Where thou art laid asleep;
Kissed by soft winds, and washed by gentle showers,
Thou hast thy crown of flowers;
Poor heart, too long in this mad world oppressed,
Take now thy rest.
I, too, perplex’d with strife of good and ill,
Long to be safe and still;
Evil is present with me while I pray
That good may win the day;
Great Giver, grant me thy last gift and best,
The gift of rest!
—_Good Words._
* * * * *
BUSINESS requires earnestness and strength of character, life
must be allowed more freedom; business calls for the strictest
sequence, whereas in the conduct of life inconsecutiveness is often
necessary—nay, is charming and graceful. If thou art strict in the
first, thou mayest allow thyself more freedom in the second; while if
thou mix them up, thou wilt find the free interfering and breaking in
upon the fixed.—_Goethe._
ECCENTRIC AMERICANS.
By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.
I.—THE SAILOR, PEDDLER, FARMER, PREACHER.
In mechanics, an eccentric is a wheel that can start all the rest of
the machinery with a jerk and a kick, and keep it going. It was the
little eccentrics that enabled ten thousand Chautauquans to scatter
to every part of the land in a few hours. The cam-motion in human
nature starts its machinery and scatters its thought. We ought to
thank God for the minds that wabble. Every originator has been counted
eccentric—many of them have been pronounced insane. The little Festuses
sitting in judgment are always crying to the inspired apostles of
truth, “Thou art beside thyself.”
It is finite mechanism and finite thought that invent geometry and
theology. Men hang, cunningly and truly, their long counter-shafts of
creed, of behavior, of thought, of dress, of consistency, of loyalty;
they bolt and key thereto immovably all human characters which are
round, “line them up” all true and uniform, lubricate with lucre,
put on the steam and away they all go beautifully and all alike.
Woe be to one who wabbles in this machine-shop of society! But God
uses no plumb-lines, right-angles, levels or true circles. “Nature’s
geometrician,” the bee, never made a true hexagon. The old planets
go “spinning through the grooves of change” in eccentrics, and never
collide. Erratic comets dash through and among them, and never crash.
I suppose the most eccentric character that ever walked this earth was
that strange boy from Nazareth who confounded the doctors with his
unprecedented outgivings. His teachings were indeed so strange that
after the world has been for one thousand nine hundred years trying
to work its standard up to them, a perfect Christian would to-day be
accounted _non compos mentis_ by the rest of Christendom.
So it is not a bad idea to study eccentric characters, especially if
they are strangely good and oddly useful. One such, at least, we have
at hand for the first study of this series—Rev. Edward T. Taylor,
“Father Taylor,” “The Sailor-Preacher,” of Boston and the world.
Born in Virginia, reared on the sea, and adopted by New England. Born
a religionist, he preached “play” sermons when a child; born again a
Christian, he preached the gospel in the Methodist Episcopal Church
until all humanity claimed him. Born a poet, for ten years he studied
nature in her tragic and her melting moods upon the sea; studied man
in the forecastle, in the prison, upon the farm, in the market. Nature
was his university; humanity his text-book; hard experience his tutor.
At the age of twenty he had traveled the world over, had sounded the
depths of human fortune, passion, misery, and sin; was profoundly
learned in his great text-book, and the most inspired interpreter
of its unuttered wants—and did not know the alphabet! He had become
celebrated throughout New England as a marvelous prodigy in the
despised sect of “shouting Methodists” years before he could read a
text or “line” a hymn. And to the day of his death his preaching knew
no method, his eloquence no logic, his conduct no consistency, and
his power no limit or restraint. To this day no one has succeeded in
analyzing his genius. He could not himself account for his power, nor
could he control it. He seemed to play upon his audiences at will as a
master plays upon the harp; yet some unseen, mysterious force played
upon him in turn. His brethren in the ministry, who accounted for his
strange power by attributing it to the Holy Spirit, were confounded by
the rudeness, jocoseness, and at times almost profanity of his speech
at its highest flights; and they who undertook to resolve his efforts
into the accepted elements of human power were astounded by the more
than human resources of a mind uncultured and a nature as wild, as
uncontrollable, as bright and as sad as the sea he loved. Surely, if
ever man was inspired, Father Taylor was.
