Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

England, and finding reproach and dissuasion alike vain with his brother, addressed his expostulations to Grace Murray herself. The poor woman, distracted by his assertion that her marriage with Wesley would be a violation of her precontract and a grievous wrong to both her suitors, at last changed her mind again, and Charles Wesley had the satisfaction to see her safely married to Bennett before he left her. Wesley would not quarrel with his brother or blame the woman; but the week after her marriage he recorded his own poignant grief in a series of stanzas that have at least the merit of utter sincerity. Forty years afterward, when both were near the close of life, they met again for a few moments; and it was evident to the friend who accompanied Wesley that the wound, though it had long since ceased to smart, had never been

gar woman, with a tendency to hysteria. What attractions of person, mind, or temper she can have had for such a man as Wesley must always remain a mystery. He doubtless intended that the marriage should not be long delayed; but it was by an accident precipitated more speedily than he had purposed. A week after the entry in his "Journal" just cited, he slipped on the ice while crossing London Bridge, injuring his ankle so that he could not walk

or stand upon his feet. He was immediately taken to the residence of Mrs. Vazeille, on Threadneedle street. And eight days later he was married. There was long leisure for repentance.

It is possible, we may admit, that the best of wives might have found Wesley exacting. In a tract on Marriage, written in later life and perhaps colored by his own experience, he says that the duties of a wife are all comprised in two: "1. That she must recognize herself as the inferior of her husband. 2. That she must behave as such."

[graphic]

Drawn by Katharine Kimball

FRONT VIEW OF CITY ROAD CHAPEL

forgotten. The affections of the man were deep and tender; but it was certainly some proof of ill-regulated sentiment that he should have bestowed them upon one so little fitted to become his companion.

Yet marriage with Grace Murray, unfortunate as it might have proved, would have saved Wesley from a worse fate. On that later story the biographer does not care to linger. On February 2, 1751, Wesley writes in his "Journal": "Having received a full answer from Mr. P[erronet], I was clearly convinced that I ought to marry." This time he evidently determined to be beforehand with his brother, for on the same day he announced to him his fixed resolution. "I was thunderstruck," said Charles, "and could only answer he had given me the first blow, and his marriage would come like the coup de grâce. Trusty Ned Perronet told me the person was Mrs. Vazeille, one of whom I never had the least suspicion. I refused his company to chapel, and retired to mourn with my faithful Sally." Charles Wesley knew there was cause for mourning. Mrs. Vazeille was the widow of a London merchant, an essentially vul

Mrs. Wesley did not accept this theory. She was obstinate, peevish, and subject to fits of violent passion. Wesley was just and-in the opinion of his brother, at least-marvelously patient; but he could hardly have felt much affection for such a wife, and some of his letters evince a certain long-suffering assertion of superiority not exactly conciliatory. One of them closes with the advice, "Be content to be a private, insignificant person, known and loved by God and me." Moreover, in his innocent unwisdom, he allowed himself to write letters of religious advice and sympathy to other women, especially to a Mrs. Ryan, housekeeper of the Kingswood school, who was doubtless at this time a pious and useful woman, but whose early career had been by no means above reproach. The knowledge of such correspondence threw his wife into paroxysms of jealousy. She intercepted and opened his letters; she interpolated com

promising passages of her own invention in them, and then read them to prejudiced persons; in one or two instances she gave such doctored letters to the public prints. She spread the most absurd and calumnious reports as to her husband's character. Her conduct, indeed, was so scandalous and at times so violent as to prove that she cannot have been perfectly sane. She left Wesley repeatedly for long periods, and finally, in 1771, departed, taking with her a bundle of Wesley's letters and papers, vowing never to return. Wesley simply noted the fact in his "Journal," and added: "Non eam reliqui; non dimisi; non revocabo." She seems, however, to have returned of her own accord, but only for a short time. When she died, ten years later, she was in separation from Wesley, and he was not even informed of her death until three days after her funeral.

