness to the "small college," whose rights and privileges he was
there to defend. Chief Justice Marshall's eyes were filled with tears;
and the eyes of the other justices were suffused with a moisture similar
to that which afflicted the eyes of the Chief. As the orator gradually
recovered his accustomed stern composure of manner, he turned to the
counsel on the other side,--one of whom, at least, was a graduate of
Dartmouth,--and in his deepest and most thrilling tones, thus concluded
his argument: "Sir, I know not how others may feel; but for myself, when
I see my Alma Mater surrounded, like Caesar in the senate-house, by
those who are reiterating stab after stab, I would not, for this right
hand, have her turn to me and say, _Et tu quoque, mi fili!_--And thou
too, my son." The effect was overwhelming; yet by what simple means was
it produced, and with what small expenditure of words! The eloquence was
plainly "in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion," but most
emphatically was it in the MAN.
Webster's extreme solicitude to make his style thoroughly
_Websterian_--a style unimitated because it is in itself inimitable--is
observable in the care he took in revising all his speeches and
addresses which were published under his own authority. His great
Plymouth oration of 1820 did not appear in a pamphlet form until a year
after its delivery. The chief reason of this delay was probably due to
his desire of stating the main political idea of the oration, that
government is founded on property, so clearly that it could not be
misconceived by any honest mind, and could only be perverted from its
plain democratic meaning by the ingenious malignity of such minds as are
deliberately dishonest, and consider lying as justifiable when lying
will serve a party purpose. It is probable that Webster would have been
President of the United States had it not been for one short sentence in
this oration,--"Government is founded on property." It was of no use for
his political friends to prove that he founded on this general
proposition the most democratic views as to the distribution of
property, and advised the enactment of laws calculated to frustrate the
accumulation of large fortunes in a few hands. There were the words,
words horrible to the democratic imagination, and Webster was proclaimed
an aristocrat, and an enemy to the common people. But the delay in the
publication of the oration may also be supposed to have been due to his
desire to prune all its grand passages of eloquence of every epithet and
image which should not be rigorously exact as expressions of his genuine
sentiments and principles. It is probable that the Plymouth oration, as
we possess it in print, is a better oration, in respect to composition,
than that which was heard by the applauding crowd before which it was
originally delivered. It is certain that the largeness, the grandeur,
the weight of Webster's whole nature, were first made manifest to the
intelligent portion of his countrymen by this noble commemorative
address.
Yet it is also certain that he was not himself altogether satisfied with
this oration; and his dissatisfaction with some succeeding popular
speeches, memorable in the annals of American eloquence, was expressed
privately to his friends in the most emphatic terms. On the day he
completed his magnificent Bunker Hill oration, delivered on the 17th of
June, 1825, he wrote to Mr. George Ticknor: "I did the deed this
morning, i.e. I finished my speech; and I am pretty well persuaded that
it will _finish_ me as far as reputation is concerned. There is no more
tone in it than in the weather in which it has been written; it is
perpetual dissolution and thaw." Every critic will understand the force
of that word "tone." He seemed to feel that it had not enough robust
manliness,--that the ribs and backbone, the facts, thoughts, and real
substance of the address, were not sufficiently prominent, owing to the
frequency of those outbursts of magnetic eloquence, which made the
immense audience that listened to it half crazy with the vehemence of
their applause. On the morning after he had delivered his eulogy on
Adams and Jefferson, he entered his office with his manuscript in his
hand, and threw it down on the desk of a young student at law whom he
specially esteemed, with the request, "There, Tom, please to take that
discourse, and weed out all the Latin words."
Webster's liking for the Saxon element of our composite language was,
however, subordinate to his main purpose of self-expression. Every word
was good, whether of Saxon or Latin derivation, which aided him to
embody the mood of mind dominant at the time he was speaking or writing.
No man had less of what has been called "the ceremonial cleanliness of
academical pharisees;" and the purity of expression he aimed at was to
put into a form, at once intelligible and tasteful, his exact thoughts
and emotions. He tormented reporters, proof-readers, and the printers
who had the misfortune to be engaged in putting one of his performances
into type, not because this or that word was or was not Saxon or Latin,
but because it was inadequate to convey perfectly his meaning. Mr.
Kemble, a great Anglo-Saxon scholar, once, in a company of educated
gentlemen, defied anybody present to mention a single Latin phrase
in our language for which he could not furnish a more forcible
Saxon equivalent. "The impenetrability of matter" was suggested;
and Kemble, after half a minute's reflection, answered, "The
un-thorough-fareableness of stuff." Still, no English writer would think
of discarding such an abstract, but convenient and accurate, term as
"impenetrability," for the coarsely concrete and terribly ponderous word
which declares that there is no possible thoroughfare, no road, by which
we can penetrate that substance which we call "matter," and which our
Saxon forefathers called "stuff." Wherever the Latin element in our
language comes in to express ideas and sentiments which were absent from
the Anglo-Saxon mind, Webster uses it without stint; and some of the
most resounding passages of his eloquence owe to it their strange power
to suggest a certain vastness in his intellect and sensibility, which
the quaint, idiomatic, homely prose of his friend, Mason, would have
been utterly incompetent to convey. Still, he preferred a plain, plump,
simple verb or noun to any learned phrase, whenever he could employ it
without limiting his opulent nature to a meagre vocabulary, incompetent
fully to express it.
