Lowell complained to Gay that their position was so purely destructive as to require them to look at everything from a point of criticism, and that this became wearisome. In saying this, he was thinking probably of the general attitude which was by necessity taken by a small knot of political and moral agitators employing their engines against a strongly intrenched evil. Criticism, however, in its more comprehensive sense, was the weapon which he most naturally used, but he turned his critical inquiry rather upon men than upon institutions, or even upon political measures. In this Imaginary Conversation, for example, the public men satirized were examined for their mental and moral characteristics. Through his studies in literature and history, with his insight as a poet and man of imagination, and his habit of holding up before his mind fundamental ideas such as truth and freedom, Lowell was chiefly interested in the characters of public men; in applying his criticism to Foote, Cass, Calhoun, Clay, Webster, and other of his contemporaries, though he was mainly testing them by their attitude toward slavery, he was constantly measuring them by great and permanent standards. The larger the man, the more thoroughly interested was he in penetrating the man’s words and deeds, and seeking to come at the bottom facts of his nature.
I have already referred to the early occasion he took, in his connection with the Standard, to try his judgment upon Webster, and it is interesting to observe that no other statesman of the time was so constantly the subject of his criticism. In common with others, he watched with eagerness the course of Webster in connection with the Whig nomination for the presidency in 1848, when the disappointment of the Massachusetts senator was so little disguised. “What Will Mr. Webster Do?” was the title of the article which he published in the Standard after General Taylor had been nominated—that nomination “not fit to be made.” Lowell never had the modern journalist’s faculty for jumping at once into the centre of his subject. Like his own “musing organist,” he is very apt to “begin doubtfully and far away,” but he is also pretty sure to strike a note at the outset which has, it turns out, a real relation to the theme he means to play. Thus in this article he begins with the reflection: “It is astonishing to see how fond men are of company. We demand a select society even upon the fence, and will not jump on this side or that till we have made as accurate a prospective census as possible;” and so on for several paragraphs of acute and amusing variations, noting especially the disposition to set expediency in the place of principle, when looking out for the majority with whom we wish to side. “After all,” he goes on, “even in estimating expediencies, we are loath to trust ourselves. We desire rather the judgment of this or that notable person, and dare not so much as write Honesty is the best policy, or any other prudent morality, till he has set us a copy at the top of the page. In Massachusetts just now there are we know not how many people waiting for Mr. Webster’s action on the recent nomination for the Presidency, and no doubt there is hardly a village in the country which has not its little coterie of self-dispossessed politicians expecting in like manner the moment when the decision of some person, whose stomach does the thinking for theirs, shall allow them to take sides.
“‘What will Mr. Webster do?’ asks Smith. ‘Greatest man of the age!’ says Brown. ‘Of any age,’ adds Jones triumphantly. Meanwhile the greatest mind of any age is sulking at Marshfield. It has had its rattle taken away from it. It has been told that nominations were not good for it. It has not been allowed to climb up the back of the Presidential chair. We have a fancy that a truly great mind can move the world as well from a three-legged stool in a garret as from the easiest cushion in the White House. Where the great mind is, there is the President’s house, whether at Wood’s Hole or Washington.
“We would not be understood as detracting in the least from Mr. Webster’s reputation as a man of great power. He has hitherto given evidence of a great force, it seems to us, rather than of a great intellect. But it is a force working without results. It is like a steam-engine[63] which is connected by no band with the machinery which it ought to turn. A great intellect leaves behind it something more than a great reputation. The earth is in some way the better for its having taken flesh upon itself. We cannot find that Mr. Webster has communicated an impulse to any of the great ideas which it is the destiny of the nineteenth century to incarnate in action. His energies have been absorbed by Tariff and Constitution and Party—dry bones into which the touch of no prophet could send life....
“‘What will Mr. Webster do?’ This is of more importance to him than to the great principle which is beginning to winnow the old parties. This, having God on its side, can do very well without Mr. Webster—but can he do as well without it? The truth of that principle will not be affected by his taking one side or the other. But occasio celeris, and the great man is always the man of the occasion. He mounts and guides that mad steed whose neck is clothed with thunder, and whose fierce ha! ha! at the sound of the trumpets appals weaker spirits. Two or three years ago we spoke of one occasion which Mr. Webster allowed to slip away from him. That was the annexation of Texas. Another is offered him now. We do not believe that party ever got what was meant for mankind. Mr. Webster has now once more an opportunity of showing which he was meant for. If party be large enough to hold him, then mankind can afford to let him go. Nevertheless, it is sad to imagine him still grinding for the Philistines. We cannot help thinking that his first appearance as Samson grasping the pillars of the idol temple would draw a fuller house than Mr. Van Buren in the same character....
