Chapter 3

Webster's liking for the Saxon element of our composite language was, however, subordinate to his main purpose of self-expression. Every word was good, whether of Saxon or Latin derivation, which aided him to embody the mood of mind dominant at the time he was speaking or writing. No man had less of what has been called "the ceremonial cleanliness of academical pharisees;" and the purity of expression he aimed at was to put into a form, at once intelligible and tasteful, his exact thoughts and emotions. He tormented reporters, proof-readers, and the printers who had the misfortune to be engaged in putting one of his performances into type, not because this or that word was or was not Saxon or Latin, but because it was inadequate to convey perfectly his meaning. Mr. Kemble, a great Anglo-Saxon scholar, once, in a company of educated gentlemen, defied anybody present to mention a single Latin phrase in our language for which he could not furnish a more forcible Saxon equivalent. "The impenetrability of matter" was suggested; and Kemble, after half a minute's reflection, answered, "The un-thorough-fareableness of stuff." Still, no English writer would think of discarding such an abstract, but convenient and accurate, term as "impenetrability," for the coarsely concrete and terribly ponderous word which declares that there is no possible thoroughfare, no road, by which we can penetrate that substance which we call "matter," and which our Saxon forefathers called "stuff." Wherever the Latin element in our language comes in to express ideas and sentiments which were absent from the Anglo-Saxon mind, Webster uses it without stint; and some of the most resounding passages of his eloquence owe to it their strange power to suggest a certain vastness in his intellect and sensibility, which the quaint, idiomatic, homely prose of his friend, Mason, would have been utterly incompetent to convey. Still, he preferred a plain, plump, simple verb or noun to any learned phrase, whenever he could employ it without limiting his opulent nature to a meagre vocabulary, incompetent fully to express it.

Yet he never departed from simplicity; that is, he rigidly confined himself to the use of such words as he had earned the right to use. Whenever the report of one of his extemporaneous speeches came before him for revision, he had an instinctive sagacity in detecting every word that had slipped unguardedly from his tongue, which he felt, on reflection, did not belong to _him_. Among the reporters of his speeches, he had a particular esteem for Henry J. Raymond, afterwards so well known as the editor of the New York Times. Mr. Raymond told me that, after he had made a report of one of Webster's speeches, and had presented it to him for revision, his conversation with him was always a lesson in rhetoric. "Did I use that phrase? I hope not. At any rate, substitute for it this more accurate definition." And then again: "That word does not express my meaning. Wait a moment, and I will give you a better one. That sentence is slovenly,--that image is imperfect and confused. I believe, my young friend, that you have a remarkable power of reporting what I say; but, if I said that, and that, and that, it must have been owing to the fact that I caught, in the hurry of the moment, such expressions as I could command at the moment; and you see they do not accurately represent the idea that was in my mind." And thus, Mr. Raymond said, the orator's criticism upon his own speech would go on,--correction following correction,--until the reporter feared he would not have it ready for the morning edition of his journal.

Webster had so much confidence in Raymond's power of reporting him accurately, that, when he intended to make an important speech in the Senate, he would send a note to him, asking him to come to Washington as a personal favor; for he knew that the accomplished editor had a rare power of apprehending a long train of reasoning, and of so reporting it that the separate thoughts would not only be exactly stated, but the relations of the thoughts to each other--a much more difficult task--would be preserved throughout, and that the argument would be presented in the symmetrical form in which it existed in the speaker's mind. Then would follow, as of old, the severe scrutiny of the phraseology of the speech; and Webster would give, as of old, a new lesson in rhetoric to the accomplished reporter who was so capable of following the processes of his mind.

The great difficulty with speakers who may be sufficiently clear in statement and cogent in argument is that turn in their discourse when their language labors to become figurative. Imagery makes palpable to the bodily eye the abstract thought seen only by the eye of the mind; and all orators aim at giving vividness to their thinking by thus making their thoughts _visible_. The investigation of the process of imagination by which this end is reached is an interesting study. Woe to the speaker who is ambitious to rise into the region of imagination without possessing the faculty! Everybody remembers the remark of Sheridan, when Tierney, the prosaic Whig leader of the English House of Commons, ventured to bring in, as an illustration of his argument, the fabulous but favorite bird of untrained orators, the phoenix, which is supposed always to spring up alive out of its own ashes. "It was," said Sheridan, "a poulterer's description of a phoenix." That is, Tierney, from defect of imagination, could not lift his poetic bird above the rank of a common hen or chicken.

