Emily Wesley
EMILY WESLEY
In the Rectory of Epworth Susanna Wesley might be able to keep a shadow of a shade of the old glory alight round the head of her husband, but his daughters were endowed with the clearest of clear eyes.
The burden of life fell cruelly upon the shoulders of the eldest daughter Emily, who stands on the mud flats of the Rector's farms, like some tragic queen, denouncing her father's jingling folly. She heard the interminable theological arguments in the Rectory and all the grand pretensions of the restless poet, but to her it befell to get a decent dinner on the table and to get herself and her sisters more or less respectably clad.
It made her angry to find that after a bumper harvest they were still as poor as church mice and that not a farthing remained to buy a yard of cloth for the family dressmaking.
She noticed with jealous eye that it was never the Rector who went short. He must be off on his journeys to London and be well provided for his visits to Convocation whether Susanna and the children found bread or not at home.
Emily lays the whole responsibility of their abject state upon the shoulders of the champion of orthodoxy: "After the fire, when I was seventeen years old," she says, "I was left alone with my mother and lived easy for one year—but after we were gotten
EMILY WESLEY
into our house and all the family settled, in about a year's time, I began to find out that we were ruined.
Then came on London journeys, Convocations of blessed memory, that for seven winters my father was at London and we at home in intolerable want and affliction; then I learnt what it was to seek money for bread, seldom having any without such hardships in getting it that much abated the pleasure of it. Thus we went on growing worse and worse; all of us children in scandalous want of necessaries for years together; vast income but no comfort or credit with it."
She really could not be expected to take very kindly to her father's ecclesiastical pretensions or to his verses and his fine hopes of preferment.
She was so uncompromising in her upright and downright character that it almost seemed that a ghost of those old haunting Puritans had forced an entrance, after all, into the Anglican sheepfold.
It was uncomfortable to have a daughter who could throw down a challenge at any moment like this: "Nor shall I put my conscience under the direction of mortal man, frail as myself.
To my own Master I stand or fall.
Yea,.I shall not scruple to say that all such desires in you or any other ecclesiastic seem to me to look very much like Church tyranny and assuming to yourself a dominion over your fellow creatures which never was designed you by God."
It was still more uncomfortable to have a daughter with such clear eyes that she could see through all strutting arrogance and all high-sounding talk, with a chuckle too at the
SON
TO SUSANNA
bantam's expense: "Our family are full of fine sanguine dreams.
My old belief yet remains that my father will never be worth a groat, as the saying is, and we of the female part of the family be left to get our own bread or starve as we see fit."
The Wesley boys were able to strike out in life with Charterhouse and Westminster behind them and Oxford on before.
They left the quarrels and the hunger and the shame behind them in Lincolnshire, but the girls must live, day in, day out, in that explosive uncertain atmosphere which had turned their mother into an espoused nun and from which marriage alone could rescue them.
But Emily's dreams of romance were doomed to perish along with her father's sanguine hopes.. She was poet enough to face all the toil of Epworth Rectory and all the poverty and anxiety as long as her lover Leyburne—that glorious young man from Oxford—comforted her by his friendship.
She was deeply in love with him with all the warmth of her strong nature, and when the family broke off the engagement she was almost desperate.
It seemed too cruel when she was carrying every burden at the Rectory for them all, and yet fate in the shape of "'a near relative" said that it must not be. There followed nights of agony in her attic and days emptied of hope.
There was a passion in these Wesley children, for all Susanna's careful banking down of fire, that flared up like gunpowder in terrible conviction or frustration.
Emily longed for death and felt she must somehow get out of it all, but the most revolutionary thing she found to do
EMILY WESLEY
was to go teaching at Lincoln in a boarding school for girls.
'There, amid colored worsteds, canvas and silks, she assayed to mend a broken heart.
She had never been in a school before, but took speedily to the way of life and found some comfort from money in her pocket and in the strange respect which was shown to her as the school mistress.
She is surely one of the earliest of our feminists in rebellion against the subjection of women and glorying in the liberating profession, for, she says, "I seemed gotten into another world; and though I worked hard for my living, yet I could maintain myself with working, and I was very willing to do it."
The glorious experiment was not to last long as home claims were not to be denied and Emily found herself back in the bosom of her family and very soon without a penny in the world.
The Poet of the Isle of Axholme found her plenty of employment in feeding his hens and washing his muddy cassock and mending the toes of his stockings.
Once again the Rector's well-known roar of command and his imperious knock became part and parcel of Emily's life.
The time of glorious first love, the effort of escape was over. Emily faced life with a Hamlet resignation and a heart of bitterness towards her father.
