Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/233

Rh speak it in plain speech, ho is sure to be widely understood. There is no learned class to whom he may talk Latin or Sanscrit, and who will understand him if ho write as ill as Immanuel Kant; there is not a largo class to buy costly editions of ancient classics, however beautiful, or magnificent works on India, Egypt, Mexico— the class of scholars is too poor for that, the rich men have not the taste for such beauty; but there is an intelligent class of men who will hear a man if he has what is worth listening to, and says it plain. It will be understood and appreciated, and soon reduced to practice. Let him think as much in advance of men as he will, as far removed from the popular opinion as he may, if he arrives at a great truth he is sure of an audience, not an audience of fellow-scholars, us in Germany, but of fellow-men; not of the children of distinguished or rich men—rather of the young parents of such, an audience of earnest, practical people, who, if his thought be a truth, will soon make it a thing. They will appreciate the substance of his thought, though not the artistic form which clothes it.

This peculiar relation of the man of genius to the people comes from American institutions. Here the greatest man stands nearest to the people, and without a mediator speaks to them face to face. This is a new thing: in the classic nations oratory was for the people, so was the drama, and the ballad; that was all their literature. But this came to the people only in cities: the tongue travels slow and addresses only the ear, while swiftly hurries on the printed word and speaks at once to a million eyes. Thucydides and Tacitus wrote for a few; Virgil sang the labours of the shepherd in old Ascræan verse, but only to the wealthy wits of Rome. "I hate the impious crowd, and stave them off," was the scholar's maxim then. All writing was for the few. The best English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is amenable to the same criticism, except the dramatic and the religious. It is so with all the permanent literature of Europe of that time. The same must be said even of much of the religious literature of the scholars then. The writings of Taylor, of Barrow and South, of Bossuet, Massillon, and Bourdaloue, clergymen though they were, speaking with a religious aid therefore a universal aim, always pre-