DANIEL WEBSTER
WITH UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPTS AND SOME EXAMPLES OF HIS PREPARATION FOR PUBLIC SPEAKING
By George F. Hoar
In one respect Daniel Webster is the most striking figure in our history, and one of the few most striking figures in all history. That is, in the impression he made on everybody—that, great as were his achievements, he was himself greater than his greatest achievement.
Franklin, Webster, and Emerson are the three great New Englanders. Each of them was a great public teacher. If Webster did not lack, at least he did not manifest, Franklin's wonderful common-sense, as applied to common things and common life. He had not Emerson's profound spiritual discernment or wonderful poetic instinct. But his intellect seems like a vast quarry. When you have excavated the great rocks at the surface, you know there is an inexhaustible supply left. When he died, the people felt as if the corner-stone of the Capitol had been removed; as if the elephant had died that bore the universe on its back.
Emerson's portraiture of Webster at Bunker Hill is made up of a few strokes. But it reveals the whole secret. Great as were the things that Webster said, profound as was his reasoning, lofty as are the flights of his imagination, stirring as are his appeals to the profoundest passions of his countrymen, there is a constant feeling that Jove is behind these thunderbolts. That is the contrast between him and so many other orators. Even in Choate and Phillips you are admiring the phrase and the elocution, and not the men. In Webster you are thinking of the man, and not the phrases. The best things that he said do not seem to his listener to be superior, and rarely seem to his listener to be equal, to the man who said them. There is plenty of reserve power behind—
... Half his strength he put not forth, but checked
His thunder in mid-volley.
Emerson also said of him, "His strength was like the falling of a planet; his discretion, the return of its due and perfect curve."
Nothing certainly can be more profitable for youth who desire to cultivate the capacity for public speaking for the purpose of addressing juries, legislative bodies, or popular assemblies, than the study of the style, the delivery, and the method of preparation of him whom nearly all his countrymen think the foremost American orator, and whom many of them think the foremost orator who ever spoke the English tongue. Many admirable critics have dealt with these topics.[2]
Mr. Winthrop has told,[3] in his own delightful way, the story of one of Webster's compositions, famous at the time, now almost forgotten.