Abstract
In his book The Romantic Movement and Methodism: A Study of English Romanticism and the Evangelical Revival (1937), Frederick C. Gill pioneered an early form of historical criticism linking British Romanticism to Methodism. My own books Wordsworth’s “Natural Methodism” (1975) and Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism (1984) contributed to such interdisciplinary criticism by further examining the relationship between Methodism and Romanticism. Recent scholarship in this vein has only deepened our understanding of how Romantic poets such as William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and others engaged with evangelicalism more broadly and Methodism in particular. Jennifer G. Jesse’s William Blake’s Religious Vision: There’s a Methodism in His Madness (2013) and Michael Farrell’s Blake and the Methodists (2014), for example, identify John Wesley’s radical early Methodism as a defining trait of Blake’s most authentic madness, his “poetic genius.” Similarly, in her book William Wordsworth and the Theology of Poverty (2013), Heidi J. Snow examines Wesley’s influence on Wordsworth’s themes of conversion, covenant, and striving toward spiritual perfection. Jasper Cragwall, in his book Lake Methodism: Polite Literature and Popular Religion, 1780–1830 (2013), also places Robert Southey, Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joanna Southcott, and, surprisingly, Mary Shelley at the intersection of Romanticism and Methodism.
Helen Boyles, for her part, in Romanticism and Methodism: The Problem of Religious Enthusiasm demonstrates that “the problem of religious enthusiasm” is central to the “fine mental chaos” (in Thomas Love Peacock’s phrase) of British Romanticism. According to Boyles, writers such as Southey, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and William Hazlitt understood enthusiasm at once positively, as an “extraordinary emotion of the soul” (Dryden) or “a real feeling for the Divine Presence” (Shaftesbury) and pejoratively, as a “vain belief in private revelation, a vain confidence in divine favour or communication” (Samuel Johnson) (Boyles, 3–5). Religious enthusiasm, in Boyles’s judgment, is the problem that arises wherever the warm hearts of her Romantics embarrass their cool heads. She concludes as well, however, that the problem abates wherever the emotion–reason binary of Romanticism proves not so much a kerfuffle as a balance. This model of both/and aesthetics, which she finds historically so intriguing and critically so irresistible, was not just imported by Coleridge from Schlegel’s Germany, but, as Boyles recognizes, independently minted in England.
Since Boyles devotes four of her eight chapters to Wordsworth, I will concentrate on her contention that he recreates and reimagines the Wesleyan synchronization of head vs. heart. Just as Wordsworth underscores “deep, enthusiastic joy” and is accordingly careful to keep his distance from “overtly didactic religiosity,” so Wesley expresses, “in heightened poetic terms,” the need for “a more personal emotional connection with the spirit of faith” (99; her emphasis). This parallel between the poet and the preacher builds on enthusiasm as implicit in Wordsworth’s 1798 definition of real poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” thereby capturing Wesley’s clearly expressed preference for poets born, not made (96). By contrast, just as Wordsworth, in “Essay, Supplementary to the Preface” (1813) to Lyrical Ballads (1798), renews his “allegiance to Anglicanism” and edifies his readers with “doctrinal guidance” (Boyles 98), so Wesley writes that “What is definitely more important than the spirit of poetry is the spirit of Piety” (qtd. Boyles, 199). There would seem to be little enthusiasm here of any kind, yet, overall, Boyles traces the two-pronged historical evolution of this single key term throughout Romanticism and Methodism considered as Exhibits A and B of her own distinctive perspective on culturally philological methodology. Through biographical evidence and textual analysis, she compares the respective attempts made by poet and preacher “to harmonize the claims” of emotion and reason (81). She resolves that the paragon of Romanticism and the founder of Methodism do not just share a commitment to “the wisdom of the heart and its rational regulation,” but enlist “co-operation of the heart and rational intelligence, each complementing the strengths and compensating for the deficiencies of the other” (97, 102). Thus, Boyles locates Wordsworth’s positive meaning of religious enthusiasm alongside his wary understanding of the concept.
Boyles maintains that “poems like The Prelude [1805] show more emotional affinity with the revelatory inspiration of evangelical culture than with formal orthodoxy or with secular pantheism” (81). However, Wordsworth’s reference in The Prelude to “prophecy” “cloth’d in priestly robe” and “spirit … singled out” is “redolent of the more dangerous enthusiastic stereotype of the deluded visionary” (Boyles, 86). Wordsworth can sometimes court that very danger. His poetic self-projection is the livelier for it. Boyles observes that “for both Wordsworth and John Wesley, the rational, corrective tendency of the educated mind remained in some conflict with a capacity for sympathetic identity with the credulous and ardent spirit” (142). Such terminology for discerning the full Wesleyan undertone of Wordsworth’s dramatis personae feels comprehensively appropriate. Thus, many of his speakers seek not so much to harmonize, as to juxtapose and make even, the claims of emotion and reason.
