Flutters, feelings, and fancies: John Wesley's sentimental sermons and the spirit of the age.

Heady, Emily Walker

The entertainingly colorful old maid Tabitha Bramble, we learn midway through Tobias Smollett's The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), "has been praying, preaching, and catechizing among the methodists." Her perhaps feigned "manifestations and revelations" spread, virus-like, to her maid, Winifred Jenkins, who "has also her heart-hearings and motions of the spirit"--physical anomalies that she attributes to the growth of Christ within her, to her regenerating spiritual self, less than to her habitual nervous "flutter" and "vapours" (266). For Smollett the "inward motions" so integral to Methodism are grounds for critique: that Winifred Jenkins could take her quasi-hysterical flutters as signs of divine favor, he asserts, signals a fundamental confusion of universal faith with private feeling, of eternal grace with fleeting sensation. Versions of this critique have haunted cultural history well beyond Smollett, in the form, for example, of the popular minister Edward Irving's 1828 assertion that Methodism privileges "feelings" and "fancies" over the objective, real "sacraments and ordinances of the church" (42). Irvhag's claim rests on the notion that private emotion cannot stand for or verify abstract theological truth, an assumption traceable through literary history as well in, for instance, the Romantic ultra-subjectivity of William Wordsworth's tranquil recollections or, conversely, the social determinism of George Eliot's Middlemarch. Both of these texts operate in a paradigm that sets the individual against culture and private experience at odds with the social stream. Post-Romantic critiques of Wesleyan Methodism suggest the inherent separateness of the universal and the particular, the social and the personal, and the eternal and the finite; they assume, in other words, that the body cannot logically serve as a proving ground for abstract truth. Even as Methodist flutters and vapors sow the seeds for such critiques, however, the ongoing presence of Wesleyan conversion tropes in literature may lead us to revise our understanding of the relationship between theology and physiology and to see the epistemological opposition of body to spirit and truth as something less than natural.

In this essay I want to trace the relationship between the conversion narratives we see in literature and John Wesley's homiletics of conversion. This relationship, I will argue, informs the way we speak not only about how individual characters learn to live in the world (and in their bodies) but also about how literary periods come to see themselves as such. The frequent post-Wesley apparitions of Methodist conversion tropes suggest not just that we can understand literary selfhood in terms of conversion but also that such tropes provide a productive site on which culture as a whole can construct a self-image. This self-image takes the form of periodization--the movement, for example, from Sentimentalism to Romanticism to Realism. This, however, is an ironic movement: to the extent that Wesley was himself an eighteenth-century literary figure, shaped by sentimental literature and himself shaping later understandings of Sentimentalism, his conversion narratives carry sentimental baggage--especially the notion that the body can tell the truth or that, for instance, collective weeping over Clarissa's death suggests something significant about the way the world works. Insofar as it uses Methodist structures of conversion as a way to think of identity as a coherent, self-aware turn away from whatever period of artistic sin came before, post-1740s literature is thus built on a contradiction. Literary movements would see themselves as complete, self-enclosed, and redeemed from the past, yet Wesley's own literary influences inform and constitute the very terms in which we think of the process of conversion. A realist Wesleyan conversion is therefore also a nod to Realism's buried sentimental roots. We can see the lineaments of these roots most plainly, I will argue finally, in literature's ever-changing relationship to the body.

Before I go on, I should acknowledge that discussing literary periodization presents some serious difficulties. We often rely on traditional divisions of literary history--the notion that Victorian Realism follows Romanticism, which follows eighteenth-century forms such as Sentimentalism--to structure our course offerings, our journals of criticism, and our self-definition as scholars. At the same time, however, we question these divisions by asserting, for instance, that postmodernism is a reincarnation of Romanticism (see Riede 240-78). The skepticism with which we approach the notion, to choose another example, that there was a self-contained "Victorian frame of mind" suggests that we are dissatisfied with the way in which periodization obscures transactions between what are often treated as discrete movements in literary history. If there is something artificial about breaking literary history into distinct eras, such periodization is in part a product of the way nineteenth-century literature reflected on itself, for these reflections often employed language reminiscent of Wesleyan conversion narratives. Thus, even as a realist like Charles Dickens would want to assert his identity as a Victorian, and even as the uber-Romantic Wordsworth would want to confine his poetic experience to his own mind and time, the terms in which both authors assert their identities disclose by their very form, Wesleyan conversion, the impossibility of being simply themselves.

Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833-34), the work that for many literary historians inaugurates the proverbial Victorian Age in literature, thematizes the relationship between individual conversion and wide-ranging cultural change that Wesley's homilies make possible. This work coopts Wesley's language and reformulates conversion as a movement for the book's hero-in-crisis, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, between life eras--from paralyzing doubt to secular faith. As a symptom and theorization of the issue I want to address, Sartor Restartus has consistently led readers and critics to take this conversion scene as a description of the movement from one literary era to another, summed up by Carlyle as the movement from the dominance of the Romantic Byron to the proto-realist Goethe.

Before taking up Professor Teufelsdrockh's secular conversion, however, I should for the sake of clarity give a fuller explanation of Wesley's teachings on religious conversion. During the 1740s, the first full decade of his peripatetic ministry, Wesley found himself embroiled in much controversy. Although he never wished to split with the Anglican Church (and was, in fact, among the most devout and High Church of his Oxford contemporaries), he found himself increasingly thought of as a threat to Anglican doctrine, Anglican practice, and Anglican identity. Reading through the volumes of sermons that Wesley collected to train later Methodist ministers, however, I am struck by how uncontroversial they would seem to be. (1) Calmly reasoned, rarely polemical, and soundly in line with the Thirty-Nine Articles, Wesley's sermons are transgressive only insofar as the reactions they produced--the flutters of a Winifred Jenkins, for example--might be thought rude, crude, and socially unacceptable. (2)

