LECTURE I
Life in the Eighteenth Century Illustrated by the Career of John Wesley
In order to depict social life in England in the eighteenth century I am going to take the career of one of its most remarkable men, though you may be surprised at the choice I have made. For the eighteenth century was an eminently social age and the stage is crowded with figures of men and women of the world. Their letters, their talk, their scandals, their amusements have come down to us in profusion; and it is not difficult for us to imagine ourselves in their midst. You may well ask me why I did not select a really brilliant character to expound the life of this time. I might for example have taken Lord Chesterfield or Horace Walpole, or Boswell, that most observant of men, or the great character whom he immortalised. Or I might have selected others less known, but equally interesting, and rather than a revivalist preacher like John Wesley. I had written thus far when I came across the following words by the British man of letters, Mr. Birrell:
“How much easier to weave into your page the gossip of Horace Walpole, to enliven it with a heartless jest of George Selwyn, to make it blush with the sad stories of the extravagance of Fox, to embroider it with the rhetoric of Burke, to humanise it with the talk of Johnson, to discuss the rise and fall of administrations, the growth and decay of the constitution, than to follow John Wesley into the streets of Bristol, or to the bleak moors near Burslem, when he met face to face in all their violence, all their ignorance, and all their generosity the living men, women, and children, who made up the nation.”
But I think I could give another reason why John Wesley is a fit person to represent the social life of his century, namely, that though he may undoubtedly be classed among the saints, though he was one of the most unworldly of men, though he took what must seem to most of us an unnecessarily serious view of life, he fell short of hardly any of the great men enumerated in shrewd observation and even in what in the language of his time would have been termed “wit.” Nay, Wesley possessed a caustic humour which many a worldly wit might have envied. “Certainly,” he writes in Scotland, “this is a nation quick to hear and slow to speak, though certainly not ‘slow to wrath.’” “You cannot be too superficial in addressing a ‘polite’ audience” is an aphorism of his which I remember. “I know mankind too well, I know they that love you for political service, love you less than their dinner; and they that hate you, hate you worse than the devil.” Here is a criticism of a tapestry in Dublin. “In Jacob’s vision you see, on the one side a little paltry ladder, and an angel climbing up it in the attitude of a chimney sweeper; and on the other side—Jacob staring at him under a silver laced hat.” The criticisms of books,—for he was an omnivorous reader, especially on a journey,—“History, poetry and philosophy I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at other times,”—are not always fair but nearly always shrewd and often as bitter as anything Johnson himself could have uttered. “I read with much expectation a celebrated book, Rousseau on Education. But how was I disappointed! Sure a more consummate coxcomb never saw the sun.... I object to his temper even more than to his judgment: he is a mere misanthrope; a cynic all over. So indeed is his brother infidel Voltaire; and well nigh as great a coxcomb. But he hides his doggedness and vanity a little better; whereas here it stares us in the face continually.” Here is his opinion of a very famous book. “Tuesday, February 11, 1772, I casually took a volume of what is called, A sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Sentimental! What is that? It is not English: he might as well say Continental. It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea: yet one fool makes many. And this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is become a fashionable one! However the book agrees full well with the title; for one is as queer as the other. For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.” “A book wrote with as much learning and as little judgment, as any I remember to have read in my whole life,” he says of Cave’s “Primitive Christianity.” Despite the fact, therefore, that John Wesley was devoted to the work of missionary preaching, that he was an ecstatic visionary and in many respects the most credulous as well as the most zealous of evangelists, his knowledge of men and critical power was not a little remarkable.
I am not at all sure that sinners are not the right people to write about saints. Saints may be; because sanctity implies something attractive which is almost unthinkable without the sympathy which nearly always reveals itself in a certain playfulness. But good, deserving people are assuredly not qualified to be the biographers of saints; for, in their desire to exalt their hero, they generally strip him of all the qualities for which men loved him (and no one was ever loved for his perfections alone) and present him as their own ideal of what a saint should be. John Wesley is an example of this and he would appear in a far more amiable light in pages written by a kindly man of the world than in a book by a devoted admirer and would-be imitator of his virtues. It was, after all, Boswell’s many failings which contributed to give us so delightful a portrait as that of his great and good friend, Samuel Johnson.
Now John Wesley was an undoubted saint, and the good he did in England, and his society in America for that matter, is incalculable: but I ask his admirers and any who profess to follow him to forgive me for using him as a peg on which to hang a few remarks on social England. Before, however, I do so may I introduce him and some of his family to you?
It is rare indeed to find in any family so much genius transmitted from father to son for more than two centuries as there was in that of the Wesleys. Here are six generations:
1. Bartholomew studied physic at the University and, when ejected for Puritanism in 1662 from the living of Allington in Dorsetshire, he practised as a doctor.
2. His son John was an ardent Puritan, imprisoned on no less than four occasions. He died at an early age and was distinguished when at New Inn Hall at Oxford for his proficiency in Oriental studies.