Varanese
Vil VARANESE Ir is still a benediction to enter the village of Stanton.
It lies in a cleft of the Cotswold Hills as they slope down to the plain.
It is like a miniature Broadway, but unspoiled, and the old stone houses border the wide, quiet street even as they stood in the golden days when John Wesley rode down from Oxford.
His friends used to call it 'dear delightful Stanton" and thought of it almost as a place and as an experience at one and the same time.
There was a quality about the hills, about the stone and the sunlight, and, above all, a richness and a zest in the company of friends which was wont to foregather there, for it was here in the old village of Stanton that grace and loveliness first dawned on the son of Epworth.
Life lived with charm and at ease was a new revelation to that strenuously knit figure fresh from the molding of Susanna Wesley's unrelenting life of rule.
The atmosphere of Stanton Rectory was congenial.
There was sunshine and laughter and also good food and good books.
There, also, was dancing and the reading of plays and abundance of good conversation.
Over a collared calf's head washed down by homebrewed cider the friends would make very merry.
They chatted easily of the Spectator and the Court and fashion. They were frivolous over dogs and cats
VARANESE with that lightness of touch which only comes when life has ceased to be so terribly earnest.
It was a different world from Mary's agonies at Wroote and from the strain and penury of the Rectory at Epworth.
In Stanton Rectory lived the glorious Kirkham family, and there came that pattern of a fine gentlewoman, Mrs. Pendarves, who was later to become Mrs. Delany, the friend of kings and queens.
She lived in but the next village of Buckland and was a beloved friend to the vital Sally Kirkham.
Both were famous for that awful quality of fire, and Mrs. Pendarves' raptures were notoriously adorable.
'They loved music and pictures and flowers and animals, and an expedition with them on those
Cotswold Hills partook of something allied to the joys of Paradise.
There was a convenient and rollicking brother, Bob Kirkham, and a younger, more unsatisfactory sister, Betty, who was prone to poke fun at John Wesley's solemnities.
It was all a new world to the young student from Oxford, who would swing along on his horse with joy in his heart and a new, compelling attraction in his life.
He began to spend just a little more money, and although there were protests by post from Epworth, John Wesley had crossed the floods and was now in the dear, delightful Land of Promise.
Old Sam Wesley might storm as much as he desired on paper, but the light in Sally Kirkham's eyes was worth it all.
In the mode of the eighteenth century the circle of friends adopted nicknames which made John
Wesley feel more at home than ever with these jolly
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girls, for it allowed a sort of intimacy which stopped short of the familiarity of the bald Christian name.
The modern Group knows no such reticence, but it suited young Wesley very well. People clearly could have more than one name, and Sally Kirkham figures as Sappho, Flavia, Deborah and Varanese in the letters of the circle. There seems no doubt but that Sappho and Varanese are both one and the same person, but it was that last lovely name that John Wesley always used when he wrote or spoke to Sally Kirkham.
She seems to have carried him quite off his diminutive feet. The woman was literally sparkling. To hear her defend some friend or some loved cause was to be caught up in a glorious enthusiasm, for she had a very pretty wit and a racy style of talking.
Her experiences lost nothing in the recounting of them with her good memory and her eye to see amusing sideplay.
She was still something of a tomboy, and as a girl she had run wild in the glorious out-of-doors of the Cotswold country.
It is likely that she had the sonsy coloring of the brunette and that fire lurked in those Celtic eyes of the west country.
She could take up the cudgels for someone dear to her so briskly that even the Bishop of Gloucester trembled.
About her there was a go-ahead energy and a bright determination which were calculated to carry all before them.
Now Sally Kirkham was by way of being religious, but there was a subtle difference of atmosphere between the religion of Epworth and of Stanton.
Stern Puritanism was the background of Susanna
VARANESE and her daughters, but here there was a strange quality of ingenuous enthusiasm.
Sally had a way of discovering everything for the first time herself.
Thomas 4 Kempis had not written until she had read him in a translation, but from henceforth he was her hero and she was his apostle.
She denounced "Holy Living and Dying" as wholeheartedly as she acclaimed the saintly Thomas, and refused to be
"frightened out of her wits" by anyone whom she did not choose as her own particular teacher.
It was all so old at Epworth. Low be it spoken, but Susanna called 4 Kempis "an honest weak man" when John wrote to ask his mother what she made of all these raptures.
He always liked to refer to Epworth for the reasoned point of view, and it gave him a greater sense of security to feel he was consulting Susanna in the background.
But all the same it was glory as of the first Eden when Sally Kirkham lent him 4 Kempis—if only in Stanhope's translation.
He felt perhaps just a little ashamed of that, for his sisters would have read it in the original, but although he remembered that translation all his life he shot his mind on to the glory and got more out of a translation than anyone at Epworth would have believed possible.
Sally Kirkham found in John Wesley an apt pupil.
True son of his mother, it was on the safe ground of theology that they foregathered.
The friendship seems to have been cemented in that reading of 4 Kempis and in the resulting discussion.
Together and in rapture they spoke of the Pattern for this
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strange, pulsating life of man.
Sally would have John Wesley live up to her enthusiastic standard of perfection and she would point the moral and adorn the tale in her letters to him to explain what he should make of himself.
In the same way she adopted one Mrs. Elstob, the first of the blue-stockings, and forced her on even into royal favor.
