Wesley in Literature
It might have seemed, in advance, impossible that Wesley could have filled any serious place in literature. What time had a man, whose study was the saddle, who travelled 4500 miles, and preached 500 sermons every year, for reading books; still less for writing or publishing them?
It may be admitted that Wesley approached literature with less of what may be called the literary spirit than perhaps any other man who ever published so many books. Literature, for him, was not an end in itself; it was not a recreation; it was not a means of winning either money or fame. It was a weapon, caught up for a moment in the heat of a fight, and used like a weapon — so long as the fight lasted. It was a tool, seized for the purpose of doing a bit of urgent work, and to be cast down like a tool, when the work was done. He was a man in haste, and the note of haste — or, at least, of urgency — runs through the whole of his literary work. He writes always like a man who has other, and better, work to do. But some controversy has arisen. It is, for Wesley, an interruption, perhaps even an exasperation; but it has to be dealt with, lest truth should suffer, and souls be wronged. He deals with it in the fewest words, and the shortest possible way, and then hastens on his road. Every sentence he writes is, in a sense, compelled; and the compulsion is always moral.
Wesley’s writings may be divided into four classes. Sometimes they are, like his sermons, appeals addressed to the human conscience, and intended to turn men from sin to righteousness. Wesley was the first discoverer of that much criticised form of literature, the “tract,” and he anticipated the famous Religious Tract Society by many years. That society was organised in 1799; but, more than fifty years earlier — in 1742 — Wesley was busy printing and circulating thousands of brief, pungent appeals to various classes of wrongdoers: to drunkards, to swearers, to Sabbath-breakers, &c. By means of his helpers, Wesley scattered these earliest of tracts like seed over the soil of the three kingdoms.
Next come his controversial writings. Round Wesley’s person, his teaching, his societies, his helpers, gathered a whirling and perpetual simoom of controversy. He troubled too many consciences, violated too many conventions, and stung with rebuke too many prejudices, to be left in peace. Now, Wesley was, both by gift of nature and by force of training, one of the most formidable controversialists that ever lived. He did not, like Dr. Johnson, wield a cudgel or a quarter-staff. His logic had the point, the shining gleam, the deadly swiftness of a rapier. But he hated controversy. He was accustomed to quote an ancient saying, “God made practical divinity necessary, the devil controversial.” And yet when truth is assailed, those who love truth must defend it. And when Wesley saw the great and essential doctrines of Christianity’, the doctrines by which men must be saved, attacked — and attacked too often by those who ought to have been their defenders — he felt like a soldier who sees the flag of his regiment surrounded by enemies. He must fight!
“Oh, that I might dispute with no man!” he writes. “But if I must dispute,” he adds, “let it be with men of sense.” But, alas! Wesley’s opponents were not often men of sense. One of the most formidable of them, and one whom Wesley smote hardest, was Dr. Lavington, Bishop of Exeter; and of him even a critic so tolerant, and so detached, as Miss Wedgwood, declares in words already quoted: “He deserves to be coupled with the men who flung dead cats and rotten eggs at the Methodists, not with those who assailed their tenets with arguments.”
Another section of Wesley’s works represents his concern for the instruction of his own people. Himself a scholar, nurtured from his very childhood in an intellectual atmosphere, the Fellow of an historic University, hate of ignorance was, for him, an instinct and a passion. Knowledge and faith, he held, had the closest kinship. No member of his societies must be allowed to remain untaught. And Wesley deliberately set himself to bring within the reach of his people the best literature the world at that day possessed. He anticipated by more than a century, that is, the age of cheap books and of popular literature. His “Christian Library” represents his most ambitious attempt in this field. He abridged some fifty famous books for this purjjose, and the library is a monument to his breadth of spirit. Ancient fathers of the early Church, the greatest Anglican divines, the most famous English Noncomformists, as well as foreign writers like Pascal and Bengel, are found side by side in the list.