to

an experience, Wesley should have repeatedly given to his young preachers who thought to marry the laconic advice of Punch, "Don't." Not that he was coldly insensible to the power and charm of youthful sentiment; on the contrary, as his favorite niece prettily said, "My uncle John always showed peculiar sympathy young people in love." His advice was prompted, I judge, not by a dislike for sentiment, but by a distrust of it. Knowing from his own case how fatally easy it is to become unequally yoked together with believers as well as with unbelievers, he feared lest his preachers, like himself, might have their judgment blinded by an excess of that amiable quality. But it certainly was unfortunate that a great religious leader should have found no happiness in the most normal of human relations, and should have dissuaded other religious

[graphic]

Drawn by Katharine Kimball

GRAVE OF JOHN WESLEY, SHOWING A PORTION OF THE REAR OF CITY ROAD CHAPEL

Perhaps it is not strange that, after such teachers from entering it.

[graphic][subsumed][merged small][merged small]

THIS COMBINATION OF REASON AND

SENTIMENT CHARACTERISTIC
OF THE AGE

THE personal character of Wesley was in some respects curiously representative of his age. In England, as everywhere else in Europe at the middle of the eighteenth century, critical reason and romantic sentiment, the one largely exclusive and scholarly, the other democratic and popular, were working together to form a new society. And in England, as elsewhere, the democratic and sentimental impulse, the impulse of Rousseau, though here restrained by a conservative national temper, was increasingly powerful. With the close of the first third of the century, English society and letters, as well as religion, began to be very indulgent to emotion. The logical intellect no longer held exclusive dominance.

Literature, emerging from the clubs and drawing-rooms of Queen Anne society, threw off the restraints of convention to gain freer utterance for personal feeling; indeed, in the reaction from academic coldness it often passed to the opposite extreme of sentimentality. In poetry, melancholy became a favorite motive, sometimes gentle and chastened, as in Goldsmith and Gray, sometimes rhetorical and sonorous, as in Young and Blair. In fiction Fielding well represents solid English common sense; but Fielding's portrayals of burly, redblooded life, healthy, though coarse, were far less popular than Richardson's portrayals of tortured, long-suffering sentiment. And Sterne was for a time a greater favorite than either. "Sentimental!" writes Wesley, after reading "A Sentimental Journey." "What is that? He might as well say continental. It is not sense. And yet this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is now become a fashionable one." Popular religious literature, appealing to a less cultivated taste, often shows this sentimentality in its most disheveled form. The most widely circulated book in England at the middle of the century was not poetry or fiction, but the "Meditations among the Tombs" of Wesley's college friend James Hervey. The reader of to-day who looks into it will probably be surprised to find it the most rhetorical of books, written in a tone of unctuous bathos very unedifying.

Now the character of Wesley exhibits just this strain of sentiment grafted upon an essentially critical nature. The basis of his character was logical. All through his life, as in his boyhood, he was always insisting on underpropping conduct with reason. He complains impatiently of some of his converts that, while their experience and conduct are satisfactory, they seem to be quite unable to give any reason for the faith that is in them. He had a natural turn for argument, which had been disciplined by his duties as moderator at the daily debates in Lincoln College, and had been given frequent exercise throughout his career. It was the only gift he used to speak of with complacency, perhaps with a little pride. "I have found abundant reason to praise God for giving me this honest art. By this, when men have hedged me in with what they call demonstration, I have many times felt able to touch the point where the fallacy lay, and it flew open in a moment."

