Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860. No. XXXVI. - Various
Why did Theodore Parker die? He died prematurely worn out through this
enormous activity,--a warning, as well as an example. To all appeals
for moderation, during the latter years of his life, he had but one
answer,--that he had six generations of long-lived farmers behind him,
and had their strength to draw upon. All his physical habits, except
in this respect, were unexceptionable: he was abstemious in diet, but
not ascetic, kept no unwholesome hours, tried no dangerous
experiments, committed no excesses. But there is no man who can
habitually study from twelve to seventeen hours a day (his friend Mr.
Clarke contracts it to "from six to twelve," but I have Mr. Parker's
own statement of the fact) without ultimate self-destruction. Nor was
this the practice during his period of health alone, but it was pushed
to the last moment: he continued in the pulpit long after a withdrawal
was peremptorily prescribed for him; and when forbidden to leave home
for lecturing, during the winter of 1858, he straightway prepared the
most laborious literary works of his life, for delivery as lectures in
the Fraternity Course at Boston.
He worked thus, not from ambition, nor altogether from principle, but
from an immense craving for mental labor, which had become second
nature to him. His great omnivorous, hungry intellect must have
constant food,--new languages, new statistics, new historical
investigations, new scientific discoveries, new systems of Scriptural
exegesis. He did not for a day in the year nor an hour in the day make
rest a matter of principle, nor did he ever indulge in it as a
pleasure, for he knew no enjoyment so great as labor. Wordsworth's
"wise passiveness" was utterly foreign to his nature. Had he been a
mere student, this had been less destructive. But to take the standard
of study of a German Professor, and superadd to that the separate
exhaustions of a Sunday-preacher, a lyceum-lecturer, a radical leader,
and a practical philanthropist, was simply to apply half a dozen
distinct suicides to the abbreviation of a single life. And, as his
younger companions long since assured him, the tendency of his career
was not only to kill himself, but them; for each assumed that he must
at least attempt what Theodore Parker accomplished.
It is very certain that his career was much shortened by these
enormous labors, and it is not certain that its value was increased in
a sufficient ratio to compensate for that evil. He justified his
incessant winter-lecturing by the fact that the whole country was his
parish, though this was not an adequate excuse. But what right had he
to deprive himself even of the accustomed summer respite of ordinary
preachers, and waste the golden July hours in studying Sclavonic
dialects? No doubt his work in the world was greatly aided both by the
fact and the fame of learning, and, as he himself somewhat
disdainfully said, the knowledge of Greek and Hebrew was "a
convenience" in theological discussions; but, after all, his popular
power did not mainly depend on his mastery of twenty languages, but of
one. Theodore Parker's learning was undoubtedly a valuable possession
to the community, but it was not worth the price of Theodore Parker's
life.
"Strive constantly to concentrate yourself," said the laborious
Goethe, "never dissipate your powers; incessant activity, of whatever
kind, leads finally to bankruptcy." But Theodore Parker's whole
endeavor was to multiply his channels, and he exhausted his life in
the effort to do all men's work. He was a hard man to relieve, to
help, or to cooperate with. Thus, the "Massachusetts Quarterly Review"
began with quite a promising corps of contributors; but when it
appeared that its editor, if left alone, would willingly undertake all
the articles,--science, history, literature, everything,--of course
the others yielded to inertia and dropped away. So, some years later,
when some of us met at his room to consult on a cheap series of
popular theological works, he himself was so rich in his own private
plans that all the rest were impoverished; nothing could be named but
he had been planning just that for years, and should by-and-by get
leisure for it, and there really was not enough left to call out the
energies of any one else. Not from any petty egotism, but simply from
inordinate activity, he stood ready to take all the parts.
In the same way he distanced everybody; every companion-scholar found
soon that it was impossible to keep pace with one who was always
accumulating and losing nothing. Most students find it necessary to be
constantly forgetting some things to make room for later arrivals; but
the peculiarity of his memory was that he let nothing go. I have more
than once heard him give a minute analysis of the contents of some
dull book read twenty years before, and have afterwards found the
statement correct and exhaustive. His great library,--the only private
library I have ever seen which reminded one of the Astor,--although
latterly collected more for public than personal uses, was one which
no other man in the nation, probably, had sufficient bibliographical
knowledge single-handed to select, and we have very few men capable of
fully appreciating its scholarly value, as it stands. It seems as if
its possessor, putting all his practical and popular side into his
eloquence and action, had indemnified himself by investing all his
scholarship in a library of which less than a quarter of the books
were in the English language.
