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.
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