As soon as the closing of the Great Exhibition afforded a reasonable hope
that there would once more be a reading public, “The Life of Sterling”
appeared. A new work by Carlyle must always be among the literary births
eagerly chronicled by the journals and greeted by the public. In a book
of such parentage we care less about the subject than about its
treatment, just as we think the “Portrait of a Lord” worth studying if it
come from the pencil of a Vandyck. The life of John Sterling, however,
has intrinsic interest, even if it be viewed simply as the struggle of a
restless aspiring soul, yearning to leave a distinct impress of itself on
the spiritual development of humanity, with that fell disease which, with
a refinement of torture, heightens the susceptibility and activity of the
faculties, while it undermines their creative force. Sterling, moreover,
was a man thoroughly in earnest, to whom poetry and philosophy were not
merely another form of paper currency or a ladder to fame, but an end in
themselves—one of those finer spirits with whom, amid the jar and hubbub
of our daily life,
“The melodies abide
Of the everlasting chime.”
But his intellect was active and rapid, rather than powerful, and in all
his writings we feel the want of a stronger electric current to give that
vigor of conception and felicity of expression, by which we distinguish
the undefinable something called genius; while his moral nature, though
refined and elevated, seems to have been subordinate to his intellectual
tendencies and social qualities, and to have had itself little
determining influence on his life. His career was less exceptional than
his character: a youth marked by delicate health and studious tastes, a
short-lived and not very successful share in the management of the
_Athenæum_, a fever of sympathy with Spanish patriots, arrested before it
reached a dangerous crisis by an early love affair ending in marriage, a
fifteen months’ residence in the West Indies, eight months of curate’s
duty at Herstmonceux, relinquished on the ground of failing health, and
through his remaining years a succession of migrations to the South in
search of a friendly climate, with the occasional publication of an
“article,” a tale, or a poem in _Blackwood_ or elsewhere—this, on the
prosaic background of an easy competence, was what made up the outer
tissue of Sterling’s existence. The impression of his intellectual power
on his personal friends seems to have been produced chiefly by the
eloquence and brilliancy of his conversation; but the mere reader of his
works and letters would augur from them neither the wit nor the _curiosa
felicitas_ of epithet and imagery, which would rank him with the men
whose sayings are thought worthy of perpetuation in books of table-talk
and “ana.” The public, then, since it is content to do without
biographies of much more remarkable men, cannot be supposed to have felt
any pressing demand even for a single life of Sterling; still less, it
might be thought, when so distinguished a writer as Archdeacon Hare had
furnished this, could there be any need for another. But, in opposition
to the majority of Mr. Carlyle’s critics, we agree with him that the
first life is properly the justification of the second. Even among the
readers personally unacquainted with Sterling, those who sympathized with
his ultimate alienation from the Church, rather than with his transient
conformity, were likely to be dissatisfied with the entirely apologetic
tone of Hare’s life, which, indeed, is confessedly an incomplete
presentation of Sterling’s mental course after his opinions diverged from
those of his clerical biographer; while those attached friends (and
Sterling possessed the happy magic that secures many such) who knew him
best during this latter part of his career, would naturally be pained to
have it represented, though only by implication, as a sort of deepening
declension ending in a virtual retraction. Of such friends Carlyle was
the most eminent, and perhaps the most highly valued, and, as co-trustee
with Archdeacon Hare of Sterling’s literary character and writings, he
felt a kind of responsibility that no mistaken idea of his departed
friend should remain before the world without correction. Evidently,
however, his “Life of Sterling” was not so much the conscientious
discharge of a trust as a labor of love, and to this is owing its strong
charm. Carlyle here shows us his “sunny side.” We no longer see him
breathing out threatenings and slaughter as in the Latter-Day Pamphlets,
but moving among the charities and amenities of life, loving and
beloved—a Teufelsdröckh still, but humanized by a Blumine worthy of him.