The Christian Library was not a financial success; it involved Wesley, indeed, in serious loss; a loss, however, which he made up by the gains on his cheap books. “Two and forty years ago,” he writes, “having a desire to furnish poor people with cheaper, shorter, and plainer books than any I had seen, I wrote many small tracts, generally a penny a piece. Some of these had such a sale as I never thought of, and by this means I unawares became rich.” Wesley, in a word, made the discovery — which explains some vast modern fortunes — that literature, when it becomes democratic, and takes root amongst the masses, is better than a gold-mine. Wesley’s “riches,” however, were on a modest scale. His receipts from his books seldom rose to £1000 a year, and every penny was made the servant of some unselfish object. “If I die leaving, after my debts are paid, more than £10,” he once wrote, “you may call me a thief.”
His anxiety to provide an adequate literature for his own people explains Wesley’s printed S ninons, and his Notes (in the New Testament. He found, at an early stage of his work, that for the use of his helpers some clear, simple, and definite statement of what may be called the theology of the Revival was needed; and to meet this want he published the first series of his sermons — fifty-three discourses, that still remain the doctrinal standard of his Church. These sermons are not the discourses actually preached, but only their doctrinal framework — a condensed statement of their theology. Wesley says his purpose in writing these sermons was “to furnish plain truth for plain people.” In writing them, he had beside him only two books, the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Testament; and he explains in the preface, “My design is in some sense to forget all that
1 have ever read in my life.” His aim, that is. was to state the great doctrines of evangelical Christianity in the freshest, the most direct, and untechnical language possible.
Wesley published, in all, five series of sermons, and they had an immense sale. But no one need turn to these sermons to-day to find in them the secret of Wesley’s own power in the pulpit, or any echoes of the thrilling speech which day after day held vast open-air crowds breathless with interest and emotion. They resemble the spoken sermons only as fossils resemble their living originals.
Wesley’s Notes on the New Testament were meant, like his sermons, to be a manual of divinity for his people. The notes were written at tremendous speed, and while Wesley was temporarily forbidden to preach, on account of sickness. The new translation of the text which accompanies the Notes has in it many curious anticipations of the readings adopted by the revisers of 1870.
A record of the various incidents of his career forms another section of Wesley’s works. The famous Journal belongs to this class, as does the Arminian Magazine started in 1778. Wesley gave to human experience — to spiritual phenomena of every kind — an evidential vahie which science, only late, and reluctantly, has begun to recognise; and his Journal and Magazine are the most complete, detailed, and scientific records of such phenomena in literature.
Wesley’s publications number 371, including oO works prepared in conjunction with his brother Charles; and as he only began to publish in 1733, this represents an average of more than seven volumes for each year of his busy life. A German historian, in solemn, heavy-handed fashion, groups Wesley’s works in five divisions — Poetical, Philological, Philosophical, Historical, and Theological. And they certainly cover an enormous range of subjects, ranging from school-books for Kingswood, hymn-books for his societies, abridgments of countless authors for his people generally, and theological standards for his helpers, down to a whole battery of controversial pamphlets and treatises.
But do Wesley’s works belong to literature in its best sense? Does he possess that great anti-septic, style?
Wesley himself would reply, with emphasis, “No.” He was no hunter after pretty phrases. He secretes no epigrams. He betrays no sense of the music and grace of words. A white light, hard and clear, beats on every page; but there are none of the subtle colour-efifects of the imagination., Wesley’s literary ideal consisted of short words, short sentences, and clear thinking. Of his own literary style he writes, in 1788, with honest directness: “I dare no more write in a fine style than wear a fine coat. A man with one foot in the grave must waste no time on ornament. But were it otherwise, had I time to spare, I should still write just as I do. I should purposely decline what many admire — a highly ornamented style. I cannot admire French oratory; I despise it from my heart.”