Her sister Hetty wrote a poem to her to celebrate her eclipse, and aptly describes the home comforts and surroundings of the Wesley family:
"Fortune has fixed thee in a place Debarred of wisdom, wit and grace;
SON
TO SUSANNA
High births and virtue equally they scorn, As asses dull on dunghills born; Imperious as the stones their heads are found,
Their rage and hatred steadfast as the ground.
With these unpolished wights thy youthful days Glide slow and dull, and Nature's lamp decays:
Oh, what a lamp is hid 'midst such a sordid race!"'
Emily's devotion to her mother was the one thing that reconciled her to her fate, and she decided to stay with her while she lived, for it was her conviction that "she has so little comfort in the world beside that I think it barbarous to abandon her."
Between John Wesley and this fiercely loving, fiercely hating elder sister there was forged a strange link of intimacy.
She was quite ten years his senior, but she wrote to him with the frankness of a contemporary and he knew all her secret love and anguish.
She trusted him absolutely, and knew he would enter into all the home news and the intimacies of clashing personalities and penurious makeshifts which made up her world.
Backwards and forwards to Oxford went these friendly sisterly letters, and it was a correspondence peculiarly dear to the young man away from home.
Susanna kept him well supplied with moral maxims and judicious proddings in the right direction for his own salvation, but Emily could stoop to warm human gossip, and he could see and hear her as he read her letters.
He could see her standing up to her enraged father and hear her saying those provocative remarks which would force the
BM TL Yow ES LEY Rector into irate contradiction and then into the position of selling the pass from sheer obstinacy and fear of ever finding himself on the same side as Emily.
The girls had the Annesley inheritance of good looks, but they had little chance of elegance.
In Epworth Rectory candles were shared, and even Madam Hetty had to sit waiting in the dark ere her father's imperious knock gave permission to her to take his candle and go to bed.
What tragic faces looked out from battered mirrors, and what hopes of what might have been haunted those beautiful eyes!
John Wesley could see them all in his mind's eye and at second hand became acquainted with a woman's heart.
This intimacy of the beloved brother with his sisters was to be of vital importance to him in the work that lay before him.
It was so safe and yet so highly intense a friendship that it exactly suited the young man's alert appreciation and his diffidence.
It was a strange education for the leader of the revival of religion, but it was to give him something which all the theories of Church Polity could never do.
It was to establish a love of fellowship which was delightful yet unexacting in personal demands and to create a love of home in the savage wilderness of this world.
It was to form an appreciation of feminine correspondence which would go through life with him.
He would always write his best letters to women and be at his best in their company.
He had a natural ease and carriage in feminine society learned from those old days at home which was calculated to make women his slaves forever.
But he was not
SON
TO SUSANNA
fond of effusion and they would do best with him in a friendship where he could call them simply by the old dear name of sister.
In the days to come the tragic little circle of girls in Epworth Rectory would reap their reward.
Theirs was to be an immortality of the spirit, and their ghostly descendants were to be those great women of Methodism who together, in feminine bands, and singly, in savage homes, were to bring sweetness and light to a brutal age of fierce masculinity. John Wesley, in the work of the revival of religion in England, was to give a special place of importance to women and to pay them the compliment of equality.
He faced his herculean task with humble men and women of no high calling or title, but baptized wholeheartedly to the work in the humble names of Brothers and Sisters.
VI JOB THE Rector of Epworth deplored the large quiverful of daughters which the Almighty had seen fit to thrust upon him.
He made shift to lighten the burden with some unsatisfactory marriages for them, and told his friends that thus he crept uphill a little faster than before when they were all at home on his hands.
He boasted that he had three sons with the best education in England, and loved to roll
Westminster, Charterhouse and Oxford under his tongue, and when he had time to think of it he remarked that he had put out sundry daughters "'to a way of living."
The truth was that there was a new inmate in Epworth Rectory and the decks must be cleared for action—all roads now led but one way.
The stranger was none other than the Patriarch Job, who would find his dungheap conveniently ready for his enthronement on the mud-flats of the Isle of Axholme.
This Job was Sam Wesley's latest hero, and he was concocting such a book of erudition and art as to make the world wonder.
Job was to be the Rector's magnum opus and to achieve the very last pinnacle in the Temple of Fame.
Money was lavished upon Job and everywhere people were pestered for his support.
Swift and Pope had to lend a hand, and a famous horse of the nobility had to be enBy
SON
TO SUSANNA
graved to adorn the page of old Sam Wesley's work.
Samuel Wesley Junior made himself a nuisance in London and in the west striving to enlist the subscriptions of patrons for the venture, and everyone at Epworth was forced into this service either with pen or pencil or the elusive search of the cross reference.
Hetty Wesley was her father's amanuensis and was a great help to him in his literary labors.