Most of these sermons are dedicated to fleshing out the meaning of Wesley's "quadrilateral"--Scripture, tradition, experience, and reason, his four-part schema of doctrinal fundamentals--for everyday life. The particularity and pragmatism with which Wesley conceives of his quadrilateral grant it a prominent (and controversial) place in religious and literary history. (3) As Gregory Clapper notes, the stumbling block for Wesley's contemporaries was the looseness of the way in which he used the term "experience" (2). For Wesley, if we are to be more than "honest heathens," the disposition of our hearts must point toward Christ; we must choose God instead of self (1:119-20). (4) This disposition will cause the "mind of Christ" to shape our thoughts and will lead to all-encompassing peace, an absence of fear, and an entirely new perspective on the world (162, 174). For the Christian, Wesley asserts, selfhood is a non-entity, something to be overcome and negated. In this absence of self, one might ask, how is a person to know that she is saved? How might unquestionable certainty about one's eternal fate be secured? Although for Wesley true religion is "inward" it "exerts itself" in our outward conversation. A Christian's character might look any number of ways, but true Christians publicly mirror the attributes detailed in the Sermon on the Mount: poverty of spirit, righteousness, peacemaking, and so forth (219,517, 533). We might thus, Wesley suggests in line with his quadrilateral, reasonably test our behavior by the authority of Scripture, as interpreted through the lens of the Apostolic Fathers and Anglican tradition. The first step to assurance for Wesley, however, is self-awareness. We must recognize, he maintains, that we are absolutely dependent on God (213). Faith that God can and will erase our sinful indebtedness, Wesley argues, primes the pump for an outpouring of God's grace--a grace that we can physically feel (119).

Here is where the difficulty occurs. Although, as George Lawton notes, Wesley rarely speaks of the body without asserting its corruptibility, he also relies on his own body to give him assurance of salvation (21). On 24 May 1738, after years of theological study, pastoral appointments in England, and disastrous missions work in Georgia, Wesley found himself unwillingly attending a meeting in Aldersgate Street where, after hearing a reading from Martin Luther, he felt his heart "strangely warmed." Even though, as Gordon Wakefield suggests, this was not the only moment we might read as Wesley's personal conversion, the physical sensation, a sort of concrete manifestation of his metaphorical change of heart, did mark for him an assurance of his salvation: he felt--and thus knew--that he was forgiven (175-76). The eradication of the self that occurs in conversion is felt in the flesh; we feel that we are not ourselves, and we use our bodies as a litmus test for salvation. Wesley consistently depicts conversion in physical terms--as a movement from senselessness to sensation, from numb aloofness to sensibility. Natural man, he says, is in a state of spiritual sleep, unable to sense the things of God: "His spiritual senses are not awake; they discern neither spiritual good nor evil [...;] having no inlets for the knowledge of spiritual things, all the avenues of his soul being shut up, he is in gross, stupid ignorance of whatever he is most concerned to know" (251). Later in the same sermon Wesley characterizes natural man as one subject to "the fumes of those opiates" that dull his sense of his spirit's being "wounded" (257). Although Wesley, outside of the ungraspable concept of grace, cannot explain exactly how it is that those opiate-like fumes may dissipate, the idea here that he wants to make conversion physiological is strong: we feel it in the body; it happens to the body.

Richard E. Brantley takes Wesley's attention to the spiritual senses as an apologia for the heavily influential ideas of John Locke, whom Wesley read and liked, as much as for Christianity (1, 22). Although Brantley's observation that Wesley's "physiology of conversion" (5) may suggest an attempt at a synthesis between dominant currents in eighteenth-century philosophy and evangelical theology is acute, he overemphasizes the extent to which Wesley fits Locke's paradigm. Wesley's idea of original sin, for example, hardly fits the tabula rasa model (Brantley 48, 59, 87). His attention to the disruptive moment of embodied assurance, more than to the ever-accumulating weight of selfhood, further differentiates Wesley from Locke. In Locke, of course, sensory experience builds consciousness: "The senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet: the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in memory and names got to them" (65). In Wesley, however, the process, though similar, is fundamentally discontinuous; natural man's "cabinet" is emptied by the process of conversion, all previous writing "blotted out" (141), and he is granted a new set of senses whereby he can apprehend the things of God. While in Locke sensory impressions build consciousness, and thus contribute to a continuous narrative of self-addition, in Wesley the spiritual senses, of which we become aware in that moment our hearts are warmed, are markers of grace and markers of disruption. Although the process by which one comes to be a Christian make take years, then, the moment in which one senses that change of heart--a felt, experienced moment--is instantaneous. The new spiritual senses serve a testamentary function; they are, Wesley says, "an evidence, a divine evidence and conviction of things not seen; not visible, not perceivable either by sight, or by any other of the external senses" (qtd. in Brantley 87). The spiritual senses, in other words, serve as a standard of proof that is entirely private yet that ought to be, Wesley argues, good enough for all. Offering an experience that, like Winifred Jenkins' flutters and vapors, cannot be shared communally, Wesley's depiction of the spiritual senses nonetheless works to integrate individuals into a believing community--a community built on the same grounds that the sentimental novel used to garner its cultural authority: the notion that the body can tell.

Before I return to Sartor Resartus, I want to skip ahead (and behind) in literary history to see more clearly how a Romantic such as Wordsworth and a mid-Victorian such as Dickens assimilated and revised Wesley's ideas. Tracing the figurative conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge from miserliness to mad generosity reveals "A Christmas Carol" to be a narrative about spectatorial absorption: Scrooge loses himself in the scenes that the Christmas spirits show him and wakes up convinced that "he will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future! [...] The Spirits of all Three shall strive within [him]" (79). (6) Often taken as "secular scripture" (Davis 14), "A Christmas Carol" asserts that Scrooge will use such scenes of absorption to learn to put his own miserly selfhood happily aside to make room for his new insights. It thus exemplifies the secular conversion scenes, major and minor, that we see throughout other literature following Wesley. In Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," similarly, we learn that the poet, taking his sister after five years to see the ruins, reevaluates the scene before him by opening himself up to her perception of it: "[...] in thy voice I catch / The language of my former heart," such that "this green pastoral landscape, were to me / More dear, both for themselves, and for thy sake" (573). For both Dickens, the Victorian heir of eighteenth-century Sentimentalism, and Wordsworth, who carried Romanticism well into the Victorian era with the multiple editions of his Prelude (1799, 1805, 1850), scenes of conversion involve a widening of perspective on the part of the "converted" and a striking temporal displacement--a coexistence, for example, of Scrooge's past with his present and future, or the imagined simultaneity of Wordsworth's trips to Tintern Abbey. While for Wesley conversion involves demarcating one's life into periods, a "before" and an "after," a "then" and a "now," for Dickens and Wordsworth conversion suggests convergences of disparate perspectives and frames--visual and temporal absorption.