All unusual learning, however, brings with it the suspicion of
superficiality; and in this country, where, as Mr. Parker himself
said, "every one gets a mouthful of education, but scarce one a full
meal,"--where every one who makes a Latin quotation is styled "a ripe
scholar,"--it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the true from the
counterfeit. It is, however, possible to apply some tests. I remember,
for instance, that one of the few undoubted classical scholars, in the
old-fashioned sense, whom New England has seen,--the late John Glen
King of Salem,--while speaking with very limited respect of the
acquirements of Rufus Choate in this direction, and with utter
contempt of those of Daniel Webster, always became enthusiastic on
coming to Theodore Parker. "He is the only man," said Mr. King more
than once to the writer, "with whom I can sit down and seriously
discuss a disputed reading and find him familiar with all that has
been written upon it." Yet Greek and Latin were only the preliminaries
of Mr. Parker's scholarship.
I know, for one,--and there are many who will bear the same
testimony,--that I never went to Mr. Parker to talk over a subject
which I had just made a speciality, without finding that on that
particular matter he happened to know, without any special
investigation, more than I did. This extended beyond books, sometimes
stretching into things where his questioner's opportunities of
knowledge had seemed considerably greater,--as, for instance, in
points connected with the habits of our native animals and the
phenomena of out-door Nature. Such were his wonderful quickness and
his infallible memory, that glimpses of these things did for him the
work of years. But, of course, it was in the world of books that this
wonderful superiority was chiefly seen, and the following example may
serve as one of the most striking among many.
It happened to me, some years since, in the course of some historical
inquiries, to wish for fuller information in regard to the barbarous
feudal codes of the Middle Ages,--as the Salic, Burgundian, and
Ripuarian,--before the time of Charlemagne. The common historians,
even Hallam, gave no very satisfactory information and referred to no
very available books; and supposing it to be a matter of which every
well-read lawyer would at least know something, I asked help of the
most scholarly member of that profession within my reach. He regretted
his inability to give me any aid, but referred me to a friend of his,
who was soon to visit him, a young man, who was already eminent for
legal learning. The friend soon arrived, but owned, with some regret,
that he had paid no attention to that particular subject, and did not
even know what books to refer to; but he would at least ascertain what
they were, and let me know. (N.B. I have never heard from him since.)
Stimulated by ill-success, I aimed higher, and struck at the Supreme
Bench of a certain State, breaking in on the mighty repose of His
Honor with the name of Charlemagne. "Charlemagne?" responded my lord
judge, rubbing his burly brow,--"Charlemagne lived, I think, in the
sixth century?" Dismayed, I retreated, with little further inquiry;
and sure of one man, at least, to whom law meant also history and
literature, I took refuge with Charles Sumner. That accomplished
scholar, himself for once at fault, could only frankly advise me to do
at last what I ought to have done at first,--to apply to Theodore
Parker. I did so. "Go," replied he instantly, "to alcove twenty-four,
shelf one hundred and thirteen, of the College Library at Cambridge,
and you will find the information you need in a thick quarto, bound in
vellum, and lettered 'Potgiesser de Statu Servorum.'" I straightway
sent for Potgiesser, and found my fortune made, it was one of those
patient old German treatises which cost the labor of one man's life to
compile and another's to exhaust, and I had no reason to suppose that
any reader had disturbed its repose until that unwearied industry had
explored the library.
Amid such multiplicity of details he must sometimes have made
mistakes, and with his great quickness of apprehension he sometimes
formed hasty conclusions. But no one has a right to say that his great
acquirements were bought by any habitual sacrifice of thoroughness. To
say that they sometimes impaired the quality of his thought would
undoubtedly be more just; and this is a serious charge to bring.
