Ingenious biographers, taking up characters hitherto surrendered to the public executioner, asking for reviews of judgments alleged to be hasty, and setting forth, in an attractive way, features which even criminals share with the unindicted and facts unstained, perhaps, with the one great crime which slew their reputations, have recently argued for new trials with a convincing sophistry that few can resist after dinner, and which captivates by its audacious novelty. All of us have discovered what Tacitus long ago so tersely expressed,—our readiness to listen to scandal, and our proneness to praise ourselves for our leniency to the maligned:—
“Livor et obtrectatio pronis auribus accipiuntur; quippe adulationi fœdum crimen servitutis, malignitati falsa species libertatis inest.”
If the puzzled are generally unsafe, the censorious are usually unfair judges.
Members of the same family, too, are among each other as likely to do injustice to a fellow-member by their jealous criticisms, as they are apt before strangers to make themselves and their fellows ridiculous by undiscriminating praise.
Over many mounds in our national cemetery the time-stains are growing very dark and the moss thick and undisturbed. As we wander among these with lips less pressed and stern, with perhaps a feeling of repenting forgiveness, slow though it be, towards those from whom politically or otherwise we have differed, and with occasional touches of tenderness, reluctant though at first they may come, for those who nobly erred, if err they did, straining for the right but missing it from the dimness of the light which they carried, let us be sure that in strolling often amid these head-stones, we shall thereby and thereafter be better prepared, by turning out our lower selves, to turn over profitably and pleasantly the pages of our newer National Album which holds a few of their portraits. If on its first leaves we are confronted by the faces of those whose lineaments—like Clay’s, Calhoun’s, Webster’s, Grundy’s, Van Buren’s, Quincy Adams’s, Jackson’s, and others—are associated with watch-words that touch party animosities that were born in us we know not how or when, and survive we know not why, we can, at least, learn to be justly proud of what has floated out from the drift-wood and dirty foam of ephemeral politics, which now no longer conceal their sturdy and solid timber growths.
Clay, Calhoun, and Webster! How much good ink was thrown uselessly away in bespattering them with blame or praise for the half-century during which they actively and industriously braided the public history of America through their triple biographies. Of this triumvirate, Mr. Clay was born in 1777, the two others five years later; Mr. Calhoun received the baptism of death in 1850, two years before his life-long competitors. They were the three American Fates, holding the distaff, the thread, and the shears of its history and administration. Utterly dissimilar in the place and circumstances of their births, educations, trainings, cultures, and courses, they yet supplied for each other the only parallels over that wide tract of time through which their prolonged lives reached.
In the House and in the Senate, sometimes on the same side, but oftener congenially opposed, yet ever divided from each other by rival ambitions, they ennobled the scenes in which they spent such large forces. The American Titans, they tossed heavy bars of logic with such ease, wrestled with such matching-power and balanced success, that we, growing up to the gigantic spectacles, almost lose the consciousness of the unwonted masteries that have so grandly played before us. And yet, somehow, for all this, comparatively little love gathers in our hearts as we look at those well-remembered faces; the large, continental visage of Henry Clay, mapping a hemisphere of vast thoughts and generous though partisan currents of action; the lofty sternness of John C. Calhoun, cast in a Cato-like mould, heroic and defiant; and the square-blocked, cubical, almost repulsive mass, outlined into the head of Daniel Webster, which looks, or rather is looked at, as if it had for several centuries capped the pyramid of Cheops, and had been finally taken down with state ceremonies and transplanted by the Pasha to America, as a testimony of his conception of our large exceptional growth.
The Intelligent Jury.
(p. 468)
Sadder than a professed comedy or a prepared funeral oration over a rich but bad man is the unsatisfied ambition of such tough athletes in the political arena, who, after a long life of great rough play, break up into common earth, and form the subjects for Commencement day or prize compositions in an open grove, where young ladies in white, bound in blue-belting-ribbons, summon their uneasy ghosts before the dull-eyed umpires. From what a cold well-depth sprang to the curb of Webster’s lips those soliloquizing words which, a few days before his death, overflowed from a disappointed life. Sitting in an open doorway at Marshfield, propped up by pillows, he looked out upon his favorite herd of cattle, which were driven up for the last inspection of their attached owner. As the fine animals passed and turned their large eyes upon him,—some pausing and looking a fond recollection into his scarcely wasted face,—he ejaculated, as his thoughts turned backward over the slights of party and the disappointments of an unsatisfied life: “I love the honest faces of animals. They look what they mean.”