Indeed, a close scrutiny of his speeches will show how conscientiously he regards the rights of other minds, however inferior they may be to his own; and this virtue, for it is a virtue, is never more apparent than in his arguments and appeals addressed to popular assemblies. No working-man, whether farmer, mechanic, factory "hand," or day-laborer, ever deemed himself insulted by a word from the lips of Daniel Webster; he felt himself rather exalted in his own esteem, for the time, by coming in contact with that beneficent and comprehensive intelligence, which cherished among its favorite ideas a scheme for lifting up the American laborer to a height of comfort and respectability which the European laborer could hardly hope to attain. Prominent politicians, men of wealth and influence, statesmen of high social and political rank, may, at times, have considered Webster as arrogant and bad-tempered, and may, at times, have felt disposed to fasten a quarrel upon him; even in Massachusetts this disposition broke out in conventions of the party to which he belonged; but it would be in vain to find a single laboring-man, whether he met Webster in private, or half pushed and half fought his way into a mass meeting, in order to get his ears into communication with the orator's voice, who ever heard a word from him which did not exalt the dignity of labor, or which was not full of sympathy for the laborer's occasional sorrows and privations. Webster seemed to have ever present to his mind the poverty of the humble home of his youth. His father, his brothers, he himself, had all been brought up to consider manual toil a dignified occupation, and as consistent with the exercise of all the virtues which flourish under the domestic roof. More than this, it may be said that, with the exception of a few intimate friends, his sympathies to the last were most warmly with common laborers. Indeed, if we closely study the private correspondence of this statesman, who was necessarily brought into relations, more or less friendly, with the conventionally great men of the world, European as well as American, we shall find that, after all, he took more real interest in Seth Peterson, and John Taylor, and Porter Wright, men connected with him in fishing and farming, than he did in the ambassadors of foreign states whom he met as Senator or as Secretary of State, or in all the members of the polite society of Washington, New York, and Boston. He was very near to Nature himself; and the nearer a man was to Nature, the more he esteemed him. Thus persons who superintended his farms and cattle, or who pulled an oar in his boat when he ventured out in search of cod and halibut, thought "Squire Webster" a man who realized their ideal and perfection of good-fellowship while it may confidently be said that many of his closest friends among men of culture, including lawyers, men of letters, and statesmen of the first rank, must have occasionally resented the "anfractuosities" of his mood and temper. But Seth Peterson, and Porter Wright, and John Taylor, never complained of these "anfractuosities." Webster, in fact, is one of the few public men of the country in whose championship of the rights and sympathy with the wrongs of labor there is not the slightest trace of the arts of the demagogue; and in this fact we may find the reason why even the "roughs," who are present in every mass meeting, always treated him with respect. Perhaps it would not be out of place to remark here, that, in his Speech of the 7th of March, he missed a grand opportunity to vindicate Northern labor, in the reference he made to a foolish tirade of a Senator from Louisiana, who "took pains to run a contrast between the slaves of the South and the laboring people of the North, giving the preference, in all points of condition, of comfort, and happiness, to the slaves of the South." Webster made a complete reply to this aspersion on Northern labor; but, as his purpose was to conciliate, he did not blast the libeller by quoting the most eminent example that could be named demonstrating the falsehood of the slave-holding Senator's assertion. Without deviating from the conciliatory attitude he had assumed, one could easily imagine him as lifting his large frame to its full height, flashing from his rebuking eyes a glance of scorn at the "amiable Senator," and simply saying, "I belong to the class which the Senator from Louisiana stigmatizes as more degraded than the slaves of the South." There was not at the time any Senator from the South, except Mr. Calhoun, that the most prejudiced Southern man would have thought of comparing with Webster in respect to intellectual eminence; and, if Webster had then and there placed himself squarely on his position as the son of a Northern laborer, we should have been spared all the rhetoric about Northern "mud-sills," with which the Senate was afterwards afflicted. Webster was our man of men; and it would seem that he should have crushed such talk at the outset, by proudly assuming that Northern labor was embodied and impersonated in him,—that HE had sprung from its ranks, and was proud of his ancestry.