These Dickensian and Wordsworthian conversions are representative of a trend in literature after Wesley in which scenes of secular conversion mirror the structure and vocabulary of a Wesleyan Christian conversion, particularly in their attention to perspective and to conversion as a moment when one learns to see the world through new eyes. However, their revised understanding of temporality not as a movement from past to present but as a coexistence of past with present entails a complicated divergence. Wesley asks his followers to empty themselves completely, to see themselves as vacant, corrupt, and indebted so that they can be filled, Scrooge-like, with the spirit. This filling, he promises, will lead to a change in perspective, a Wordsworth-like ability to be "always standing on the tower" seeing all (311). For Wesley temporality figures in conversion only insofar as it allows a convert to mark the moment at which he began his new life; it demarcates past and present, then and now. For Dickens and Wordsworth, however, temporality is of the essence, and we see in the movement from Wesley to Wordsworth to Dickens an increasing sense that conversion is a form of socialization--the movement of the individual's spirit in rhythm with the spirit of the age. (7) Scrooge's dream-journey, as I have suggested, is a surrender to the series of scenes before him, a surrender not just to their striking visuality but also to their temporality. He must feel himself invested in the cheerful Zeitgeist of his childhood, of London's bittersweet present, and the bleakness of the future, much as Wordsworth's time-spirit is Dorothy: she allows him, if only for a moment, to reintegrate himself into a time five years ago, when Tintern Abbey was new to him, and thus to feel his own present sensations all the more keenly. In attending to the temporality of the present, and to the sense that it is the culminating moment of all of history, Dickens and Wordsworth imply the continuing, ghost-like persistence of the past in the present, and their nostalgia serves as a way to mark out the personal progress, good or bad, that they have made. At the same time, however, in insisting that one can revisit the past only through the miraculous mechanism of a ghost story, or through a more realistic (albeit phantasmic) nostalgia, both authors further firm up our sense of being in the here and now. Although seeming to collapse boundaries between temporal eras, Dickens' and Wordsworth's time-travel in fact suggests the impossibility, in the real world at least, of crossing temporal boundaries. We are, like it or not, in our own age, in our own bodies.

Such conversion scenes curiously echo Wesley in their attention to the senses, or to embodied perspective, but their revision of the role of temporality in conversion points to a wider cultural movement away from the notion that the body can serve as a marker of a division between past and present, to one in which the body and sensory experience materialize the here and now. In figuring Wesley's Holy Spirit as the spirit of the age, that is, Dickens and Wordsworth insist that they are part of a world bound up in real bodies and real physical phenomena, tempered and supplemented (but not undercut) by the illusory scenes of Scrooge's conversion and the reflective, self-produced nostalgia that colors Wordsworth's aesthetic awakening. Their insistence on seeing the body as a present-tense object and the mind as a time-traveling abstraction suggests the impossibility that flesh and image, or materiality and discourse, might converge. In this model the body's role in conversion is ironic. On the one hand, it carries the weight of history into the present and insists on historical continuity in the face of religious or discursive change. On the other hand, even as Wordsworth and Dickens accept the rationalist opposition of faith to experience, the suddenness that characterizes both scenes of conversion implies that in reality the weight of accumulated history sits but lightly on the poet's and Scrooge's shoulders. That is, in their careful alignment with the spirit of the age, Wordsworth and Dickens bear the accumulated weight of the past that molds this spirit, but with their sudden insight they suggest that a flight from or reevaluation of their own history is possible--and even desirable. (8)

To some extent this is an irony present in Wesley as well. Although for him the moment of assurance is instantaneous, a road-to-Damascus awakening, the ineffable process by which one reaches this moment--conversion--is an often lengthy "dark night of the soul." The epistemological shift that Wesley introduces with his attention to sudden changes of heart and adjustments in perspective thus does not inherently oppose revolutionary change to gradual progress (Lenz 115). Rather, Wesley reads the suddenness with which we sense God's grace as evidence: this dizzying shift in perspective is not about being saved but about knowing we are saved; it is, in other words, a way of marking out the boundaries of our own identities, a way of summing up the meaning of our various parts. Both Wordsworth and Dickens thus use Wesleyan conversion language to delineate not their own frames of mind, or their own particularities, but rather how they came to understand themselves as selves. That Wesleyan conversion could figure so prominently in movements as diverse--or even diametrically opposed--as Romanticism and Realism signifies, then, the functionality of such scenes, not so much for nailing down what Romanticism or Realism is but rather for thinking about how one begins to define such a thing as an historical or literary era.

In attempting to firm up their own identities as something other than or beyond their own histories, critics and writers have often treated their labors as conversions away from whatever came before them. A Romantic like Wordsworth is thus not a sentimentalist; a Victorian is neither a Samuel Richardson nor a Wordsworth. In so doing, however, they have perhaps underestimated the extent to which using such Wesley-inflected conversion language maintains the currency of eighteenth-century literary culture, of which Wesley's widely published homilies were an integral part. (9) Not only, though, did Wesley's works flood the literary market; he also mimicked in his preaching the physical structures of reader response underlying the novels of, say, Richardson. As Bernd Lenz suggests, "the development of Methodist homiletics and homilies precedes and then parallels the rise of sentimentalism in literature" (124), just as later Leslie Stephen would see Sentimentalism as a form of decadence born out of Wesley's luxuriantly introspective preaching (2:437). What Lenz and Stephen suggest falls in line with Smollett's earlier assertion that Methodism encourages the production of emotions to which we assign inflated cultural value: because we cry over our sins or over Clarissa's or Little Nell's death, according to this logic, we know that we are good people. These are also critiques born out of the post-Wesley conviction, which we have seen in Wordsworth and Dickens, that the body, temporally and materially bound in the here and now, is something other than a vehicle for timeless, abstract truth. Insofar as Wesleyan homiletics and sentimental literature work on the audience's body in similar ways, a critique of one's epistemology--the understanding that one can test universal truth on the pulses, or that an individual's tears suggest something abstract-constitutes a critique of the other's. Asking for physical displays of emotion as evidence of conversion, conviction, or right thinking, both Wesleyan homiletics and sentimental literature play off the notion that the word ought to overtake the body--a notion that seems as foreign to us now as does the idea that thousands of readers reacted to Clarissa's tragic elements with felt grief.

