Theodore Parker
by
[Little, Brown, $3.00]
HAVING already distinguished himself as a historian, Professor Commager now achieves new laurels as a biographer. It is a temptation to wonder, at first, why he chose Theodore Parker for his first portrait. Anyone who desired to learn about the famous abolitionist could do so in the Lives which have already appeared. Dr. Commager’s own explanation is that he wrote the book because ‘I could not help myself,’ which is probably a better reason than the ones behind most Lives.
It is easy to understand, however, as the pages are turned, why this biography was undertaken. Dr. Commager might have selected any among a score of important men. Instead, he chose a preposterous one. Parker was naïve, egotistical, childish, wise, brave, and foolish. All the elements were mixed in him, save one. He was never dull. And this Life is never dull, either. Parker was the essence of New England. He had its vigor and its intolerance. He had its integrity and its skepticism.
Dr. Commager disavows the rôle of critical biographer. ‘ This book, then, is Parker’s book,’ he explains in his preface. He will have none of the appraising which modern biography emphasizes. So Commager swears. But the volume is objective despite all that. Sometimes the reader detests Parker. Sometimes he loves him. Sometimes he merely laughs at his antics.
‘For the reformers, at least,’ Cornmager notes, ‘Boston was the Hub of the I niverse’ in the ’40s and ’50s. ‘It was downright uncomfortable to live in Boston ... it was not enough that you paid for your pew and stood well in State Street and sent your boys to Harvard College; someone was sure to tell you that the Church was rotten and State Street wicked and that Harvard College taught nothing that a good man need know.’ Parker was in the centre of nearly every quarrel. A minister, he berated his church. Perhaps the greatest preacher of his generation, he often had small use for the pulpit. He said that war was evil, but he inflamed Massachusetts when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed. War was evil, but the Civil War was righteous.
Parker was quarrelsome. He was often violent. He made men think. He scolded the clergy because they were complacent. He scolded the merchants of Boston because they tolerated pauperism, want, and licentiousness.
‘A minister,’ Dr. Cornmager writes, ‘he dwelt in eternity; a scientist, he took a million years in his stride, but he could never postpone the present hour even for the morrow. He had an invincible faith in the future, but he acted as if every moment were his last.’
So this is a warm and human book, not infrequently graced by distinguished writing, about a warm and human man. ‘My candle stands in a current of air and so, I suppose, will burn away faster than if all about it were still,’ Parker wrote when he was still a young man and yet wasted by the furious activities of his life. The currents of air continued and the candle burned away.
It is interesting to note that Dr. Commager either forgot or ignored the date of Parker’s death. It is not mentioned. It is, of course, wholly unimportant in a biography which brings its subject to life.
HENRY F. PRINGLE