Sally's letter to the Queen was so eloquent then as to charm from kingly pockets a substantial pension.
She would doubtless have done the same for John Wesley and must have produced upon him the bracing experience of optimism.
With Sally Kirkham at his side surely he could conquer the world.
It was difficult to keep one's reasonable head, and somewhere round the heart would come gusts of warmth in the sunshine of this generous and enthusiastic friendship.
Varanese became a name to conjure with, a name to make reason totter, a name to bring tears to the eyes.
It must have felt like playing with fire, but John Wesley really began to wonder whether in seven years' time he might dream of an engagement.
He dreamed of a man in the future who might conceivably be himself—a man of thirty years of age.
It seemed more reasonable with so long a vista ahead, and well he knew that he would not have enough money until then.
He was scandalously poor, and Brother Charles would soon be knocking on the doors of the University without a penny in his pocket.
But to a man of Wesley's cautious strain it was all the more to be enjoyed when the prospect was so far ahead, and meanwhile in the beauty of dear de-
VARANESE lightful Stanton "he would think of it."
Life has suddenly become exciting, and it was glorious to work at religion like Thomas 4 Kempis, to keep a diary, to work and to play really hard.
Oxford was but thirty-six miles from Stanton, and the ride was altogether delightful with the welcome Varanese would give him as he rode up to her garden gate and reined in his horse.
The friendship was withal so theological that the son of Susanna Wesley blossomed out into a shy springtime.
He became excellent company in Stanton Rectory as his own sisters had always found him in the hard work and poverty of life at Epworth.
But now all was like heaven, and the beauty of that Cotswold country almost unbearable.
To walk those hills with Varanese, to discuss everything in heaven and earth and to see her kindle to the great and glorious in life was enough to turn the head even of Susanna Wesley's own son.
It was typical of John Wesley to set his reasoning powers to work to devise, after all, something of a short cut from that shy springtime of the heart to the glories of full summer.
At the beginning of the year 1725 he was definitely thinking of ordination as a means to an end. He wrote home about it, and his letters up to a point were quite honest.
He asked his father if one might enter the Church "to eat a piece of bread," and old Sam Wesley was inclined to agree, but as usual he was thinking first of the Rector of Epworth and not of young men's hearts in springtime.
He thought it much better that John should devote himself to looking up cross-
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references for Job's edification and to helping on with the Hebrew.
Ordination might come later or might even be left to take care of itself.
The young lover was destined to get more encouragement from his mother, knowing as she did only half the tale.
She wondered what the lad could be reasoning about now and what could be at the back of his mind.
She had dedicated Samuel, her first-born, to the Church, but not so his brother John.
He had been free to choose and she had not thought that he was heading that way. Now she rejoiced at this unexpected turn of events and wrote eagerly to push him on in the good way, for she feared lest he should reason himself out of it before he was well launched.
She knew her John.
Also she knew his father and the demands of the preposterous Job, and dreaded the by-paths of secular learning when so glorious a vineyard as the Church lay just there for the entering.
If the lad could now be pushed gently towards that desired goal all would be well.
Job should not be allowed to wreck the boy's career if at Epworth they were bound to put up with his demands upon their time and patience.
So Susanna writes to the young man at Oxford to encourage him towards ordination, and in her letter she roundly tells him "it is an unhappiness peculiar to our family that your father and I never think alike on anything."
So between Oxford and Epworth the letters went backwards and forwards, but it was only Sister Emily who knew that behind the hotly disputed question of John's ordination stood the vital figure of Sally
VARANESE Kirkham.
She was devoted to this young brother of hers and knew him as well as his mother, but she also knew his shy blossoming and his reasonable calculation of days and years.
So into the post-bag with the Epworth letters she slipped in one of her own for the purpose of quickening his too reasonable feet.
It was a letter almost Bronté-esque in its vehemence and its knowledge of love.
She brushed aside that idea of waiting until he is thirty years old before he moves in such a matter with urgent warnings of danger.
She had suffered too fiercely herself and dreaded lest John should come to suffer as she had done.
So the words burn across the paper and read with a pressing sense of urgency: "Whether you will be engaged before thirty or not I cannot determine; but if my advice is worth listening to, never engage your affections before your worldly affairs are in such a posture that you may marry very soon.
The contrary practice has proved very pernicious to our family; and were I to live my time over again and had the same experience I have now, were it for the best man in England I would not wait one year.
I know you are a young man encompassed with difficulties that has passed through many hardships already and probably must through many more before you are easy in the world, but believe me if ever you come to suffer the torment of a hopeless love all other afflictions will seem small in comparison of it."
Now young John Wesley had gone out of town on April 10, 1725, and he had ridden down to Stanton.
Emily's letter was dated April 7, and :
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whether it hastened his flight from Oxford or whether it followed him to Stanton, it gave him food for much troubled thought.
He had never before been so alarmed.
He had not contemplated the possibility that women could move so swiftly as that.
Why, here was staid Emily Wesley saying she would not wait one year for the best man in England, and he had intended keeping Sally Kirkham waiting seven long years for him.
That letter was destined to survive many years after both John Wesley and Sally Kirkham were dust, and it must have brought to him the urgency of panic in that peaceful, lovely village of Stanton in the Cotswold hills.