Curiously, however, the critique that Smollett would level at Methodism--and that Lenz and Stephen would accept as a flaw in Wesley's reasoning--delivers only a glancing blow to the anatomy of his theology. For Wesley, in fact, the emotions were not to be indulged. Wesley's sister Emily recounts that he had his own feelings under tight rein; he thought of "natural affections as a great weakness if not a sin" (qtd. in Outler 10). Wesley's apparent anti-emotionalism caused him some theological troubles. Struggling, for instance, with the biblical revelation that Jesus himself had emotions, Wesley says: "The affections of Jesus were not properly passions, but voluntary emotions, which were wholly in His own power. And this tender trouble, which He now voluntarily sustained, was full of the highest order and reason" (qtd. in Clapper 54-55). The right emotions are the ones we choose to have. Further, Wesley asserts, like Jesus we can learn to control our emotions, and we can turn right emotions into right habits (Maddox 5, 17). The resulting habitual, rational affections will point God-ward and will bear spiritual fruit (Knight 195). Cultivating the religious affections, for Wesley, is a way of situating oneself vis-a-vis the world: they are "dispositional, relational and interpretive of the world" and are, further, a product and producer of narrative. In understanding God, for instance, not as a friend whom he loves but as an enemy who has been reconciled, the convert lives within the frame of his conversion story--and, indeed, lives out the master plan of salvation (Knight 195-96). The new birth for Wesley, then, signals not so much an effusive, emotive display but rather a narration of perspective--a carefully calculated, fresh way of seeing the world and the self. While Wordsworth and Scrooge rely on the body, that vessel for the spirit of the age, to bear the weight of history into the present, Wesley relies on narrative to do that work. He sees history as discursive and the body as a way of gauging its progress. What precisely is sentimental about Wesleyan conversion might thus cause critical confusion, for what Lenz and Stephen are reacting against in Wesley is not a lack of restraint, not collective misbehavior in the name of religion, but rather a marked shift in the place of the body in culture from Wesley's time to their own. Understanding the emotions as both dispositional and discursive, as a means of situating and narrating the self in the world, Wesley grants the body significant authority as a marker and maker of social meaning; at the same time, however, he wants to see the body as anything but natural. Hardly a site on which involuntary blushes, for instance, might be thought to expose their owners' selfhood, (10) Wesley's bodies are carefully composed, and even their involuntary reactions are built piece by piece, narrated into existence by the process of conversion.

These tensions underlying Wesley's model of conversion help to explain the extraordinary influence of what is perhaps the most important scene of personal (and cultural) conversion in nineteenth-century literature--that of Carlyle's Romantic-Victorian hero Professor Teufelsdrockh. Working off the same fundamentally discontinuous model of the self that differentiates Wesley's embodied subject from Locke's, the former dissenter Carlyle uses the language of Methodist conversion in Sartor Restatus to flesh out his hero's movement from doubt to blessed--albeit secular--certainty. Ironically, Carlyle was no fan of the sentimental: he reacted strongly, for instance, against Mrs. Oliphant's writing, using terms similar to those with which Smollett and Irving reacted against Methodism, and he was hardly kind to Methodism itself. (11) Nevertheless, Carlyle's famous depiction of Teufelsdrockh's conversion, the story of emergence from a navel-gazing Romantic paradigm into a more pragmatic epistemology, suggests a mid-point between heavily socialized Victorian understandings of conversion and Wordsworthian introspection in language that draws as heavily on the body as sentimental literature. Having decided not to submit to the depressing fate the universe would have for him, Teufelsdr6ckh emerges into what he calls "the everlasting yea," a state of social action instead of gloomy, introspective despair. For Teufelsdrockh, as for Wesley, this state comes about after a long, agonizing period of self-annihilation, what Carlyle calls "the first preliminary moral act" (142). Teufelsdr6ckh imagines that to the skeptic Voltaire he would assert that his new-found faith is real because he can feel it, much as Wesley feels his conversion in his warmed heart: "Is the God present, felt in my own Heart a thing which Herr von Voltaire will dispute out of me; or dispute into me? [...] Feel it in thy heart, and then say whether it is of God! This is Belief; all else is Opinion" (147). Although Carlyle's (or Teufelsdrockh's) God is something other than Wesley's, the standards of proof that Teufelsdrockh uses to ascertain the reality of his conversion are structurally identical to Wesley's: he knows that he has converted because he can feel it. He, like Wesley, has replaced abstract, substance-less selfhood with physicality and has moved the grounds for proving abstract truth into everyday sensory experience. "Yes here, in this poor miserable, hampered, despicable Actual," Teufelsdrockh says, "wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal" (149). So had Wesley asserted, nearly a hundred years before, that one must treat holiness as the property of the present; if one wants to come out clean in the wash, one must think of daily life as an ideal lens through which to examine his spots and stains (646).