We have often wished that genius would incline itself more frequently to
the task of the biographer—that when some great or good personage dies,
instead of the dreary three or five volumed compilations of letter, and
diary, and detail, little to the purpose, which two thirds of the reading
public have not the chance, nor the other third the inclination, to read,
we could have a real “Life,” setting forth briefly and vividly the man’s
inward and outward struggles, aims, and achievements, so as to make clear
the meaning which his experience has for his fellows. A few such lives
(chiefly, indeed, autobiographies) the world possesses, and they have,
perhaps, been more influential on the formation of character than any
other kind of reading. But the conditions required for the perfection of
life writing—personal intimacy, a loving and poetic nature which sees the
beauty and the depth of familiar things, and the artistic power which
seizes characteristic points and renders them with lifelike effect—are
seldom found in combination. “The Life of Sterling” is an instance of
this rare conjunction. Its comparatively tame scenes and incidents
gather picturesqueness and interest under the rich lights of Carlyle’s
mind. We are told neither too little nor too much; the facts noted, the
letters selected, are all such as serve to give the liveliest conception
of what Sterling was and what he did; and though the book speaks much of
other persons, this collateral matter is all a kind of scene-painting,
and is accessory to the main purpose. The portrait of Coleridge, for
example, is precisely adapted to bring before us the intellectual region
in which Sterling lived for some time before entering the Church. Almost
every review has extracted this admirable description, in which genial
veneration and compassion struggle with irresistible satire; but the
emphasis of quotation cannot be too often given to the following pregnant
paragraph:
“The truth is, I now see Coleridge’s talk and speculation was the
emblem of himself. In it, as in him, a ray of heavenly inspiration
struggled, in a tragically ineffectual degree, with the weakness of
flesh and blood. He says once, he ‘had skirted the howling deserts
of infidelity.’ This was evident enough; but he had not had the
courage, in defiance of pain and terror, to press resolutely across
said deserts to the new firm lands of faith beyond; he preferred to
create logical _fata-morganas_ for himself on this hither side, and
laboriously solace himself with these.”
The above mentioned step of Sterling—his entering the Church—is the point
on which Carlyle is most decidedly at issue with Archdeacon Hare. The
latter holds that had Sterling’s health permitted him to remain in the
Church, he would have escaped those aberrations from orthodoxy, which, in
the clerical view, are to be regarded as the failure and shipwreck of his
career, apparently thinking, like that friend of Arnold’s who recommended
a curacy as the best means of clearing up Trinitarian difficulties, that
“orders” are a sort of spiritual backboard, which, by dint of obliging a
man to look as if he were strait, end by making him so. According to
Carlyle, on the contrary, the real “aberration” of Sterling was his
choice of the clerical profession, which was simply a mistake as to his
true vocation:
“Sterling,” he says, “was not intrinsically, nor had ever been in the
highest or chief degree, a devotional mind. Of course all excellence
in man, and worship as the supreme excellence, was part of the
inheritance of this gifted man; but if called to define him, I should
say artist, not saint, was the real bent of his being.”
Again:
“No man of Sterling’s veracity, had he clearly consulted his own
heart, or had his own heart been capable of clearly responding, and
not been bewildered by transient fantasies and theosophic moonshine,
could have undertaken this function. His heart would have answered,
‘No, thou canst not. What is incredible to thee, thou shalt not, at
thy soul’s peril, attempt to believe! Elsewhither for a refuge, or
die here. Go to perdition if thou must, but not with a lie in thy
mouth; by the eternal Maker, no!’”
From the period when Carlyle’s own acquaintance with Sterling commenced,
the Life has a double interest, from the glimpses it gives us of the
writer, as well as of his hero. We are made present at their first
introduction to each other; we get a lively idea of their colloquies and
walks together, and in this easy way, without any heavy disquisition or
narrative, we obtain a clear insight into Sterling’s character and mental
progress. Above all, we are gladdened with a perception of the affinity
that exists between noble souls, in spite of diversity in ideas—in what
Carlyle calls “the logical outcome” of the faculties. This “Life of
Sterling” is a touching monument of the capability human nature possesses
of the highest love, the love of the good and beautiful in character,
which is, after all, the essence of piety. The style of the work, too,
is for the most part at once pure and rich; there are passages of deep
pathos which come upon the reader like a strain of solemn music, and
others which show that aptness of epithet, that masterly power of close
delineation, in which, perhaps, no writer has excelled Carlyle.
We have said that we think this second “Life of Sterling” justified by
the first; but were it not so, the book would justify itself.