There had been pleasant days in the country and in Varanese's own arbor, and there had been talk of a Kempis and the Way of Life, but by April 20 the diary shows the sign of urgent emotion and the secret mark of Varanese.
There follows a scarcely audible prayer:
"May it not be in vain."
'The date of April 20 was branded on the young man's memory for years afterwards.
He would commemorate it in his diary as 'caw Varanese," and then the veil of silence is drawn upon that momentous day of spring in the year
1725.
April airs were abroad, but it was also the time of the first mocking cuckoo's song.
It is impossible to know what took place and how the face of that smiling countryside was changed for the young man in the course of one interview.
But from all the evidence available it looks as though he had sustained a great shock.
For all his haste and in spite of Emily's promptings, John Wesley had come too
VARANESE late.
Sally Kirkham would marry the village schoolmaster, Jack Chapon, before the year was out.
What was said?
None knows, none ever will know, but it all seemed bound up with a breaking heart and much thought of 4 Kempis and the struggle of life and of discipline.
The incident and the place and Varanese made an indelible mark on Wesley's mind, and the secret diary took it down never to be forgotten.
But when the ordination day came it made no sort of stir at all.
It befell in the September of that fatal year of 1725, and Wesley lost his temper badly on the day and disputed over a trifle.
On the Thursday of that week, his mother's day, he wrote to Varanese.
She must have been kind, and he was heroically getting her into perspective by thinking of her on his mother's day.
The staid friendship should go on and he would go to her wedding and dance there, perhaps with tears in his eyes.
But he would never be the same man again, and Varanese would hold a place in his heart different from all his other friends.
He would write to her for the whole of ten years afterwards, and he would treasure her letters as one of the beautiful things in his life and speak of them wistfully as "those last monuments of the goodness of my dear Varanese."
That year of 1725, which had begun with such high hopes, ended in a relentless manner with the little deacon in the bosom of Mother Church and the radiant Sally in the arms of Jack Chapon. After the wedding and the song and the dance were over John Wesley returned to Oxford deep in meditation.
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He would always go back to the Faithful City when the world was unkind, and he came to love the very sight of Oxford. Now in his lonely bachelor rooms he sat himself down and entered up his diary. There followed a long and an eloquent pause..... There was deep quiet in the little room, for it was the moment between the closing of one chapter of life and the opening of another.
His mind was busy going over all the old ground. Christchurch dreamed about him as he sat deep in thought and as he tried to worry out from the heartbreak some sort of rhyme or reason.
What question would has mother have asked him could she know how he was suffering then?
He was Susanna's own son as he drew a line of finality in his diary and asked himself as searching a question as ever his mother could have done: "Have
I loved women or company more than God?"
It was ever Susanna's way to clear up a situation by means of these searching questions, and it was only right that her son should take her own medicine for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
He meant to make the most of the mistress which did remain to him, and his devotion to the Church should grow from that hour.
He was broken and bruised, but the blessed life of method and the cloister remained.
Varanese was lost, but she had given him the way of salvation in the example of 4 Kempis, and his mother had shown him at Epworth how to be in the world but not of it.
It was an uphill journey, but John Wesley did not lack courage and he was inured to iron discipline.
VARANESE If he had only known it, that Varanese experience was to be of lasting importance to himself and to the world.
It was necessary that the one who was to be the pioneer in the discovery of the love of God should pass just this way of defeated human love.
It was the quality of that lad's love which was to prove the important thing.
It was essential that John Wesley should have come to know it and to baptize 4 Kempis in that very essence.
It was a love of shy adoration, of April laughter and of April tears.
It was a love so pure and virgin that it could contemplate waiting for seven long years in willing service ere the consummation of bliss.
It was the only love that, without irreverence, could be transferred to God Himself.
That was, in fact, just what John Wesley managed to do, if his sister Emily's testimony may be accepted.
She read the lad like an open book, and saw the significance for his spiritual life and for his whole career in the loss of his dear Varanese.
She might take her place in Harley Street today with her cool reading of the young priest's mind: "Had you not lost your dear Mrs. C n, where had your love been fixed?
On heaven, I hope, principally; but a large share, too, had been hers: you would not have been so spiritualized, but something of this lower world would have had its part in your heart, wise as you are; but being deprived of her there went all hope of worldly happiness: and now the mind, which is an active principle, losing its aim here, has fixed on its Maker for happiness.
This will ever be the
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end that all rational beings will aim at, and when disappointed of one thing will soon fix on another."
NoTE ON VARANESE
The Editor of Wesley's Journal gives Betty Kirkham as Varanese (I, 15), but by Vol. VIII, 255, he allows Sally Kirkham to have been the formative influence in Wesley's life.
Vulliamy follows Journal I, 15.
Sappho and Varanese seem both to have referred to Sally Kirkham.
Anne Granville never speaks of 'Varanese to John Wesley, but always of Sappho.
Mrs. Pendarves and John Wesley mention her as Varanese, but evidently mean the same well-known correspondent who was noted for her letter-writing powers.
Mrs. Pendarves, writing to her sister, mentions Sally and John Wesley almost in a breath as members of this correspondence circle: "I have not heard from Sally a good while.
I am indebted to Cyrus, but will write to him as soon as I can" (Corres., I, 285).
Betty Kirkham married a Mr. Wilson (Tyerman) and died soon.
