Flutters, Feelings, and Fancies: John Wesley's Sentimental Sermons and the Spirit of the Age

Abstract

The entertainingly colorful old maid Tabitha Bramble, we learn midway through Tobias Smollett's The Expedition ofHumphrey 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-heavings 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 quasihysterical 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). Irving'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 141