Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/370

 342 T. W. Davenport. Webster's greatness is expressed by the words power and weight, physical and intellectual, and in these he surpassed all other Americans, if not all human kind. But there are other ingredients of human nature to be reached, besides rea- son and judgment and the sensitiveness to the impact of great force— other heart strings to be played upon by the orator, Mr. Webster was not endowed to touch them. This is illus- trated by the difference in judgment among men as to the merits of great orators. Gen. W. T. Sherman heard Webster's Seventh-of-March speech upon the compromise measures in 1850, and also Clay's upon the same, and he gave his opinion concerning them in his Memoirs. He thought Webster's tame and ineffective in comparison, as undoubtedly it was upon the Senate, but superior in effect upon the minds of the people who read them both. Clay's speeches did not read as well as Webster's ; Clay had a noble and impressive presence, too, but not indic- ative of so much power. One poet described him as "he of the fearless soul and brow, ' ' but no such tremendous effect was ever produced by him upon an audience or the mind of the nation as was that of Webster in reply to Hayne. Clay, hav- ing a more sensitive temperament, was more easily brought into the oratorical mood, and so never disappointed public expectation. We have Webster's word that eloquence is not to be compassed by the tricks of rhetoric, that it does not come from afar; it must be in the man and in the occasion. As Horace Greeley once said, "a great speech has a great man behind it." And he might have gone further and required that the great man should be in a state of prime efficiency, that his whole soul should be intensely emotional and irradi- ant. But at last the greatness of oratory must be judged by its effect upon the audience, taking into account the antagonisms of bigotry, superstition, prejudice, selfishness, ignorance, required to be removed or neutralized, to bring an audience into harmony with the speaker. And though a great presence is perhaps a great help, there are effects, pro- found and permanent, involving the affectional and altruis-