His writing is usually at its best when he is proving or confuting something. His own style, in sermon, essay, or pamphlet, is clear, direct, and entirely plain. He holds himself closely to the thought in hand; there is no allusiveness in his writing; it is straightforward, eighteenth-century common sense. His manner is as homely and simple as Swift's, in whose style, he says, all the properties of a good writer meet; but, unlike Swift, he has very little imagination, and cannot, therefore, illumine his page as Swift can, with constant play of illustration, indignant, pathetic, or humorous. Wesley only speaks right on. For the florid pulpit manner of Whitefield, for what he called " the amorous way of praying and the luscious way of preaching" common among some of Lady Huntingdon's Methodists, he had a most healthy dislike. Over and over again he cautions his own preachers against extravagance of statement or violence of elocution. His taste in matters of phrase, indeed, was severe, sometimes almost finical. His nicer judgment corrected many a careless line in the hymns of his brother Charles, and his own translations of the Moravian hymns, though sometimes bald, are always dignified. It was from an analogous severity of taste, as well as from principle, that he practised himself, and enjoined upon Methodists, plainness of dress. So far from being in

different to his own apparel, he was the most precise of mortals; as many as ten times in telling of his encounters with mobs he remarks, as if it were a physical injury, that he got some dirt upon his coat or hat. It was just this scrupulous precision that made him. impatient of anything gaudy or decorative.

But in Wesley, as the child of his age, this precise and reasoning temper was united with a contrasting vein of sentiment. His own nature was not emotional, but— possibly all the more on that account-he admired and valued any expression of genuine emotion in others. This susceptibility is seen very suggestively in the comments upon books and authors with which the "Journal" abounds. He was a tireless reader. Books, indeed, were almost his only companions in his lonely and wandering life. Whenever he rode, on horseback or by coach, a volume was always open before him. And his reading included the best the world afforded. In his monotonous and wearisome labors, performed mostly with and for people of narrow horizon and scanty ideas, he found refreshment and inspiration in the works of the masters of literature. One week he reads over again the "Odyssey," and breaks out into a fine burst of enthusiasm over the charm of its description and the nobility of its morals; another time he reads over the tenth book of the "Iliad" while riding to Newcastle; or it is the "Cyropædia" of Xenophon, or the "Letters" of Cicero. Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakspere, Milton, Voltaire-they are all among the companions of his travel. But the trend of his tastes may be seen best in his comments upon contemporary literature.

The one poet then supreme, of course, was Pope. Wesley shared and often expresses the general admiration for his work, but with only one of Pope's poems does he show special familiarity, and this one is significantly Pope's one concession to sentimentalism, the "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady." This Wesley quotes repeatedly, and expresses great admiration for it. The one of the Queen Anne poets, however, whom Wesley admired most was not Pope, but Prior. He quotes him over and over again; and when Johnson, in his "Lives of the Poets," spoke in depreciation of the character and verse of Prior, Wesley, then seventy-nine years old, came

to the defense of his favorite poet in a very spirited paper. Prior, he asserts, was not half so bad a man as his critics have painted him; while as to the Chloe of the charming lyrics, who had been represented as no better than she should be, Wesley declares, on the authority of his brother Samuel, who knew her well, that she was an estimable Miss Taylor of Westminster, who refused the advances of the poet while he was living, and spent hours weeping over his tomb when he was dead. But it is Johnson's criticism of Prior's verse that provokes Wesley's warmest protest. The great critic had said it lacks feeling.

Does it?" cries Wesley. "Then I know not with what eyes or with what heart a man must read it! Never man wrote with more tenderness." Prior's "Henry and Emma," a rather frigid version of the "Nut-brown Maid" story, he avers to be a poem that "no man of any sensibility can read without tears." Various other verdicts in the "Journal" betray a similar susceptibility. Of Thomson's work he says he had entertained a very low opinion till he read his sentimental tragedy "Edward and Eleanor." Home's once famous romantic drama "Douglas," now remembered only by a single line, he is "astonished to find one of the finest tragedies I ever read." The grandiose declamation of "Ossian," which excited only the contempt of Johnson, he pronounces deeply pathetic, “little inferior to Homer and Virgil, and in some respects superior to both." Beattie, whose poetry is, for the most part, an attempt to give a romantic flavor to the warmed-over philosophy of Pope, he considers one of the best poets of the age-an opinion shared, I believe, by George III. After reading Voltaire's "Henriade," which he praises generously, he remarks that the French. language, for all its finish and precision, lacks pathos and heartiness, and is no more to be compared to the German and Spanish than is a bagpipe to an organ. All which, with many other opinions of a like sort, may show that in literature, as in life, Wesley's critical judgment was never proof against the charms of romantic sentimentalism.