Learning is not accumulation, but assimilation; every man's real
acquirements must pass into his own organization, and undue or hasty
nutrition does no good. The most priceless knowledge is not worth the
smallest impairing of the quality of the thinking. The scholar cannot
afford, any more than the farmer, to lavish his strength in clearing
more land than he can cultivate; and Theodore Parker was compelled by
the natural limits of time and strength to let vast tracts lie fallow,
and to miss something of the natural resources of the soil. One
sometimes wished that he had studied less and dreamed more,--for less
encyclopedic information, and more of his own rich brain.
But it was in popularizing thought and knowledge that his great and
wonderful power lay. Not an original thinker, in the same sense with
Emerson, he yet translated for tens of thousands that which Emerson
spoke to hundreds only. No matter who had been heard on any subject,
the great mass of intelligent, "progressive" New-England thinkers
waited to hear the thing summed up by Theodore Parker. This popular
interest went far beyond the circle of his avowed sympathizers; he
might be a heretic, but nobody could deny that he was a marksman. No
matter how well others seemed to have hit the target, his shot was the
triumphant one, at last. Thinkers might find no new thought in the new
discourse, leaders of action no new plan, yet, after all that had been
said and done, his was the statement that told upon the community. He
knew this power of his, and had analyzed some of the methods by which
he attained it, though, after all, the best part was an unconscious
and magnetic faculty. But he early learned, so he once told me, that
the New-England people dearly love two things,--a philosophical
arrangement, and a plenty of statistics. To these, therefore, he
treated them thoroughly; in some of his "Ten Sermons" the demand made
upon the systematizing power of his audience was really formidable;
and I have always remembered a certain lecture of his on the
Anglo-Saxons as the most wonderful instance that ever came within my
knowledge of the adaptation of solid learning to the popular
intellect. Nearly two hours of almost unadorned fact,--for there was
far less than usual of relief and illustration,--and yet the
lyceum-audience listened to it as if an angel sang to them. So perfect
was his sense of purpose and of power, so clear and lucid was his
delivery, with such wonderful composure did he lay out, section by
section, his historical chart, that he grasped his hearers as
absolutely as he grasped his subject: one was compelled to believe
that he might read the people the Sanscrit Lexicon, and they would
listen with ever fresh delight. Without grace or beauty or melody, his
mere elocution was sufficient to produce effects which melody and
grace and beauty might have sighed for in vain. And I always felt that
he well described his own eloquence while describing Luther's, in one
of the most admirably moulded sentences he ever achieved,--"The homely
force of Luther, who, in the language of the farm, the shop, the boat,
the street, or the nursery, told the high truths that reason or
religion taught, and took possession of his audience by a storm of
speech, then poured upon them all the riches of his brave plebeian
soul, baptizing every head anew,--a man who with the people seemed
more mob than they, and with kings the most imperial man."
Another key to his strong hold upon the popular mind was to be found
in his thorough Americanism of training and sympathy. Surcharged with
European learning, he yet remained at heart the Lexington
farmer's-boy, and his whole atmosphere was indigenous, not exotic. Not
haunted by any of the distrust and over-criticism which are apt to
effeminate the American scholar, he plunged deep into the current of
hearty national life around him, loved it, trusted it, believed in it;
and the combination of this vital faith with such tremendous criticism
of public and private sins formed an irresistible power. He could
condemn without crushing,--denounce mankind, yet save it from despair.
Thus his pulpit became one of the great forces of the nation, like the
New York "Tribune." His printed volumes had but a limited circulation,
owing to a defective system of publication, which his friends tried in
vain to correct; but the circulation of his pamphlet-discourses was
very great; he issued them faster and faster, latterly often in pairs,
and they instantly spread far and wide. Accordingly he found his
listeners everywhere; he could not go so far West but his abundant
fame had preceded him; his lecture-room in the remotest places was
crowded, and his hotel-chamber also, until late at night. Probably
there was no private man in the nation, except, perhaps, Beecher and
Greeley, whom personal strangers were so eager to see; while from a
transatlantic direction he was sought by visitors to whom the two
other names were utterly unknown. Learned men from the continent of
Europe always found their way, first or last, to Exeter Place; and it
is said that Thackeray, on his voyage to this country, declared that
the thing in America which he most desired was to hear Theodore Parker
talk.