His career, like his methods, answered to all the terms that can define
eccentricity. Deeply religious as the child was by nature, he ran away
to sea at the age of seven. His conversion was characteristic. Putting
into port at Boston, he strolled to a meeting-house where a revival
was in progress; instead of going in by the door, he listened outside,
and when stricken under conviction, with characteristic impulsiveness
he climbed in through the window. To use his own sailor words: “I was
dragged in through the ‘lubber hole,’ brought down by a broadside
from the seventy-four, Bishop Hedding, and fell into the arms of
Thomas W. Tucker.” This was at the age of nineteen. Then off to sea
as a privateersman in the war of 1812, he was captured and imprisoned
at Halifax, and here his preaching of the gospel strangely began. A
fellow-prisoner read texts to him till one flashed upon his conception
as the cue to his discourse. “Stop!” the boy would cry; “read that
again.” “That will do;” and he was ready to pour forth a fervid hour of
pathos, wit, brilliant imagery, all supported by perfect acting.
Out of prison at last, he returns to Boston, leaves his seafaring
forever, and takes to the road with a tin peddler’s cart: clad in a
sailor’s jacket and tarpaulin, talking “sea lingo,” religion and poetry
in equal proportions, he traveled over New England as attractive a
sight as Don Quixote would have been. He came across an old lady who
taught him to read (age 21), and he paid her by gratefully holding
meetings in her big kitchen, and exhorting wondering crowds of rustics
and weeping crowds of penitents. Next he undertook to learn shoemaking,
and then worked a farm for a living—all the time concentrating his
intense nature on his grand passion for playing upon the human heart;
earning little bread for himself, and breaking the bread of life
abundantly to farmers, shoemakers, fishermen; in farm houses, school
houses, barns, camp-meetings; over a circuit of his own organization.
“He was a youthful rustic Whitefield,” says Bishop Haven, “thrilling
rustic audiences with his winged words and fiery inspiration.” He
loved to preach from the text, “How knoweth this man letters, having
never learned?” Taylor did not know letters, and his speech was rude
and coarse, his blunders innumerable: if words failed him out of his
limited vocabulary, he manufactured them. Once, completely at fault
in his struggle to express the burning thoughts that crowded his
brain he cried, with a perplexed but irradiated face: “I have lost my
nominative case, but I am on my way to glory!” A few smiled; all wept.
His earnestness atoned for many defects; his imagery was even now
beautiful, and his magnetism irresistible.
Thus young Taylor preached, unlicensed, for five years. It was the
breaking-up and seed-time of New England Methodism. Between the
Puritans and Quakers, with their mutual antagonism, the shouting
Methodists were as corn between the millstones, a despised and
persecuted sect.
About the age of twenty-five occurred three notable events in his life.
He was licensed by the Methodist Conference to preach. He attended
school a short time and began his education. He married one of God’s
noble-women to complete his education. For ten years he continued the
life of a circuit preacher, growing in culture, power, spirit, and
fame, under that wise and gentle nurture. No one can say how far short
of its fullness Father Taylor’s life might have fallen without Deborah
Taylor.
All these seventeen years of his ministry he had, as far as possible,
kept near to the coast and the haunts of sailors; praying in the
forecastle and preaching on the decks of ships about to sail, wherever
he could reach them. The salt air was incense to him, and the music
of the surf seemed ever dwelling in the nautilus-chambers of his
heart. At last his life-work came in the direction of his longings.
At the age of thirty-fire he was called to preach to the sailors of
Boston. The meetings were a success from the first, and Mr. Taylor
went South and solicited the money ($2,100) to buy a house for their
Bethel. (More bread cast on the waters to return after many days to the
South.) The work grew, and soon an incorporated society was organized,
called the “Boston Port Society;” from the first nondenominational,
though a majority of its board were Methodists. The work still grew.
