Retrospect of Western Travel, Volume 2 (of 2)

by Harriet Martineau

... "I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming days as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state. One of these signs is the fact that the same movement which effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the low, the common was explored and poetized. That which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it not?—of new vigour, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy and Arabia; what is Greek art or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body; show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the leger referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing; and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has form and order; there is no trifle, there is no puzzle, but one design unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench."

... "Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is the new importance given to the single person. Everything that tends to insulate the individual—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state—tends to true union as well as greatness. 'I learned,' said the melancholy Pestalozzi, 'that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man.' Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be a university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing; the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these; but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience, patience; with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world not to be a unit; not to be reckoned one character; not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand of the party, the section to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the North or the South? Not so, brothers and friends; please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds."

Of the last class of originals—those who are not only strong to form a purpose in life and fulfil it, but who are driven by pressure of circumstance to put forth their whole force for the control of other destinies than their own—there is no more conspicuous example than Father Taylor, as he is called. In America there is no need to explain who Father Taylor is. He is known in England, but not extensively. Father Taylor is the seamen's apostle. He was a sailor-boy himself, and at twenty years old was unable to read. He rose in his calling, and at length became full of some religious convictions which he longed to express. He has found a mode of expression, and is happy. He is one of the busiest and most cheerful of men; and, of all preachers living, probably the most eloquent to those whom his preaching suits. So it would appear from events. I heard him called a second homely Jeremy Taylor; and I certainly doubt whether Jeremy Taylor himself could more absolutely sway the minds and hearts of the learned and pious of his day than the seamen's friend does those of his flock. He has a great advantage over other preachers in being able to speak to his hearers from the ground of their common experience; in being able to appeal to his own sealife. He can say, "You have lodged with me in the forecastle; did you ever know me profane?" "You have seen me land from a long voyage. Where did I betake myself? Am not I a proof that a sealife need not be soiled with vice on land?" All this gives him some power; but it would be little without the prodigious force which he carries in his magnificent intellect and earnest heart.

A set of institutions is connected with the Boston Port Society, whose agent Mr. Taylor is. There is the Seamen's Bethel, in North Square, where Mr. Taylor preaches; a Reading-room, and a Nautical School; a Temperance Society, and the Bethel Union, the last being an association of seamen and masters of vessels for the purpose chiefly of settling disputes without litigation and scandal, promoting the just and kind treatment of seamen, and watching over their rights. There is also a Clothing Society, the object of which is economy rather than charity; and a Savings' Bank for seamen, the merits of which are sufficiently indicated by the title.

Father Taylor is the life and soul of all this. Some help him liberally with the purse, and many with head and hands; but he is the animating spirit of the whole. His chapel is filled, from year's end to year's end, with sailors. He has no salary, and will not hear of one. He takes charge of all the poor connected with his chapel. To many this must look like an act of insanity. No class is more exposed to casualties than that of seamen; and, when a life is lost, an entire helpless family comes upon the charity of society. Father Taylor speaks of his ten thousand children, and all the woes and faults of a multitude are accumulated upon his hands; and yet he retains the charge of all his poor, though he has no fixed income whatever. He does it by putting his charge in the way of helping each other and themselves. He encourages sobriety and economy in all their habits, and enforces them with a power which it would be vain to attempt to give an idea of. He uses the utmost openness about his plans, and thereby obtains valuable co-operation. He has a collection of money made twice every Sunday in his church. The sums are given by the seamen almost exclusively, and are in very small coin; but the amount has gone on increasing, from first to last, except during intervals when Father Taylor was absent for his health. Between the years 1828 and 1835, the annual sum thus contributed rose from 98 to 1079 dollars.

Boston owes to Mr. Taylor and to Dr. Tuckerman its convictions of the pernicious operation of some of the old methods of charity by almsgiving; and the names of these gentlemen ought ever to be held in honour for having saved the young community in which they dwell from the curse of such pauperism in kind (the degree could never have become very formidable) as has afflicted the kingdoms of the Old World. Mr. Taylor owns that he little foresaw what he was undertaking in assuming the charge of all his poor, under such liabilities as those who follow the seaman's calling are exposed to: but he does it. The funds are, as it has been seen, provided by the class to be benefited; and they have proved hitherto sufficient, under the wise administration of the pastor and his wife, and under the animating influence of his glowing spirit, breathed forth from the pulpit and amid their dwellings. It seems as if his power was resorted to in difficult and desperate cases, like that of a superior being; such surprising facts was I told of his influence over his flock. He was requested to visit an insane man, who believed himself to be in heaven, and therefore to have no need of food and sleep. The case had become desperate, so long had the fasting and restlessness continued. Father Taylor prevailed at once; the patient was presently partaking of "the feast of the blessed" with Father Taylor, and enjoying the "saints' rest on a heavenly couch." From carrying a single point like this to redeeming a whole class from much of the vice and wo which had hitherto afflicted it, the pastor's power seems universally to prevail.

I have not mentioned all this time what Father Taylor's religion is, or, rather, what sect he belongs to. This is one of the last considerations which, in his case, occurs to an observer. All the essentials of his faith must be so right to produce such results, that the separate articles of belief do not present themselves for inquiry. He is "orthodox" (Presbyterian), but so liberal as to be in some sort disowned by the rigid of his sect. He opens his pulpit to ministers of any Protestant denomination; and Dr. Beecher and other bigots of his own sect refused to preach thence after Unitarians. When this opposition of theirs diminished the contributions of his people during his absence, they twitted him with it, and insultingly asked whether he cheated the Unitarians, or they him? to which he replied, that they understood one another, and left all unfair proceedings to a third party.

