Memoir of Theophilus Parsons
Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ; with Notices of some of his Contemporaries. By his Son, . Boston: Tieknor & Fields. 1859. pp. 476.
THE division of the United States into so many wellnigh independent republies, each with official rewards in its gift great enough to excite and to satisfy a considerable ambition, makes fame a palpably provincial thing in America. We say palpably, because the larger part of contemporary fame is truly parochial everywhere ; only we are apt to overlook the fact when we measure by kingdoms or empires instead of counties, and to fancy a stature for Palmerston or Persigny suitable to the size of the stage on which they act. It seems a much finer thing to be a Lord Chancellor in England than a Chief Justice in Massachusetts ; yet the same abilities which carried the chance-transplanted Boston boy, Lyndhurst, to the woolsack, might, perhaps, had he remained in the land of his birth, have found no higher goal than the bench of the Supreme Court. Mr. Dickens laughed very fairly at the “ remarkable men ” of our small towns ; but England is full of just such little-greatness, with the difference that one is proclaimed in the “ Bungtown Tocsin” and the other in the “Times.” We must get a new phrase, and say that Mr. Brown was immortal at the latest dates, and Mr. Jones a great man when the steamer sailed. The small man in Europe is reflected to his contemporaries from a magnifying mirror, while even the great men in America can be imaged only in a diminishing one. If powers broaden with the breadth of opportunity, if Occasion be the mother of greatness and not its tool, the centralizing system of Europe should produce more eminent persons than our distributive one. Certain it is that the character grows larger in proportion to the size of the affairs with which it is habitually concerned, and that a mind of more than common stature acquires an habitual stoop, if forced to deal lifelong with little men and little things.
Even that German-silver kind of fame, Notoriety, can scarcely be had here at a cheaper rate than a murder done in broad daylight of a Sunday ; and the onlysure way of having one’s name known to the utmost corners of our empire is by achieving a continental disrepute. With a metropolis planted in a crevice between Maryland and Virginia, and stunted because its roots vainly seek healthy nourishment in a soil impoverished by slavery, a paulopost future capital, the centre of nothing, without literature, art, or so much as commerce,—we have no recognized dispenser of national reputations like London or Paris. In a country richer in humor, and among a people keener in the sense of it than any other, we cannot produce a national satire or caricature, because there is no butt visible to all parts of the country at once. How many men at this moment know the names, much more the history or personal appearance, of our cabinet ministers ? But the joke of London or Paris tickles all the ribs of England or France, and the intellectual rushlight of those cities becomes a beacon, set upon such bushels, and multiplied by the manyfaced provincial reflector behind it. Meanwhile New York and Boston wrangle about literary and social preeminence like, two Schoolboys, each claiming to have something (he knows not exactly what) vastly finer than the other at home. Let us hope that we shall by-and-by develop a rivalry like that of the Italian cities, and that the difficulty of fame beyond our own village may make us more content with doing than desirous of the name of it. For, after all, History herself is for the most part but the Muse of Little Peddlington, and Athens raised the heaviest crop of laurels yet recorded on a few acres of rock, without help from newspaper guano.
Theophilus Parsons was one of those men of whom surviving contemporaries always say that he was the most gifted person they had ever known, while yet they are able to produce but little tangible evidence of his superiority. It is, no doubt, true that Memory’s geese are always swans ; but in the case of a man like Parsons, where the testimony is so various and concurrent, we cannot help believing that there must have been a special force of character, a marked alertness and grasp of mind, to justify the impression he left behind. With the exception of John Adams, he was probably the most considerable man of his generation in Massachusetts; and it is not merely the caruit, quia vate sacro, but the narrowness of his sphere of action, still further narrowed by the technical nature of a profession in itself provincial, as compared with many other fields for the display of intellectual power, that has hindered him from receiving an amount of fame at all commensurate with an ability so real and so various.
But the life of a strong man, lived no matter where, and perhaps all the more if it have been isolated from the noisier events which make so large a part of history, contains the best material of biography. Judge Parsons was fortunate in a son capable of doing that well, which, even if ill done, would have been interesting. A practised writer, the author of two volumes of eloquent and thoughtful essays, Professor Parsons has known how to select and arrange his matter with a due feeling of effect and perspective. When he falls to do this, it is because here and there the essayist has got the better of the biographer. We are not concerned here, for example, to know Mr. Parsons’s opinions about Slavery, and we are sure that the sharp insight and decisive judgment of his father would never have allowed him to be frightened by the now somewhat weather-beaten scarecrow of danger to the Union.
In the earlier part of the Memoir we get some glimpses of pre-Revolutionary life in New England, which we hope yet to see illustrated more fully in its household aspects.1 The father of Parsons was precisely one of those country-clergymen who were “ passing rich on forty pounds a year.” On a salary of two hundred and eighty dollars, he brought up a family of seven children, three of whom he sent to college, and kept a hospitable house.
Of Parsons’s college experiences we get less than we could desire ; but as he advances in life, we find his mind exercised by the great political and social problem whose solution was to be the experiment of Democracy at housekeeping for herself, — we see him influencing State and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining the end to being known as the means, — and finally', as Chief Justice, reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the Common Law of the country.
We know nothing more striking than the dying speech recorded in the concluding chapter. At the end of a life so laborious and so useful, the Judge, himself withdrawing to he judged, murmurs, —“ Gentlemen of the Jury, the facts of the case are in your hands. You will retire and consider of your verdict.” In this volume, the son has submitted the facts of the case to a jury of posterity. His case will not be injured by the modesty with which he has stated it. He has claimed less for his father than one less near to him might have done. We think the verdict must be, that this was a great man marooned by Destiny on an out-of-theway corner of the world, where, however he might exert great powers, there was no adequate field for that display of them which is the necessary condition of fame.
Mr. Parsons has done a real service to our history and our letters in this volume. Accompanying and illustrating his main topic, he has given us excellent sketches of some other persons less eminent than his father, sometimes from tradition and sometimes from his own impressions. We hope in the next edition he will give us a supplementary chapter of personal anecdotes, of which there is a large number that deserve to be perpetuated in print, and which otherwise will die with the memories in which they are now preserved. The strictly professional part of the biography, illustrating the Chief Justice’s more important decisions, might also he advantageously enlarged.
- Mr. Elliott, in his New England History, has wisely gathered many of those unconsidered trifles which are so important in forming a just notion of the character of a population. We cannot but wish that our town-historians, instead of giving so much space to idle and often untrustworthy genealogies, and to descriptions of the “elegant mansions ” of Messrs. This and That, would do us the real service of rescuing from inevitable oblivion the fleeting phases of household scenery that help us to that biography of a people so much more interesting than their annuls. We would much rather know whether a man wore homespun, a hundred years ago, than Whether he was a descendant of Ramuses I.↩