The test that may be most easily applied to all efforts of the imagination is sincerity; for, like other qualities of the mind, it acts strictly within the limits of a man's character and experience. The meaning of the word "experience," however, must not be confined to what he has personally seen and felt, but is also to be extended to every thing he has seen and felt through vital sympathy with facts, scenes, events, and characters, which he has learned by conversation with other men and through books. Webster laid great emphasis on conversation as one of the most important sources of imagery as well as of positive knowledge. "In my education," he once remarked to Charles Sumner, "I have found that conversation with the intelligent men I have had the good fortune to meet has done more for me than books ever did; for I learn more from them in a talk of half an hour than I could possibly learn from their books. Their minds, in conversation, come into intimate contact with my own mind; and I absorb certain secrets of their power, whatever may be its quality, which I could not have detected in their works. Converse, _converse_, CONVERSE with living men, face to face, and mind to mind,--that is one of the best sources of knowledge."

But my present object is simply to give what may be called the natural history of metaphor, comparison, image, trope, and the like, whether imagery be employed by an uneducated husbandman, or by a great orator and writer. Many readers may recollect the anecdote of the New Hampshire farmer, who was once complimented on the extremely handsome appearance of a horse which he was somewhat sullenly urging on to perform its work. "Yaas," was the churlish reply, "the critter looks well enough, but then he is as slow as--as--as--well, as slow as cold molasses." This perfectly answers to Bacon's definition of imagination, as "thought immersed in matter." The comparison is exactly on a level with the experience of the person who used it. He had seen his good wife, on so many bitter winter mornings, when he was eager for his breakfast, turn the molasses-jug upside down, and had noted so often the reluctance of the congealed sweetness to assume its liquid nature, that the thing had become to him the visible image of the abstract notion of slowness of movement. An imaginative dramatist or novelist, priding himself on the exactness with which he represented character, could not have invented a more appropriate comparison to be put into the mouth of an imagined New England farmer.

The only objection to such rustic poets is, that a comparatively few images serve them for a lifetime; and one tires of such "originals" after a few days' conversation has shown the extremely limited number of apt illustrations they have added to the homely poetry of agricultural life. The only person, belonging to this class, that I ever met, who possessed an imagination which was continually creative in quaint images, was a farmer by the name of Knowlton, who had spent fifty years in forcing some few acres of the rocky soil of Cape Ann to produce grass, oats, potatoes, and, it may be added, those ugly stone walls which carefully distinguish, at the cape, one patch of miserable sterile land from another. He was equal, in quickness of imaginative illustration, to the whole crowd of clergymen, lawyers, poets, and artists, who filled the boarding-houses of "Pigeon Cove"; and he was absolutely inexhaustible in fresh and original imagery. On one hot summer day, the continuation of fourteen hot summer days, when there was fear all over Cape Ann that the usual scanty crops would be withered up by the intense heat, and the prayer for rain was in almost every farmer's heart, I met Mr. Knowlton, as he was looking philosophically over one of his own sun-smitten fields of grass. Thinking that I was in full sympathy with his own feeling at the dolorous prospect before his eyes, I said, in accosting him, that it was bad weather for the farmers. He paused for half a minute; and then his mind flashed back on an incident of his weekly experience,--that of his wife "ironing" the somewhat damp clothes of the Monday's "washing,"--and he replied: "I see you've been talking with our farmers, who are too stupid to know what's for their good. Ye see the spring here was uncommonly rainy, and the ground became wet and cold; but now, for the last fortnight, _God has been putting his flat-iron over it_, and 'twill all come out right in the end."

Thus Mr. Knowlton went on, year after year, speaking poetry without knowing it, as Molière's Monsieur Jourdain found he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. But the conception of the sun as God's flat-iron, smoothing out and warming the moist earth, as a housewife smooths and warms the yet damp shirts, stockings, and bed-linen brought into the house from the clothes-lines in the yard, is an astounding illustration of that "familiar grasp of things divine," which obtains in so many of our rustic households. Dante or Chaucer, two of the greatest poets of the world, would, had they happened to be "uneducated" men, have seized on just such an image to express their idea of the Divine beneficence.

