The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864

The ancestors of Theodore Parker seem to have been creditable offshoots from the Puritan stock. They were men and women of thrift and sagacity. Of his mother there are very sweet glimpses. He describes her as "imaginative, delicate-minded, and poetic, yet a very practical woman." She appears to have been thoroughly religious, but without taste for the niceties of dogmatic theology. Piety did not have to be laboriously put into her, before it could generously come out. "I have known few," writes her son, "in whom the religious instincts were so active and profound, and who seemed to me to enjoy so completely the life of God in the soul of man." And again he says, "Religion was the inheritance my mother gave,—gave me in my birth,—gave me in her teachings. Many sons have been better born than I, few have had so good a mother. I mention these things to show you how I came to have the views of religion that I have now. My head is not more natural to my body, has not more grown with it, than my religion out of my soul and with it. With me religion was not carpentry, something built up of dry wood, from without; but it was growth,—growth of a germ in my soul." Thus we see that Parker was not singular in his sources of goodness and nobility: here also have the strong and worthy men of all time received their inspiration. The mother's sphere is never confined to the household, but expands for joy or bitterness through the world at large. A youth of farm-work, snatches of study, and school-teaching, seem to be the appointed curriculum for our trustworthy men. In addition to this, Theodore achieves a slight connection with Harvard,—insufficient for a degree, yet enough for him, if not for the College. Then he teaches a private class in Boston, and presently opens school in Watertown. Here, for the first time, comes a modest success after the world's measurement. He has soon thirty-five, and afterwards fifty-four scholars. And now occurs an incident which is unaccountably degraded to the minion type of a note. It is, however, just what the reader wants to know, and deserves Italics and double-leading, if human actions are ever sufficiently noteworthy for these honors. The Watertown teacher receives a colored girl who has been sent to him, and then consents to dismiss her in deference to the prejudices of Caucasian patrons. Simon Peter denied the Saviour for whom he was afterwards crucified with his head hanging down. One day we shall find this schoolmaster leaving most cherished work, and braving all social obloquies, that he may stand closer than a brother to the despised and ignorant of the outcast race. The colored girl was amply avenged. But the teacher is here, as ever after, a learner, and his leisure is filled with languages, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, German, Spanish, and French. During his subsequent stay at the Cambridge Divinity School, there are added studies in Italian, Portuguese, Icelandic, Chaldaic, Arabic, Persian, and Coptic. Of his proficiency in this Babel of tongues the evidence is not very conclusive. Professor Willard is said to have applied to the young divinity-student for advice in some nice matters of Hebrew and Syriac. Theology there can be no doubt that he thoroughly mastered. After a brief season of itinerancy through Massachusetts pulpits, he is settled at West Roxbury. And here begins that agony of doubt dismal and unprofitable to contemplate, when it is not redeemed by a manly ardor which searches on for attainable grounds of trust. But in this young minister the faith of a little child cannot be superseded by the advents of geology and carnal criticism. Some of the Biblical conceptions of the Deity may be found inadequate, but Nature and the human soul are full of His presence and glow with His inspirations. Within the limits of capacity and obedience, every man and woman may receive direct nourishment from God. At length the South-Boston sermon of 1841 separates the position of Theodore Parker from that of his Unitarian brethren. After this, his life belongs to the public. He is known of men as an assailant of respectable and sacred things, a bitter critic of political and social usages. That these manifestations were but small portions of the total of his life, the public may now discern.

We can recall no published correspondence of the century which combines more excellent and diverse qualities than this with which Mr. Weiss has plentifully filled his pages. Occasions for which the completest of Complete Letter-Writers has failed to provide are met by Mr. Parker with consummate discretion. His letters are to Senators, Shakers, Professors, Doctors, Slaveholders, Abolitionists, morbid girls, and heroic women: they are all equally rich in spontaneity, simplicity, and point. Keen criticisms of noted men, speculations upon society, homely wisdom of the household, estimates of the arts, and consolations of religion, all packed in plain and precise English, seem to have been ever ready for delivery. If Mr. Parker had not chosen the unpopularity of a great man, he could have had the abundant popularity of a clever one. Let us see how he outlines the Seer of Stockholm for an inquiring correspondent:—