An ingenious and powerful, but paradoxical thinker, once told me that I was mistaken in calling Jonathan Edwards and Daniel Webster great reasoners. "They were bad reasoners," he added, "but great poets." Without questioning the right of the author of "An Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notion of that Freedom of the Will, which is supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency," to be ranked among the most eminent of modern logicians, I could still understand why he was classed among poets; for whether Edwards paints the torments of hell or the bliss of heaven, his imagination almost rivals that of Dante in intensity of realization. But it was at first puzzling to comprehend why Webster should be depressed as a reasoner in order to be exalted as a poet. The images and metaphors scattered over his speeches are so evidently brought in to illustrate and enforce his statements and arguments, that, grand as they often are, the imagination displayed in them is still a faculty strictly subsidiary to the reasoning power. It was only after reflecting patiently for some time on the seeming paradox that I caught a glimpse of my friend's meaning; and it led me at once to consider an entirely novel question, not heretofore mooted by any of Webster's critics, whether friendly or unfriendly, in their endeavors to explain the reason of his influence over the best minds of the generation to which he belonged. In declaring that, as a poet, he far exceeded any capacity he evinced as a reasoner, my paradoxical friend must have meant that Webster had the poet's power of so organizing a speech, that it stood out to the eye of the mind as a palpable intellectual product and fact, possessing, not merely that vague reality which comes from erecting a plausible mental structure of deductive argumentation, based on strictly limited premises, but a positive reality, akin to the products of Nature herself, when she tries her hand in constructing a ledge of rocks or rearing a chain of hills.
In illustration, it may be well to cite the example of poets with whom Webster, of course, cannot be compared. Among the great mental facts, palpable to the eyes of all men interested in literature, are such creations as the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, the great Shakspearian dramas, the Paradise Lost, and Faust. The commentaries and criticisms on these are numerous enough to occupy the shelves of a large library; some of them attempt to show that Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, and Goethe were all wrong in their methods of creation; but they still cannot obscure, to ordinary vision, the lustre of these luminaries as they placidly shine in the intellectual firmament, which is literally over our heads. They are as palpable, to the eye of the mind, as Sirius, Arcturus, the Southern Cross, and the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, are to the bodily sense. M. Taine has recently assailed the Paradise Lost with the happiest of French epigrams; he tries to prove that, in construction, it is the most ridiculously inartistic monstrosity that the imagination of a great mind ever framed out of chaos; but, after we have thoroughly enjoyed the play of his wit, there the Paradise Lost remains, an undisturbed object in the intellectual heavens, disdaining to justify its right to exist on any other grounds than the mere fact of its existence; and, certainly, not more ridiculous than Saturn himself, as we look at him through a great equatorial telescope, swinging through space encumbered with his clumsy ring, and his wrangling family of satellites, but still, in spite of peculiarities on which M. Taine might exercise his wit until doomsday, one of the most beautiful and sublime objects which the astronomer can behold in the whole phenomena of the heavens.
Indeed, in reading criticisms on such durable poetic creations and organizations as we have named, one is reminded of Sydney Smith's delicious chaffing of his friend Jeffrey, on account of Jeffrey's sensitiveness of literary taste, and his inward rage that events, men, and books, outside of him, do not correspond to the exacting rules which are the products of his own subjective and somewhat peevish intelligence. "I like," says Sydney, "to tell you these things, because you never do so well as when you are humbled and frightened, and, if you could be alarmed into the semblance of modesty, you would charm everybody; but remember my joke against you about the moon: 'D—n the solar system! bad light—planets too distant—pestered with comets—feeble contrivance; could make a better with great ease.'"
Now when a man, in whatever department or direction of thought his activity is engaged, succeeds in organizing, or even welding together, the materials on which he works, so that the product, as a whole, is visible to the mental eye, as a new creation or construction, he has an immense advantage over all critics of his performance. Refined reasonings are impotent to overthrow it; epigrams glance off from it, as rifle-bullets rebound when aimed at a granite wall; and it stands erect long after the reasonings and the epigrams are forgotten. Even when its symmetry is destroyed by a long and destructive siege, a pile of stones still remains, as at Fort Sumter, to attest what power of resistance it opposed to all the resources of modern artillery.
If we look at Webster's greatest speeches, as, for instance, "The Reply to Hayne," "The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States," "The President's Protest," and others that might be mentioned, we shall find that they partake of the character of organic formations, or at least of skilful engineering or architectural constructions. Even Mr. Calhoun never approached him in this art of giving objective reality to a speech, which, after all, is found, on analysis, to consist only of a happy collocation and combination of words, but in Webster the words are either all alive with the creative spirit of the poet, or, at the worst, resemble the blocks of granite or marble which the artisan piles, one on the other, and the result of which, though it may represent a poor style of architecture, is still a rude specimen of a Gothic edifice. The artist and artificer are both observable in Webster's work; but the reality and solidity of the construction cannot be questioned. At the present time, an educated reader would be specially interested in the mental processes by which Webster thus succeeded in giving objective existence and validity to the operations of his mind, and, whether sympathizing with his opinions or not, would as little think of refusing to read them because of their Whiggism, as he would think of refusing to read Homer because of his heathenism, or Dante because of his Catholicism, or Milton because of his compound of Arianism and Calvinism, or Goethe because of his Pantheism. The fact which would most interest such a reader would be, that Webster had, in some mysterious way, translated and transformed his abstract propositions into concrete substance and form. The form might offend his reason, his taste, or his conscience; but he could not avoid admitting that it had a form, while most speeches, even those made by able men, are comparatively formless, however lucid they may be in the array of facts, and plausible in the order and connection of arguments.
