But it must now be owned that these astonishing results were bought by some intellectual sacrifices which his nearer friends do not all recognize, but which posterity will mourn. Such a rate of speed is incompatible with the finest literary execution. A delicate literary ear he might have had, perhaps, but he very seldom stopped to cultivate or even indulge it. This neglect was not produced by his frequent habit of extemporaneous speech alone; for it is a singular fact, that Wendell Phillips, who rarely writes a line, yet contrives to give to his hastiest efforts the air of elaborate preparation, while Theodore Parker's most scholarly performances were still stump-speeches. Vigorous, rich, brilliant, copious, they yet seldom afford a sentence which falls in perfect cadence upon the ear; under a show of regular method, they are loose and diffuse, and often have the qualities which he himself attributed to the style of John Quincy Adams,--"disorderly, ill-compacted, and homely to a fault." He said of Dr. Channing,--"Diffuseness is the old Adam of the pulpit. There are always two ways of hitting the mark,--one with a single bullet, the other with a shower of small shot: Dr. Channing chose the latter, as most of our pulpit orators have done." Theodore Parker chose it also.
Perhaps Nature and necessity chose it for him. If not his temperament, at least the circumstances of his position, cut him off from all high literary finish. He created the congregation at the Music Hall, and that congregation, in turn, moulded his whole life. For that great stage his eloquence became inevitably a kind of brilliant scene-painting,--large, fresh, profuse, rapid, showy;--masses of light and shade, wonderful effects, but farewell forever to all finer touches and delicate gradations! No man can write for posterity, while hastily snatching a half-day from a week's lecturing, during which to prepare a telling Sunday harangue for three thousand people. In the perpetual rush and hurry of his life, he had no time to select, to discriminate, to omit anything, or to mature anything. He had the opportunities, the provocatives, and the drawbacks which make the work and mar the fame of the professional journalist. His intellectual existence, after he left the quiet of West Roxbury, was from hand to mouth. Needing above all men to concentrate himself, he was compelled by his whole position to lead a profuse and miscellaneous life.