"Swedenborg has had the fate to be worshipped as a half-god, on the one side; and on the other, to be despised and laughed at. It seems to me that he was a man of genius, of wide learning, of deep and genuine piety But he had an abnormal, queer sort of mind, dreamy, dozy, clairvoyant, Andrew-Jackson-Davisy; and besides, he loved opium and strong coffee, and wrote under the influence of those drugs. A wise man may get many nice bits out of him, and be the healthier for such eating; but if he swallows Swedenborg whole, as the fashion is with his followers,—why, it lays hard in the stomach, and the man has a nightmare on him all his natural life, and talks about 'the Word,' and 'the Spirit,' 'correspondences,' 'receivers.' Yet the Swedenborgians have a calm and religious beauty in their lives which is much to be admired."

The deeply affectionate nature of Theodore Parker glows warmly through the Correspondence and Journal. His friends were necessities, and were loved with a devotion by no means characteristic of Americans. He could give his life to ideas, but his heart must be given to persons, young and old. Turning from his task of opposition and conflict, he would yearn for the society of little children, whose household loves might dull the noise and violence and passion through which he daily walked. "The great joy of my life," he writes, "cannot be intellectual action, neither practical work. Though I joy in both, it is the affections which open the spring of mortal delight. But the object of my affections, dearest of all, is not at hand. How strange that I should have no children, and only get a little sad sort of happiness, not of the affectional quality! I am only an old maid in life, after all my bettying about in literature and philanthropy." And in a letter to Dr. Francis there comes an exclamation of which the arrangement is very pathetic in its significance,—"I have no child, and the worst reputation of any minister in all America!"

We are in no position to estimate with any exactness either the adaptation of Theodore Parker to our national well-being or his positive aid to the mental and moral progress of New-England society. Violent denunciations in the interest of the various sects and policies that he attacked will for the present be levelled against him. Neither will there be wanting extravagant eulogiums from personal friends, fellow-religionists, and zealous reformers. Only the distant view of a generation yet to be can see him in just relation to the men of this time. In judging the weight and work of a contemporary, we attach an over-importance to the number and social position of his nominal adherents; while, in estimating the utility of an historic leader, we instinctively feel that these things are almost the last to be considered. For the greatest influence for good has come from men who have struggled in feeble minorities,—ever alienating would-be friends by an invincible honesty, or even by an invincible fanaticism. Not to the excellences or extravagances of a handful of persons who precisely agree with his views of Christianity may we look for the influence of Theodore Parker which to-day works among us. We might find it in greater power in Brownson's Catholic Review, in the humane magnetism of orthodox Mr. Beecher, in the Episcopal ministrations of Dr. Tyng. For any intelligent Christian must allow that those claiming to represent the Church of Christ have too often sided with the oppressor, fettered human thought in departments foreign to religion, and inculcated degrading beliefs, which scholars eminent in orthodoxy declare indeducible from any Biblical precept. It is not the incredibleness of a metaphysical belief, but a laxity or cowardice of the practice connected with it, which can point the reformer's gibe and wing his sarcasm. Theodore Parker virtually told the Christian minister that he must reprove profitable and popular sins, or else stand at great disadvantage in the trial between Rationalism and Supernaturalism which is vexing the age. In rich and prosperous communities Christianity has been too prone to degenerate into a mere credence of dogma; it must reassert itself as the type of ethics. It is also good that the clergy, intrusted with the defence of the faith delivered to saints, be compelled to place themselves on a level with the ripest scholarship of the day. For ends such as these the life of this critic and protester has abundantly wrought. If he has pulled down a meeting-house here and there, we are confident that he has been instrumental in building up many more to an effective Christianity.

Peculiar. A Tale of the Great Transition. By Epes Sargent. New York: G.W. Carleton. 12mo.