At the same time as Carlyle embodies Teufelsdr6ckh's conversion in Wesleyan terms, his divergences from Wesley play out the cultural ramifications of Methodist logic. While Wesley, echoing Socrates, urges his congregations to conversion with the maxim "Know thyself" (696), Carlyle suggests the more practical maxim "Know what thou canst work at" (126). For Wesley there is no tension between embodied self-knowledge and social activity: feeling yourself to be a Christian, he urges, go and do God's will (584). In this, of course, his logic mirrors that of the sentimental novel: cry over Clarissa; then imitate her virtue. For the fed-up Romantic Carlyle, however, one must choose to be or to do; one must choose between the self and society, between the spirit of introspection and the spirit of the age. Even as Carlyle adopts the structure of Wesleyan conversion with his insistence that Teufelsdrockh's conversion can be felt in the flesh, then, his Romantic-Victorian opposition of the individual to society suggests that Wesley's paradigm--and, by extension, Sentimentalism's--has a logical flaw at its core. Wesleyan language for Carlyle serves to point out a problem in Methodism's sentimental roots. Put crudely (and ahistorically), Sentimentalism is flawed because it falsely attempts to impose a Victorian sense of duty on Romantic self-analysis; it treats pleasurable, passionate introspection as productive social work. In other words, it suggests a means by which social beings caught up too completely in the utilitarian "Mill of death" (Carlyle, Sartor 127) could be productively introspective and make feeling useful. While Wesley's model of conversion may be built squarely on top of what Carlyle would see as Sentimentalism's fault line, it is only this faultiness that allows it to move so fluidly between the Romantic and Victorian registers that Carlyle would separate.

Reading Wesley through the lens of Carlyle obviates Wesley's unique, compelling role as a philosopher of the particular, interested in discovering the place of real bodies in abstract experience and the ways in which an individual's psychology might become a social thing. And, as a philosopher, Wesley is in good company. While Ren6 Descartes (and David Hume after him) would think of emotions as inactive, unlike the will or the capacity for judgment, Aristotle, one of Wesley's intellectual mentors, argues that "beliefs, bodily motions, and physiological changes are inseparable elements of emotion": feelings point toward concrete action as explicitly as a decision to move a limb does (Calhoun and Solomon 6, 43). The authority we ascribe to feelings has strong philosophical and theological grounds for Wesley, grounds no less fundamental than the Incarnation itself--the notion that body can encompass Logos, that flesh is a vehicle for narrative, and that what we feel suggests what we are. In fact, Wesley's homiletics were often thought shocking, particularly early in his ministry, precisely because of their attempt to make personal the truths of the Thirty-Nine Articles and to assert the presence of an abstract God in even the knee-scrapes and spilled milk of everyday life (cf. Lawton 292). As lames Downey notes, until the Methodist movement emerged in the 1740s, "rational, ethical homiletics" dominated religious discourse (17). Hardly that of a logician interested only in the abstract nature of Christianity, Wesley's force (like that of his evangelical contemporary George Whitefield), Downey argues, comes primarily from his extraordinary personality--his refusal to be disembodied and his apparent belief in what he said (20). It comes, in other words, from his willingness to assert the real particularity of God in his own life. Stephen proposes that Wesley's sermons resist the "dull, duller, dullest" regimen of eighteenth-century homiletics by privileging the bodily over the intellectual and the engaging over dry-as-dust Oxford religious rhetoric. They seem, in other words, to play out the logic of Incarnational theology rhetorically (2:337).

It is thus hardly surprising that Wesley's followers so often signaled their piety with violent physical displays of emotion, for they wanted, in line with the logic of Sentimentalism, to narrate their conversions with their own bodies. Wesley himself had mixed feelings about the propriety of such behavior; in fact, he says, a preacher ought to avoid the possibility of driving the crowd into mass hysteria, "loud shouting, horrid unnatural screaming, repeating the same words twenty or thirty times, jumping two or three feet high, and throwing about the arms or legs both of men and women, in a manner shocking not only to religion, but to common decency" (qtd. in Stephen 2:423). Curiously, as many historians have noted, people were thrown into such a fever-pitch not in the aftermath of conversion but rather as a precursor to it. They displayed their desire for divine intervention by thrashing about; feeling the grace of God most often left them calm and, as in Wesley's own conversion, prompted no visible displays. (12) In Wesley's narrative physical sensation marks a fundamental disconnection between inside and outside, as his hyperawareness of his body (his warmed heart) is matched at once by an utter absence of self. He is a spirit-filled body, and the feelings he senses are not his own. Among the Winifred Jenkins-like characters in Wesley's congregations, however, physical effusiveness seems to signal self-awareness knowledge of one's sinfulness and fear for one's eternal fate. In Wesley's model the body is reliable precisely because it is not personal, not the self, while in his followers' model quite the opposite is true. Thus Wesley discouraged such displays because for him they signaled not the self-emptying moment of conversion but rather a self-aggrandizing desire to enact religious experience. These distinctions, however, did not resonate in more secular discussions of early Methodist practice. What, observers wondered, did Wesley's most demonstrative followers hope to accomplish by such physical displays? Were they publicly performing a sort of grief ritual for their own fallen state? Or were they so caught up in their own feelings that they had no awareness that others were watching? This discordance, built into the very structure of Methodist practice, helps to set the terms for wide-ranging debate about the nature of the embodied social self.

As I have suggested, in experiencing the flame of the Holy Spirit as a literally warmed heart, Wesley seemed to some, the earnest Victorian agnostic Leslie Stephen included, to displace the voice of God entirely and to refigure it as sentimentality (2:415). The shape of this critique has shifted over time, indicating not just that Wesley and Sentimentalism did indeed cross paths but also that the way we read Wesleyan (or sentimental) literature signals our need to take a hard look at our own reading practices. Smollett, of course, sees Methodism as overly self-obsessed and faultily invested in seeing the divine in ordinary experience, yet he does not deny the reality of Winifred Jenkins' flutters--he merely charges her with misreading them. Later critics, however, would posit that there was nothing real or material, nothing truly embodied, about Methodism's warmed hearts and physiological conversions: the Methodists, in short, were faking. Henry Abelove has continued in this vein, arguing that the Methodists rejected games, theater, and so on because they had their own playhouse (104-05). However, the idea that a movement so inherently theatrical, so inherently false, could wield the force it did in the eighteenth century (and continues to wield today) suggests that later critiques of Methodism fail to get at the movement's full epistemological complexity, a complexity visible in Methodism's much-demonstrated ability to generate apparently antithetical discourses--to seem both too sentimental and too theatrical, too introverted and too public. Of course, we could claim that Methodism does so because it is itself conflicted, a heterogeneous movement put to varying, even contradictory, purposes. We could further propose that the two different models of selfhood put forward by Wesley and his followers--one in which the inside and outside are inherently disjunctive, another in which they operate in tandem--entail the possibility for theatricality: we have a choice either to be or to seem. Methodism, by this logic, stumbles into an ideological hole it has dug for itself. The way in which these critiques have changed, however, implies not so much that the Methodists needed to find a way to control their own widely divergent practices with, for instance, a new catechism, but rather that the ways in which we think about such heterogeneity say as much about us as about them.