In 1732 Mrs. Pendarves writes to her sister: 'Poor Mrs. Wilson! I am sorry for the shock her death must have given Sally, whose tenderness must sometimes take the place of her wisdom. .... Pray has Mrs. Wilson left any children?" (Corres. 360.) Now John Wesley is still writing to Varanese in 1735-37, and Charles Wesley sees her at Stanton in 1737, so she could not be Betty Kirkham who died in 1732.
In 1731 both Varanese and Sappho had a child born to them, but Mrs. Pendarves is asking in 1732 if Mrs. Wilson left any children.
The Granvilles were godmothers to this child of "our valuable Sappho," and John Wesley is well up in all the same news, and writes in that year to Mrs. Pendarves telling her what Varanese thought of when the baby was born (J. W., Letters, I, 97).
Emily Wesley's evidence is valuable because she had John Wesley's confidence: "Had you not lost your dear Mrs. C n"
(Stev. 271), which is the way he was accustomed to speak of both Varanese and Sappho: he speaks of conversation with our dear Sappho and "the uninterrupted conversation of dear Varanese"? (Letters, I, 88) both in this year 1731 when on a visit to Stanton. The mistake seems to have arisen from Bob Kirkham's letter with a picture of Betty falling on her knees'so that Wes-
VARANESE ley might know how pious she was becoming, but in the same letter in contrast to this folly comes the message that he goes to read a Spectator to his sister Chapon.
This Betty Kirkham was described by Mrs. Pendarves as "'a sister who had given more woe than happiness" to Sally Chapon, but Varanese always shines as a goddess in the letters of the circle.
VIII RETREAT Ir was idle to deny that John Wesley had received a severe shock. He seemed to stagger back from life itself under the loss of this, his first love.
The brand plucked from the burning might be true in this case also, but the experience had taken the very heart out of him.
For the time being he had lost his ambition of being the Lord's Trophy.
He retreated to the bosom of his own family at least equipped to be his father's curate.
His devotion to his new calling can be gauged from the fact that he did not proceed to Priest's Orders until three years had elapsed since his ordination as Deacon.
He must have hoped for balm to his wounded spirit in the feminine atmosphere of his home, but he was soon to discover that old Sam Wesley was really no sort of a rest cure for frayed nerves.
The crestfallen lover could think of no happier subject than love itself to argue about with that virile old father of his. The recent tragedy of Hetty loomed large on the family horizon, and the old man was still behaving like a lunatic if anyone had the hardihood to mention her name.
There was bound to be a clash between father and son, for the reasonable, argumentative John was the same as the child Jacky who had so exasperated his father with his exquisite
RETREAT reasons in those old days in Epworth Rectory. Now they met on more equal terms as scholars and twin souls in the Church, and John had even tried his hand at poetry.
His wise mother had put her foot down there with strict orders that only as a diversion must he pursue that dangerous way, so instead he gave himself to sermon-making, which in her eyes was a much better business. But the mischief of it was that mother and son must make the sermons together and almost drive the Rector mad with jealousy.
John's heart was tender with memories of spring evenings at Stanton, and he could almost see it was possible to lose one's head when love called the tune.
He had himself come within measurable distance of that passion which could kindle in the children of Samuel and Susanna Wesley.
Even he, the child of his mother's cloistered days, had been frightened by its stirrings, so that it was no miracle that in Hetty it should burst into flame.
She had come into the world at the peak of her father's poetic raptures, and even Susanna, with her blessed routine and her methods of education, was no match for Samuel's children born on Parnassus.
So it came about that John, in love's springtime, felt he understood Sister Hetty perhaps better than father, mother or shrewd Sister
Emily.
He dreamed of Divine love and Christian charity and read of love's power to cover a multitude of sins.
Of course it had all to go into one of those brand-new sermons of his, and proudly he showed his manuscript to Susanna.
His mother went straight to the thought at the back of his mind, as was her
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way with him, and she told him, "You writ this sermon for Hetty; the rest was brought in for the sake of the last paragraph."
The Rector of Epworth was furious when the sermon was preached.
He at once put the cap on his own tyrant head and found that it fitted to a nicety.
He was "inconceivably exasperated" against this erring daughter and never spoke of her save with the "utmost detestation."
Indeed, his family rejoiced when she was brought to bed before the old man could get to her in her agony to tell her just what he thought of her conduct.
So the intimate letter had run, "My father has been at Louth to see Sister Wright, who by good providence was brought to bed two days before he got thither, which perhaps might prevent his saying what he otherwise might have said to her; for none that deserves the name of a man would say anything to grieve a woman in a condition where grief is often present death to them."
On such a delicate situation and upon such thin ice John Wesley trampled gaily with the gait of an elephant.
His words seemed so reasonable and good to himself that there seemed no reason that they should not be acceptable to his father.
He really believed, in the assurance of youth, that he had done some good by his discourse on Christian charity, for he says with a flourish, "I had the same day the pleasure of observing that my father the same day when one Will Atkins was mentioned did not speak so warmly nor largely against him as usual."
The situation of father and son must have appeared com-
RETREAT plicated even to the resourceful Susanna, but it remained for her youngest son Charles to rush in where angels feared to tread.
'To him the Rector opened his angry heart—did not Charles hear how John always contradicted him?