This natural, this instinctive operation of the imaginative faculty, is often observed in children. Numberless are the stories told by fond mothers of the wonderful things uttered by their babies, shortly after they have left their cradles. The most striking peculiarity running through them all is the astonishing audacity with which the child treats the most sacred things. He or she seems to have no sense of awe. All children are taught to believe that God resides above them in the sky; and I shall never forget the shock of surprise I felt at the answer of a boy of five years--whom I found glorying over the treasures of his first paint-box--to my question: "Which color do you like best?" "Oh," he carelessly replied, "I like best sky-blue,--God's color." And the little rogue went on, daubing the paper before him with a mixture of all colors, utterly unconscious that he had said any thing remarkable; and yet what Mrs. Browning specially distinguishes as the characteristic of the first and one of the greatest of English poets, Chaucer, namely, his "familiar grasp of things Divine," could not have found a more appropriate illustration than in this chance remark of a mere child, expressing the fearlessness of his faith in the Almighty Father above him.

Now in all these instinctive operations of the imagination, whether in the mind of a child or in that of a grown man, it is easy to discern the mark of sincerity. If the child is petted, and urged by his mother to display his brightness before a company of other mothers and other babies, he is in danger of learning early that trick of falsehood, which clings to him when he goes to school, when he leaves the school for the college, and when he leaves the college for the pursuits of professional life. The farmer or mechanic, not endowed with "college larnin'," is sure to become a bad declaimer, perhaps a demagogue, when he abandons those natural illustrations and ornaments of his speech which spring from his individual experience, and strives to emulate the grandiloquence of those graduates of colleges who have the heathen mythology at the ends of their fingers and tongues, and can refer to Jove, Juno, Minerva, Diana, Venus, Vulcan, and Neptune, as though they were resident deities and deesses of the college halls. The trouble with most "uneducated" orators is, that they become enamored of these shining gods and goddesses, after they have lost, through repetition, all of their old power to give point or force to any good sentence of modern oratory. During the times when, to be a speaker at Abolitionist meetings, the speaker ran the risk of being pelted with rotten eggs, I happened to be present, as one of a small antislavery audience, gathered in an equally small hall. Among the speakers was an honest, strong-minded, warm-hearted young mechanic, who, as long as he was true to his theme, spoke earnestly, manfully, and well; but alas! he thought he could not close without calling in some god or goddess to give emphasis--after the method of college students--to his previous statements. He selected, of course, that unfortunate phantom whom he called the Goddess of Liberty. "Here, in Boston," he thundered, "where she was cradled in Faneuil Hall, can it be that Liberty should be trampled under foot, when, after two generations have passed,--yes, sir, have elapsed,--she has grown--yes, sir, I repeat it, has grown--grown up, sir, into a great man?" The change in sex was, in this case, more violent than usual; but how many instances occur to everybody's recollection, where that poor Goddess has been almost equally outraged, through a puerile ambition on the part of the orator to endow her with an exceptional distinction by senseless rhodomontade, manufactured by the word-machine which he presumes to call his imagination! All imitative imagery is the grave of common-sense.

Now let us pass to an imagination which is, perhaps, the grandest in American oratory, but which was as perfectly natural as that of the "cold molasses," or "God's flat-iron," of the New England farmer,--as natural, indeed, as the "sky-blue, God's color," of the New England boy. Daniel Webster, standing on the heights of Quebec at an early hour of a summer morning, heard the ordinary morning drum-beat which called the garrison to their duty. Knowing that the British possessions belted the globe, the thought occurred to him that the morning drum would go on beating in some English post to the time when it would sound again in Quebec. Afterwards, in a speech on President Jackson's Protest, he dwelt on the fact that our Revolutionary forefathers engaged in a war with Great Britain on a strict question of principle, "while actual suffering was still afar off." How could he give most effect to this statement? It would have been easy for him to have presented statistical tables, showing the wealth, population, and resources of England, followed by an enumeration of her colonies and military stations, all going to prove the enormous strength of the nation against which the United American colonies raised their improvised flag. But the thought which had heretofore occurred to him at Quebec happily recurred to his mind the moment it was needed; and he flashed on the imagination an image of British power which no statistics could have conveyed to the understanding,--"a Power," he said, "which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England." Perhaps a mere rhetorician might consider superfluous the word "whole," as applied to "globe," and "unbroken," as following "continuous"; yet they really add to the force and majesty of the expression. It is curious that, in Great Britain, this magnificent impersonation of the power of England is so little known. It is certain that it is unrivalled in British patriotic oratory. Not Chatham, not even Burke, ever approached it in the noblest passages in which they celebrated the greatness and glory of their country. Webster, it is to be noted, introduced it in his speech, not for the purpose of exalting England, but of exalting our Revolutionary forefathers, whose victory, after a seven years' war of terrible severity, waged in vindication of a principle, was made all the more glorious from having been won over an adversary so formidable and so vast.