He was an old man when he wrote that self-description. But a quarter of a century earlier (in 1764) he had written: —
“As for me, I never think of my style at all; but just set down the words that come first. Only, when I transcribe anything for the press, then I think it my duty to see every phrase be clear, pure, and proper. Conciseness (which is now, as it were, natural to me) brings quantum sufficit of strength. If, after all, I observe any stiff expression, I throw it out, neck and shoulders. Clearness, in particular, is necessary for you and me; because we are to instruct people of the lowest understanding.”
Leslie Stephen’s criticism of Wesley’s writings is interesting, if only as an illustration of Stephen’s own limitations as a critic. He cannot judge Wesley fairly because he is parted from him by so wide a theological interval. When he is fresh from reading Wesley he says: —
“He shows remarkable literary power. His writings are means to a direct practical end. ... It would be difficult to find any letters more direct, forcible, and pithy in expression. He goes straight to the mark without one superfluous flourish. He writes as a man confined within the narrowest limits of time and space, whose thoughts are so well in hand that he can say everything needful within those limits. The compression gives emphasis and never causes confusion.”
These, surely, are literary qualities of great value for their own sake, as well as reflecting a very fine moral temper. But presently Leslie Stephen forgets what he has written; he remembers only his dislike of Wesley’s
4 /-ar/r /“mwi .l.,„,-,i,il ,n (!ror;ji,i. theology, and be says, “Wesley’s thoughts rim so frequently in the grooves of obsolete theological speculation, that be has succeeded in producing no single book satisfactory in a literary sense.” How can writings be at once “means to a direct and practical end” and yet run almost exclusively in “the grooves of obsolete theological speculation”?
The truth is, Wesley has sufiFered, as far as his litei-ary fame is concerned, much injustice at the hands alike of his critics and of his admirers. He has been both underestimated and over-praised; or rather, he has been praised at the wrong point. His second best work, the famous Journal, has somehow shut out of sight work of much finer literary quality. Leslie Stephen, as we have seen, says that Wesley “never produced a single book satisfactory in a literary sense,” and even Mr. Augustine Birrell, who has written one of the most charming of essays on Wesley’s Journal, says that as a writer Wesley “has not achieved distinction.”
But a hundred critics may be arrayed on the other side. Mr. FitzGerald, of “Omar Khayyam” fame, for example, who has a poet’s sense of distinction and charm in style, dwells with delight on the “pure, unaffected, undying English” of Wesley’s Journal. Leslie Stephen himself has to admit that Wesley’s English is “allied to that of Swift or Arbuthnot,” and that his Journal “only wants a little humour to be one of the most entertaining volumes ever written.”
Now the charm of the famous Journal is, no doubt, very great. The original records exist in the shape of twenty-one neat, closely written volumes, from which extracts only have been printed. The first entry in the Journal is dated October 18, 1732, and consists of a letter of stupendous length which Wesley wrote defending the little society of Methodists at Oxford from the charge of having helped to kill one of their own number by their excessive austerity of life. The last entry is dated October 24, 1790. The Journal, therefore, covers a period of fifty-eight years. And betwixt those two Octobers, to quote Mr. Augustine Birrell, lies “the most amazing record of human exertion ever penned or endured.”
No one will deny the value of the Journal; yet probably nobody could read it through continuously. Mr. Birrell says “an atmosphere of tremeudous activity fills it”; but this is hardly true. The notes are too cold and brief. No wind blows through the Journal; no sense of space stirs in it. Only by an effort of deliberate recollection does the reader succeed in realising that beneath the cool and quiet syllables .there burns a flame of sustained effort almost without parallel.
In his Journal Wesley records in the briefest fashion the general course of his work and life. He preaches at such a place; the text is given, the result of the service is condensed into a sentence, there is a pious aspiration for a blessing upon it. Then Wesley hurries on his way to another service. There is no perspective in the Journal; no clear background. It gives no seTise of the life, so crowded and vivid and strenuous, of which it is a partial record. No echo of the great events in politics, literature, and social life taking place concurrently with the events it records runs through it. This, indeed — its almost complete detachment from the general life of its own times — is the great literary defect of the Journal. The eighteenth century, it must be remembered, resounds with tumult; it is crowded with great events. It begins with the thunders of Blenheim and ends with those of the Nile. Wesley himself was contemporary with four great wars — the war of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748), the Seven Years’ War (175G-1763), the war of American Independence (1775-1783), and the first half of the Great War with France (1793-1803). England was at war for thirty years out of the last sixty years of the century. In addition, there was the Jacobite rising of 1715, and the still more famous rising of 1745, with its chain of bloody fights ranging from Prestonpans to Culloden.
