Wesley’s Personality
“A CLEAB, smooth forehead, an aquiline nose, an eye the brightest and the most piercing that can be conceived, and a freshness of complexion, scarcely ever to be found at his years, and expressive of the most perfect health. In his countenance and demeanour, there was a cheerfulness mingled with gravity; a sprightliness, which was the natural result of an unusual flow of spirits. His aspect, particularly in profile, had a strong character of acuteness and penetration. A narrow, plated stock, a coat with small upright collar, no buckles at his knees, no silk or velvet in any part of his apparel, and a head as white as snow, gave an idea of something primitive and apostolical; while an air of neatness and cleanliness diffused over his whole person.”
This is the figure of Wesley as seen by the eyes of his contemporaries, and it was the best known figure in the three kingdoms during the last half of the eighteenth century. Yet in this little, alert, compact figure, with its air of old-maidish neatness, dwelt — as the story we have told proves — a calm intensity of energy which has been rarely paralleled in any generation. In range, speed, intensity, and effectiveness Wesley must always remain one of the greatest workers known to mankind. He seemed to live many lives in one, and each life was of amazing fulness. He preached more sermons, travelled more miles, published more books, wrote more letters, built more churches, waged more controversies, and influenced more lives than any other man in English history. And through it all, as he himself, in a humorous paradox, puts it, “he had no time lo be in a hurry!”
Lord Rosebery describes Cromwell as “a practical mystic, the most formidable and terrible of all combinations.” And Wesley was exactly that “most formidable and terrible of all combinations,” a practical mystic. His life thrilled with forces which streamed upon him from spiritual realms; and yet he kei)t his feet on the solid earth and had the keenest vision for the facts of earth. He knew how to bring to the service of far-off and invisible ideals the practical sense, the knowledge of lueu, the faculty of adjusting means to ends, of choosing fit instruments and shaping effective methods, which are the characteristics of a great soldier, or of a successful captain of industry. And it is in this combination of the spiritual with the practical, of ends which belong to the moral order with methods which are effective in the earthly realm; this wedlock of unlike qualities — of ice and of fire, of calmness and of intensity, of serene composure and of demonic energy — that the secret of Wesley’s power lies.
No man ever moved more quickly, and none was ever less in a hurry than he. There was something of the inexorable and unhurrying swiftness of a planet about him; and something, too, of its shattering impact. And yet a strange air of repose — of the quiet which is born of problems solved, and of victory attained — lay upon him. There are certain qualities of character which draw other men to their possessor as the moon draws the tides, and sway them, as the winds sway the forest. Who possesses these qualities is inevitably, and by gift of nature, a leader of men. And Wesley had precisely these qualities. But he had them not so much by any endowment of nature as by spiritual creation. He carried with him everywhere — after his conversion — a certain serenity of courage, in the presence of which fear grew ashamed of itself; a certain swiftness of will, a strength of immovable resolution when once conscience had spoken and duty had become clear, which made crowds, with the instinct of crowds for a tnie leader, follow him without question.
Wesley had ideals beyond the reach of other men’s vision, but absolutely clear to himself. He trod with an assured step; he spoke as one who knew. He was absolutely emptied of selfishness. So he became for those about him, in a sense”, an embodied conscience. Here was one human spirit, at least, utterly given up to divine things; one human soul in which religion had fulfilled all its offices. And with all his radiant cheerfulness there was something of the unconscious loftiness of Alpine peaks about him; a remoteness — as though caught from some purer air — from the pursuits and desires of ordinary men. His very face was a rebuke to all mean things. When he came to a town the crowds gathered about him in the street; the little, compact, erect figure standing perhaps on a table brought from some cottage at hand. His look, his speech, the atmosphere he brought with him, his accent both of certainty and authority, the ideals by which he tried himself and others, the perspective in which he saw things, and made other men see them — it was for a moment as if a messenger who belonged to another spiritual order stood amongst men I Then he went on his swift way, and men felt as if some spiritual presence had left them. Contact with him was a spiritual education.
And yet there was nothing of chilly remoteness, of monkish austerity, about Wesley. After his conversion, at least, no human being less like a monk could well be imagined. A sort of perpetual radiance shone in him, and streamed from him. Alexander Knox, who knew Wesley well and judged him coolly, dwells in astonished admiration on his unclouded cheerfulness. “My acquaintance with him,” he says, “has done more to teach me what a heaven upon earth is implied in the maturity of Christian piety than I have elsewhere seen or heard or read.” His countenance and conversation expressed an habitual gaiety of heart. Wesley himself declared that “he had not felt lowness of spirits one quarter of an hour in his life. Ten thousand cares were no more weight to his mind than ten thousand hairs to his head.”