Did he not see how he sided with Hetty against him? And then in a burst of uncontrollable anger the secret was out, although he tried to recall the word but half spoken, "Nay, he disputes with me preach—" The old man's spleen was twisting still round that unfortunate sermon on the Love of God.
John was pronounced undutiful and defiant, and the calmness of his general walk and conduct his father attributed to impertinence.
He was never ready to give a hand with the family incubus, that preposterous Job, but would go his own way in quiet friendship with his mother and sisters and never once ask after the fate of the patriarch.
Charles Wesley could scarcely believe his brother could really be just as wicked as all that.
It made the young man weep tears to think of the children's sins being so visited upon the heads of the fathers of the race.
He took John for an evening stroll in the country and gave him a piece of his . mind.
It is the first record of the eruption of Charles Wesley, but it was not to be the last by any means:
He was to constitute himself the wayside volcano of John's journey through life.
He was really a true splinter from the old block, and understood his father and spoke his language.
He knew just that proper swelling pride when his father exhorted him to beat the waves beneath him and bid
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them know that they carried "Charles" to preeminence in a golden future.
It was in the Parsonage at Wroote that the reconciliation of the injured parent and the undutiful son took place.
Brother Charles catapulted John to the feet of his father to ask forgiveness for he knew not what.
It was incredibly exciting to Charles to see the two weeping on each other's necks and to know that he, Charles, had brought it all about.
He might not be the brand plucked from the burning, but he could hatch out a pretty little plot and watch a glorious explosion from the safe distance of the garden path.
John promised with tears to help with Job, and right sharply he was kept to his promise.
Old Sam Wesley kissed the prodigal and damned him with faint praise in one and the same breath, for he said he believed son John was really "good at bottom."
So much for a young man's sermon on the love of God.
Incomprehensibly, it appeared to be weighted with combustible matter, and John found greater peace and safety with Sister Emily in the garden and about the farm at Wroote.
He made his sisters a summerhouse in the garden in pitiful imitation of the Varanese arbor, and there he read to his sisters
Spenser's Faerie Queene.
He flew at logs and sawed them vigorously, gaining from the clean sanity of honest wood some sort of poise and satisfaction.
He made benches in the summerhouse and decorated that part of the garden with flowers and ferns which he gathered with his sisters from the countryside.
He went to every fair in the neighborhood, and per-
RETREAT haps brought back those fairings for the bonny brown hair of his sisters, for he had some little money and had now nothing for which he wished to save it.
He, in any case, left money behind him when he finally went from Wroote, although he thought it wise not to tell his father so.
Money in that Parsonage had a way of enriching the destitute Job and not of adorning the beautiful daughters of old Sam
Wesley. The boys swam in the river and went snipeshooting, and John enjoyed the freedom of life at Wroote much better than the life at Epworth.
But most of all he was thankful for the love of mother and of sisters, and glad to have a woman like Emily there with him to whom he could tell the sorrows of his heart.
After that letter which she had written _ to him, telling him of her own hard hap, all barriers were down between them.
She must have heard all about April 20 and of the loss of Waranese, and after his return to Oxford she was not at all surprised at the more religious turn which was obvious in his career at the University.
Well she knew the imperious makeshifts of the empty heart.
She had as few illusions about John Wesley's dawning ecclesiastical raptures as Susanna had about her poetical husband.
She takes her stand with D. H. Lawrence, who, from the eminence of a Teacher's Certificate, tells the world all there is to know of love and of religion in his "The young man has lost his young wife so calls his love the Holy Ghost."
Emily Wesley took the mind of her young brother into her cool fingers and so analyzed his later religious enthusiasms.
The
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world had much to say of his resulting efforts to convert Oxford, and his famous Holy Club became the laughing-stock of the University.
It was all supposed to resemble primitive Christianity and to constitute a desperate fight for holiness, but the modern miss at Epworth shook her head and knew so much, much better.
It is an illuminating picture, that of the eighteenthcentury girl shaking her wise head and so diagnosing
John Wesley's trouble: "Herein, you yourself speak as one that is guilty: had you not lost your dear Mrs.
C n where had your love been fixed?"
It is one of the "ifs" of history, but the world has cause for thankfulness that ever an insignificant person lived who bore the name of Jack Chapon.
He struggled for preferment with the help of his wife's friend, Mrs. Delany; he tried to keep school in a house too big for him; he was constantly in debt and tried various devices in various towns to carve a way to fame, but the best thing he ever did, of which, of course, he was blissfully unconscious, was to save the great revival of religion by merely existing.
It must have been saved but by the turn of a head, or a tone of voice, or perchance by the light and color of an eye.
In any case there was something just significant enough for Varanese to pass over the modest little leaden casket which was John Wesley and choose instead the glitter of Jack Chapon.
It is most likely that the great transaction was settled only by inches.
John Wesley was really very small, and, after all, what would you have a fine young woman like Sally
RETREAT Kirkham do but seek out a mate of respectable standing?
Mrs. Delany laughed at little people, and among his fine friends Wesley himself was painfully conscious of his few inches. He speaks to his mother of "my being little and weak," but by the time that letter was written two years had separated him from the harshness of Sally Kirkham's refusal and he was able to add: "I can readily trace the wisdom and mercy of Providence in allotting me these imperfections." Had it not been so there might have been no Holy Club and no desperate fight for heaven by means of good works.