Wesley, too, saw Clive win India for England, and Wolfe win Canada. He saw Captain Cooke open for her, not any “perilous seas forlorn,” such as Keats describes, but the majestic, many-isled world of the great Pacific; and he saw George Washington take from her the thirteen colonies. Wesley was the contemporary of the two Pitts, of Wilkes, of Junius. The efifervescence of the South Sea Bubble was round his youth, and the tumult of the Lord George Gordon riots about his old age. When Voltaire visited England in 1726-1729 Wesley was at Oxford. He saw across the narrow seas the opening of iLe mighty drama of the Revolution in France. The VVhiteboys were filling Ireland with terror in the very years Wesley was traversing Ireland as an evangelist.
And while such great events as these were filling the world with their tumult, Wesley, it must be remembered, was beyond all his contemporaries in contact with people of every class; he knew the common mind intimately, with all its ebb and flow of terror, rage, excitement. It is surely very remarkable, and argues a curious detachment of mind, or an intense preoccupation with greater interests, that his Journal contains such scanty references to these events. No vibration of the agitations or passion of the moment runs through its swift, but ordered, syllables. No one else of that generation, it is certain, could have lived so constantly amongst the crowds, and so completely escaped the contagion of their emotions. No one else could have written a journal of daily events so minute and full, yet so completely divorced from the tumult of battles, the passion of party strife, the dust of contemporary events.
Yet the interest of the book, in spite of all this, is vivid and great. It abounds in curious incidents, in pungent literary judgments, in sudden pictures of odd characters, in records of odd events. It gives us gleams of curious light into the dark places of human life and character. For Wesley was dealing with men and women in high moods of feeling, and saw aspects of human character usually hidden from sight, and sometimes even from consciousness. Wesley believed in Providence as a force in human affairs, and delights to give instances of its working. Human experience was for him a phenomenon to be treated with respect, and recorded with diligence.
It is sometimes said that the Journal supplies many proofs of the credulousness of Wesley, but that is not quite just. He notes all the strange phenomena that come under his observation, but his temper about them is almost scientific, not to say modern. He does not dismiss a strange story because it is strange. “I tell the story as it happened,” he says again and again, “let those explain it who can.” These are genuine phenomena, and Wesley has a scientific respect for facts.
The true literary quality of the Journal can only be realised when it is put side by side with the other two famous works of the same general type, belonging to the same i)erio(l — Horace Walpole’s “Letters,” and Boswell’s “Johnson.” What other generation of Englishmen yields such a trinity of self-drawn portraits as these three picturesque and strangely contrasted figures!
Walpole and Wesley were contemporaries, and the contrast of their diaries is nothing short of dramatic. Walpole is an idler, a human butterfly. He has no serious business in life; but his lightness, both of touch and of spirit, has a curious charm with it. And still, in the dainty and scented amber of his gossip, lie embalmed for human curiosity the lords and ladies, the rakes and flirts, the fools and spendthrifts of that generation. The very element in which Walpole lives is an atmosphere of malicious gossip. To hear, to tell, to write, all the scandalous stories of his day was his chief occupation; and the sense of the value of his gossip is shown by the care in which he kept copies of his own letters.
Johnson, too, was Wesley’s contemporary, and with his courage, his cudgel-like logic, his robust common-sense, his respect for realities, is a more manly figure than Walpole, and has an infinitely better title to human respect. But if Walpole looked on men and women simply for the entertainment they afl’orded him, and with a remoteness too careless to be scientific; Johnson, on the other hand, valued literature more than men and women, and perhaps he valued politics even more than literature. All men for him were capable of being divided into two classes, to be cudgelled, or to be praised, according as they were Whigs or Tories.