Indeed, his conversational power was so wonderful that no one could go
away from a first interview without astonishment and delight. There
are those among us, it may be, more brilliant in anecdote or repartee,
more eloquent, more profoundly suggestive; but for the outpouring of
vast floods of various and delightful information, I believe that he
could have had no Anglo-Saxon rival, except Macaulay. And in Mr.
Parker's case, at least, there was no alloy of conversational
arrogance or impatience of opposition. He monopolized, not because he
was ever unwilling to hear others, but because they did not care to
hear themselves when he was by. The subject made no difference; he
could talk on anything. I was once with him in the society of an
intelligent Quaker farmer, when the conversation fell on agriculture:
the farmer held his own ably for a time; but long after he was drained
dry, our wonderful companion still flowed on exhaustless, with
accounts of Nova Scotia ploughing and Tennessee hoeing, and all things
rural, ancient and modern, good and bad, till it seemed as if the one
amusing and interesting theme in the universe were the farm. But it
soon proved that this was only one among his thousand departments, and
his hearers felt, as was said of old Fuller, as if he had served his
time at every trade in town.
But it must now be owned that these astonishing results were bought by
some intellectual sacrifices which his nearer friends do not all
recognize, but which posterity will mourn. Such a rate of speed is
incompatible with the finest literary execution. A delicate literary
ear he might have had, perhaps, but he very seldom stopped to
cultivate or even indulge it. This neglect was not produced by his
frequent habit of extemporaneous speech alone; for it is a singular
fact, that Wendell Phillips, who rarely writes a line, yet contrives
to give to his hastiest efforts the air of elaborate preparation,
while Theodore Parker's most scholarly performances were still
stump-speeches. Vigorous, rich, brilliant, copious, they yet seldom
afford a sentence which falls in perfect cadence upon the ear; under a
show of regular method, they are loose and diffuse, and often have the
qualities which he himself attributed to the style of John Quincy
Adams,--"disorderly, ill-compacted, and homely to a fault." He said of
Dr. Channing,--"Diffuseness is the old Adam of the pulpit. There are
always two ways of hitting the mark,--one with a single bullet, the
other with a shower of small shot: Dr. Channing chose the latter, as
most of our pulpit orators have done." Theodore Parker chose it also.
Perhaps Nature and necessity chose it for him. If not his temperament,
at least the circumstances of his position, cut him off from all high
literary finish. He created the congregation at the Music Hall, and
that congregation, in turn, moulded his whole life. For that great
stage his eloquence became inevitably a kind of brilliant
scene-painting,--large, fresh, profuse, rapid, showy;--masses of light
and shade, wonderful effects, but farewell forever to all finer
touches and delicate gradations! No man can write for posterity, while
hastily snatching a half-day from a week's lecturing, during which to
prepare a telling Sunday harangue for three thousand people. In the
perpetual rush and hurry of his life, he had no time to select, to
discriminate, to omit anything, or to mature anything. He had the
opportunities, the provocatives, and the drawbacks which make the work
and mar the fame of the professional journalist. His intellectual
existence, after he left the quiet of West Roxbury, was from hand to
mouth. Needing above all men to concentrate himself, he was compelled
by his whole position to lead a profuse and miscellaneous life.
All popular orators must necessarily repeat themselves,--preachers
chiefly among orators, and Theodore Parker chiefly among preachers.
The mere frequency of production makes this inevitable,--a fact which
always makes every finely organized intellect, first or last, grow
weary of the pulpit. But in his case there were other compulsions.
Every Sunday a quarter part of his vast congregation consisted of
persons who had never, or scarcely ever, heard him before, and who
might never hear him again. Not one of those visitors must go away,
therefore, without hearing the great preacher define his position on
every point,--not theology alone, but all current events and permanent
principles, the Presidential nomination or message, the laws of trade,
the laws of Congress, woman's rights, woman's costume, Boston
slave-kidnappers, and Dr. Banbaby,--he must put it all in. His ample
discourse must be like an Oriental poem, which begins with the
creation of the universe, and includes all subsequent facts
incidentally. It is astonishing to look over his published sermons and
addresses, and see under how many different names the same stirring
speech has been reprinted;--new illustrations, new statistics, and all
remoulded with such freshness that the hearer had no suspicions, nor
the speaker either,--and yet the same essential thing. Sunday
discourse, lyceum lecture, convention speech, it made no difference,
he must cover all the points every time. No matter what theme might be
announced, the people got the whole latitude and longitude of Theodore
Parker, and that was precisely what they wanted. He broke down the
traditional non-committalism of the lecture-room, and oxygenated all
the lyceums of the land. He thus multiplied his audience very greatly,
while perhaps losing to some degree the power of close logic and of
addressing a specific statement to a special point. Yet it seemed as
if he could easily leave the lancet to others, grant him only the
hammer and the forge.