She could write better poetry than he could himself, and was full of such a sprightly humor as to delight her old father.
But it was not to be expected that so fair a queen of Epworth was to find entire satisfaction either in old Sam Wesley or in the patriarch himself.
Passion had awakened in her also, and the sorrows of Job must play second fiddle to the joys of first love.
Of course the match was considered unsuitable, for it was likely that the young man had hailed from that horrid dissenting past into which Hetty had been introduced on a glorious visit to one Uncle Matthew
Wesley in London.
Equally of course a child of Samuel Wesley took the law into her own hands, for the dice were too heavily weighted against one born, like Hetty, in the peak period of the Rector's poetical raptures.
She must see her lover if the heavens fell, and she would stay out all night with him if necessity compelled her so to do. And stay she did, and down the heavens fell, and poor hapless Hetty was consumed.
Samuel Wesley had never flown into such a temper as that in all his long series of alarms and excursions.
JOB He was "inconceivably exasperated" against her, and wreaked so horrible a vengeance upon her as to strike all laughter from her soul.
Perhaps he had always been jealous of her bright wits and he always had detested a rival. So ina rage of jealousy and righteous indignation he married her off to a drunken plumber when she would willingly have plucked out her lovely eyes if, by those means, her father might have been entreated.
'There is no darker blot on the Wesley escutcheon of those pilgrim cockleshells than her father's taunting of her after such a marriage with her strange change of opinion on the joys of wedlock.
In her letter of reply breathes a true dignity and an infinite sadness: "You ask me what hurt matrimony has done me and whether I had always so frightful an idea of it as I have now.
Home questions indeed!
I had not always such notions of wedlock as now, but thought that where there was a mutual affection and desire of pleasing, something near an equality of mind and person, either earthly or heavenly wisdom, and anything to keep love warm between a young couple, there was a possibility of happiness in a married state, but where all or most of these were wanting I ever thought people could not marry without sinning against God and themselves."
The tragic young couple lived in London, and the fumes of William Wright's lead works in Soho stifled the life out of babies born to Hetty in this bleak contest.
There is no sadder picture than that of the beautiful young mother leaning from her bed to watch death wipe the life away from the face of her
SON
TO SUSANNA
newly born child.
As Hetty watched the baby die, her heart was twisted into poetry.
An intolerable passion of despair seemed to wring the words from her.
Here was no premeditated eighteenth-century elegance, but something straight from the heart. Old
Sam Wesley's jingles were being refined by fire, and not far away now was the birth of new poetry.
But first other Wesleys had to sing ere the Romantic Revival could be born.
William Wright, her illiterate, pot-house haunting husband, sat beside her.
It was he who scrawled down the burning words on paper ere Hetty forgot them.
That scrap of paper which was intended for Brother John Wesley's edification is an eloquent condemnation of the other poet of the Isle of Axholme, for it speaks for itself: "I've sen you sum verses that my wife maid of Dear Lamb.
Let me hear from one or both of you as soon as you think conveniant."
Then with fumbling fingers he traces out the illspelled words with hands more used to drains than to the shy dawn of romantic poetry:
"Drooping sweetness!
Verdant flower, Blooming, withering in an hour!
Ere thy gentle breast sustains Latest, fiercest mortal pains, Hear a suppliant!
Let me be Partner in thy destiny."
Hetty Wesley was enough her father's daughter to seek comfort in poetry, and when things became too
JOB desperate she would serenade her impossible husband with verses in which his sins were commemorated.
The epitaph which she wrote for herself is eloquent of what marriage to William Wright had involved for this daughter of the Muses:
"Destined while living to sustain An equal share of grief and pain:
All various ills of human race Within this breast had once a place, Without complaint she learned to bear A living death, a long despair; Till hard oppressed by adverse fate, O'ercharged she sunk beneath its weight;
And to this peaceful tomb retired, So much esteemed, so long desired.
The painful mortal conflict's o'er; A broken heart can bleed no more!"
The plight of Sister Mary was as sad as Hetty's own.
'These two sisters had been devoted to each other in childhood almost in the same strange intimacy as of an Emily and an Anne Bronté.
The one was the foil to the other, and when Hetty fell it was Mary only who stood by her in a devotion of loyalty which nothing could break.
It would have been supposed that Mary would have escaped her father's notice and his hasty decrees, but her time surely came.
With small twisted body she was married to a large shambling charity school cleric who was the laughing-stock of the family.
Even Mrs. Wesley
SON
TO SUSANNA
called him "poor starvling Johnny," and the Rector himself knew what a figure of fun he could look when he fell overboard in the swollen river at Wroote with his waving arms and legs. He could even raise a smile from Hetty amid the horrors of Soho, and it must have refreshed her to write to her brother John the letter she knew so well would make him also laugh; John had been kind to this same Johnny
Whitelamb at Oxford, whither the Wesley family had contrived to send him.