Yet he never departed from simplicity; that is, he rigidly confined
himself to the use of such words as he had earned the right to use.
Whenever the report of one of his extemporaneous speeches came before
him for revision, he had an instinctive sagacity in detecting every word
that had slipped unguardedly from his tongue, which he felt, on
reflection, did not belong to _him_. Among the reporters of his
speeches, he had a particular esteem for Henry J. Raymond, afterwards so
well known as the editor of the New York Times. Mr. Raymond told me
that, after he had made a report of one of Webster's speeches, and had
presented it to him for revision, his conversation with him was always a
lesson in rhetoric. "Did I use that phrase? I hope not. At any rate,
substitute for it this more accurate definition." And then again: "That
word does not express my meaning. Wait a moment, and I will give you a
better one. That sentence is slovenly,--that image is imperfect and
confused. I believe, my young friend, that you have a remarkable power
of reporting what I say; but, if I said that, and that, and that, it
must have been owing to the fact that I caught, in the hurry of the
moment, such expressions as I could command at the moment; and you see
they do not accurately represent the idea that was in my mind." And
thus, Mr. Raymond said, the orator's criticism upon his own speech would
go on,--correction following correction,--until the reporter feared he
would not have it ready for the morning edition of his journal.
Webster had so much confidence in Raymond's power of reporting him
accurately, that, when he intended to make an important speech in the
Senate, he would send a note to him, asking him to come to Washington as
a personal favor; for he knew that the accomplished editor had a rare
power of apprehending a long train of reasoning, and of so reporting it
that the separate thoughts would not only be exactly stated, but the
relations of the thoughts to each other--a much more difficult
task--would be preserved throughout, and that the argument would be
presented in the symmetrical form in which it existed in the speaker's
mind. Then would follow, as of old, the severe scrutiny of the
phraseology of the speech; and Webster would give, as of old, a new
lesson in rhetoric to the accomplished reporter who was so capable of
following the processes of his mind.
The great difficulty with speakers who may be sufficiently clear in
statement and cogent in argument is that turn in their discourse when
their language labors to become figurative. Imagery makes palpable to
the bodily eye the abstract thought seen only by the eye of the mind;
and all orators aim at giving vividness to their thinking by thus making
their thoughts _visible_. The investigation of the process of
imagination by which this end is reached is an interesting study. Woe to
the speaker who is ambitious to rise into the region of imagination
without possessing the faculty! Everybody remembers the remark of
Sheridan, when Tierney, the prosaic Whig leader of the English House of
Commons, ventured to bring in, as an illustration of his argument, the
fabulous but favorite bird of untrained orators, the phoenix, which is
supposed always to spring up alive out of its own ashes. "It was," said
Sheridan, "a poulterer's description of a phoenix." That is, Tierney,
from defect of imagination, could not lift his poetic bird above the
rank of a common hen or chicken.
The test that may be most easily applied to all efforts of the
imagination is sincerity; for, like other qualities of the mind, it acts
strictly within the limits of a man's character and experience. The
meaning of the word "experience," however, must not be confined to what
he has personally seen and felt, but is also to be extended to every
thing he has seen and felt through vital sympathy with facts, scenes,
events, and characters, which he has learned by conversation with other
men and through books. Webster laid great emphasis on conversation as
one of the most important sources of imagery as well as of positive
knowledge. "In my education," he once remarked to Charles Sumner, "I
have found that conversation with the intelligent men I have had the
good fortune to meet has done more for me than books ever did; for I
learn more from them in a talk of half an hour than I could possibly
learn from their books. Their minds, in conversation, come into intimate
contact with my own mind; and I absorb certain secrets of their power,
whatever may be its quality, which I could not have detected in their
works. Converse, _converse_, CONVERSE with living men, face to face, and
mind to mind,--that is one of the best sources of knowledge."
But my present object is simply to give what may be called the natural
history of metaphor, comparison, image, trope, and the like, whether
imagery be employed by an uneducated husbandman, or by a great orator
and writer. Many readers may recollect the anecdote of the New Hampshire
farmer, who was once complimented on the extremely handsome appearance
of a horse which he was somewhat sullenly urging on to perform its work.
"Yaas," was the churlish reply, "the critter looks well enough, but then
he is as slow as--as--as--well, as slow as cold molasses." This
perfectly answers to Bacon's definition of imagination, as "thought
immersed in matter." The comparison is exactly on a level with the
experience of the person who used it. He had seen his good wife, on so
many bitter winter mornings, when he was eager for his breakfast, turn
the molasses-jug upside down, and had noted so often the reluctance of
the congealed sweetness to assume its liquid nature, that the thing had
become to him the visible image of the abstract notion of slowness of
movement. An imaginative dramatist or novelist, priding himself on the
exactness with which he represented character, could not have invented a
more appropriate comparison to be put into the mouth of an imagined New
England farmer.