Ah, but the long centuries, where the reading of books is concerned,
set aside all considerations of quantity, of popularity, of immediate
influence, and sternly test by quality alone,--judge each author by
his most golden sentence, and let all else go. The deeds make the man,
but it is the style which makes or dooms the writer. History, which
always sends great men in groups, gave us Emerson by whom to test the
intellectual qualities of Parker. They cooperated in their work from
the beginning, in much the same mutual relation as now; in looking
back over the rich volumes of the "Dial," the reader now passes by the
contributions of Parker to glean every sentence of Emerson's, but we
have the latter's authority for the fact that it was the former's
articles which originally sold the numbers. Intellectually, the two
men form the complement to each other; it is Parker who reaches the
mass of the people, but it is probable that all his writings put
together have not had so profound an influence on the intellectual
leaders of the nation as the single address of Emerson at Divinity
Hall.
And it is difficult not to notice, in that essay in which Theodore
Parker ventured on higher intellectual ground, perhaps, than anywhere
else in his writings,--his critique on Emerson in the "Massachusetts
Quarterly,"--the indications of this mental disparity. It is in many
respects a noble essay, full of fine moral appreciations, bravely
generous, admirable in the loyalty of spirit shown towards a superior
mind, and all warm with a personal friendship which could find no
superior. But so far as literary execution is concerned, the beautiful
sentences of Emerson stand out like fragments of carved marble from
the rough plaster in which they are imbedded. Nor this alone; but, on
drawing near the vestibule of the author's finest thoughts, the critic
almost always stops, unable quite to enter their sphere. Subtile
beauties puzzle him; the titles of the poems, for instance, giving by
delicate allusion the key-note of each,--as "Astraea," "Mithridates,"
"Hamatreya," and "Etienne de la Boece,"--seem to him the work of "mere
caprice"; he pronounces the poem of "Monadnoc" "poor and weak"; he
condemns and satirizes the "Wood-notes," and thinks that a pine-tree
which should talk like Mr. Emerson's ought to be cut down and cast
into the sea.
The same want of fine discrimination was usually visible in his
delineations of great men in public life. Immense in accumulation of
details, terrible in the justice which held the balance, they yet left
one with the feeling, that, after all, the delicate main-springs of
character had been missed. Broad contrasts, heaps of good and evil,
almost exaggerated praises, pungent satire, catalogues of sins that
seemed pages from some Recording Angel's book,--these were his mighty
methods; but for the subtilest analysis, the deepest insight into the
mysteries of character, one must look elsewhere. It was still
scene-painting, not portraiture; and the same thing which overwhelmed
with wonder, when heard in the Music Hall, produced a slight sense of
insufficiency, when read in print. It was certainly very great in its
way, but not in quite the highest way; it was preliminary work, not
final; it was Parker's Webster, not Emerson's Swedenborg or Napoleon.
The same thing was often manifested in his criticisms on current
events. The broad truths were stated without fear or favor, the finer
points passed over, and the special trait of the particular phase
sometimes missed. His sermons on the last revivals, for instance, had
an enormous circulation, and told with great force upon those who had
not been swept into the movement, and even upon some who had been. The
difficulty was that they were just such discourses as he would have
preached in the time of Edwards and the "Great Awakening"; and the
point which many thought the one astonishing feature of the new
excitement, its almost entire omission of the "terrors of the Lord,"
the far gentler and more winning type of religion which it displayed,
and from which it confessedly drew much of its power, this was
entirely ignored in Mr. Parker's sermons. He was too hard at work in
combating the evangelical theology to recognize its altered phases.
Forging lightning-rods against the tempest, he did not see that the
height of the storm had passed by.