Soon the merchants of Boston assumed the burden of the work, and in
1833 “The Seamen’s Bethel” was completed at a cost of $24,000. Soon
a Seamen’s Savings Bank and then a Seamen’s Aid Society, a Seamen’s
Boarding-house, and then a Mariner’s Home (at a cost of $34,000), an
Industrial School for Seamen’s Children, and a Seamen’s Co-operative
Store, sprang up around this nucleus. These collateral enterprises
were largely the inspiration of Mother Taylor, but the burden of them
fell upon the Unitarians of Boston, who soon assumed entire control
of the noble charity and mission. Here Father Taylor fulfilled his
life-mission. “From 1829 to 1871 he trod this quarter-deck, its
master.” The fame of the Bethel and its chaplain, one and the same,
went to all quarters of the globe. Edward Everett styled him “The
Walking Bethel,” and Richard H. Dana in his “Two Years Before the
Mast,” said one of the first inquiries of sailors in foreign ports,
from him, was regarding the welfare of Father Taylor, the mariner’s
preacher in Boston. A sailor declared he had been in ports where the
United States had not been heard of, but never where Father Taylor
had not. Once, soliciting aid for Bethel before another audience than
his own, he glowingly promised: “Drop your gold into this ocean and
it will cast a wave on the shores of Europe which will strike back
to the islands of the Southern Sea, rebound on the Northwest coast,
and so make the circuit of the world and strike this port again.” The
realization of this prediction was more extravagant than the bold
imagery of it. At the dedication of the Bethel he cried: “America is
the center of the world, the center of America is Boston, and the
center of Boston is the Bethel.”
The first place of a returning sailor’s thoughts became the Bethel,
instead of the groggery. Two of them, seeking it for the first time,
spelled out the name on the flag floating above it: “B-E-T, beat,
H-E-L, hell; beat-hell! This is Father Taylor’s place,” and they cast
anchor. “There he is, Bill,” said an old tar to another, as they
entered the Bethel; “there’s the old man walking the deck. He’s got his
guns double-shotted and will give it to us right and left. See how fast
he travels—fifteen knots on a taut bowline. When he walks that way he’s
ready for action.”
There were strange scenes in that vast audience room. The body of
the church was reserved for sailors always, while the side slips and
galleries were for the general public. When the seats were all filled,
he would order the sailors forward like a sea captain, and crowd the
altar rail, the pulpit stairs, the pulpit, and the pulpit sofas with
the weather-beaten mariners, while the grandest in the land stood and
listened in the aisles. “Now,” he would say, with a beaming face,
“we have got the hold full and a deck load, and we’ll up anchor and
start.” Many of the best critics and reporters have tried to describe
and analyze a service after such a “start”—Dickens, Harriet Martineau,
Fredricka Bremer, Horace Mann, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others—but all
fail to give us much comprehension of the method of the man; I suspect
because they were all so absorbed they forgot to take notes, mental
or otherwise. But they recall the _effects_ of the preaching vividly,
each in his own way. So much of the power of Father Taylor was in his
presence and action, that no report of one of his sermons has been made
and preserved. He said himself, “You might as well try to report chain
lightning.” Dr. Bellows said, twelve years ago, “Alas! nothing remains
of him but his memory and his influence. He will be an incredible myth
in another generation.” Why _need_ this be so? He has left a wealth of
original sayings behind him unequaled by the utterances of few save
Abraham Lincoln; and he may furnish the material for many rare studies
in character. We may be forgiven the presumption of attempting to help
rescue Father Taylor from vanishing into oblivion. What, then, were
the characteristics that lay at the foundations of this remarkable
character? I would classify them under four heads:
1. _Intensity._ This gave him concentration of thought, earnestness of
belief, courage and aggressiveness in action. He went into everything
with an irresistible impulse. His training on the sea and in the
circuit gave free growth to this trait. He was never placed where he
needed to be politic or conservative; and his combativeness always had
free play. He was the champion of his despised sect, but he fought
with the polished weapons of a wit, and the impressive presence of a
will which the foes of his cause more dreaded than force. And then his
spirit was so lovable that there is no instance on record of any one
ever having laid hands on him, fierce disputant as he was.
He was a man born to command. His will was imperious. The last
conscious act of his life was to shake his fist at his nurse, who
refused to let him rise from bed. Peter Cartwright said there were
two cataracts in this country—Niagara and Father Taylor. His brethren
called him “the breaking-up plow of the Church.” Miss Martineau
spoke of “the prodigious force which he carries in his magnificent
intellect and earnest heart.” Another English writer said, “He goes on
as energetically as any ‘Praise-God Barebones’ of the old Covenanter
times.”