In trying to explain this power, the most obvious comparison which would arise in the mind of an intelligent reader would be, that Webster, as a rhetorician, resembled Vauban and Cohorn as military engineers. In the war of debate, he so fortified the propositions he maintained, that they could not be carried by direct assault, but must be patiently besieged. The words he employed were simple enough, and fell short of including the vocabulary of even fifth-rate declaimers; but he had the art of so disposing them that, to an honest reasoner, the position he took appeared to be impregnable. To assail it by the ordinary method of passionate protest and illogical reasoning, was as futile as a dash of light cavalry would have been against the defences of such cities as Namur and Lille. Indeed, in his speech, "The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States," he erected a whole Torres Vedras line of fortifications, on which legislative Massenas dashed themselves in vain, and, however strong in numbers in respect to the power of voting him down, recoiled defeated in every attempt to reason him down.
In further illustration of this peculiar power of Webster, the Speech of the 7th of March, 1850, may be cited, for its delivery is to be ranked with the most important historical events. For some years it was the object of the extremes of panegyric and the extremes of execration. But this effort is really the most loosely constructed of all the great productions of Webster's mind. In force, compactness, and completeness, in closeness of thought to things, in closeness of imagery to the reasoning it illustrates, and in general intellectual fibre, muscle, and bone, it cannot be compared to such an oration as that on the "First Settlement of New England," or such a speech as that which had for its theme, "The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States"; but, after all deductions have been made, it was still a speech which frowned upon its opponents as a kind of verbal fortress constructed both for the purpose of defence and aggression. Its fame is due, in a great degree, to its resistance to a storm of assaults, such as had rarely before been concentrated on any speech delivered in either branch of the Congress of the United States. Indeed, a very large portion of the intellect, the moral sentiment, and the moral passion of the free States was directed against it. There was not a weapon in the armory of the dialectician or the rhetorician which was not employed with the intent of demolishing it. Contempt of Webster was vehemently taught as the beginning of political wisdom. That a speech, thus assailed, should survive the attacks made upon it, appeared to be impossible. And yet it did survive, and is alive now, while better speeches, or what the present writer thought, at the time, to be more convincing speeches, have not retained individual existence, however deeply they may have influenced that public opinion which, in the end, determines political events. "I still live," was Webster's declaration on his death-bed, when the friends gathered around it imagined he had breathed his last; and the same words might be uttered by the Speech of the 7th of March, could it possess the vocal organ which announces personal existence. Between the time it was originally delivered and the present year there runs a great and broad stream of blood, shed from the veins of Northern and Southern men alike; the whole political and moral constitution of the country has practically suffered an abrupt change; new problems engage the attention of thoughtful statesmen; much is forgotten which was once considered of the first importance; but the 7th of March Speech, battered as it is by innumerable attacks, is still remembered at least as one which called forth more power than it embodied in itself. This persistence of life is due to the fact that it was "organized."
Is this power of organization common among orators? It seems to me that, on the contrary, it is very rare. In some of Burke's speeches, in which his sensibility and imagination were thoroughly under the control of his judgment, as, for instance, his speech on Conciliation with America, that on Economical Reform, and that to the Electors of Bristol, we find the orator to be a consummate master of the art of so constructing a speech that it serves the immediate object which prompted its delivery, while at the same time it has in it a principle of vitality which makes it survive the occasion that called it forth. But the greatest of Burke's speeches, if we look merely at the richness and variety of mental power and the force and depth of moral passion displayed in it, is his speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts. No speech ever delivered before any assembly, legislative, judicial, or popular, can rank with this in respect to the abundance of its facts, reasonings, and imagery, and the ferocity of its moral wrath. It resembles the El Dorado that Voltaire's Candide visited, where the boys played with precious stones of inestimable value, as our boys play with ordinary marbles; for to the inhabitants of El Dorado diamonds and pearls were as common as pebbles are with us.
But the defect of this speech, which must still be considered, on the whole, the most inspired product of Burke's great nature, was this,— that it did not strike its hearers or readers as having reality for its basis or the superstructure raised upon it. Englishmen could not believe then, and most of them probably do not believe now, that it had any solid foundation in incontrovertible facts. It did not "fit in" to their ordinary modes of thought; and it has never been ranked with Burke's "organized" orations; it has never come home to what Bacon called the "business and bosoms" of his countrymen. They have generally dismissed it from their imaginations as "a phantasmagoria and a hideous dream" created by Burke under the impulse of the intense hatred he felt for the administration which succeeded the overthrow of the government, which was founded on the coalition of Fox and North.