This chapter would not be complete if we failed to glance at the essentials of Webster’s greatness as an orator, and to point out the means used by the powers to give him his extraordinary excellence. He did not stale himself by discussing trivial matters. When he rose, people knew that he had an important message, and they ought to attend. In harmony with this was his uniform seriousness, gravity, and becoming dignity of manner; and even in his merry-making humor, as instanced in describing Hayne leading the South Carolina militia, he never stooped. He spoke to the sound common sense and the regnant conscience of the masses. His propositions, his illustrations, his argument went home without effort to every one who thought at all and who cared for moral virtue. The entire country has heard with great acceptance that Davy Crockett said to him, “Mr. Webster, you are not the great orator people say you are; for I heard your speech, and I understood every word of it.” Whether this be an invention or not, it well characterizes his easy intelligibility. Herbert Spencer could have exampled the main proposition of his able essay on style by Webster’s best efforts, and every part and parcel of them—statement of proposition, necessary explanation and narrative, distinctions, illustrations, reasoning, invocation of feeling—appeal to the sense of justice. I often feel that he is not more majestic in any particular than the always manifest meaning of what he says. In this he reminds of Bacon.
He chose only the most important subjects; he befittingly addressed always the higher nature of his hearers; and he always spoke with a transparent clearness. But all this does not indicate more than the mere beginning of true eloquence. The greatest teachers—those who win and keep the admiration of the world—have, as their worshippers teach us, gifts of expression commensurate with the desert of their communications. Remember Homer, Plato, Demosthenes, Vergil, Cicero, Dante, Bacon, Goethe, and above all Shakspeare. As the reader hangs over them he becomes more and more unconscious of what we call, rather vaguely, their style. Their diction, in unhackneyed use of hackneyed words, in metaphors that flash like electric sparks, in appropriateness of varied rhythm, and all appertaining jewels, becomes to him but a belonging of the much more precious sense. As it must impart that without impediment it is unconsciously made as like it as the protecting coloring of animals is made like that of the objects amidst which they lurk. There has been but one other which admits of comparison in world-wide secular importance with Webster’s theme—that which inspired
“Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento.”
We have learned how the Æneid was prized above all other poetry, not only by the Romans themselves, but, long after they had become a mere name and memory, by the different nations of Europe. Plainly it was because Vergil, in that “stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man,” had fitly celebrated the greatest factor delivering from barbarism, and spreading civilization abroad, that had yet appeared in history,—the Roman empire. The American union, immeasurably exceeding that empire in immediate good to millions at home, and in fair promise to all the earth, was Webster’s subject. It got from him an appropriate style. The variety of ornament in his language reaches all the way from the modest violets of the Anglo-Saxon common to Bunyan and King James’s version, up to the most gorgeous trappings which are part and parcel of the sense in the best passages of Paradise Lost. There is also a variety of idiom. He uses that of the field or street, or of the gentleman or of the scholar, as best suits. He affected short sentences, and also pure English words. He told Davis to weed the Latin words out of his speech on Adams and Jefferson. But when occasion calls he can revel in that latinity of our tongue which, as De Quincey has noted, becomes intense with Shakspeare, when he is soaring his strongest. If you are inclined to dispute this, look over the last two sentences of the reply to Hayne. How you would lower this sublime peroration into the dust, if you replaced the Latin with native derivatives, or changed the long for short sentences in what is now above all example in English or American oratory, and can be paralleled in structure, “ocean-roll of rhythm,” and exquisite words only by the most famous paragraphs of Cicero and Livy. As our last word here, Webster always imparts the wisest counsel as to the American union in phrase all-golden, and his eloquence is entitled to praise beyond all other, because it is always what his high subject demands.
As I have to do mainly with the permanent and lasting in Webster, I can merely allude to his physical endowments, described with such rapture by March, Choate, and many others of his time, and well summarized by Mr. Lodge. I must remind the reader how it accorded with the purpose of the powers to bestow upon their favorite majesty of form, mien, and look, a voice that suggested the music of the spheres, action that would have been a model to Demosthenes; in short, a physique for the orator superior to any on record. These things helped him mightily in his day.
Apparently I finished with Webster’s education some pages back of this. But the more important part of it has not as yet been touched upon; and it is incumbent upon me to tell it, because of the lesson we ought to learn from it.
The largest and most characterizing part of our education—perhaps it would more accurately express my meaning to say our culture—each one of us gets from his associations, from his contact with the people of all sorts around him in his infancy, boyhood, and manhood often as far on as middle age, if not sometimes farther. We get it by imitation, unconscious and conscious, and by absorption from what we see, hear, and read, etc., which absorption is often most active when we are least aware of it. Now let us consider the community of which Webster was the product.
In the Plymouth oration, as we have already suggested, he exhibits the exceptional progress and acquisitions of New England. What other community ever showed greater courage against danger or greater energy against obstacles, and such wise building-up of a new country in a strange land? The Pilgrim Fathers could not have liberty and their own religion at home, and for these they went into the wilderness. There they kept the savage at bay. With soil and climate both unfavorable they wrought out general plenty and comfort. They prospered in industry. They equalized as far as they could all in property rights. And these liberty-lovers gave the regulation of local affairs to the town meeting, of which Webster says: “Nothing can exceed the utility of these little bodies. They are so many councils or parliaments, in which common interests are discussed, and useful knowledge acquired and communicated.”
Jefferson, the great apostle of popular self-government, most earnestly longed to see all America outside of New England divided into such townships as hers.
But to return to the Pilgrims. They established schools and churches everywhere. Free education was maintained by taxation of all property.