Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/384

376 invited his hearers to a Stoic feast of Medford crackers and water, to a philosophic banquet of metaphors and metaphysics.

We confess that we expected a great deal. Better a crust with Plato than nightingales' tongues with Apicius; and if Mr. Choate promised only the crust, we were sure of one melodious tongue, at least, before the meal was over. He is a man of whom any community might be proud. Were society an organized thing here, as in Europe, no dinner and no drawing-room would be perfect without his talk. He would have been heard gladly at Johnson's club. The Hortensins of our courts, with a cloud of clients, he yet finds time to be a scholar and a critic, and to read Plato and Homer as they were read by Plato's and Homer's countrymen. Unsurpassed in that eloquence which, if it does not convince, intoxicates a jury, he was counted, so long as Webster lived, the second advocate of our bar.

All this we concede to Mr. Choate with unreserved admiration; but when, leaving the field where he had won his spurs as the successful defender of men criminally accused, he undertakes to demonstrate the sources whence national life is drawn, and the causes which lead to its decay,—to expound authoritatively the theory of political ethics and the principles of sagacious statesmanship, wary in its steps, and therefore durable in its results,—it becomes natural and fair to ask, What has been the special training that has fitted him for the task? More than this: when he comes forward as the public prosecutor of the Republican Party, it becomes our duty to examine the force of his arguments and the soundness of his logic. Has his own experience given him any right to talk superciliously to a great party overwhelmingly triumphant in the Free States? And does his oration show him to possess such qualities of mind, such grasp of reason, such continuity of induction, as to entitle him to underrate the intelligence of so large a number of his fellow-citizens by accusing them of being incapable of a generalization and incompetent to apprehend a principle?

The Bar has given few historically-great statesmen to the world,—fewer than the Church, which Mr. Choate undervalues in a sentence which, we cannot help thinking, is below the dignity of the occasion, and jarringly discordant with the generally elevated tone of his address. Burke, an authority whom Mr. Choate will not call in question, has said that the training of the bar tends to make the faculties acute, but at the same time narrow. The study of jurisprudence may, no doubt, enlarge the intellect; but the habit of mind induced by an indiscriminate advocacy—which may be summoned to the defence of a Sidney to-day and of a spoon-thief to-morrow—is rather that of the sophist than of the philosophic reasoner. Not truth, but the questionable victory of the moment, becomes naturally and inevitably the aim and end of all the pleader's faculties. For him the question is not what principle, but what interest of John Doe, may be at stake. Such has been Mr. Choate's school as a reasoner. As a politician, his experience has been limited. The member of a party which rarely succeeded in winning, and never in long retaining, the suffrages of the country, he for a time occupied a seat in the Senate, but without justifying the expectations of his friends. So far, his history shows nothing that can give him the right to assume so high and mighty a tone in speaking of his political opponents.

But in his scholarship he has a claim to be heard, and to be heard respectfully. Here lies his real strength, and hence is derived the inspiration of his better eloquence. The scholar enjoys more than the privilege, without the curse, of the Wandering Jew. He can tread the windy plain of Troy, he can listen to Demosthenes, can follow Dante through Paradise, can await the rising of the curtain for the first acting of Hamlet. Mr. Choate's oration shows that he has drawn that full breath which is, perhaps, possible only under a Grecian sky, and it is, in its better parts, scholarly in the best