Wordsworth’s alternation of heart and head appears, throughout Boyles’s discussion, not so much ruinously bipolar or culpably contradictory as simply or not so simply interactive. Each one of these means of expression, she determines, whether in Wordsworth or in Wesley, proves the more effective for its proximity to, and coexistence with, the other. Therefore, to adapt Boyles’s explanatory terms, as formal orthodoxy and secular pantheism converse and clash in Wordsworth’s proliferating series of both/ands, his revelatory inspiration creates his resolute and independent, yet at the same time non-conclusive and kinetic, “poetic faith.” There is a double edge even to the positively enthusiastic Wanderer as Boyles portrays him throughout her interpretation of Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814). If, like a sinner, the Wanderer wanders in error, then, in Boyles’s estimation, he is not really lost, for, after all, “Not all those who wander are lost” (as Tolkien would have it). Like the circuit-riding Methodist preacher who converts Peter in Wordsworth’s Peter Bell (1805, 1815), the Wanderer, otherwise known as “The Pedlar,” is less a con artist than an “independent spirit of field evangelism,” less a traveling salesman than an itinerant minister (Boyles, 129). The Pedlar’s “spiritual inspiration” (Boyles, 128) is not just inward, but sense-based, or, in Wordsworth’s admiring words about the Wanderer’s religious enthusiasm, not just “from the Soul,” but “from the breath of outward circumstance” (qtd. Boyles, 128).
Throughout her Wordsworth chapters (e.g., 105–27), Boyles acknowledges that Wordsworth’s general ambivalence about enthusiasm and increasing rejection of it—like some “cultured despiser of religion” (Schleiermacher’s phrase)—can turn out to be a rather troublesome betrayal of healthy duality—and hence an unmistakable omen of artistic unsubtlety. She laments his timid assimilation of the “discriminatory principles” on which The Edinburgh Review used Enlightenment criteria to skewer the subjective propensities of early nineteenth-century poetry (118). And she itemizes his growing acceptance—to the detriment of his creative talent—of Francis Jeffrey’s 1815 objections to Lyrical Ballads and The Excursion. Over successive, decades-long revisions of the poem “Beggars” (1800), Wordsworth’s sympathy toward, and mortification about, Methodism comes down on the side of discomfiture alone, or so Boyles’s reading of the later Wordsworth’s record indicates (121–22). Boyles signals a guideline for reading Wordsworth. That is, the greater his embarrassment over Methodism, the greater his loss of creative nerve. In his prime, or at his best, she discloses, he does not so much express reservations about religious enthusiasm as combine them with reason.
Boyles’s centering on the problem of religious enthusiasm will draw other scholars to the difficult fascination of grappling with Romanticism and Methodism. Her tacit awareness that the both/and logic of art can sometimes feel relentless, as when it becomes more dialectically determining than richly conversational, enhances her persuasiveness. Notwithstanding her historical, interdisciplinary insight into the on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand quality of Romantic and Methodist enthusiasm, Boyles suggests that Wordsworth can cultivate creative ground even when he accepts the risk of heated emotion and indulges the guilty pleasure of unalloyed sympathy toward Methodism. She amply shows (119–21) that John Wilson’s strictures against the experimental poem “The Idiot Boy” (1798) elicit Wordsworth’s Methodist-like riposte: “I have often applied to idiots, in my own mind, that sublime expression of scripture, that ‘their life is hidden with God’ [Col 3:3]. … I have, indeed, often, looked upon the conduct of fathers and mothers of the lower classes of society towards idiots as the great triumph of the human heart. It is there that I see the strength, disinterestedness, and grandeur of love” (qtd. Boyles, 120).
Let me recommend—heartily commend—Helen Boyles’s full-scale, complete, thoroughly sourced, clearly written account of Romantic Britain’s Protestant heritage. Just as voices in a divided chancel choir chant responsively, so Romanticism and Methodism, as Boyles conducts these co-present oppositions, alternate. Or, perhaps even more paradoxically, just as male and female congregants at Methodist Society meetings sing hymns an octave apart, so Boyles’s perspective on Romanticism undergirds, seconds, and benefits from her understanding of Methodism, and vice versa. Moving beyond the scholar’s complacent joys of comparison, her book tests the satisfying complexities of comparison/contrast. This method of hers assures her place among her peers: these young dogs of today, never mind Johnson, make such good scholars that inquiring minds can henceforth consider Romanticism and Methodism linked.