There seems to be an element of luck in the production of highly successful plays and novels. To succeed in this department of imaginative writing, it is not enough that the author has literary power and skill. Else why do the failures of every great novelist and playwright almost always outnumber the successes? Even Shakspeare offers no exception to the fact. What a descent from "Hamlet" to "Titus Andronicus," from "Othello" to "Cymbeline"! Miss Bronté writes "Jane Eyre," and fails ever afterwards to come up to her own standard. Bulwer delights us with "The Caxtons," and then sinks to the dulness of "The Strange Story." Dickens gives us "Oliver Twist," and then tries the patience of confiding readers in "Martin Chuzzlewit." We will not undertake to analyze all the reasons for these startling discrepancies; but one obvious reason is infelicity in the choice of a subject. A subject teeming with the right capabilities will often enable an ordinary playwright to produce a drama that will rouse an audience to wild enthusiasm; whereas, if the subject is un-pregnant with dramatic issues, not even genius can invest it with the charm that commands the sympathy and attention of the many. Watch a large, miscellaneous audience, as it listens, rapt, intent, and weeping, to Kotzebue's "Stranger," and see the same audience as it tries to attend to Talfourd's "Ion." Yet here it is the hack writer who succeeds and the true poet who fails. Why? Because the former has hit upon a subject which gives him at once the advantage of nearness to the popular heart, while the latter has selected a theme remote and unsympathetic.

In "Peculiar" Mr. Sargent has had the luck, if we may so call it, of finding the materials for his plot in incidents which carry in themselves so much of dramatic power that a story is evolved from them with the facility and inevitableness of a fate. When the United States forces under General Butler occupied New Orleans, certain developments connected with the workings of "the peculiar institution" were made, which showed a state of social degradation of which we had not supposed even Slavery capable. It appeared that women, so white as to be undistinguishable from the fairest Anglo-Saxons, were held as slaves, lashed as slaves, subjected to all the indignities which irresponsible mastership involves.

"Peculiar" derives its title from one of the characters of the novel, an escaped negro slave, who has received from his sportive master the name of "Peculiar Institution." The great dramatic fact of the story lies in the kidnapping of the infant child of wealthy Northern parents who have been killed in a steamboat-explosion on the Mississippi. The child, a girl, is saved from the water, but saved by two "mean whites," creatures and hangers-on of the Slave Power, who take her to New Orleans, and finally, being in want of money, sell her with other slaves at auction. In a very graphic and truthful scene, the "vendue" is depicted. About this little girl, Clara by name, the intensest interest is thenceforth made to centre. Her every movement is artfully made a matter of moment to the reader.

Antecedent to the introduction of Clara, the true heroine of the novel, we have the story of Estelle, also a white slave. At first this story seems like an episode, but it is soon found to be inextricably interwoven with the plot. The author has shown remarkable dexterity in preserving the unity of the action so impressively, while dealing with such a variety of characters. Like a floating melody or tema in a symphony or an opera, the souvenirs of Estelle are introduced almost with the effect of pathetic music. Indeed, to those accustomed to look at plots as works of art, the constructive skill manifest in this novel will be not the least of its attractive features.

One word as to the characters. These are drawn with a firm, confident pencil, as if they were portraits from life. Occasionally, from very superabundance of material, the author leaves his outline unfilled. But the important characters are all live and actual flesh and blood. In Pompilard, a capitally drawn figure, many New-Yorkers will recognize an original, faithfully limned. In Colonel Delancy Hyde, "Virginia-born," we have a most amusing representative of the lower orders of the "Chivalry." Estelle is a charming creation, and we know of few such touching love-stories as that through which she moves with such naturalness and grace. In the cousins Vance and Kenrick we have strongly marked and delicately discriminated portraits. The negro "Peculiar" is made to attract much of our sympathy and respect. He is not the buffoon that the stage and the novel generally make of the black man. He belongs rather to the class of which Frederick Douglas is a type. It is no more than poetic justice that from "Peculiar" the book should take its name.

We should say more of the plot, did we not purposely abstain from marring the reader's interest by any indiscreet foreshadowing. Everybody seems to be reading or intending to read the book; and its success is already so far assured that no hostile criticism can gainsay or check it. Not the least of the merits of "Peculiar" is the healthy patriotic spirit which runs through it, vivifying and intensifying the whole. The style is remarkably animated, often eloquent, and would of itself impart interest to a story far less rich than this in incident, and less powerful in plot.

The Life of William Hickling Prescott. By George Ticknor. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

The third edition of Mr. Ticknor's "History of Spanish Literature" was noticed with due commendation in our number for November last. That was a work drawn exclusively from the region of the intellect, and written by the "dry light" of the understanding. The author appeared throughout in a purely judicial capacity. His task was to summon before his literary tribunal the writers of a foreign country, and mostly of past generations, and pronounce sentence upon their claims and merits. Learning, method, sound judgment, and good taste are displayed in it; but the subject afforded no chance for the expression of those personal traits which are shown in daily life, and make up a man's reputation in the community where he dwells.