Mr. Taylor has a remarkable person. He is stoutly built, and looks more like a skipper than a preacher. His face is hard and weather-beaten, but with an expression of sensibility, as well as acuteness, which it is wonderful that features apparently so immoveable can convey. He uses a profusion of action. His wife told me that she thought his health was promoted by his taking so much exercise in the shape of action, in conversation as well as in the pulpit. He is very loud and prodigiously rapid. His splendid thoughts come faster than he can speak them; and, at times, he would be totally overwhelmed by them, if, in the midst of his most rapid utterance of them, a burst of tears, of which he is wholly unconscious, did not aid in his relief. I have seen them streaming, bathing his face, when his words breathed the very spirit of joy, and every tone of his voice was full of exhilaration. His pathos, shed in thoughts and tones so fleeting as to be gone like lightning, is the most awful of his powers. I have seen a single clause of a short sentence call up an instantaneous flush on the hundreds of hard faces turned to the preacher; and it is no wonder to me that the widow and orphan are cherished by those who hear his prayers for them. The tone of his petitions is importunate, even passionate; and his sailor hearers may be forgiven for their faith, that Father Taylor's prayers cannot be refused. Never, however, was anything stranger than some particulars of his prayers. I have told elsewhere[13] how importunately he prayed for rain in fear of conflagration, and, as it happened, the Sunday before the great New-York fire. With such petitions, urged with every beauty of expression, he mixes up whatever may have struck his fancy during the week, whether mythology, politics, housewifery, or anything else. He prayed one day, when dwelling on the moral perils of seamen, "that Bacchus and Venus might be driven to the end of the earth, and off it." I heard him pray that the members of Congress might be preserved from buffoonery. Thence he passes to supplication, offered in a spirit of sympathy which may appear bold at another moment, but which is true to the emotion of the hour. "Father! look upon us! We are a widow." "Father! the mother's heart thou knowest; the mother's bleeding heart thou pitiest. Sanctify to us the removal of this lamb!"

The eloquence of his sermons was somewhat the less amazing to me from my feeling that, if there be inspiration in the world, it arises from being so listened to. It was not like the preaching of Whitfield, for all was quiet in Father Taylor's church. There were no groans, few tears, and those unconsciously shed, rolling down the upturned face, which never for a moment looked away from the preacher. His voice was the only sound; now tremendously loud and rapid, overpowering the senses; now melting into a tenderness like that of a mother's wooings of her infant. The most striking discourse I heard from him was on the text, "That we, through the comfort of the Scriptures, might have hope." A crew from among his hearers were going to sail in the course of the week. He gave me a totally new view of the great trial of the seaman's life, the pining for rest. Never, among the poets of the earth, was there finer discourse of the necessity of hope to man, and never a more tremendous picture of the state of the hopeless. Father Taylor is no reader except of his Bible, and probably never heard of any poem on the subject on which he was speaking; and he therefore went unhesitatingly into a picture of what hope is to the mariner in his midnight watches and amid the tossing of the storm; and, if Campbell had been there, he would have joyfully owned himself outdone. But then the preacher went off into one of his strange descriptions of what people resort to when longing for a home for their spirits, and not finding the right one. "Some get into the stomach, and think they can make a good home of that; but the stomach is no home for the spirit;" and then followed some particular reasons why. Others nestle down into people's good opinion, and think, if they can get praise enough, they shall be at peace. "But opinion is sometimes an easy tradewind, and sometimes a contrary hurricane." Some wait and wait upon change; but the affairs of Providence go on while such are standing still, "and God's chronometer loses no time." After a long series of pictures of forlornness and pinings for home, he burst forth suddenly upon the promise, "I will give you rest." He was for the moment the wanderer finding rest; his flood of tears and of gratitude, his rapturous account of the change from pining to hope and rest were real to himself and to us for the time. The address to the departing seamen was tender and cheerful; with a fitting mention of the chances of mortality, but nothing which could be ever construed by the most superstitious of them, in the most comfortless of their watches, into a foreboding.

Such preaching exerts prodigious power over an occasional hearer, and it is an exquisite pleasure to listen to it; but it does not, for a continuance, meet the religious wants of any but those to whom it is expressly addressed. The preacher shares the mental and moral characteristics, as well as the experience in life of his nautical hearers; their imaginative cast of mind, their superstition, their strong capacity for friendship and love, their ease about the future, called recklessness in some, and faith in others. This is so unlike the common mind of landsmen, that the same expression of worship will not suit them both. So Father Taylor will continue to be the seaman's apostle; and, however admired and beloved by the landsman, not his priest. This is as it should be, and as the good man desires. His field of labour is wide enough for him. No one is more sensible than he of its extent. He told me what he tells seamen themselves, that they are the eyes and tongues of the world; the seed carriers of the world; the winged seeds from which good or evil must spring up on the wildest shores of God's earth. His spirit is so possessed with this just idea of the importance of his work, that praise and even immediate sympathy are not necessary; though the last is, of course, pleasant to him. One Christmas day there was a misunderstanding as to whether the chapel would be open, and not above twenty people were present; but never did Father Taylor preach more splendidly.