THE CHARGE OF CREDULITY

WESLEY has often been charged with credulity. Some of the remarks in the 1"Arminian Magazine," 1782.

"Journal" upon which the charge is based do not in fairness warrant it. If a man really believe-what many profess and do not believe that there are no accidents whatever in the government of the universe, he may justly see something providential in the fact that rain ceases as he is about to address a large audience, or that a cloud slips over the sun just when the heat upon the bared head of the preacher is becoming intolerable. Before a universal Providence, distinctions of great and small vanish, and you may as reasonably deny accident to trifles like these as to the catastrophe that ingulfs a city. But there are other and better grounds for this charge of credulity. Wesley did profess a belief in witches and apparitions, and declared that to give up witchcraft is in effect giving up the Bible. From boyhood, probably in part because of the strange happenings in the Epworth rectory, he lent a ready ear to accounts of dreams, visions, second sight, ghosts, and all such preternatural phenomena. The "Journal" contains a large assortment of these marvels, ranging from what would now be called cases of thought-transference to the most creepy and convincing ghost-stories. They are generally recounted with circumstantial detail, and most of them, it must be admitted, are well enough attested to deserve examination by the Society for Psychical Research. In nearly every instance it seems clear that they were not fabrications, but sincerely believed by the good people who told them.

All such matters evidently had a fascination for Wesley; yet he seldom accepts without qualification a supernatural explanation for them, and never insists that any one else shall do so. Still less does he countenance any attempt to base a system of belief or teaching on such phenomena. His interest in such matters is not, in fact, exactly a proof of credulity, but rather of a singular curiosity with reference to whatever lies on the borderland of experience. One thinks of it as an extension, beyond scientific limits, of that intense interest in all unfamiliar physical facts which led him to read with avidity the records of chemical and physical experiment, and to follow eagerly the new science of electricity. But, while his logical faculty was acute, his judgment upon facts or testimony was not always sound.

From boyhood he was very deferential to a syllogism; but he did not always scrutinize carefully enough the facts that went into the major premise of his syllogism.

Outside the realm of the preternatural, at all events, it cannot be said that Wesley was credulous; yet his very confidence in logic made him over-ready to revise or to reverse any accredited opinions that seemed to be contradicted by a correct course of reasoning. Some of his verdicts were curious. Mary Queen of Scots, he is convinced, was a person of devout and unaffected piety; and Queen Elizabeth was as just and merciful as Nero, and as good a Christian as Mahomet." On all historical and scientific questions, his opinion is liable to be the prey of the last book he has read. He reads Woodrow's "History of the Church of Scotland," and he pronounces Charles II a monster, in comparison with whom Bloody Mary was a lamb-a judgment about equally unjust to both monarchs. A treatise by a certain Dr. Wilson convinces him that the heart has nothing to do with the circulation of the blood. Moreover, he is not only careless of the content of his premises, but he is prone to forget that the motives for conduct can seldom be run into syllogisms, and that practical conclusions of any importance are not to be proved or disproved by a single line of argument. For example, in the middle of June, 1775,-just forty-eight hours before Bunker Hill, -he wrote to Lord North an able letter on American affairs, in which he says: "In spite of my long-rooted prejudice, I cannot avoid thinking that an oppressed people asked for nothing more than their legal rights, and that in the most modest and inoffensive manner that the nature of the thing would allow." Less than three months later, he issued his "Calm Address to the American Colonies," in which he tells our forefathers that they have every right that the English enjoy, and their complaint of taxation without representation is altogether groundless. How came he to change his mind? He had read Samuel Johnson's "Taxation no Tyranny."

Yet this easy surrender to a line of clear reasoning, if a fault, is a fault that implies some very important virtues. John Wesley was the most candid of men. Seldom has a great religious reformer been so little of a dogmatist, or shown so little stubborn

« AnkstesnisTęsti »