The only objection to such rustic poets is, that a comparatively few
images serve them for a lifetime; and one tires of such "originals"
after a few days' conversation has shown the extremely limited number of
apt illustrations they have added to the homely poetry of agricultural
life. The only person, belonging to this class, that I ever met, who
possessed an imagination which was continually creative in quaint
images, was a farmer by the name of Knowlton, who had spent fifty years
in forcing some few acres of the rocky soil of Cape Ann to produce
grass, oats, potatoes, and, it may be added, those ugly stone walls
which carefully distinguish, at the cape, one patch of miserable sterile
land from another. He was equal, in quickness of imaginative
illustration, to the whole crowd of clergymen, lawyers, poets, and
artists, who filled the boarding-houses of "Pigeon Cove"; and he was
absolutely inexhaustible in fresh and original imagery. On one hot
summer day, the continuation of fourteen hot summer days, when there was
fear all over Cape Ann that the usual scanty crops would be withered up
by the intense heat, and the prayer for rain was in almost every
farmer's heart, I met Mr. Knowlton, as he was looking philosophically
over one of his own sun-smitten fields of grass. Thinking that I was in
full sympathy with his own feeling at the dolorous prospect before his
eyes, I said, in accosting him, that it was bad weather for the farmers.
He paused for half a minute; and then his mind flashed back on an
incident of his weekly experience,--that of his wife "ironing" the
somewhat damp clothes of the Monday's "washing,"--and he replied: "I see
you've been talking with our farmers, who are too stupid to know what's
for their good. Ye see the spring here was uncommonly rainy, and the
ground became wet and cold; but now, for the last fortnight, _God has
been putting his flat-iron over it_, and 'twill all come out right in
the end."
Thus Mr. Knowlton went on, year after year, speaking poetry without
knowing it, as Molière's Monsieur Jourdain found he had been speaking
prose all his life without knowing it. But the conception of the sun as
God's flat-iron, smoothing out and warming the moist earth, as a
housewife smooths and warms the yet damp shirts, stockings, and
bed-linen brought into the house from the clothes-lines in the yard, is
an astounding illustration of that "familiar grasp of things divine,"
which obtains in so many of our rustic households. Dante or Chaucer, two
of the greatest poets of the world, would, had they happened to be
"uneducated" men, have seized on just such an image to express their
idea of the Divine beneficence.
This natural, this instinctive operation of the imaginative faculty, is
often observed in children. Numberless are the stories told by fond
mothers of the wonderful things uttered by their babies, shortly after
they have left their cradles. The most striking peculiarity running
through them all is the astonishing audacity with which the child treats
the most sacred things. He or she seems to have no sense of awe. All
children are taught to believe that God resides above them in the sky;
and I shall never forget the shock of surprise I felt at the answer of a
boy of five years--whom I found glorying over the treasures of his first
paint-box--to my question: "Which color do you like best?" "Oh," he
carelessly replied, "I like best sky-blue,--God's color." And the little
rogue went on, daubing the paper before him with a mixture of all
colors, utterly unconscious that he had said any thing remarkable; and
yet what Mrs. Browning specially distinguishes as the characteristic of
the first and one of the greatest of English poets, Chaucer, namely, his
"familiar grasp of things Divine," could not have found a more
appropriate illustration than in this chance remark of a mere child,
expressing the fearlessness of his faith in the Almighty Father above
him.
Now in all these instinctive operations of the imagination, whether in
the mind of a child or in that of a grown man, it is easy to discern the
mark of sincerity. If the child is petted, and urged by his mother to
display his brightness before a company of other mothers and other
babies, he is in danger of learning early that trick of falsehood, which
clings to him when he goes to school, when he leaves the school for the
college, and when he leaves the college for the pursuits of professional
life. The farmer or mechanic, not endowed with "college larnin'," is
sure to become a bad declaimer, perhaps a demagogue, when he abandons
those natural illustrations and ornaments of his speech which spring
from his individual experience, and strives to emulate the
grandiloquence of those graduates of colleges who have the heathen
mythology at the ends of their fingers and tongues, and can refer to
Jove, Juno, Minerva, Diana, Venus, Vulcan, and Neptune, as though they
were resident deities and deesses of the college halls. The trouble with
most "uneducated" orators is, that they become enamored of these shining
gods and goddesses, after they have lost, through repetition, all of
their old power to give point or force to any good sentence of modern
oratory. During the times when, to be a speaker at Abolitionist
meetings, the speaker ran the risk of being pelted with rotten eggs, I
happened to be present, as one of a small antislavery audience, gathered
in an equally small hall. Among the speakers was an honest,
strong-minded, warm-hearted young mechanic, who, as long as he was true
to his theme, spoke earnestly, manfully, and well; but alas! he thought
he could not close without calling in some god or goddess to give
emphasis--after the method of college students--to his previous
statements. He selected, of course, that unfortunate phantom whom he
called the Goddess of Liberty. "Here, in Boston," he thundered, "where
she was cradled in Faneuil Hall, can it be that Liberty should be
trampled under foot, when, after two generations have passed,--yes, sir,
have elapsed,--she has grown--yes, sir, I repeat it, has grown--grown
up, sir, into a great man?" The change in sex was, in this case, more
violent than usual; but how many instances occur to everybody's
recollection, where that poor Goddess has been almost equally outraged,
through a puerile ambition on the part of the orator to endow her with
an exceptional distinction by senseless rhodomontade, manufactured by
the word-machine which he presumes to call his imagination! All
imitative imagery is the grave of common-sense.