Perhaps in writing those words — words which may well fill ordinary men with despairing envy — Wesley’s memory was coloured by the gladness of the moment. He did know moods of depression, and these are reflected again and again in his Journal. But these records only give a more human aspect to Wesley, for they prove that he, too, had a touch of human infirmity. And it is characteristic of him that in each case he cures his own despondency by the medicine of hard work.
Wesley was, to quote Hampsou — like Knox, not too friendly a critic — “of exquisite companionable talents.” Walsh, that Irish saint amongst Wesley’s helpers — a combination of mystic and genius — discovered even too much humour in Wesley’s conversation, and complained to him that, amongst the three or four persons that tempted him to levity, “You, sir, are one, by your witty proverbs.” Walsh, however, discovered humour in Wesley probably because he had none of his own. But that
Wesley had in the highest degree the gift of clear, keeu, wise conversation cannot be doubted. He could have discussed criticism with Pope, politics with Swift, literature with Dr. Johnson, or philosophy with Berkeley, on equal terms — but for one circumstance. He had better things to do! Df. Johnson, himself a glutton in talk, complained to Patty Wesley of her brother: “I hate to meet John Wesley,” he said. “The dog enchants you with his conversation, and then breaks away to go and visit some old woman.”
But for Wesley, the “old woman” represented duty. She was an immortal spirit, as precious in the sight of God as Dr. Johnson himself. If Christ valued her enough to die for her, then, as Wesley’s conscience told him, he might well value her enough to sacrifice ease that he might go and comfort her. “I find time to visit the sick and the poor,” Wesley was accustomed to say, “and I must do it if I believe the Bible. These are the marks by which the great Shepherd will know His sheep.”
Once, when tempted to linger in a lovely landscape, Wesley cried, “I believe there is an eternity, I mxist arise and go hence;” and those words express the temper of his life. He lived in the spirit of Andrew Marvel’s strong lines: —
“Ever at my back I hear
Time’s winged chariots hurrying near.”
And this, Johnson complained, “is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have his talk out as I do.”
For all this, it may be repeated, there was no touch of the ascetic in Wesley. He did not understand children, as his Kingswood experiment proves, but he loved them and had the art of winning their love. And he stamped these qualities on his helpers. “Spend an hour a week with the children in every large town” — was his rule for them — “whether you like it or not. Talk with them every time you see any at home. Pray in earnest for them.” Wesley did not, again, imderstand women, as his love affairs abundantly show. But no other man in the England of that day had so many friendships with saintly and noble women as he.
Wesley’s limitations were bred of his very virtues. His life was governed by a relentless method. This, applied to his body, made it the toughest bit of human flesh and blood that walked English soil in those days. Applied to his work, it enabled him to accomplish a volume of business which yet makes him the rebuke and despair of all other woi’kers. There is something almost amusing in the unsparing discipline he applied to his own body, until his appetites became the most docile servants that ever obeyed a human will. He made, as his brother Samuel complained, almost a sin of abstinence. The method he took to ascertain with how little sleep his body could be kept in effective working order is amusing. He tells the tale thus: —
“If any one desires to know exactly what quantity of sleep his own constitution requires, he may very easily make the experiment which I made about fifty years ago. I then waked every night about twelve or one, and lay awake for some time. I readily concluded that this arose from being in bed longer than nature required. To be satisfied, I procured an alarm, which waked me the next morning at seven (near an hour earlier than I rose the day before), yet I lay awake again at night. The second morning I rose at six; but notwithstanding this, I lay awake the second night. The third morning I rose at five; but, nevertheless, I lay awake the third night. The fourth morning I ros6» at four, as, by the grace of God, I have done ever since. AnSn lay awake no more. And I do not now lie awake, taking the year round, a quarter of an hour together in a month. By the same experiment, rising earlier and earlier every morning, may any one find how much sleep he really wants.”
No human soul, in a word, ever got more out of the body it inhabited than Wesley did out of his. His economy of time and sleep and food extended to everything else. He wasted, says one of his biographers, not even so much as a sheet of paper. His moments were mea.sured out as an anxious chemist weighs out his drugs, and assigned — as if in scruples and drachms — to various duties. He had a fixed hour for every purpose, and no company, no conversation, no pleasure was permitted to vary, by a hair’s-breadth, the inflexible order of bis life. He wrote, he travelled, he visited the sick, he did everything in certain hours; and those hours were inviolable.
But the iron resolution with which Wesley mapped out the use of every faculty, the discharge of every duty, the employment of every moment of time, had its disadvantages. It made him, from some aspects, a machine. It gave him no time for friendships. Domestic life under such unyielding conditions became impossible. His wife had a genius for making herself and those about her miserable, and under any environment would have succeeded in being unhappy. But Wesley, as a husband, might have sorely tried the patience of any wife. She must have found herself dismissed to one tiny compartment of his many-celled life. And even a woman of generous and self-sacrificing temper might well have found the experience too heroic.