But the Life of Prescott is a book of another mood, and drawn from other fountains than those of the understanding. It glows with human sympathies, and is warm with human feeling. It is the record of a long and faithful friendship, which began in youth and continued unbroken to the last. It is the elder of the two that discharges this last office of affection to his younger brother. Mr. Ticknor could not write the life of Mr. Prescott without showing how worthy he himself was of having so true, so loving, and so faithful a friend. But he has done this unconsciously and unintentionally. For it is one of the charms of this delightful book—one of the most attractive of the attractive class of literary biography to which it belongs that we have ever read—that the biographer never intrudes himself between his subject and the reader. The story of Mr. Prescott's life is told simply and naturally, and as far as possible in Mr. Prescott's own words, drawn from his diaries and letters. Whatever Mr. Ticknor has occasion to say is said with good taste and good feeling, and he has shown a fine judgment in making his portraiture of his friend so life-like and so true in detail, and yet in never overstepping the line of that inner circle into which the public has no right to enter. We have in these pages a record of Mr. Prescott's life from his cradle to his grave, sufficiently minute to show what manner of man he was, and what influences went to make up his mind and character; and it is a record of more than common value, as well as interest.

For the last twenty years of his life Mr. Prescott was one of the most eminent and widely known of the residents of Boston. He was universally beloved, esteemed, and admired. He was one of the first persons whom a stranger coming among us wished to see. His person and countenance were familiar to many who had no further acquaintance with him; and as he walked about our streets, many a glance of interest was turned upon him of which he himself was unconscious. The general knowledge that his literary honors had been won under no common difficulties, owing to his defective sight, invested his name and presence with a peculiar feeling of admiration and regard. The public at large, including those persons who had but a slight acquaintance with him, saw in him a man very attractive in personal appearance, and of manners singularly frank and engaging. There was the same charm in his conversation, his aspect, the expression of his countenance, that was felt in his writings. Everything that he did seemed to have been done easily, spontaneously, and without effort. There were no marks of toil and endurance, of temptations resisted and seductions overcome. His graceful and limpid style seemed to flow along with the natural movement of a running stream, and to those who saw his winning smile and listened to his gay and animated talk he appeared like one who had basked in sunshine all his days and never known the iron discipline of life.

But this was not true; at least, it was not the whole truth. Besides this external, superficial aspect, there was an inner life which was known only to the few who knew him intimately, and which his biography has now revealed to the world. This memoir sets the author of "Ferdinand and Isabella" before the public, as Mr. Ticknor says in his preface, "as a man whose life for more than forty years was one of almost constant struggle,—of an almost constant sacrifice of impulse to duty, of the present to the future." Take Mr. Prescott as he was at the age of twenty-five, and see what the chances are, as the world goes, of his becoming a laborious and successful man of letters. He was handsome in person, attractive in manners, possessed of a competent property, very happy in his domestic relations, with one eye destroyed and the other impaired by a cruel accident; what was more probable, more natural, than that he should become a mere man of wit and pleasure about town, and never write anything beyond a newspaper-article or a review? And we should remember that defective sight was not the only disability under which he labored. His health was never robust, and he was a frequent sufferer from rheumatism and dyspepsia,—the former a winter visitor, and the latter a summer. And not only this, but there was yet another lion in his path. His temperament was naturally indolent. He was fond of social gayety, of light reading, of domestic chat. He had that love of lounging which Sydney Smith said no Scotchman but Sir James Mackintosh ever had. But there was a stoical element in him, lying beneath this easy and pleasure-loving temperament, and subduing and controlling it. He had a vigilant conscience and a very strong will. He had early come to the conclusion that not only no honor and no usefulness, but no happiness, could be secured without a regular and daily recurring occupation. He made up his mind, after due reflection and consideration, to make literature his profession; and not only that, but he further made up his mind to toil in this, his chosen and voluntary vocation, with the patient and uninterrupted industry of a professional man whose daily bread depends upon his daily labor.