Now let us pass to an imagination which is, perhaps, the grandest in
American oratory, but which was as perfectly natural as that of the
"cold molasses," or "God's flat-iron," of the New England farmer,--as
natural, indeed, as the "sky-blue, God's color," of the New England boy.
Daniel Webster, standing on the heights of Quebec at an early hour of a
summer morning, heard the ordinary morning drum-beat which called the
garrison to their duty. Knowing that the British possessions belted the
globe, the thought occurred to him that the morning drum would go on
beating in some English post to the time when it would sound again in
Quebec. Afterwards, in a speech on President Jackson's Protest, he dwelt
on the fact that our Revolutionary forefathers engaged in a war with
Great Britain on a strict question of principle, "while actual suffering
was still afar off." How could he give most effect to this statement? It
would have been easy for him to have presented statistical tables,
showing the wealth, population, and resources of England, followed by an
enumeration of her colonies and military stations, all going to prove
the enormous strength of the nation against which the United American
colonies raised their improvised flag. But the thought which had
heretofore occurred to him at Quebec happily recurred to his mind the
moment it was needed; and he flashed on the imagination an image of
British power which no statistics could have conveyed to the
understanding,--"a Power," he said, "which has dotted over the surface
of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose
morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the
hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the
martial airs of England." Perhaps a mere rhetorician might consider
superfluous the word "whole," as applied to "globe," and "unbroken," as
following "continuous"; yet they really add to the force and majesty of
the expression. It is curious that, in Great Britain, this magnificent
impersonation of the power of England is so little known. It is certain
that it is unrivalled in British patriotic oratory. Not Chatham, not
even Burke, ever approached it in the noblest passages in which they
celebrated the greatness and glory of their country. Webster, it is to
be noted, introduced it in his speech, not for the purpose of exalting
England, but of exalting our Revolutionary forefathers, whose victory,
after a seven years' war of terrible severity, waged in vindication of a
principle, was made all the more glorious from having been won over an
adversary so formidable and so vast.
It is reported that, at the conclusion of this speech on the President's
Protest, John Sergeant, of Philadelphia, came up to the orator, and,
after cordially shaking hands with him, eagerly asked, "Where, Webster,
did you get that idea of the morning drum-beat?" Like other public men,
accustomed to address legislative assemblies, he was naturally desirous
of knowing the place, if place there was, where such images and
illustrations were to be found. The truth was that, if Webster had ever
read Goethe's Faust,--which he of course never had done,--he might have
referred his old friend to that passage where Faust, gazing at the
setting sun, aches to follow it in its course for ever. "See," he
exclaims, "how the green-girt cottages shimmer in the setting sun. He
bends and sinks,--the day is outlived. Yonder he hurries off, and
quickens other life. Oh, that I have no wing to lift me from the ground,
to struggle after--for ever after--him! I should see, in everlasting
evening beams, the stilly world at my feet, every height on fire, every
vale in repose, the silver brook flowing into golden streams. The rugged
mountain, with all its dark defiles, would not then break my godlike
course. Already the sea, with its heated bays, opens on my enraptured
sight. Yet the god seems at last to sink away. But the new impulse
wakes. I hurry on to drink his everlasting light,--_the day before me
and the night behind_,--and under me the waves." In Faust, the wings of
the mind follow the setting sun; in Webster, they follow the rising sun;
but the thought of each circumnavigates the globe, in joyous
companionship with the same centre of life, light, and heat,--though the
suggestion which prompts the sublime idea is widely different. The
sentiment of Webster, calmly meditating on the heights of Quebec,
contrasts strangely with the fiery feeling of Faust, raging against the
limitations of his mortal existence. A humorist, Charles Dickens, who
never read either Goethe or Webster, has oddly seized on the same
general idea: "The British empire," as he says, in one of his
novels,--"on which the sun never sets, and where the tax-gatherer never
goes to bed."
This celebrated image of the British "drum-beat" is here cited simply to
indicate the natural way in which all the faculties of Webster are
brought into harmonious co-operation, whenever he seriously discusses
any great question. His understanding and imagination, when both are
roused into action, always cordially join hands. His statement of facts
is so combined with the argument founded on them, that they are
interchangeable; his statement having the force of argument, and his
argument having the "substantiality" which properly belongs to
statement; and to these he commonly adds an imaginative illustration,
which gives increased reality to both statement and argument. In rapidly
turning over the leaves of the six volumes of his Works, one can easily
find numerous instances of this instinctive operation of his mind. In
his first Bunker Hill oration, he announces that "the _principle_ of
free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it,
immovable as its mountains." Again he says: "A call for the
representative system, wherever it is not enjoyed, and where there is
already intelligence enough to estimate its value, is perseveringly
made. Where men may speak out, they demand it where the bayonet is at
their throats, they pray for it." And yet again: "If the true spark of
religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn. Human agency
cannot extinguish it. Like the earth's central fire, it may be smothered
for a time; the ocean may overwhelm it; mountains may press it down; but
its inherent and unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the
land, and at some time or other, in some place or other, the volcano
will break out, and flame up to heaven." It would be difficult to find
in any European literature a similar embodiment of an elemental
sentiment of humanity, in an image which is as elemental as the
sentiment to which it gives vivid expression.