It is a mistake, of course, to think that Wesley was in a semi-miraculous way exempt from ill health of every sort. He suffered from hereditary gout, the disease of which his mother died. He underwent a serious surgical operation in 1764; in 1789 he had an attack of diabetes. The strain of his work was interrupted again and again by illness. He had, as a matter of fact, sufficient hints of physical weakness to have justified a man of less heroic spirit nursing himself into a state of soft-fibred indolence.
Beside his Journal, Wesley kept a diarj’, a little book which he carried continually with him, and in which he noted in shorthand his hour of rising, what he read or wrote till breakfast, and the exact use to which every moment of the day was turned. On the first page of each of these little books he always wrote the following sentences: “I resolve, Deo juvante, (1) To devote an hour morning and evening to private prayer, no pretence or excuse whatsoever; (2) To converse Kara Qeov, no lightness, no evTpaneUa.” How Wesley, with so tremendous a volume of work poured into his waking moments, could devote an hour morning and evening to private prayer is almost unintelligible. But he did it, and all the other hours of the day took calmness, serenity, strength from those two sacred hours which marked their boundaries. But that phrase, “no pretence, no excuse whatsoever,” is characteristic of Wesley. All his purposes had that note of supreme resolution. Other things must yield to them. His own plans were for him a categorical imperative.
Few men, again, have ever been more systematically generous than Wesley. He lived with the utmost economy himself, and gave away the whole surplus of his income. As he tells the story: “When he had thirty pounds a year, he lived on twenty-eight, and gave away two. The next year, receiving sixty pounds, he still lived on twenty-eight, and gave away two-and-thirty. The third year he received ninety pounds, and gave away sixty-two. The fourth year he received a hundred and twenty pounds. Still he lived on twenty-eight, and gave to the poor ninety-two.” But Hampson says, with a certain degree of truth, ‘’his charities seem to have been rather the result of a sense of duty than of any tenderness of nature.”
Wesley’s preaching, no doubt, suffered from his over crowded habit of life. He was accustomed to say he could preach three or four times a day without any trouble, and he acted on that theory — with the result that he often preached with insufficient preparation, and with less effect than he might have done. Hampson says that when he gave himself suflBcient time for study he succeeded, and when he did not he frequently failed. “He was sometimes flat and insipid. He often appeared in the pulpit thoroughly exhausted with labour and want of rest, but wherever he was he made it a point to preach if he could stand upon his legs.” Hampson adds the curious remark that whenever Wesley “fell into anecdote and story-telling” his sermon was a failure. What is a resource to ordinary men was to Wesley fatal! “We have scarcely ever,” he says, “heard from him a tolerable sermon in which a story was introduced.”
Wesley’s literary work, again, suffered in the same way from haste and inadequate opportunity. He was a tireless and omnivorous reader, and he read under conditions which to other men would have made reading impossible. He was a poor rider, almost as poor as Napoleon; though, unlike Napoleon, he did not require wooden steps by which to mount his horse. Wesley on horseback was the best-known figure on all the roads of the three kingdoms of that day. It was the figure of a man in haste; great duties behind him just discharged, and great duties still beckoning him in front. And betwixt duty finished and duty beckoning, he went, book in hand, and read as he went. With the reins lying loose on his horse’s neck, and his hands grasping a volume held up to his eyes, he would ride fifty or sixty miles a day. In this fashion he rode on an average 4500 miles every year, and did it for over fifty years. During those fifty years he preached more than forty thousand times, to
4B8
WESLEY AND HTS CENTURY
all .sorts of audiences, under all sorts of coDditions. No other man in history, except perhaps Whitefield, was so familiar with the faces of a crowd, spent so much time amongst crowds, or understood so completely their moods. But who beside Wesley ever turned the saddle, and the open road, and the changing English skies, into a permanent study!
But his reading had, as was inevitable, the vice of haste. It bred swift and hurried judgments, born of half knowledge. When We.sley dismounted, at the close of the day, or at night, when the last lingering hearers had left him, he would record in his Journal, in his curious shorthand, all the hasty recollections and judgments of the day. So his .Toiirnals are packed with the queerest obiter dicta; judgments on men, events, and books; sentences which represent, not large knowledge and reflection, but only the momentary impul.se of his feeling, or of his prejudices, born of the swift and broken glance at the pages of a book as he jolted over some rough country road.