And the biography before us reveals that inner life of struggle and conquest which, while Mr. Prescott was living, was known only to his most intimate friends. We see here how resolutely and steadily he contended, not only against defective sight and indifferent health, but also against the love of ease and the seductions of indolence. We see with what strenuous effort his literary honors were won, as well as with what gentleness they were worn. And thus the work has a distinct moral value, and is full of encouragement to those who, under similar or inferior disabilities, have determined to make the choice of Hercules, and prefer a life of labor to a life of pleasure. And this moral lesson is conveyed in a most winning and engaging way. The interest of the narrative is kept up to the end with the freshness of a well-constructed work of fiction. It is an interest not derived from stirring adventures, for Mr. Prescott's life was very uneventful, but from its happy portraiture of those delightful qualities of mind and character of which his life was a revelation. Though it tells of constant struggle and not a little suffering, the tone of the book is genial, sunny, and cheerful, as was the temperament of the historian himself. For it is a remarkable fact that Mr. Prescott's bodily infirmities never had any effect in making his mind or his character morbid. His spiritual nature was eminently healthy. His leading intellectual trait was sound good sense and the power of seeing men and things as they were. He had no whims, no paradoxes, no prejudices. His histories reflect the aggregate judgment of mankind upon the personages he describes and the events he narrates, without extravagance or overstatement in any direction. And it was the same with his character, as shown in daily life; it was frank, generous, cordial, and manly. No man was less querulous, less irritable, less exacting than he. His social nature was warm; discriminating, but not fastidious. He liked men for the good there was in them, and his taste in friendship was wide and catholic. He was rich in friends, and this book proves how just a title to such wealth he could show. We shall be surprised, if this biography does not attain a popularity as wide and as enduring as that enjoyed by any of Mr. Prescott's historical works. It is largely made up of extracts from his letters and private journals, which are full of the playful humor, the ready sympathy, the sunny temper, the kindly judgment of men and things, which made the historian so dear to his friends and so popular among his acquaintances.

We cannot dismiss this book without saying a word or two in praise of its externals. Handsome books are, happily, no longer so rare a product of the American press as to require heralding when they do appear, but this is so beautiful a specimen of the art of book-manufacturing that it deserves special commendation. The type, paper, press-work, and illustrations are all admirable, and the whole is a result not easily to be surpassed in any part of the world.

My Farm of Edgewood. A Country Book. By the Author of "Reveries of a Bachelor." New York: Charles Scribner. 12mo.

When "Ik Marvel" ten years ago turned farmer, a good proportion of the reading public supposed that his experiment would combine the defects of gentleman- and poet-farming, and that he would escape the bankruptcy of Shenstone only by possessing the purse of Astor. That a man of refined sentiments, elegant tastes, wide cultivation, and humane and tender genius, given, moreover, to indulgences in "Reveries" and the "Dream-Life," should succeed in the real business of agriculture, seemed a monstrous supposition to those cockney idealists who consider the cultivation of the mind incompatible with the cultivation of the ground, who cannot bring, by any theory of the association of ideas, practical talent into neighborly good-will with lofty aspirations, and who necessarily connect the government of brutes with an imbruted intelligence. The book we have under review is a blunt contradiction to objectors of the literary class. That it is practical, the coarsest farmer must admit; that its practicality is not purchased by any mean and unwise concessions to "popular prejudice," the most sensitive littérateur will concede; and that the whole representation constitutes a most charming book, all readers will be eager to pronounce. Indeed, the critic of the volume is somewhat puzzled to harmonize the fine rhythm of the periods, and the superb propriety of the tone, with the subject-matter. The bleakest and most ghastly aspects of Nature,—the most prosaic facts of the farmer's life,—Irish servants and compost-heaps,—cows which try to consume their own milk,—beehives which send forth swarms to sting the children of the house, and give no honey,—soils which refuse to bear the products which intelligence has anticipated,—all are transformed into "something rich and strange" by the poet's alchemy, without any sacrifice of truth, or the insertion of details which a farmer would disavow as inaccurate or sentimental. The "Ik" is a full counterpoise to the "Marvel," even to the most literal reader of the volume, though it is certain that no book has ever before appeared in our country in which the farmer-life of New England has assumed so poetic a form. The "chiel" among the agriculturists "taking notes" will be more likely to seduce than to warn; and if the record of his eventual triumphs be received as gospel truth, we must expect a vast emigration of the men of mind from the cities to the country. Who would not cheerfully encounter all the vexations attending a settlement in "My Farm in Edgewood" for the compensations so bountifully provided for the privations?