And then with what majesty, with what energy, and with what simplicity,
can he denounce a political transaction which, had it not attracted his
ire, would hardly have survived in the memory of his countrymen! Thus,
in his Protest against Mr. Benton's Expunging Resolution, speaking for
himself and his Senatorial colleague, he says: "We rescue our own names,
character, and honor from all participation in this matter; and,
whatever the wayward character of the times, the headlong and plunging
spirit of party devotion, or the fear or the love of power, may have
been able to bring about elsewhere, we desire to thank God that they
have not, as yet, overcome the love of liberty, fidelity to true
republican principles, and a sacred regard for the Constitution in that
State whose soil was drenched to a mire by the first and best blood of
the Revolution." Perhaps the peculiar power of Webster in condemning a
measure by a felicitous epithet, such as that he employs in describing
"the _plunging_ spirit of party devotion," was never more happily
exercised. In that word "plunging," he intended to condense all his
horror and hatred of a transaction which he supposed calculated to throw
the true principles of constitutional government into a bottomless abyss
of personal government, where right constitutional principles would
cease to have existence, as well as cease to have authority.
There is one passage in his oration at the completion of the Bunker Hill
Monument, which may be quoted as an illustration of his power of compact
statement, and which, at the same time, may save readers from the
trouble of reading many excellent histories of the origin and progress
of the Spanish dominion in America, condensing, as it does, all which
such histories can tell us in a few smiting sentences. "Spain," he says,
"stooped on South America, like a vulture on its prey. Every thing was
force. Territories were acquired by fire and sword. Cities were
destroyed by fire and sword. Hundreds of thousands of human beings fell
by fire and sword. Even conversion to Christianity was attempted by fire
and sword." One is reminded, in this passage, of Macaulay's method of
giving vividness to his confident generalization of facts by emphatic
repetitions of the same form of words. The repetition of "fire and
sword," in this series of short, sharp sentences, ends in forcing the
reality of what the words mean on the dullest imagination; and the
climax is capped by affirming that "fire and sword" were the means by
which the religion of peace was recommended to idolaters, whose
heathenism was more benignant, and more intrinsically Christian, than
the military Christianity which was forced upon them.
And then, again, how easily Webster's imagination slips in, at the end
of a comparatively bald enumeration of the benefits of a good
government, to vitalize the statements of his understanding!
"Everywhere," he says, "there is order, everywhere there is security.
Everywhere the law reaches to the highest, and reaches to the lowest, to
protect all in their rights, and to restrain all from wrong; and over
all hovers liberty,--that liberty for which our fathers fought and fell
on this very spot, with her eye ever watchful, and her eagle wing ever
wide outspread." There is something astonishing in the dignity given in
the last clause of this sentence to the American eagle,--a bird so
degraded by the rhodomontade of fifth-rate declaimers, that it seemed
impossible that the highest genius and patriotism could restore it to
its primacy among the inhabitants of the air, and its just eminence as a
symbol of American liberty. It is also to be noted, that Webster here
alludes to "the bird of freedom" only as it appears on the American
silver dollar that passes daily from hand to hand, where the watchful
eye and the outspread wing are so inartistically represented that the
critic is puzzled to account for the grandeur of the image which the
orator contrived to evolve from the barbaric picture on the ugliest and
clumsiest of civilized coins.
The compactness of Webster's statements occasionally reminds us of the
epigrammatic point which characterizes so many of the statements of
Burke. Thus, in presenting a memorial to Congress, signed by many
prominent men of business, against President Jackson's system of
finance, he saw at once that the Democrats would denounce it as another
manifesto of the "moneyed aristocracy." Accordingly Webster introduced
the paper to the attention of the Senate, with the preliminary remark:
"The memorialists are not unaware, that, if rights are attacked,
attempts will be made to render odious those whose rights are violated.
Power always seeks such subjects on which to try its experiments." It is
difficult to resist the impression that Webster must have been indebted
to Burke for this maxim. Again, we are deluded into the belief that we
must be reading Burke, when Webster refers to the _minimum_ principle as
the right one to be followed in imposing duties on certain manufactures.
"It lays the impost," he says, "exactly where it will do good, and
leaves the rest free. It is an intelligent, discerning, discriminating
principle; not a blind, headlong, generalizing, uncalculating operation.
Simplicity undoubtedly, is a great beauty in acts of legislation, as
well as in the works of art; but in both it must be a simplicity
resulting from congruity of parts and adaptation to the end designed;
not a rude generalization, which either leaves the particular object
unaccomplished, or, in accomplishing it, accomplishes a dozen others
also, which were not desired. It is a simplicity wrought out by
knowledge and skill; not the rough product of an undistinguishing,
sweeping general principle."
An ingenuous reader, who has not learned from his historical studies
that men generally act, not from arguments addressed to their
understandings, but from vehement appeals which rouse their passions to
defend their seeming interests, cannot comprehend why Webster's
arguments against Nullification and Secession, which were apparently
unanswerable, and which were certainly unanswered either by Hayne or
Calhoun, should not have settled the question in debate between the
North and the South. Such a reader, after patiently following all the
turns and twists of the logic, all the processes of the reasoning
employed on both sides of the intellectual contest, would naturally
conclude that the party defeated in the conflict would gracefully
acknowledge the fact of its defeat; and, as human beings, gifted with
the faculty of reason, would cheerfully admit the demonstrated results
of its exercise. He would find it difficult to comprehend why the men
who were overcome in a fair gladiatorial strife in the open arena of
debate, with brain pitted against brain, and manhood against manhood,
should resort to the rough logic of "blood and iron," when the nobler
kind of logic, that which is developed in the struggle of mind with
mind, had failed to accomplish the purposes which their hearts and
wills, independent of their understandings, were bent on accomplishing.
