Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v2.djvu/108

CHAPTER XVI Webster WE may take it for granted that Webster knew well how large a place he would fiU in the history of his time. He was singularly free from small vanities and petty conceit but he was too great a man not to be conscious of his own intellectual power or of the part which he had played in his day and generation. His feeling about himself comes out in the famous passage of the Seventh of March speech when he asked: "What States are to secede? What is to remain American? What am I to be?" A re- markable question that last one! With the exception of Washington and Lincoln, who in oiu" history could haVe sol- emnly put it forth in a public speech without being laughed at and ridiculed? Yet Webster uttered the words in a speech in the Senate, and a political opponent said that the tone of that question made him shudder as if some dire calamity were at hand. Laughter and ridicule fled before this naked assertion of a personality, and men not only shrank from the visions which it conjured up but accepted it as very solemn and entirely natural. The power of the orator was one reason, no doubt, for the impression, but the greatness of the man himself was the controlling cause. Yet despite this just sense of his place in the history of his time and of his own greatness, Webster would have been pro- foundly surprised to find himself included as a marked figure in the history of our literature. ' Except for a fragment of an autobiography and some private letters he never wrote any- thing in the literary sense. In his day public men did not turn to the newspaper or the magazine for an opportunity to express their views upon public questions. The age of pamphlets, so ' There are used here, with modifications, two or three passages from an address delivered by the writer at the imveiling of the Webster monument in Washington, 14 January, 1900. 92