The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster With an Essay on Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style

Excerpt

DANIEL WEBSTER AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE.

From my own experience and observation I should say that every boy, who is ready enough in spelling, grammar, geography, and arithmetic, is appalled when he is commanded to write what is termed "a composition." When he enters college the same fear follows him and the Professor of Rhetoric is a more terrible personage to his imagination than the Professors of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, and Moral and Intellectual Philosophy. Both boys at school and young men in college show no lack of power in speaking their native language with a vehemence and fluency which almost stuns the ears of their seniors. Why, then, should they find such difficulty in writing it? When you listen to the animated talk of a bright school-boy or college student, full of a subject which really interests him, you say at once that such command of racy and idiomatic English words must of course be exhibited in his "compositions" or his "themes"; but when the latter are examined, they are commonly found to be feeble and lifeless, with hardly a thought or a word which bears any stamp of freshness or originality, and which are so inferior to his ordinary conversation, that we can hardly believe they came from the same mind.

The first quality which strikes an examiner of these exercises in English composition is their falseness. No boy or youth writes what he personally thinks and feels, but writes what a good boy or youth is expected to think or feel. This hypocrisy vitiates his writing from first to last, and is not absent in his "Class Oration," or in his "Speech at Commencement." I have a vivid memory of the first time the boys of my class, in a public school, were called upon to write "composition." The themes selected were the prominent moral virtues or vices. How we poor innocent urchins were tormented by the task imposed upon us! How we put more ink on our hands and faces than we shed upon the white paper on our desks! Our conclusions generally agreed with those announced by the greatest moralists of the world. Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Seneca, Cudworth and Butler, could not have been more austerely moral than were we little rogues, as we relieved the immense exertion involved in completing a single short baby-like sentence, by shying at one companion a rule, or hurling at another a paper pellet intended to light plump on his forehead or nose. Our custom was to begin every composition with the proposition that such or such a virtue "was one of the greatest blessings we enjoy"; and this triumph of accurate statement was not discovered by our teacher to be purely mechanical, until one juvenile thinker, having avarice to deal with, declared it to be "one of the greatest evils we enjoy." The whole thing was such a piece of monstrous hypocrisy, that I once timidly suggested to the schoolmaster that it would be well to allow me to select my own subject. The request was granted; and, as narrative is the natural form of composition which a boy adopts when he has his own way, I filled, in less than half the time heretofore consumed in writing a quarter of a page, four pages of letter-paper with an account of my being in a ship taken by a pirate; of the heroic defiance I launched at the pirate captain; and the sagacity I evinced in escaping the fate of my fellow-passengers, in not being ordered to "walk the plank." The story, though trashy enough, was so much better than any of the moral essays of the other pupils, that the teacher commanded me to read it before the whole school, as an evidence of the rapid strides I had made in the art of "composition."

This falseness of thought and feeling is but too apt to characterize the writing of the student, after he has passed from the common school to the academy or the college....