It may be considered certain that so wise a statesman as Webster--a
statesman whose foresight was so palpably the consequence of his
insight, and whose piercing intellect was so admirably adapted to read
events in their principles--never indulged in such illusions as those
which cheered so many of his own adherents, when they supposed his
triumph in argumentation was to settle a matter which was really based
on organic differences in the institutions of the two sections of the
Union. He knew perfectly well that, while the Webster men were glorying
in his victory over Calhoun, the Calhoun men were equally jubilant in
celebrating Calhoun's victory over him. Which of them had the better in
the argument was of little importance in comparison with the terrible
fact that the people of the Southern States were widening, year by year,
the distance which separated them from the people of the Northern
States. We have no means of judging whether Webster clearly foresaw the
frightful civil war between the two sections, which followed so soon
after his own death. We only know that, to him, it was a conflict
constantly impending, and which could be averted for the time only by
compromises, concessions, and other temporary expedients. If he allowed
his mind to pass from the pressing questions of the hour, and to
consider the radical division between the two sections of the country
which were only formally united, it would seem that he must have felt,
as long as the institution of negro slavery existed, that he was only
laboring to postpone a conflict which it was impossible for him to
prevent.
But my present purpose is simply to indicate the felicity of Webster's
intrepid assault on the principles which the Southern disunionists put
forward in justification of their acts. Mr. Calhoun's favorite idea was
this,--that Nullification was a conservative principle, to be exercised
within the Union, and in accordance with a just interpretation of the
Constitution. "To begin with nullification," Webster retorted, "with the
avowed intent, nevertheless, not to proceed to secession, dismemberment,
and general revolution, is as if one were to take the plunge of Niagara,
and cry out that he would stop half-way down. In the one case, as in the
other, the rash adventurer must go to the bottom of the dark abyss
below, were it not that the abyss has no discovered bottom."
How admirable also is his exposure of the distinction attempted to be
drawn between secession, as a State right to be exercised under the
provisions of what was called "the Constitutional Compact," and
revolution. "Secession," he says, "as a revolutionary right, is
intelligible; as a right to be proclaimed in the midst of civil
commotions, and asserted at the head of armies, I can understand it. But
as a practical right, existing under the Constitution, and in conformity
with its provisions, it seems to me nothing but a plain absurdity; for
it supposes resistance to government, under the authority of government
itself; it supposes dismemberment, without violating the principles of
union; it supposes opposition to law, without crime, it supposes the
total overthrow of government, without revolution."
After putting some pertinent interrogatories--which are arguments in
themselves--relating to the inevitable results of secession, he adds,
that "every man must see that these are all questions which can arise
only after a revolution. They presuppose the breaking up of the
government. While the Constitution lasts, they are repressed";--and
then, with that felicitous use of the imagination as a handmaid of the
understanding, which is the peculiar characteristic of his eloquence, he
closes the sentence by saying, that "they spring up to annoy and startle
us only from its grave." A mere reasoner would have stopped at the word
"repressed"; the instantaneous conversion of "questions" into spectres,
affrighting and annoying us as they spring up from the grave of the
Constitution,--which is also by implication impersonated,--is the work
of Webster's ready imagination; and it thoroughly vitalizes the
statements which precede it.
A great test of the sincerity of a statesman's style is his moderation.
Now, if we take the whole body of Mr. Webster's speeches, whether
delivered in the Senate or before popular assemblies, during the period
of his opposition to President Jackson's administration, we may well be
surprised at their moderation of tone and statement. Everybody old
enough to recollect the singular virulence of political speech at that
period must remember it as disgraceful equally to the national
conscience and the national understanding. The spirit of party, always
sufficiently fierce and unreasonable, was then stimulated into a fury
resembling madness. Almost every speaker, Democrat or Whig, was in that
state of passion which is represented by the physical sign of "foaming
at the mouth." Few mouths then opened that did not immediately begin to
"foam." So many fortunes were suddenly wrecked by President Jackson's
financial policy, and the business of the country was so disastrously
disturbed, that, whether the policy was right or wrong, those who
assailed and those who defended it seemed to be equally devoid of common
intellectual honesty. "I do well to be angry," appears to have been the
maxim which inspired Democratic and Whig orators alike; and what reason
there was on either side was submerged in the lies and libels, in the
calumnies and caricatures, in the defamations and execrations, which
accompanied the citation of facts and the affirmation of principles.
Webster, during all this time, was selected as a shining mark, at which
every puny writer or speaker who opposed him hurled his small or large
contribution of verbal rotten eggs; and yet Webster was almost the only
Whig statesman who preserved sanity of understanding during the whole
progress of that political riot, in which the passions of men became the
masters of their understandings. Pious Whig fathers, who worshipped the
"godlike Daniel," went almost to the extent of teaching their children
to curse Jackson in their prayers; equally pious Democratic fathers
brought up their sons and daughters to anathematize the fiend-like
Daniel as the enemy of human rights; and yet, in reading Webster's
speeches, covering the whole space between 1832 and 1836, we can hardly
find a statement which an historian of our day would not admit as a
candid generalization of facts, or an argument which would not stand the
test of logical examination. Such an historian might entirely disagree
with the opinions of Webster; but he would certainly award to him the
praise of being an honest reasoner and an honest rhetorician, in a time
when reason was used merely as a tool of party passion, and when
rhetoric rushed madly into the worst excesses of rhodomontade.
