CHAPTER VII NATIONAL LIFE AND CULTURE.-LONGFELLOW, WHITTIER, LOWELL, HOLMES, WHITMAN Of the period of our literature now under considerationthe prolific middle of the nineteenth century-four or five major writers and countless minor ones still remain to be treated. Placing them here in a single group is, perhaps, on the ground of coherence, a course not entirely justifiable. Yet to make any of the divisions that suggest themselves would seem to be even less justifiable. A separation, for instance, into poets and prose-writers is scarcely possible, since many of the writers were both; and to divide along other lines, as into Cambridge scholars, anti-slavery agitators, and the like, would again be only to work confusion by making divisions that seriously overlap. It seems better therefore to keep the writers together, regarding them broadly as contributors, each in his way, to our national life and character-as co-workers toward the one end of upbuilding a modern nation of political unity and of continuous moral and intellectual growth. It is true, the writers we have already treated might be regarded in the same light, but there is at least this difference, that they worked more specifically to literary or personal ends, while the men whom we have now to consider were in closer touch with our social organization, and their writings and speeches largely grew out of, or contributed toward, the wide activities among which they moved. ORATORY Oratory in America, which has perhaps had a more continuous history than any other form of letters except theology, reached its highest development between 1830 and 1860. This is, of course, only another manifestation of the great intellectual and artistic energy that attended the development and fixing of our national character, the more direct stimulus in this case being found in the political conditions-in the difficult adjustment of early national principles, and especially in the unsettled and continually vexing issue of slavery. But our oratory scarcely rose to the level attained in other literary forms. It was made illustrious by at least two eminently great men— Webster and Lincoln-but it never united in one man all the original genius and the eloquent and scholarly virtues that have made the speeches of Demosthenes, Cicero, Bossuet, and Burke, permanent classics in the world's literature. Daniel Webster we are still disposed to regard as our foremost exponent of deliberative and forensic eloquence. He had, to begin with, physical advantages that seemed to proclaim him an even greater man than he was. Daniel Webster, 1782-1852. 6 Carlyle, a master at portraiture, saw him once and described him in a letter to Emerson: "The tanned complexion; that amorphous, crag-like face; the dull black eyes under their precipice of eyebrow, like dull anthracite furnaces, needing only to be blown; the mastiff mouth, accurately closed. He is a magnificent specimen; you might say to all the world, This is your Yankee Englishman, such limbs we make in Yankeeland."" Born on a backwoods farm in New Hampshire at the close of the Revolutionary War, and graduated from Dartmouth in 1801, Webster rapidly rose in the legal profession, until he was sent to Congress in 1813. He shortly afterward took up his residence at Boston, and from that time on, as representative, senator, secretary of state, and Whig aspirant for the Presidency, he was, as Carlyle put it, "the notablest of our notabilities." His supremacy in American statesmanship was somewhat comparable to that, in later years, of Gladstone in English or of Bismarck in Prussian. Webster's great service was done in the stormy Congressional debates of 1830-1832, when he came forward in opposition to the principle of state sovereignty, and helped to fix finally the supreme power and authority of the federal constitution. He made himself the champion of the national idea, of complete union, and it is fitting that he should be remembered by those famous words with which he closed the speech in reply to Hayne: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable." The great blemish upon his career was his weakness in not facing squarely the question of slave-holding when that issue was approaching a crisis. By supporting the compromise measures of 1850 instead of throwing his influence with the radical opponents of slavery, he added to the confidence of the slave power and contributed much to the final disastrous results. Whittier, in the poem Ichabod, lashed him severely for his defection. But Webster suffered to the full for his weakness, and many years after his death Whittier was glad to do his memory justice, mourning, in The Lost Occasion, that Webster had not been spared till the day of actual disunion, assured that no stronger voice than his would have then "Called out the utmost might of men, To make the Union's charter free The best examples of Webster's forensic pleading are to be found in the argument on the Dartmouth College Case before the United States Supreme Court in 1818 and in his speech at the White murder trial at Salem in 1829. His great deliberative speeches in the Senate have already been mentioned— the Reply to Hayne in 1830, and the "Seventh of March Speech" in favor of compromise in 1850. His best public addresses include one delivered at the anniversary at Plymouth in 1820, one at the laying of the corner-stone of the Bunker Hill Monument and another at its completion, and a eulogy on Adams and Jefferson. His oratory was mainly of the old type, only some degrees removed from the half-pedantic classicism that was the ideal of the early academic orators. Yet he was undeniably eloquent, both in the conventional and in the real sense of the word-clear in thought, strong and pure and sonorous in diction, with a beauty of imagery and an animation of style that have set his printed speeches among the select examples of modern oratorical prose. What those speeches must have been in utterance all the enthusiastic accounts of their hearers will not suffice for us to realize, since the force of the speaker's personality must have counted for even more than his words, lending impressiveness to his simplest and calmest statements, and enabling him, when deeply stirred, to carry everything before him. Henry Clay, 1777-1852. Henry Clay, who belonged to Virginia by birth and to Kentucky by residence, came into public life somewhat before Webster, and rose to be the recognized leader of the Whig party, and, with the exception of Webster, its foreJ. C. Calhoun, most man. He was three times a candidate for the 1782-1850. Presidency, and once narrowly missed election. Though opposed to slavery, he was not radical in his views. As the chief promoter of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the author of the compromise measures of 1850, he earned the title of "the great pacificator." As an orator he held and swayed audiences as effectually as ever Webster did, though more exclusively by his personality and his rhetorical magic. He lacked the learning and depth of that great statesman, and his orations are now little read. From farther south, and with wholly southern views and doctrines, came John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina. It was he, then president of the Senate, whom Webster was really attacking in his famous Reply to Hayne in 1830, for Calhoun was an ardent believer in States' Rights and was the author of the doctrine of Nullification. He was scarcely eloquent, as we ordinarily understand the term, but was a great thinker, and the clearness of his logic was conspicuous in everything he said. This, coupled with his earnestness and his candor, gave him a clear title to his fame. Rufus Choate, 1799-1859. Edward Everett, 1794-1865. Massachusetts produced the men who pressed Webster most closely for oratorical honors of the academic kind-Rufus Choate, the lawyer, and Edward Everett, the scholar, statesman, and diplomatist. Choate was never brought into the same great conflicts as Webster, his eloquence being expended before juries; but he had even more than Webster's scholarship and refinement, and, with a fervid imagination and an inexhaustible flow of words, he exercised over emotional hearers that "spell" which it was long thought to be an orator's highest virtue to exercise. His oratory held much of the poetic quality, and is seen at its best in his eulogies—the eulogy, for example, on Webster. Everett, who began life as an editor and professor of Greek, held many high positions: he was governor of Massachusetts, minister to Great Britain, president of Harvard College, Secretary of State, and United States senator. His oratory also was of the finished and scholarly type. It might even be called cold, for Everett lacked the personal force which Choate and Webster possessed. Yet by frequent lectures on the platform he came into closer touch with the general public than most statesmen of his day. Emerson testified to his great influence on the youth of New England; and late in life he delivered his famous eulogy on Washington one hundred and fifty times in the interest of the Mount Vernon Association. His last important oration was the one delivered at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg in 1863 -an occasion made most memorable by another address, the unpretentiously noble speech of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, almost the antithesis of the academic orators, |