Two Books About Webster

THE general opinion of Webster has inevitably changed during the fifty years which have elapsed since his death. His oratory is not now taken quite so seriously: perhaps no oratory is ; and his statesmanship appears, when shorn of the magnificent generalities with which he loved to adorn its manifestoes, to have been the fruit of a sane opportunism. Yet the name of Webster has come down armed with a certain awe even for the youngest generation. His very physical presence will not be forgotten ; the vision of that dark, austere, and massive figure, “ in shape and gesture proudly eminent,” the echo of that sounding voice, still linger in the American consciousness ; and we have a feeling that the man who looked and spoke like that must have had something dæmonic if not Satanic in his power. The generation of Americans is yet to arise which has not been bred in the fear of Webster. Yet Webster has never been loved. Even in his hour of greatest authority the public could find no affectionate nickname for him. There was something withdrawn, even a little forbidding, in the man as the people saw him ; some quality whether of lack or of reluctance which the public admired and could not quite forgive.

I confess to have taken up two recently published books about Webster ¹ mainly in the hope of correcting or modifying this impression. It would not have been reasonable to expect any radically new interpretation of the public policy, or appraisal of his public speeches; these matters have been pretty well settled by time. The remaining question, on the other hand, — what kind of man he really was, — has been only obscured by the passage of years. Mr. McMaster’s book offers nothing toward answering this question. It is clearly a by-product of his work in American history, and valuable simply as it affords a compact account of Webster’s public acts and speeches.

The new edition of Webster’s letters, on the contrary, yields the best evidence to the point now obtainable. “ It is for Webster, the man,” says the editor in his preface, “ that one comes to the letters. The statesman, the jurist, and the orator are in the volumes which we call his works.” Mr. Van Tyne’s method of classifying the letters is on the whole an aid to this end. Except to students of history, the only noteworthy fact about the large number of letters printed under the heading The National Statesman will be that they are so dull. The present editor frankly calls attention to the fact that Webster’s literary ability (that is, his power of putting things in the way most effective for him) exerted itself only upon extraordinary occasion: “ There is abundant evidence that the massive mind of Webster needed, if it was to manifest its greatest power, the spur of a great national crisis. Webster had to feel that the fate of a nation hung upon his words if he was to render the best that was in him. . . . His mind had little subtlety, and his letters have none of that ingenuity in the phrasing of trivial matters which is characteristic of the typical literary man.” He excelled, that is, only in the grand style ; and it must be said further that his greatest efforts in that style were gained largely by his physique, his eye, his voice, and his rhetoric. That is why the man remains, as no great writer can, a mystery in spite of his works ; and that is why, in the present collection of his letters, under the headings which have to do with his private life, we may get rather better evidence of what his private character must have been from the letters written to the man by his family and friends than from his own letters.

The letters of his two wives are particularly interesting. They were very different women. Mrs. Grace, the wife of his youth and the mother of his children, was, as she says meekly, “the daughter of a poor country clergyman, — all the early part of her life passed in obscurity, toiling with hands not ‘ fair ’ for subsistence.” Mrs. Caroline was the daughter of a wealthy New York merchant, a person of fashion according to the modest standard of that day, and a woman of some ambition. The first wife seems more domestic, more devoted, more exacting; altogether more womanly, in short. She is a little plaintive about her husband’s remoteness in Washington and in public life, though she most wishes to desire what he himself desires. She believes him a very great man, but at the bottom of her pride lurks a pitiful and wholly human regret that he could not have been a little less great and a little more hers. It is easy to understand how she might have bored her busy and absent husband. At times she proses and at times she undeniably nags ; but there is so much sweetness and ingenuousness behind it all. “ How many hundred of times I have written you love and kisses, — I think you must be tired of both. Charley asked me this morning, 4 Where is papa ?’ I told him. ‘ Why don’t he come home?’ said he, and, I confess the truth, this has been a very long fortnight since you left. It seems as though you had been gone long enough to return.”

It is a pity that Webster’s part of this correspondence should not have been preserved ; though it is easy to guess that he may have destroyed his own letters in the first moment of his loss. Webster was, Mr. McMaster tells us, prostrated for a time after his wife’s death ; a supposition mercifully reconcilable with the fact that he was married again within the year.

Mrs. Caroline Webster is a far less humble person. She takes pride in her distinguished husband, but she offers him a face dressed with smiles rather than a heart full of yearning. She addresses him in a tone of affectionate civility, congratulates him properly on his public successes, and tells him whom she has been drinking tea with. Altogether the most eloquent and human letter of hers in the present collection gives an account of her first New Year’s Day in Boston. It is written at six o’clock in the evening : “ A gloomy day this, I have been dressed up all day, and the only creature who called was Alleyne Otis, and he sent his card in. I had my table spread with cakes, liquor, and wine, and not a soul to take them.” This is apparently as near tragedy as Heaven allows Mrs. Caroline to approach, and it is near enough, Heaven knows.

Whatever whimsical interest one may find in comparing these letters, there is no doubt that they help correct one’s estimate of Webster as a mere historical bogey. Mrs. Grace Webster feared her husband not as an imposing figure in national life, but as a man who might not give her quite enough love in return for her passionate devotion ; and Mrs. Caroline made a social confidant of him because she found him approachable and human. People who have a weakness for humanity as opposed to mere greatness will find much to interest them in Mr. Van Tyne’s collection. B.