It is reported that, at the conclusion of this speech on the President's Protest, John Sergeant, of Philadelphia, came up to the orator, and, after cordially shaking hands with him, eagerly asked, "Where, Webster, did you get that idea of the morning drum-beat?" Like other public men, accustomed to address legislative assemblies, he was naturally desirous of knowing the place, if place there was, where such images and illustrations were to be found. The truth was that, if Webster had ever read Goethe's Faust,--which he of course never had done,--he might have referred his old friend to that passage where Faust, gazing at the setting sun, aches to follow it in its course for ever. "See," he exclaims, "how the green-girt cottages shimmer in the setting sun. He bends and sinks,--the day is outlived. Yonder he hurries off, and quickens other life. Oh, that I have no wing to lift me from the ground, to struggle after--for ever after--him! I should see, in everlasting evening beams, the stilly world at my feet, every height on fire, every vale in repose, the silver brook flowing into golden streams. The rugged mountain, with all its dark defiles, would not then break my godlike course. Already the sea, with its heated bays, opens on my enraptured sight. Yet the god seems at last to sink away. But the new impulse wakes. I hurry on to drink his everlasting light,--_the day before me and the night behind_,--and under me the waves." In Faust, the wings of the mind follow the setting sun; in Webster, they follow the rising sun; but the thought of each circumnavigates the globe, in joyous companionship with the same centre of life, light, and heat,--though the suggestion which prompts the sublime idea is widely different. The sentiment of Webster, calmly meditating on the heights of Quebec, contrasts strangely with the fiery feeling of Faust, raging against the limitations of his mortal existence. A humorist, Charles Dickens, who never read either Goethe or Webster, has oddly seized on the same general idea: "The British empire," as he says, in one of his novels,--"on which the sun never sets, and where the tax-gatherer never goes to bed."

This celebrated image of the British "drum-beat" is here cited simply to indicate the natural way in which all the faculties of Webster are brought into harmonious co-operation, whenever he seriously discusses any great question. His understanding and imagination, when both are roused into action, always cordially join hands. His statement of facts is so combined with the argument founded on them, that they are interchangeable; his statement having the force of argument, and his argument having the "substantiality" which properly belongs to statement; and to these he commonly adds an imaginative illustration, which gives increased reality to both statement and argument. In rapidly turning over the leaves of the six volumes of his Works, one can easily find numerous instances of this instinctive operation of his mind. In his first Bunker Hill oration, he announces that "the _principle_ of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains." Again he says: "A call for the representative system, wherever it is not enjoyed, and where there is already intelligence enough to estimate its value, is perseveringly made. Where men may speak out, they demand it where the bayonet is at their throats, they pray for it." And yet again: "If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn. Human agency cannot extinguish it. Like the earth's central fire, it may be smothered for a time; the ocean may overwhelm it; mountains may press it down; but its inherent and unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, and at some time or other, in some place or other, the volcano will break out, and flame up to heaven." It would be difficult to find in any European literature a similar embodiment of an elemental sentiment of humanity, in an image which is as elemental as the sentiment to which it gives vivid expression.

And then with what majesty, with what energy, and with what simplicity, can he denounce a political transaction which, had it not attracted his ire, would hardly have survived in the memory of his countrymen! Thus, in his Protest against Mr. Benton's Expunging Resolution, speaking for himself and his Senatorial colleague, he says: "We rescue our own names, character, and honor from all participation in this matter; and, whatever the wayward character of the times, the headlong and plunging spirit of party devotion, or the fear or the love of power, may have been able to bring about elsewhere, we desire to thank God that they have not, as yet, overcome the love of liberty, fidelity to true republican principles, and a sacred regard for the Constitution in that State whose soil was drenched to a mire by the first and best blood of the Revolution." Perhaps the peculiar power of Webster in condemning a measure by a felicitous epithet, such as that he employs in describing "the _plunging_ spirit of party devotion," was never more happily exercised. In that word "plunging," he intended to condense all his horror and hatred of a transaction which he supposed calculated to throw the true principles of constitutional government into a bottomless abyss of personal government, where right constitutional principles would cease to have existence, as well as cease to have authority.