Wesley’s standpoint is parted by whole horizons from that of either Walpole or Johnson. He sees men and women as they stand related to eternity. His temper towards them is not that of a peeping curiosity like Walpole’s, nor of vehement resentments and preferences like those of Johnson. It is that of a passionate and divine pity, an untiring concern for their happiness. He has an overpowering sense of the value of men apart from all question of their social standing, their politics, their knowledge or ignorance, their poverty or wealth. He sees them, in a word — as far as such a vision is possible to human eyes — as God sees them!
Wesley’.^ bpst literary work is not his Journal. It is his famous “Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion.” Who wants to know what the English language, at its highest point of clearness and power, is, may well turn to these famous “Appeals.” They are unmatched in fire and power; unrivalled in their translucent clearness. The present writer, at least, knows nothing else in the English language to excel them, alike for directness, simplicity, and strength. The clear, terse, hurrying syllables burn with a white flame of conviction. Here is Wesley’s style at its best. Swift’s fierce syllables burn with a more evil fire; and there is smoke — smoke sometimes as of the pit! — as well as flame in them. Burke has, of course, a more glowing colour, and a wider imaginative range than Wesley. His sentences resemble disintegrated light. But what they gain in colour they lose in simplicity and clearness. Wesley’s short, packed, monosyllabic sentences are a perfect medium for the swiftest logic the human brain can shape, and they reflect some of the loftiest emotions the human soul can know.
The “Appeal” shows that Wesley has in him a fine capacity for anger; but his anger only serves to give a new edge to his logic. He is a tremendous disputant. His swift and pitiless logic, because of its very swiftness — its accent of haste — has not seldom the effect of scorn. It cuts like a whip. His reply to Bishop Lavington in the second Appeal is a case in point. Bishop Lavington was a typical Hanoverian divine — fat, drowsy, contented, and as destitute of spiritual sense as a block of wood. He resents, with an anger that has in it a certain note of terror, the “enthusiasm” of the Revival. What is there in religion to be “enthusiastic” about? He called upon all his clergy to make common cause against the Methodists. He felt about them as a French secularist to-day feels about the clergy. They were the common enemy. They must be suppressed at any cost, and by any methods. Wesley replies to Bishop Lavington’s charges in detail, and with infinite patience, and in his closing words he strikes a lofty note. A bishop dealing publicly with a question of religion has great influence. Thousands will accept his utterances. No doubt, Bishop Lavington succeeded in his purpose of “preserving” multitudes from being touched by the forces of the Revival. Wesley acknowledges this, and goes on: — “My lord, it cannot be long before we shall both drop this house of earth, and stand naked before God. No, nor before we shall see the great white Throne coming down from heaven, and Him that sitteth thereon. On His left hand shall be those who are shortly to dwell in everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. In that number will be all who died in their sins. And, among the rest, those whom you ‘preserved’ from repentance. Will you then rejoice in your success? The Lord God grant it may not be said in that hour, ‘These have perished in their iniquity. But their blood I require at thy hands.’”
Wesley, in literature, was, it must be coufessed, a fiddle with one string. He has only one note. In each book, in turn, he sets out from a given point, and for a given end; and he never loiters; he never digresses. The landscape has no interest for him. His only concern is to reach his goal, and to do the precise bit of business in hand. This habit of using literature only as a tool, or as a weapon, of course, gives Wesley a certain narrowness; but it is the virtue of a sword-edge to be narrow! And, behind Wesley’s logic, there is always the impact of something stronger than logic, the force of a tremendous personality, of a life occupied in great things, and the channel of great energies. Wesley unconsciously writes and argues like a man who has come down for a moment from some loftier realm, and from the preoccupation of some divine task. And the utter unconsciousness of the mood robs it of all arrogance, and makes the descent both credible and impressive.
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