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.”