“Let us concede to Mr. Webster’s worshippers that he has heretofore given proof enough of a great intellect, and let us demand of him now that he make use of, perhaps, his last chance to become a great Man. Of what profit are the hands of a giant in the picking up of pins? Let him leave Banks and Tariffs to more slender fingers. If ever a man was intended for a shepherd of the people, Daniel Webster is. The people are fast awakening to great principles: what they want is a great man to concentrate and intensify their diffuse enthusiasm. And it is not every sort of greatness that will serve for the occasion. Webster, if he would only let himself go, has every qualification for a popular leader. The use of such a man would be that of a conductor to gather, from every part of the cloud of popular indignation, the scattered electricity which would waste itself in heat lightnings, and grasping it into one huge thunderbolt, let it fall like the messenger of an angry god among the triflers in the Capitol.
“Let Mr. Webster give over at last the futile task of sowing the barren seashore of the present, and devote himself to the Future, the only legitimate seed-field of great minds. Slimmer and glibber men will slip through the labyrinth of politics more easily than he. He will always be outstripped and outwitted. Politics are in their nature transitory. He who writes his name on them, be the letters never so large, writes it on the sand. The next wind of shifting opinion puffs it out forever. It is never too late to do a wise or great action. We do not yet wholly despair of hearing the voice of our Daniel reading the Mene, Mene, written on the wall of our political fabric.”
The Buffalo Convention indorsed the nomination of Martin Van Buren, by the Barnburners, or anti-slavery wing of the Democratic party, with the result that the disaffected Whigs came to the support of General Taylor, and Webster rather tardily came forward and cast in his influence on that side. Lowell had been watching for his action, and at once wrote one of his bantering yet serious articles.
“Mr. Webster,” he said, “with the tan of the Richmond October sun not yet out of his face, is shocked beyond measure at Mr. Van Buren’s former pro-slavery attitude. Sitting upon the fence at Marshfield, he tells his neighbors that, should he and Mr. Van Buren meet upon the same political platform, they could not look at each other without laughing. If Mr. Webster’s face looks as black as it is said to have done just after the Philadelphia nomination, we think it the last thing in the world that any one would venture even a smile at. Mr. Webster finds fault with Mr. Van Buren because Northern Democratic Senators voted in favor of the annexation of Texas. But where was Mr. Webster himself? If he foresaw that Texas would be a Trojan horse, why did he not say so? If people would not come to hear him in Faneuil Hall, could he not have gathered his friends and neighbors together at Marshfield, as he did last week? It is perfectly clear now by actual demonstration, as it was clear then to persons who thought about the matter, that if Mr. Webster had put himself at the head of the opposers of annexation, Texas would never have been annexed, and he would have been the next President of the United States. The effect of the Free Soil movement, led by men with not a tithe of his influence, upon the Compromise Bill, puts this beyond a question. Where was the Wilmot Proviso then? At the Springfield Convention a year ago, Mr. Webster laid claim to this as ‘his thunder.’ In the Marshfield speech he dates its origin as far back as 1787. A precocious Cyclops, truly, to be forging thunderbolts in his fifth year! If Mr. Webster should live till 1852, and his retrospective anti-slavery feeling go on increasing at its present ratio, he will tell us that he established the Liberator in 1831.”
Quite at the end of Lowell’s stated contributions to the Standard came the longest of his articles in the form of a running comment on Webster’s fateful seventh of March speech, and in his comment he pronounced that judgment which was inevitable from an anti-slavery prophet. “It has been characterized,” he says, “like most of Mr. Webster’s speeches, as a ‘masterly effort.’ Some of them have been masterly successes, but this we sincerely hope and believe was an effort.... It is the plea of a lawyer and an advocate, but not of a statesman. It is not even the plea of an advocate on the side which he was retained to argue. We have heard enough of Democratic defalcations: here is a great Whig defalcation which dwarfs them all, for it is not money which has disappeared in this instance, but professions, pledges, principles. Men do not defend themselves in advance against accusations of inconsistency unless they feel an uncomfortable sense that there is some justice in the charge. This feeling pervades a great part of Mr. Webster’s speech like a blush.” He uses a fine scorn in dissecting Mr. Webster’s specious plea that slavery is nowhere directly prohibited in the teachings of the New Testament, and quietly asks if incest is anywhere forbidden there. “But if,” he adds, Mr. Webster were really in search of a scriptural prohibition of slavery, we think he might find it in that commandment which forbids us to covet anything that is our neighbor’s. For if we may not do that, then a fortiori we may not covet our neighbor himself.... Mr. Webster, we have said, avoids carefully all the moral points of the argument. He falls in with the common assumption that this is a question of political preponderance between the North and the South.... It is not a question between the North and the South. It is a struggle between the South (we had almost said Calhoun) and the spirit of the nineteenth century after Christ.... Is slavery the only thing whose sensitiveness is to be respected? Freedom has been thought by some to have her finer feelings also.” And he closes the discussion of the speech in these words:—