Our tendency to read Methodism as either sentimental or theatrical, either too private or too public, either real or false, diverges from the eighteenth-century reading practices we see in the likes of Smollett, in that we have increasingly refused over time to trust the body as a mechanism for truth-telling and have increasingly separated the inner and outer selves. In taking the flaw at the heart of Winifred Jenkins' Methodism to be one of misreading, Smollett signals that he believes a body can be read but that this reading ought to remain private, separate from the sphere of public performance. Pitting the individual against culture, private against public, and the body against the "buried life," later readings of Wesley attest to the presence of a set of reading practices--practices we have yet to shake off--that are interested less in the individual's relation to himself than in situating the individual within the amorphous spirit of the age. In this frame any attempt at reading the body participates in a discussion about the role of the individual within his community. If we believe our bodies, we must then prove the social worth of our private experience; if we mistrust the flesh, we must privatize feelings. Because it jars against this separation of abstract truth and material reality, Wesley's theology of the body constitutes a language in which this later debate about the role of the individual body in social life can be contested. Treating the body as a bridge between the particular and the universal, Wesley's homilies open a way for individual conversion to be seen as relevant for the whole of society. In practice such discontinuous conversion narratives might offer a way for a culture increasingly invested in abstract notions of self-interest to conceive of itself as something other than the product of (or a reaction against) something else.

The conversion scenes I have discussed follow Wesley's model in that they construct selfhood around the notion that how we see the world structures who we are. Perspective is identity, and the way we read--both books and the world as a whole--depends on the physical frame in which we locate ourselves. The heavily embodied nature of perspective, however, particularly when it comes to resemble something like "publicity" or "the spirit of the age" involves a multifaceted problem. Where does the authority of the body stop? Where, for that matter, does it start? Is it possible to feel in my flesh the dynamic of a whole society and bring my own rhythms in line with, say, Britain's in the 1840s? We might consider just a few formulations of this problem. For example, we might question whether this notion that the body increasingly belongs more to the public and less to the private sphere informs the logic behind the idea that a marketplace should consist of free agents working together. Or we might ask how Benjamin Disraeli could assert in 1848 that every man ought to contribute his voice to government, which he says is the spirit of the age (13). Does not the idea that one should exercise individual agency because it is his duty somehow feel like a contradiction? Finally, we might question the growing sense in the nineteenth century that the individual is inherently at odds with society--that, in George Eliot's compelling metaphor, we are threaded together as in a web. Christopher Herbert extends this into the world of the novel: "Individuality is effectively defined within the rhetorical system of nineteenth-century novels as one's capacity for resisting the social pressures of conformity" (259). In this formulation, if one wants to be an individual, one has to fight the system; if one wants to be thought of as a public man, or at least one with a sociable bent, one must resist the demands of one's own body and surrender to the spirit of the age.

This logic suggests a certain negation of natural emotion or desire, the idea that what we conceive of as self-gratification is an illusion. Here, for example, is D. H. Lawrence declaring in his characteristically unembarrassed fashion, "Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got" (qtd. in Robinson 121). More recently, the crusty Anglican clergyman Peter Mullen has described sentimentality as "what is left when everything substantial has been taken away--form, content, order and reasonable purpose" (103). Mullen's assertion that sentimentality fails to bridge flesh and Logos recalls, finally, the postliberal theologian George Lindbeck, who argues that failing to teach about Christ's incarnate atonement makes room for a therapy school of Christianity; universal religious truth, in this model, is no larger than any one person's need to feel better about himself (235). Asserting Incarnationalism as a cure for the sort of phantasmic sentimentality that Stephen thought Wesley encouraged, these theologians would seem to urge us to turn back the clock. Introducing such a cure for theological laxity, however, would hardly be so easy as this, for it is just our imbrication in a deeply anti-Incarnational cultural frame, one that opposes word to flesh and interiority to materiality, that makes this critique possible in the first place.

Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough's anti-Incarnational assertion that "religion has been the psychotherapy of the ages" suggests that Mullen's and Lindbeck's worst fears have come true: we have set aside a Word-made-flesh model of Christianity in favor of a narrow neo-Sentimentalism in which we chase after a non-existent means of self-gratification (x). However, insofar as Goodenough sees religion as entirely abstract, entirely immaterial, we can also trace in him the influence of the nineteenth-century thought patterns that make Wesley so hard for us to understand. For instance, we can see woven through Goodenough's nervy declaration the threads of Friedrich Schleiermacher's earlier assertion that true religion is found within as the "sum of all higher feelings" (94). Schleiermacher, many theologians have noted, paved the way for modern-day liberal theology based not as much on universal truth as on subjective experience. If for Wesley the body is a site to display evidence of God's work, for Schleiermacher the body matters little: conversion happens entirely within--in the mind, in the heart. The secular conversion scenes we see in nineteenth-century literature thus often suggest a skeptical view of the flesh, the idea that it can provide evidence of something entirely false, and its signs, even when they proceed from someone without any observable degree of self-consciousness, may point to nothing in particular. Upon his secular conversion, for example, Scrooge is seen "laughing and crying in the same breath," hardly the most legible of physical displays (Dickens 79). And Wordsworth, we might imagine, simply stands there looking at his sister. The body in these formulations is little more than dead weight, but, perhaps ironically, it is a weight necessary if one is to apprehend the longtime-coming spirit of the age and to act in light of it.

