Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 3 (of 3)Parker, Theodore
Religion
Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 3 (of 3)
Parker, Theodore
Sermons, American; Unitarianism
Here all is changed, every thing that is written is for the hands of the
million. In three months Mr. Macaulay has more readers in America than
Thucydides and Tacitus in twelve centuries. Literature, which was once
the sacrament of the few, only a shew-bread to the people, is now the
daily meat of the multitude. The best works get reprinted with great
speed; the highest poetry is soon in all the newspapers. Authors know
this, and write accordingly. It is only scientific works which ask for a
special public. But even science, the proudest of the day, must come
down from the clouds of the academy, lay off its scholastic garb, and
appear before the eyes of the multitude in common work-day clothes. To
large and mainly unlearned audiences Agassiz and Walker set forth the
highest teachings of physics and metaphysics, not sparing difficult
things, but putting them in plain speech. Emerson takes his majestic
intuitions of truth and justice, which transcend the experience of the
ages, and expounds them to the mechanics' apprentices, to the factory
girls at Lowell and Chicopee, and to the merchants' clerks at Boston.
The more original the speaker, and the more profound, the better is he
relished; the beauty of the form is not appreciated, but the original
substance welcomed into new life over the bench, the loom, and even the
desk of the counting-house. Of a deep man the people ask clearness also,
thinking he does not see a thing wholly till he sees it plain.
From this new relation of the scholar to the people, and the direct
intimacy of his intercourse with men, there comes a new modification of
his duty: he is to represent the higher facts of human consciousness to
the people, and express them in the speech of the people; to think with
the sage and saint, but talk with common men. It is easy to discourse
with scholars, and in the old academic carriage drive through the broad
gateway of the cultivated class; but here the man of genius is to take
the new thought on his shoulders and climb up the stiff, steep hill, and
find his way where the wild asses quench their thirst, and the untamed
eagle builds his nest. Hence our American scholar must cultivate the
dialectics of speech as well as thought. Power of speech without
thought, a long tongue in an empty head, calls the people together once
or twice, but soon its only echo is from an audience of empty pews.
Thought without power of speech finds little welcome here; there are not
scholars enough to keep it in countenance. This popularity of
intelligence gives a great advantage to the man of letters, who is also
a man. He can occupy the whole space between the extremes of mankind;
can be at once philosopher in his thought and people in his speech,
deliver his word without an interpreter to mediate, and, like King
Mithridates in the story, talk with the fourscore nations of his camp
each in his own tongue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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