I think one thing all his biographers lost sight of was the fact that
his belief became a vital part of him, the very breath of his nostrils.
There is a mighty difference between truly believing, and simply
accepting a belief second-hand, which latter passes for belief with
most people. It is the men who genuinely believe who make others accept
and adopt their belief. In the pulpit his action is tremendous. He
always comes down wet through with perspiration, and a complete change
of wardrobe is necessary with every effort.
2. _Imagination._ To this quality is to be referred his profound
religious nature, his poetry, dramatic power, eloquence, and (in
conjunction with his earnestness) even his faults. One called him a
poet; another, a born actor. James Freeman Clarke said he was the
only man he ever heard to whom the much-abused word, “eloquence,”
could be truly applied. But I think none of these terms so accurately
classify his genius as to call him a painter. His earnestness made
everything his quick imagination conjured up seem realistic to him;
and his dramatic power enabled him to make these images realistic to
his hearers. His thoughts were entities to him, and they always took
the form of objects real and visible. This differs from the _poetic_
imagination, the essence of which is unsubstantiality. The poet sees
visions, the artist creates forms. Taylor was an artist, with words for
his colors, action for his pencil. One who heard him said: “While he
preached the ocean rolled and sparkled, the ship spread her sails, the
tempest lowered, the forked lightnings blazed, the vessel struck, her
disjointed timbers floated upon the waves. It was all pictured to the
eye as positive reality. You could hardly believe afterward you had not
actually witnessed the scene.”
He describes a shipwreck, and at the climax, as the ship is slowly
settling in the water, and every face in the audience is livid with
fear, he roars, “Man the life boat!” and every sailor in the house
springs to his feet. Now sailors, under the influence of drink, have
killed their captain. He describes the deed. They start up before
the audience, creeping down the stairs and into the cabin; he raises
the imaginary knife, and half the men in the house jump forward to
arrest the blow, while women shriek in horror. Once, however, a
matter-of-fact, though possessed sailor, confused Father Taylor. He
had depicted the impenitent sinner, under the figure of a storm-tossed
ship, with her sails split, and driven by the gale toward the
rock-bound coast of Cape Ann. “Oh, how,” he exclaimed, in tones of
despair, “shall this poor sin-tossed sinner be saved?” “Put his helm
hard down, and _bear away for Squam_!” bellowed the old salt, springing
excitedly to his feet.
So he painted the Mosaic miracles, “till the brethren saw the snakes
squirm, heard the frogs croak, felt the lice bite, brushed the flies
out of their faces and saw the Israelites march out of Egypt.”
One of his last sermons, when he was old and feeble, ended thus: “My
work is almost done. Where are all my old shipmates—they who lay in
hammocks beside me and who have fought at the same guns? Gone, gone—all
gone! No, blessed be God! not _all_; there’s one left. [Here he made
the picture realistic by pointing to an old salt, gray, bent, and
knotty-faced.] Yes, there’s old Timberhead. He and I have weathered
many a storm together. It is only a little farther we have to sail.
Look, look ahead there! It is only to beat just around that point
yonder. Now—now! there is the peaceful, blessful haven and home full in
view.” By this time the audience was weeping, radiant with hope.
Even his isolated sentences are full of this imaginary realism.
“Sailors ignorant!” he cried indignantly when one depreciated them;
“sailors know everything; they grasp the world in their hand like an
orange!” The boldness of this language is wonderful. Of superannuated
ministers he said: “They are like camels bearing precious spices and
browsing on bitter herbs. They were moral giants. When God made them he
rolled his sleeves up to the arm-pits.”
It was the activity of his brain, the realism of his imagery and the
homely naturalness of his language that made some of his transitions
abrupt to grotesqueness and some of his speech border startlingly on
impropriety. He really thought aloud—which many a matter-of-fact, heavy
speaker would find it unsafe to do. Dissociated from their context and
from the earnestness and devout spirit of the man, they sound much
worse than when uttered.