Rather, in some other part of the country there might have arisen another Epworth Rectory with its harassing domestic cares and its inevitable ending of a beautiful dream.
IX ASPASIA JouHN WestEy was called back to Oxford by the authorities.
He was Fellow of Lincoln College and had duties to fulfil, whether his heart were empty or no.
He had been forced to get the vital figure of Sally Chapon into some sort of perspective, but he was to find that this lower world had a way of. dying but slowly.
There often befell so teasing a mingling of events as to make the upward path very difficult.
Soon after Wesley's return death took a hand and plunged the young man back again amid all his old friends.
There was one tragic Sunday of sermons and journeys and the news that Robin Griffiths of Broadway was dead.
He was a friend of the ladies at Stanton, and John Wesley was called on to preach the funeral sermon.
He struggled on as best he could with Sally Chapon sitting there just in front of him, and people asked him for that sermon afterwards because somehow it was shot through with reality.
It reads coldly in print, but it was delivered in an atmosphere that was tense with emotion. John
Wesley was certainly finding this life of sermonmaking uphill work, with human life breaking in on his reasons and his periods to lay all in a tangle at his feet.
Just a few pews away sat Varanese, and with
ASPASIA her that glorious friend Mrs. Pendarves, and an iron band of restraint must be upon the young man's heart and he must not indulge in perilous sentiment over Robin Griffiths.
So reads his upright and downright tribute to his friend's memory: "Let it suffice to have paid my last duty to him—by saying in a few plain words such as were his own and were always agreeable to him, that he was to his parents an affectionate, dutiful son, to his acquaintance an ingenuous, cheerful, good-natured companion, and to me a well-tried, sincere friend."
At the close Sally claimed the preacher as escort, and over the hills to Stanton that strange couple journeyed.
It was no longer spring in the Cotswolds nor in Wesley's heart, but he carried his precious companion safely to her husband looking as white as the corpse he had just buried. He was suffering from the prostration of nervous exhaustion in an attack of sickness with which he was to become familiar.
These tingling personal contacts, coupled with his heroic cleaving to his Maker, were always sure to bring on John Wesley the same sickness and distress.
He always notes it as a mysterious prompting of Providence, but it sprang directly from his own propensity for burying his head in the sand.
He had an extraordinary way of blinding himself to the obvious, and his iron restraint and disregard of internal wounds was bound to take its toll of human nerves.
He was ever on his guard, and his body groaned involuntarily under that terrible repression.
He had a way of trying to walk through hell without
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so much as acknowledging that painful locality. He could only seek safety in devising a fire-proof equipment, so that the flames might leave him unscathed.
All would be well could he but keep the joints of that harness sealed.
He had all sorts of safety devices, and would evolve many more.
Already before Sally Kirkham's wedding he had resolved to fast once a month and once a day to read over the last week's resolutions.
He would get out of bed at five in the morning and never let sleep or company hinder him from going to prayers.
Presently Charles Wesley and Bob Kirkham would come to his help in a Holy Club of their devising, but on which John seized with joy as just the very thing he was searching for as a protection against all fire risks.
In his hands it was to become a thing of terror, until young Morgan went mad with the name of Wesley on his lunatic lips.
But life was hard for young men in springtime in that lovely Cotswold country, and Wesley came to dread a new attack on his susceptible heart.
Come it surely did, and in an overwhelming lady of elegance and charm beyond anything a son of Epworth had seen.
Mrs. Pendarves was an old friend of Sally Kirkham's, and she came on a visit to Stanton to mend her own heart over the default of Lord Baltimore.
She found John Wesley quite amusing for a season.
He contrived to keep her at arm's length as best he could in a correspondence of stilted style and under the protection of a pen-name.
He was Cyrus to her Aspasia.
But under all the camouflage the
ASPASIA letters of Wesley show the pattern of growing intensity.
He writes with tears in his eyes, and is alarmed again at that strange emotion creeping along his heartstrings.
He fears he is again laying himself open to a hell of suffering, but on he must go.
He tells her all that the correspondence of Varanese has meant to him, and seems to feel that he could spend all his life in this gentle art of letter-writing did not God demand of him an account of his stewardship of time: "Should I neglect the work to which Providence so plainly calls me even in hope of such a good?"
His heart burnt within him just to read Aspasia's written word, and he felt a strange dislike of coarse masculine society when he dreamed of his lovely lady: "The more I observe the dispositions of those poor creatures that make up the bulk of mankind the more do I desire to shelter myself from them under the protection of Varanese and Aspasia."
Of course Wesley was frightened, and protection was essential to him.
Never again did he wish to suffer as he had done in that old month of April, and all the time he is begging Aspasia for her friendship he is sheltering behind his guardian angel Varanese:
"While I am reflecting on this I can't but often observe with pleasure the great resemblance between the emotion I then feel and that with which my heart frequently overflowed, in the beginning of my intercourse with our dear Varanese.
Yet is there a sort of soft melancholy mixed with it when I perceive that I am making another avenue for grief, that I am laying open another part of my soul at
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which the arrows of fortune may enter.
Nay, but here will I hold: since the Christian name for fortune is providence or the hand of God, should it wound me even in the person of my friend there would be goodness in the severity."
Time went on leaden wings when the goddess did not write, in spite of his pious determination to accept the will of God.