It is also to be said that Webster rarely indulged in personalities.
When we consider how great were his powers of sarcasm and invective, how
constant were the provocations to exercise them furnished by his
political enemies, and how atrociously and meanly allusions to his
private affairs were brought into discussions which should have been
confined to refuting his reasoning, his moderation in this matter is to
be ranked as a great virtue. He could not take a glass of wine without
the trivial fact being announced all over the country as indisputable
proof that he was an habitual drunkard, though the most remarkable
characteristic of his speeches is their temperance,--their "total
abstinence" from all the intoxicating moral and mental "drinks" which
confuse the understanding and mislead the conscience. He could not
borrow money on his note of hand, like any other citizen, without the
circumstance being trumpeted abroad as incontrovertible evidence that
Nick Biddle had paid him that sum to defend his diabolical Bank in the
Senate of the United States. The plain fact that his speeches were
confined strictly to the exposition and defence of sound opinions on
trade and finance, and that it was difficult to answer them, only
confirmed his opponents in the conviction that old Nick was at the
bottom of it all. His great intellect was admitted; but on the high,
broad brow, which was its manifestation to the eye, his enemies pasted
the words, "To be let," or, "For sale." The more impersonal he became in
his statements and arguments, the more truculently was he assailed by
the personalities of the political gossip and scandal-monger. Indeed,
from the time he first came to the front as a great lawyer, statesman,
and patriot, he was fixed upon by the whole crew of party libellers as a
man whose arguments could be answered most efficiently by staining his
character. He passed through life with his head enveloped "in a cloud of
poisonous flies"; and the head was the grandest-looking head that had
ever been seen on the American continent. It was so pre-eminently noble
and impressive, and promised so much more than it could possibly
perform, that only one felicitous sarcasm of party malice, among many
thousands of bad jokes, has escaped oblivion; and that was stolen from
Charles Fox's remark on Lord Chancellor Thurlow, as Fox once viewed him
sitting on the wool-sack, frowning on the English House of Lords, which
he dominated by the terror of his countenance, and by the fear that he
might, at any moment, burst forth in one of his short bullying,
thundering retorts, should any comparatively weak baron, earl, marquis,
or duke dare to oppose him. "Thurlow," said Fox, "must be an impostor,
for nobody can be as wise as he looks." The American version of this
was, "Webster must be a charlatan, for no one can be as great as he
looks."
But during all the time that his antagonists attempted to elude the
force of his arguments by hunting up the evidences of his debts, and by
trying to show that the most considerate, the most accurate, and the
most temperate of his lucid statements were the products of physical
stimulants, Webster steadily kept in haughty reserve his power of
retaliation. In his speech in reply to Hayne he hinted that, if he were
imperatively called upon to meet blows with blows, he might be found
fully equal to his antagonists in that ignoble province of intellectual
pugilism; but that he preferred the more civilized struggle of brain
with brain, in a contest which was to decide questions of principle. In
the Senate, where he could meet his political opponents face to face,
few dared to venture to degrade the subject in debate from the
discussion of principles to the miserable subterfuge of imputing bad
motives as a sufficient answer to good arguments; but still many of
these dignified gentlemen smiled approval on the efforts of the
low-minded, small-minded caucus-speakers of their party, when they
declared that Webster's logic was unworthy of consideration, because he
was bought by the Bank, or bought by the manufacturers of Massachusetts,
or bought by some other combination of persons who were supposed to be
the deadly enemies of the laboring men of the country. On some rare
occasions Webster's wrath broke out in such smiting words that his
adversaries were cowed into silence, and cursed the infatuation which
had led them to overlook the fact that the "logic-machine" had in it
invectives more terrible than its reasonings. But generally he refrained
from using the giant's power "like a giant"; and it is almost pathetic
to remember that, when Mr. Everett undertook to edit, in 1851, the
standard edition of his works, Webster gave directions to expunge all
personalities from his speeches, even when those personalities were the
just punishment of unprovoked attacks on his integrity as a man. Readers
will look in vain, in this edition of his works, for some of the most
pungent passages which originally attracted their attention in the first
report of the Defence of the Treaty of Washington. At the time these
directions were given, Webster was himself the object of innumerable
personalities, which were the natural, the inevitable results of his
speech of the 7th of March, 1850.
It seems to be a law, that the fame of all public men shall be "half
disfame." We are specially warned to beware of the man of whom all men
speak well. Burke, complimenting his friend Fox for risking every thing,
even his "darling popularity," on the success of the East India Bill,
nobly says: "He is traduced and abused for his supposed motives. He will
remember, that obloquy is a necessary ingredient in all true glory; he
will remember, that it was not only in the Roman customs, but it is in
the nature of human things, that calumny and abuse are essential parts
of triumph."