He had been taught Greek and Latin, and John Wesley had seen that he got a gown to drape round his shambling body.
From the tone of Hetty's letter it seems that she is particularly edified by her brother's efforts for the good of Whitelamb's soul.
Perhaps he had never been properly baptized and John had rectified this omission by sprinkling, for he was just then very particular about such weighty matters.
In any case the large male infant gets a chuckle out of the unregenerate Hetty:
'"Forasmuch as it seemeth good unto me to say something about the long male infant thou wast pleased to comfort our eyes withal, let me ask thee whether thou thinkest it lawful to send from under thy protection a plant of so fine a growth for thy fair sisters to rejoice at? What aileth thee, O Man, to expose to female view a sight that perhaps our latest moment can scarce eradicate?
If I may follow the example of better writers and use a contradiction in terms, so visible a nothingness no countenance ever disclosed before.
But to the rueful length of legs,
JOB to say nothing of back, etc., for as Susie said the best that can be said of some things is to say nothing at all.
But if such mighty matters might be said or conceived concerning length, what shall we say (for description's sake) concerning breadth? Why verily nothing neither, since nothing. can come of nothing.
Not to insinuate neither that this goodly flower is without a stalk, for I heard a sage matron affirm he was all stalk, and you forgot not to sprinkle him daily lest his want of growing might be laid to you.
"Thy affectionate friend and sister, I am pretty well as also is the husband of my bosom.
Adieu."
In spite of the family's amusement the Rector of Epworth had discovered that this same Johnny Whitelamb could be very useful.
It was he who was to fall heir to the mantle wrenched from Hetty's own shoulders.
The Rector of Epworth had added the church of Wroote to his numerous cares, and there had sought to colonize his large family, as, at Wroote, food was more easily come by on the parsonage farm. Now another plan for Job's assistance came to him like an inspiration.
He would marry Johnny Whitelamb to his daughter Mary and settle them at Wroote, for he knew that no other curate would live there, and he saw that it was quite the best way out for the cripple Mary and for Job, and so he ingenuously told the Lord Chancellor when he asked to transfer the living to Whitelamb: "It lies in our low levels and is often overflowed four or five years since I have had it and the people have lost most
SON
TO SUSANNA
or all the fruits of the earth—but they love the place though I can get nobody else to reside on it."
So the little deformed Mary Wesley and the "long male infant" were married and took up their abode on the water-logged mud-flats of Wroote.
The Rector of Epworth heaved a sigh of relief and thanked God for "being eased of four daughters out of seven, as I hope I shall be of the fifth in a little longer."
It was also a great source of satisfaction to know that Johnny Whitelamb would go on to the end of the chapter drawing maps and strange figures for the great work on Job "as well as we could by the light of nature."
Of course it was sad, but whatever else could God do but slay Mary in agony at the birth of her first baby?
Even those dull asses, the parishioners whom Hetty deplored, had been scandalized by the quality of the little cripple's sufferings then.
'They might be without imagination and they were well used to farm tragedies of birth and death, but this was something so terrible as to soften their dull hearts in heavenly pity.
It comes as no surprise to learn, after such a display of the ignorance of biological fact, that the Rector of Epworth was the poorest of poor farmers.
He never made a penny either out of Epworth or Wroote, and when his turn came to die, his creditors distrained on his stock to pay his debts.
But as he said himself, he could "struggle with the world but not with Providence."
In this bundle of inept arrogance and homely tragedy the life of John Wesley was bound up.
JOB knew every twist and turn of the road and was spared no detail of that strange home of his. He knew that his mother's cast-iron scheme of education had not prevented Hetty's destruction; he knew of all Emily's wees and now he must weep for Mary also.
But in the midst of it all his mother maintained her poise.
She had achieved the whole armor of the saint whose whole care is for the things of the spirit, and she would side-track the ache of loss by the pain of fresh heavenly endeavor.
Her letters to her son John are full of the axioms of morality and the fight against the world, the flesh and the devil.
She quite honestly confesses the way in which she has been able to save the absolute collapse of the mother's heart—a kind of desperate resignation to the will of God has been the secret she has learned in a long life with Samuel
Wesley.
As she says to John when she believes him to be already in a consumption: "But take your own way; I have already given you up as I have some before which once were very dear to me."
'That example of the Spartan mother was not to be lost on the leader of the revival of religion in England in the eighteenth century.
Hers was the weapon which he himself would use to subdue the disappointments and the human love of his own heart, and though the weapon was to break in his hand it was not to be without significance in the way his feet must travel ere he learned a deeper secret yet.