On the question of embodiment, Carlyle again has his finger on the pulse of his culture. In his half-autobiographical Reminiscences (1866) he describes his own conversion in terms remarkably similar to those in which he presents Teufelsdrockh's. In so doing, he not only foregrounds the problem of conversion as a cultural phenomenon but also suggests that the place of the body in conversion, if indeed it has a place at all, has shifted over the three decades since he wrote Sartor Resartus. As the narrative goes, after a year of meditating and musing, his thoughts traveling "through Eternity, through Time, and through Space," Carlyle suddenly finds that he "had conquered all [his] skepticisms, agonising doubtings, fearful wrestlings with the foul and vile and soul-murdering Mud-gods of my Epoch" (320-21). Conversion for him entails a flight from the material weight of history that culture carries into the present, a flight permitted by an elevation in perspective and a throwing off of the weight of the flesh: [I] was emerging, free in spirit, into the eternal blue of ether,--where, blessed be Heaven, I have, for the spiritual part, ever since lived; looking down upon the welterings of my poor fellow-creatures, in such multitudes and millions, still stuck in that fatal element; and have had no concern whatever in their Puseyisms, Ritualisms, Metaphysical controversies and cobwebberies; and no feeling of my own, except honest silent pity for the serious or religious part of them, and occasional indignation, for the poor world's sake, at the frivolous, secular and impious part, with their Universal Suffrages, their Nigger [sic] Emancipations, Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection Societies, and 'Unexampled Prosperities,' for the time being! [...] I understood well what the old Christian people meant by their 'Conversion' [...]. (321)

While Wesley's Christians stand on towers, seeing all through a God's-eye view, Carlyle is able to gain a similar vantage point by divorcing himself from his era's material "Mud-gods" of self-worship. However, even as he adopts Wesley's language of perspective with his assertion that conversion entails a separation from the irritations of everyday life, Carlyle also refuses, at the distance of so many years from Teufelsdr6ckh's half-Romantic and half-Victorian conversion, to move his own body into his frame of reference, perhaps because he realizes that with embodiment comes participation in the spirit of the age.

For the Christian, however, Wesley's hermeneutics coherently interpret a fragmented world not because his perspective disavows the body-versus-self binary in which Carlyle refuses to participate, but because the perspective from which he interprets is unitary: it is God's. Self-vacating so that the spirit of God can fill him, as wine fills a skin, Wesley sees daffy life within the "universal frame" that he says God's voice calls forth (589). The biblical text reconfigured as embodied selfhood, that is, constitutes a coherent perspective, a story that frames and constitutes the world with the easy authority of a novel's omniscient narrator. This embodied reading practice for Wesley is a way to flee skepticism: "When we desire and seek nothing but God, clouds and doubts vanish away" (614). Thus the integration of the individual into the community, not his resistance to it, is in Wesley a matter not of shared evidence or shared standards of proof, components of the materialism Carlyle fears, but of perspective.

If Wesley and Carlyle want to embrace a unitary perspective, Wesley in the body and Carlyle out of it, Wordsworth and Dickens seem to suggest an alternative. Here, though, the Christian Wesley and the unaffiliated theist Carlyle diverge. While Wesley envisions the convert as seeing everyday life through new spiritual eyes, Wordsworth's and Dickens' assumption (and Carlyle's assertion) that spiritual truth is inherently abstract, outside the realm of the body and concrete proof, suggests that for them spiritual and material modes of reading are at odds. This skepticism toward metanarrating the mundane in spiritual terms, assimilated in Wordsworth and Dickens as Zeitgeist and in Carlyle as an escape from "Mud-gods," bolsters an anti-Incarnationalist understanding of conversion and leads toward the fragmented world view characteristic of postmodernism. For Wesley, conversion makes all the difference. The unconverted person views the world as though it were unilluminated stained glass, a visual chaos without any coherent meaning. For the Christian, however, the light of God has allowed him, through his new spiritual senses, to see it as all of a piece. For Smollett's Lydia Melford, this inability to see the unity of things is a source of continual frustration: "I have prayed fervently to be enlightened," she says, "but as yet I am not sensible of these inward motions, those operations of grace which are the signs of a regenerated spirit; and therefore, I begin to be in terrible apprehensions about the state of my poor soul" (139). She cannot, in other words, see--or feel--the light.

Wesley sees the Incarnation as the ultimate act of unification, bringing together the disparate categories of body and mind that the nineteenth century would later sever and making fellowship between God and humankind possible. In other words, it turns the anomic fragments that comprise natural man's existence into art. Wesley's own artful language, freighted with biblical phraseology, demonstrates his Incarnational notion of selfhood, bringing together various scriptural fragments and cementing them into a new mosaic-like whole. Desiring "to express Scripture sense in Scripture phrase,' Wesley suggests that we can play out Incarnational theology by allowing biblical language to overwrite our graffiti-like selfhood (qtd. in Rivers 264). (13) His performance is impressive. The second sentence of "Salvation by Faith," for instance, a sermon he preached on 11 June 1738 at Oxford, contains no less than three Bible references: "It was free grace that 'formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into him a living soul; and stamped on that soul the image of God, and 'put all things under his feet'" (117-18). (14) Thinking of his self in discontinuous yet oddly harmonious terms, Wesley makes possible an Incarnational model of self--the idea that God's word can take over our bodies just as much as it did Christ's.

The difficulty with which we wrap our minds around this model, however, indicates that we are still enmeshed in a series of binaries that only recently came to have cultural currency, binaries that did not inform Wesley's own reading practices. For example, the post-Wesley idea that the sentimental is somehow opposed to the social certainly suggests that we have become attentive to the possibly performative nature of emotion and sentiment. Because some emotions can rise to the surface of the body, the logic goes, could not these emotions be mimed? Could not we have the physical trappings of feeling without the feeling itself? In order to find a trustworthy emotion in this model, we must search ever deeper until we find a core of being so private that it cannot be expressed publicly. Sigmund Freud, conceivably, is the product of this sort of logic. The fact that Wesley, even in spite of his knowledge that theatricality was a potential danger, still grounded his understanding of religious truth in the body might disclose that he did not think of outward action as inherently dissimulative. He felt no need to peel back layers of his converts' onion-like selves to test if their beliefs were real. Wesley's willingness to brush his own inclinations aside to let God overwrite his selfhood allows us to imagine a surface-and-depth model of the self that does not inherently privilege depth. The true or genuine self, in this paradigm, is not necessarily hidden away from the public eye but rather, according to Wesley, is constituted within the realm of everyday life.