It may be said, however, that Webster's virtue in this general
abstinence from personalities is to be offset by the fact that he could
throw into a glance of his eye, a contortion of his face, a tone of his
voice, or a simple gesture of his hand, more scorn, contempt, and hatred
than ordinary debaters could express by the profuse use of all the
scurrilous terms in the English language. Probably many a sentence,
which we now read with an even pulse, was, as originally delivered,
accompanied by such pointing of the finger, or such flashing of the eye,
or such raising of the voice, that the seemingly innocent words were
poisoned arrows that festered in the souls of those against whom they
were directed, and made deadly enemies of a number of persons whom he
seems, in his printed speeches, never to have mentioned without the
respect due from one Senator to another. In his speech in defence of the
Treaty of Washington, he had to repel Mr. Ingersoll's indecent attack on
his integrity, and his dreadful retort is described by those who heard
it as coming within the rules which condemn cruelty to animals. But the
"noble rage" which prompted him to indulge in such unwonted invective
subsided with the occasion that called it forth, and he was careful to
have it expunged when the speech was reprinted. An eminent judge of the
Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in commending the general dignity and
courtesy which characterized Webster's conduct of a case in a court of
law, noted one exception. "When," he said, "the opposite counsel had got
him into a corner, the way he 'trampled out' was something frightful to
behold. The court itself could hardly restrain him in his gigantic
efforts to extricate himself from the consequences of a blunder or an
oversight."
Great writers and orators are commonly economists in the use of words.
They compel common words to bear a burden of thought and emotion, which
mere rhetoricians, with all the resources of the language at their
disposal, would never dream of imposing upon them. But it is also to be
observed, that some writers have the power of giving a new and special
significance to a common word, by impressing on it a wealth of meaning
which it cannot claim for itself. Three obvious examples of this
peculiar power may be cited. Among poets, Chaucer infused into the
simple word "green" a poetic ecstasy which no succeeding English poet,
not even Wordsworth, has ever rivalled, in describing an English
landscape in the month of May. Jonathan Edwards fixed upon the term
"sweetness" as best conveying his loftiest conception of the bliss which
the soul of the saint can attain to on earth, or expect to be blessed
with in heaven; but not one of his theological successors has ever
caught the secret of using "sweetness" in the sense attached to it by
him. Dr. Barrow gave to the word "rest," as embodying his idea of the
spiritual repose of the soul fit for heaven, a significance which it
bears in the works of no other great English divine. To descend a
little, Webster was fond of certain words, commonplace enough in
themselves, to which he insisted on imparting a more than ordinary
import. Two of these, which meet us continually in reading his speeches,
are "interesting" and "respectable." The first of these appears to him
competent to express that rapture of attention called forth by a thing,
an event, or a person, which other writers convey by such a term as
"absorbing," or its numerous equivalents. If we should select one
passage from his works which, more than any other, indicates his power
of seeing and feeling, through a process of purely imaginative vision
and sympathy, it is that portion of his Plymouth oration, where he
places himself and his audience as spectators on the barren shore, when
the _Mayflower_ came into view. He speaks of "the _interesting_ group
upon the deck" of the little vessel. The very word suggests that we are
to have a very commonplace account of the landing, and the circumstances
which followed it. In an instant, however, we are made to "feel the cold
which benumbed, and listen to the winds which pierced" this
"interesting" group; and immediately after, the picture is flashed upon
the imagination of "chilled and shivering childhood, houseless, but for
a mother's arms, couchless, but for a mother's breast,"--an image which
shows that the orator had not only transported himself into a spectator
of the scene, but had felt his own blood "almost freeze" in intense
sympathy with the physical sufferings of the shelterless mothers and
children.
There is no word which the novelists, satirists, philanthropic
reformers, and Bohemians of our day have done so much to discredit, and
make dis-respectable to the heart and the imagination, as the word
"respectable." Webster always uses it as a term of eulogy. A respectable
man is, to his mind, a person who performs all his duties to his family,
his country, and his God; a person who is not only virtuous, but who has
a clear perception of the relation which connects one virtue with
another by "the golden thread" of moderation, and who, whether he be a
man of genius, or a business man of average talent, or an intelligent
mechanic, or a farmer of sound moral and mental character, is to be
considered "respectable" because he is one of those citizens whose
intelligence and integrity constitute the foundation on which the
Republic rests. As late as 1843, in his noble oration on the completion
of the Bunker Hill Monument, he declared that if our American
institutions had done nothing more than to produce the character of
Washington, that alone would entitle them to the respect of mankind.
"Washington is all our own!... I would cheerfully put the question
to-day to the intelligence of Europe and the world, what character of
the century, upon the whole, stands out in the relief of history, most
pure, most _respectable_, most sublime; and I doubt not, that, by a
suffrage approaching to unanimity, the answer would be Washington!" It
is needless to quote other instances of the peculiar meaning he put into
the word "respectable," when we thus find him challenging the Europe of
the eighteenth century to name a match for Washington, and placing "most
respectable" after "most pure," and immediately preceding "most
sublime," in his enumeration of the three qualities in which Washington
surpassed all men of his century.
It has been often remarked that Webster adapted his style, even his
habits of mind and modes of reasoning, to the particular auditors he
desired to influence; but that, whether he addressed an unorganized
crowd of people, or a jury, or a bench of judges, or the Senate of the
United States, he ever proved himself an orator of the first class.