Much of Wesley’s literary work, done under such conditions, shows marks of inadequate care. He was never a writer at leisure. He scorned attempts at style. To say what he wanted in the shortest words, and in the shortest sentences, was his ideal. And there is very much to be said for his ideal. In literature, as in mathematics, a straight line is the shortest distance betwixt two point.s. Wesley, at least, never thought in curves, and never wrote in spirals. But much of his writing is marred by visible hurry.
It must be remembered, too, that his books, when they were not controversial accidents, were written for the constituency of his own followers — a great, docile, untaught multitude, who had towards Wesley a dumb and filial reverence, and for whom Wesley had the protecting concern of a father. He would put all literature within their reach; and to do it he must translate it into their language. So he was for ever condensing, abridging, and publishing books for his people. But his methods were hurried. To quote Hampson, “he just looked over his author and drew his pen across the passages he disapproved, and this with so little accuracy that he frequently left sentences directly contrary to his own principles.”
Wesley read and wrote, indeed, with such an heroic economy of time that he sometimes not only forgot what he had read and what he had written, but what he had recommended! The one serious literary scandal which befell him, his reproduction of Dr. Johnson’s pamphlet on the American Revolution, was due to this.
Wesley had an almost rash frankness. He could not always keep the secrets of other people, and he could never keep his own. To one who complained of his brother’s want of reticence, Charles Wesley replied, “You expect he will keep his own secrets? Let me whisper it in your ears: he never could do it since he was born! It is a gift that God has not given him.” “My brother,” said Charles on another occasion, in disgusted accents, “was, I believe, born for the benefit of knaves.” He was of the sweetest possible temper; he forgave easily, generously, completely — and perhaps too often! When aroused, he was a man of keenest penetration, with a gift for speech which bit like the stroke of a whip, or cut like the edge of a sword-blade. And yet there was in his character a vein of simplest generosity, which made him almost gullible! His sweetness of temper sometimes permitted ignoble men to have a place about him they did not deserve. Hampson says that he “had no attachments that partook of the genius of friendship”; but that is certainly untrue. He clung, not seldom with an overpatient fidelity, to his friends. And it was inevitable that round a figure so strong, so sweet, a -character of such charm and power, strange crowds gathered. The earnest wanted a leader. The weak came to lean on him, the timid to catch the infection of his courage, the selfish to profit by his influence. And Wesley had not the critical eyes of his brother Charles. He chose his greater comrades nobly — Fletcher, Coke, and many another; but he tolerated spirits about him less lofty than these, and his shrewder brother Charles looked on these with unfriendly eyes. “Are you one of my brother’s favourites?” he inquired once of a certain person, and on receiving the reply that he was not, Charles said bluntly, “I do not like you the worse for that.” “It signifies nothing,” Charles complained to his brother once, “to tell you anything; for whom you love once you will love on through thick and thin,”
But this fine generosity on the part of Wesley, we repeat, had its risks. There gathered round him in his latter days a group of followers almost too docile. They reflected all his habits. They copied his gestures, his dress, his accents, his prejudices. “If he left off tea, which he did in 1742,” says Hampson, “they did the same. If he lay upon boards, or lived on vegetables, they did so too; and because he was fond of morning preaching, they observed the practice, at five in the morning, winter and summer, though, very often, they could scarcely collect half-a-dozen hearers. Some imitated his handwriting, and so exactly copied his style and manner of speaking, that the difference was almost imperceptible.”
All this inevitably strengthened the masterful note in Wesley’s character. He became, in his latter days, less patient of argument, less tolerant of any judgment which clashed with his own. He was reluctant to hear reasons intended to change a purpose on which he had set his mind. “When anything was proposed,” says Hampson, “which he disapproved, or any attempt to go into a debate of his favourite doctrines, it was common with him to tell a story or give out a hymn to put an end to the conversation.” Men of strong will and independent judgment came to resent this; and thus in his later years Wesley drew close to himself those who opposed the least resistance to his own opinions and plans.
Coleridge denies to .Wesley the philosophic mind; Isaac Taylor says he had no touch of intuitional genius; he had only the logical intellect, &c. It is not quite clear what this tangle of phrases means. Wesley’s work was not to spin out philosophical reflections, or to write volumes of abstract dissertations. He lived in a real world; he dealt with men and women, with human passions and sorrows, with the tragedies of human life, and the problems of the human soul. He did the work of a preacher, of an administrator, of a statesman. All his energies were in close and constant relation to the everyday facts of human life. And the fruits of his life are not to be sought in a library, or measured by printed pages. They are to be found in history. Their imperishable record is in human lives.
That he had some touch of creative genius is proved by the great and living Churches which to-day bear his name. The re-birth of the Christian religion in English history is directly traceable to John Wesley. And what monument built to statesman or soldier, to poet or inventor or discoverer, can compare with a memorial like this!