In his monk's cell in Lincoln College he had a consuming passion to receive her letters, and he dreamed of her in the moonlight.
And truly she was very beautiful. Aspasia had that irresistible hair which glistens, and in moonlight or in golden sunshine she would be clothed in glory.
One who knew and loved this Aspasia drew this pen-portrait of her: "She had a most lovely face of great sweetness set off with a head of fair hair shining and naturally curled, with a complexion which nothing could outdo or equal, in which, to speak in the language of poets, 'the lilies and the roses contended :for the mastery.'
Her eyes were bright—indeed I never could tell what color they were of—dove's eyes—she is almost the only woman I ever saw whose lips were scarlet, their bloom beyond expression.
Fair as the moon, clear as the sun, but terrible as an army with banners."
This came from a dean's pen, but a statesman said no less. Edmund Burke's tribute in the ear of Fanny
Burney is as convincing: "She was the model of a perfect fine woman."
Her charm of manner, which Wesley would fain attribute to an innate goodness, was not produced in a day.
It was an inheritance from a long line of aristocratic ancestors who had
ASPASIA come to learn how to treat their fellow men.
Aspasia was related to that Sir Richard Grenville of the epic of "The Revenge," and to that other gallant knight of Landsdown who fell in battle for his King.
Service and Command were both part of her rich inheritance.
The goddess appears to have collected sermons as others of baser metal pursue old china or cigarette cards.
Her friendship with John Wesley was cemented over a sermon.
It was balm to the son of Epworth for Aspasia to ask for his sermon notes.
She seemed to think much more highly of them than his father did.
She knew just how to talk to the budding priest after his efforts in Stanton pulpit, and together the friends would converse in Sally's
Arbor and on the hillside with that strange light drawing the gold from the old stone houses below and shining in that wonderful hair there close at hand.
Even when she was not there and he was traversing the same ground with dear Varanese, now much married, he would remember everything she said and everything she did just there: "On this spot she sat";
Along this path she walked"; '""Here she showed that lovely instance of condescension."
John Wesley told himself he wasn't really playing with fire, he was really looking for protection from this daughter of the gods, yet anyone who has been in like case can see exactly where he was heading when he let his mind play tricks like that.
Mrs. Pendarves had all the added attraction of a tragic figure.
She had been sacrificed in an appall-
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ingly unsuitable marriage at the age of eighteen, and one day had awakened to find her husband dead at her side behind the curtains of their four-posted bed of horror.
Some degree of the tragedy of such a marriage may be guessed at from the fact that death, choking the lungs of her spouse, sounded no whit unusual to the girl at his side, for she was too accustomed to the stentorian breathing of this drunken husband of hers.
She never knew he was dead until she pulled the curtains back and the morning light revealed her grim bed-fellow.
Aspasia was old in experience.
She knew her way around a dangerous corner quite commendably.
She had no sort of idea of "love and a knapsack," and Wesley was as poor as a church mouse.
She was interested to think of the little man sitting shivering in his College rooms without a fire, and found him something of an oddity against her background of good food and drink and dresses at thirteen shillings a yard.
She called him "Primitive Christianity" behind his back, and when she was away from him speedily forgot all about him.
Aspasia went to Ireland in 1731, and John Wesley waited in vain for a letter that never came.
She rejoiced in the more congenial men friends whom she acquired on the other side of the water, and wished she only had such a circle in England.
Dean Swift speedily filled her horizon, and Dr. Delany, whom she afterwards married, made his appearance.
Life with the Dean of St. Patrick's was altogether more exciting than a theological friendship with little
"Primitive Christianity" complete in blinkers.
Swift
ASPASIA pinched her and corrected her English and wrote letters to her which she really coveted.
Her tone here is altogether different from Cyrus' beloved epistles, and it looks as though she considered his only in the ruck of the more ordinary letters which she received.
Writing to Swift in 1733 Aspasia says: "If I were writing to a common correspondent I should now make a fine flourish to excuse myself for not sooner answering the favor of your letter; but I must deal plainly with you, sir, and tell you (now do not be angry) that the fear of tiring you stopped my hand.
I value your correspondence so highly that I think of every way that may preserve it." Now in many of her letters to John Wesley she makes just that flourish to excuse herself for not answering his letters.
She protests too much a constant want of time, but will not hurt his feelings if flourishes will avail anything: "I have but a moment's time, and I cannot: employ it better than in answering Cyrus, though I doubtless appear unworthy of the favor he shows me, that Aspasia has been more unfortunate than ungrateful. The true reason I have not wrote has been my incapacity of doing it. A great weakness I had in my eyes, and the fear of its returning if I strained them too soon has been the only reason of my silence.
I have received all your letters and have been infinitely obliged by them."
John Wesley never got a letter out of her, tired eyes or not, all the time she was in Ireland.
It was only when she returned to England and found a languid moment that she put pen to paper to restart the flow of those earnest
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Cyrus letters.
But it was too late.
After all, the man had a fine pride tucked away about his little person.
He used to pray God to help him conquer his pride, but it stood him in good stead against the flourishes of the Aspasias of this world: "Doubtless you acted upon cool reflection; you declined the trouble of writing not because it was a trouble, but because it was a needless one.
And if so, what injury have you done yourself?
As for me, you could do me no injury by your silence.
It did indeed deprive me of much pleasure and of a pleasure from which I ought to have received much improvement.