Our troubles with Wesley's discontinuous Incarnationalism suggest, finally, that we have a vexed situation on our hands when we oppose historicity to conversion, as though valuing the past somehow obscures the need for reform. Wesley's quadrilateral asserts something different: reason is not opposed to experience, or tradition to Scripture; rather, they are all continuous elements of the Christian life in practice. The only way for such a world view to work properly, Lindbeck asserts, following Wesley, is for us to begin to think of selfhood and religion in terms of narrative. Believing that what we do is what we are, that character drives plot, we avow that we see the Spirit of God--not the spirit of the age--at work (224). In fact, Lindbeck argues, we can only separate life from work, or being from doing, if we think of existence in non-narrative terms (231). Indeed, if all narratives demand that we situate ourselves ethically and emotively in relation to them, we have no choice but to engage with the things of God on more than one level at once (Phelan 13). We must feel a transaction between our moral sense and our emotions, between the weight of history and the airiness of theology, and the ground of this transaction, according to Wesley, is the flesh. Thinking of ourselves as the products of divine narrative and, in so doing, performing the work of grace Wesley says we can already feel in our flesh, we bring together word and flesh, Logos and body, and pull these apparently disparate entities into perspectival alignment. The spirit of the age does not interpret our identity or structure our conversions: we are not simply for or against mainstream culture, reproducing or protesting dominant ideologies. Rather, the spirit of the age in this model is itself open to interpretation, itself in the process of continual conversion, and itself subservient to the universal frame, the divine light, through which the disembodied Carlyle and the flesh-and-blood Christian would read it. Wesley's Incarnational theology teaches us, that is, to narrate ourselves by experiencing God.

Indiana University

NOTES

(1) For an excellent history of the first three volumes of Wesley's eight-volume Sermons on Several Occasions, see Albert C. Outler's introduction to The Works of John Wesley. The first volumes, which were published in 1746, 1748, and 1750, give a rich summary of Wesley's understanding of the basic doctrines underlying conversion and the Christian life. Volume 4 appeared in 1760, while the last four volumes were added in 1787, just a few years before Wesley's death. Although Wesley would wait until later in his career to detail his views on such tricky issues as predestination (Wesley was an Arminian), Moravian "inwardness" (dangerously antisocial, he argued), sacramentalism (Wesley gratefully acknowledges these visual signs of God's grace), miraculous healing (it was indeed possible, but one ought not to discount medicine), and slavery (an abomination), the seeds of his views are visible in the initial three volumes, on which I focus here.

(2) On the transgressive nature of Methodist camp meetings in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Deborah M. Valenze: "The camp meeting made public the worst private experiences of lower-class life. Middle-class refinement and oratorical skill seldom tempered this unembarrassed admission of past degradation. Primitive Methodism thus elevated the debased to the realm of the sacred and upset the hierarchy of experience essential to conventional social order" (90). Sectarian theology, she says, was a sort of carnivalesque, a "world turned upside down" (98).

(3) It is worth noting that the quadrilateral still has a good deal of cultural currency, as it forms the basis of many present-day evangelical theologies, including (but not limited to) the book of discipline published by Wesley's most prominent descendants--the United Methodists.

(4) All subsequent citations are from this volume and will be cited parenthetically by page number only.

(5) See Leslie Stephen, who first used the phrase "physiology of conversion" to describe the problematic Wesley explores (2:418).

(6) On the subject of absorption, see also Michael Fried.

(7) Although the concept of the spirit of the age was not theorized until well after Wordsworth's early poems, we can read him as anticipating this concept. William Hazlitt formulates a more explicit version of what Wordsworth's epistemology implies--namely, that the spirit of the age forces the individual to negotiate his particular place in society in a way that is often combative. Later formulations of this concept depict it as a site on which the relationship between the individual and his community can be worked out, a relationship often infused with an increasing degree of paranoia. An OED search for "time-spirit" or "Zeitgeist" further attests to the combative relationship understood in this concept: in 1831 Carlyle refers to life as "an internecine warfare with the Time-spirit"; in 1848 Matthew Arnold says that his reading of Obermann is a refuge "against your Zeit Geist." Years later, in Literature and Dogma (1873), Arnold would realize the secular, empiricist nature of the Victorian Zeitgeist: "It is what we call the Time-spirit that is sapping the proof from miracles,--it is the 'Zeit-Geist' itself."

(8) Following the same logic, J. S. Mill argues that only an age coming to terms with change, such as the wide-ranging literary and cultural shifts I describe above, could conceptualize a spirit of the age. Such a spirit, he argues, is a way of labeling, and thus fixing, a mutable present (22:227-316).

(9) Later in the century Wesley's fifty-volume edited work The Christian Library, a collection of heavily revised and rewritten classics of Christian literature intended originally for use by his ministers-in-training, would be widely read, along with his collection of new work titled The Arminian. For a discussion of these texts, see Rivers 260.

(10) For an excellent account of this dynamic, see O'Farrell.

(11) See, for example, Carlyle's comments on Oliphant in his memoir Reminiscences.

(12) For a discussion of this point, see Outler's introduction to Wesley's important sermon "The Righteousness of Faith." Outler suggests that Wesley was able to bring on such hysterics by convincing people that they had not yet felt the bodily evidence of grace in their own lives. They therefore were driven to bodily display out of a keen sense of their own sinfulness.

(13) See also Downey, who argues that "it is almost impossible to exaggerate the influence of scriptural idiom upon [Wesley's] thought and language [...]. Scriptural reference, allusion, quotation, and expression are the warp and woof of his oratory" (218).

(14) The references, in order, are to Genesis 2:7, Genesis 1:27, and a combination of Psalms 8:6, 1 Corinthians 15:27, and Ephesians 1:22.

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