It was the combination of these two qualities also which made him
extravagant in speech, erratic in sentiment, and inconsistent with
himself. He _was_ whatever he thought or imagined for the moment; his
genius possessed and controlled him. Thus he was a radical temperance
reformer, but he denounced prohibitory legislation and hurled ridicule
at those who proposed the use of an unfermented wine in the sacrament;
he called it “raisin water.” Of rum-sellers he said: “I wonder that the
angels in heaven do not tear up the golden pavements and throw them on
their heads;” but he conjured those who should succeed him to “Cast out
from this church, in my name, any man that comes up to the altar with
his glue-pot and dye-stuff.”
Dr. Jewett says: “I have heard him at times when I have been amazed
at the utter inconsistency of his views, not only with any standard
of doctrine recognized as sound by other men, but with his own public
utterances of perhaps the week previous. His imagination, once fairly
excited, could furnish in thirty minutes material for half-a-dozen
speeches of an hour each; and, unfortunately, it frequently happened
that different parts of the same speech could be used on opposite sides
of the same question.”
So he denounced the abolitionists and slavery in the same breath.
“Before I would assist one of those Southern devils to catch a nigger,”
he shouted, after reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “I would see them all
in hell, and I would shout hallelujah on to the end of it!” “You talk
like a rabid abolitionist,” said his interlocutor. “No,” he cried, with
even more vengeance; “no, I despise them. They have cursed the land!”
He called Foster, the abolitionist orator, “a devil on the platform.”
His reverence for the church led him to consign summarily to a hotter
climate those who came out on the anti-slavery issue; and he was a
vehement advocate of church authority, and evangelical orthodoxy, yet
the most of his life he preached for Unitarians; and he openly defied
the mandate of the conference regarding Masonry, being a member of the
fraternity, and he submitted to church discipline for his contumacy,
but refused to withdraw from the order, and prayed in public for the
anti-Masons, “O, Lord, make their hearts as soft as their heads are.”
Plainly, there was no managing such a tempestuous soul, and he was
left to go his own way. Honor be to the church that had the magnanimity
and broad charity to let him do his own grand work in his own grand
way. It was herein as grand and eccentric as an organization as he was
among men.
His sarcasm, wit, terseness, and vigor of speech were the outcome of an
energetic and picturesque mind, struggling with a limited vocabulary
for its expression. His sentences were explosive. “This fast age,” he
said, “would be glad to put spurs to lightning, and blow a trumpet in
the ears of thunder.” Again, “Some people think they are saints. If
they could see themselves as the just in glory see them they wouldn’t
dare to look a decent devil in the face.” “If I owed the devil a
hypocrite, and he wouldn’t take that man for pay, I’d repudiate the
debt.” He called another minister, who had preceded him, and infringed
on his allotted time, “As selfish as a whale who takes in a ton of
herring before breakfast.” Again, “It is a great mistake to think of
converting the world without the help of sailors. You might as well
think of melting a mountain of ice with a moonbeam, or of heating an
oven with snow-balls.” He called morality, without religion, “Starting
a man to heaven with an icicle in his pocket.” “I am not two inches off
heaven!” he exclaimed, in a moment of religious exaltation. He said to
Channing, the Unitarian: “When you die angels will fight for the honor
of carrying you to heaven on their shoulders.” “Sailors’ hearts are
big as an ox’s; open like a sunflower, and they carry them in their
right hands ready to give them away.” One of his converts, gifted in
prayer, he always called “Salvation-set-to-music.” A colored brother,
speaking with the simple pathos of his race, drew from Father Taylor
the ejaculation, “There is rain in that cloud.”
But, whether homely or lofty, whether pathetic or witty, he always
talked in dead earnest out of his warm heart, out of his seething
brain, and everything was gilded by the magic touch of imagination.
“A man,” says Stevens, “who could scarcely speak three sentences,
in the pulpit or out of it, without presenting a striking poetic
image, a phrase of rare beauty, or a sententious sarcasm, whose
discourses presented the strangest, the most brilliant exhibition of
sense, epigrammatic thought, pathos, and humor, spangled over by an
exhaustless variety of the finest images and pervaded by a spiritual
earnestness that subdued all listeners.” “His splendid thoughts come
faster than he can speak them,” said Harriet Martineau, “and at times
he could be totally overwhelmed by them if a burst of tears, of which
he was wholly unconscious, did not aid in his relief.” “I have seen a
diamond shining,” said Dr. Bartol, “but he was a diamond on fire.”