Evan Lloyd, Robert Lloyd, and Churchill, starting from somewhat different philosophic principles, all arrive at similar positions.
The Curate, his second satire, is largely autobiographical. It shows, as does The Powers of the Pen, some clever turns of phrases, pithy expressions, and amusing images. It also contains incisive criticism of corruption in the Church, of declining respect for Christianity, and, what seems to Lloyd almost the same thing, of a collapsing class structure. The Church wardens, “uncivil and unbred! / Unlick’d, untaught, un-all-things—but unfed!” are “but sweepers of the pews, / The Scullions of the Church, they dare abuse, / And rudely treat their betters” (pp. 16-17). They show a lack of proper respect both for class-structure and Christianity:
Servant to Christ! and what is that to me?
I keep a servant too, as well as He (p. 17).
But The Curate frequently descends to a whine. The curate is morally above reproach while those above him are arrogant and those below him are disrespectful.
The most serious problem with The Curate, however, is the same as the problem with all of Lloyd’s satires except The Methodist, and the same as the problem with almost all satires between Pope and Burns or Blake. The satirist seems unwilling to probe, to find out what are the political, ethical, psychological, or aesthetic forces that cause the problems which the satirist condemns, and to recommend what can be done to change these forces. If the satirist notes any pattern at all, it is one of ineffective, unmoving abstraction and generality.
One explanation for this deliberate avoidance of more profound issues is not hard to find. An astonishing number of satires of this period contain a large proportion of lines devoted to describing how wonderful everything is. The widespread conviction that whatever is, in the England of the late eighteenth century, is right, may have resulted from the influence of An Essay on Man. Or the Essay may have been popular because it expressed ideas already in general acceptance. But whatever the explanation is, the catch-phrases extracted from Pope’s most popular work become the touchstones of post-Augustan satire.
The problem that the satirist faced in the sixties was, then, formidable. The country was in upheaval but the conventions demanded that the satirist say everything was nearly perfect. As a result, satire tended toward personal whines, like The Curate, toward attacking tiresomely obvious objects, like the superficial chit-chat of Lloyd’s Conversation, toward trivial quarrels, like Churchill’s Rosciad, toward broadly unimpeachable morals, like Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes. It is understandable that many writers, such as Joseph Warton and Christopher Smart, abandoned satire for various kinds of enthusiasm.
Methodism lent itself to such satire. Methodists could be described as unfortunate aberrants from an essentially good world, typical of those bothersome fanatics and deviants at the fringe of society who keep this world from being perfect. They were also logical heirs to the satire once visited upon Dissenters but which diminished when Dissenters became more restrained in their style of worship. (The Preface to one anti-Methodist satire even takes pains to exclude “rational Dissenters” from its target.) Many Methodists were followers of Calvin. These Methodists brought out the old antagonisms against the Calvinist doctrine of Election (or the popular version of it), directed against its severity, its apparent encouragement of pride, and its antinomian implications. The mass displays of emotion at Methodist meetings would be distasteful to many people in most periods and probably were especially so in an age in which rational behavior was particularly valued. And there were those people who believed that Methodism, in spite of Wesley’s arguments to the contrary, led good members of the Church of England astray and threatened religious stability.
Yet all these causes do not explain the harshness of anti-Methodist satire. No other subject during this period received such severe condemnation. Wesley and Whitefield were accused of seducing their female converts, of fleecing all their converts of money, of making trouble solely out of envy or pride. Evan Lloyd is not so harsh nor so implacably bigoted about any other subject as he is about Methodism. He was an intimate friend of John Wilkes, the least bigoted of men. Also, there are essential differences between the Dissenters of the Restoration and the Methodists of the late eighteenth century that would seem to lessen the antagonism toward the Methodists. To the satirists of the Restoration, Dissenters were reminders of civil war, regicide, the chaos that religious division could bring. Now the only threat of religious war or major civil disturbance had come from the Jacobites, and even that threat was safely in the past. It is notable that Swift, Pope, and Gay tended to satirize Dissenters within the context of larger problems. The assault on Methodists, then, is actually not a continuation of anti-Dissenter satire but something new. Hence the whole movement of anti-Methodist satire in the sixties and seventies has an untypically violent tone which cannot be explained solely in terms of satiric trends or religious attitudes. The explanation lies, I think, partly in the social, political, and economic background.
The Methodist movement was perhaps the most dramatic symptom (or at least the symptom hardest to ignore) of the changes taking place in England. The Methodist open-air services were needed because new industrial areas had sprung up where there were no churches, and lay preachers were necessary because of population shifts but also because of the increase in population made possible by new agricultural and manufacturing methods. The practice of taking lay preachers from many social classes had obvious democratic implications. Wesley, in spite of his political conservatism, challenged a number of widely-held, complacent aphorisms, such as the belief that people are “poor only because they are idle.”[3] The mass emotionalism of the evangelical meetings were reminders that man was not so rational as certain popular ideas tried to make him. Wesley’s insistence (with irritatingly good evidence) that he did no more than adhere to the true doctrine of the Church of England strongly suggested that the Church of England had strayed somewhere. (It is rather interestingly paralleled by Wilkes’s insistence that he only wanted to return to the Declaration of Rights, a reminder that the government had also strayed.) And Methodism, by its very existence and popularity, posed the question of whether the Church of England, in its traditional form, was capable of dealing with problems created by social and economic changes.