But still, as it was one I had no title to but your goodness, to withdraw it was no injustice.
I sincerely thank you for what is past, and may the God of my salvation return it sevenfold into your bosom."
The curtain was down on Aspasia and up on the Holy Club.
Cheeks where blew the apple blossom and lips where cherries ripen might very easily wreck the career in time and in eternity of the Brand plucked from the burning.
Wesley had told himself that he was but creeping into the protection of these glorious women by setting up for himself the dear home intimacies which he missed in monastic Oxford, but well he knew that this strange warmth round the heart could portend nothing but danger.
Today Stanton Vicarage has been rebuilt and the arbor of Varanese is no more, but the place of Aspasia's sojourn stands as it stood in Wesley's day.
It is there at Buckland, but a few miles from Stanton, that the very spirit of that old eighteenth-century go
ASPASIA friendship can be recaptured.
There stands the old church and the glorious old manor house on the side of the hill. There is the long wide terrace where the friends must have walked and discussed, perchance, the nature of a sacrament.
There is the old stone wall with the door in it leading from the manor house to the church. How often must Aspasia have passed that way to her place in the squire's pew?
How often must she have raised her lovely eyes to the little serious man in the old pulpit and made mental notes of his sermon to discuss it the better with him afterwards?
Their ghosts have fled, and the modern villager responds neither to the names of Pendarves,
Delany or Wesley, but the old stone remains in a setting of Cotswold beauty which can never be forgotten.
It was one part of John Wesley's life, and the loveliness and the heart-warming there were to be important to him as an experience in itself.
Ten years and more were to pass over his diminutive head before he learned that to feel a warmth round the heart for God meant the revival of religion in England. gl
THE HOLY CLUB
THE system of self-examination and good works in the Holy Club at Oxford was so arranged as to leave no room for the flesh. Every odd moment was filled with prayer, or at least with ejaculatory prayer.
Every hour the members must take their bearings and probe into the state of their souls with that sudden switching on to the God of their salvation.
The modern Oxford Group is merely child's play to Wesley's holy endeavors.
There was "deep sharing" to the purpose and an inquisition into each other's walk and conduct that only a man with the hide of a rhinoceros could have suffered without going out of his mind.
It was no wonder that William Morgan, one of the most promising members, went stark, staring mad.
With John Wesley in this mood of relentless piety, suicide, to this young man, must have seemed the only way of escape.
In his frenzy he babbled all the time of Wesley and literally died of excess of holiness.
The manner of William Morgan's death might have given pause to a less determined man, but with an other-worldliness that is almost shocking, Wesley embraced Morgan's younger brother and urged him also on to the same celestial slaughter.
A love of dogs and of sport mercifully saved this boy, or the Q2
Dakine HV OOL Yor Ly UB old father in Ireland might have had to mourn for both his sons.
Young Morgan had the good sense to approach John Wesley, enthroned as President of the Holy Club, leading a very beautiful greyhound by the collar.
This was partaking of the nature of sin, but it sufficed to keep one's balance in the orgies of holiness.
The picture which this young man gives of the saints is edifying.
John Wesley set the pace, and the laughter and tears of the circle show a state of things bordering on the hysterical.
The breaking point could not be far to seek according to the young man with his hand on the greyhound's collar.
He says: '""They imagine they cannot be saved if they do not spend every hour, nay minute, of their lives in the service of God—they almost starve themselves in order to be able to relieve the poor and buy books for their conversion.
They endeavor to reform notorious whores and allay spirits in haunted houses.
They fast two days in the week, which has emaciated them to that degree that they are a frightful sight— they are become the jest of the whole University; they often cry for five minutes for their sins, then lift up their heads and eyes and return God thanks for the great mercies He has showed them in granting them such repentance, and then laugh immoderately as if they were mad."
It is as though the young man were watching some strange play from the stalls of a theater.
He sees every action and every movement of the actors, but he is not, himself, one of them, and knows not all that lies behind this desperate struggle for holiness.
Only one thing he
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knows, at the beginning of his University career, and that is, that for him escape is imperative.
He concludes his letter home with the urgent message: "I think it incumbent upon me to inform you that it is my opinion that if I am continued under Mr.
Wesley I shall be ruined."
The owner of the lovely greyhound, free of inhibitions and on tiptoe for excitement and glorious life, could only consider those first Oxford Methodists as lunatics.
He had not come by way of Epworth Rectory and burning nurseries nor by way of a broken heart in the arbor of Varanese.
He had not felt a burning heart turn to ashes or climbed the hill of difficulty and renunciation.
It was a terrible struggle this of St. Paul's warfare with the body of this death, for it hung too tightly round the neck of young manhood to be resisted without blood.
In the midst of this desperate fight for holiness at Oxford a bombshell was dexterously dropped by Samuel Wesley Junior.
This young man was a poet like his father, but not quite so penurious a one.
He was a great help to the family financially, and carried weight with his younger brothers.
He was happily married to a nut-brown maid who bore the charming name of Berry, and after leaving a trailing cloud of innocents behind him under the stones of the cloisters of Westminster Abbey, he had migrated to Blundell's School at Tiverton in Devon.
Those who walk over the worn stones of the cloisters at Westminster will see looking up at them the strange name of a little girl called "Nutty."
It is a queer