Whatever importance may attach to the life and writings of John Sterling, is due to the fact of his having been a representative man. Without being supremely original, without anything wonderful in his career, he has been made the subject of a memoir by two eminent men, Archdeacon Hare and Thomas Carlyle. The one represents Anglican belief, which is partial infidelity, and the other nineteenth-century belief, which is infidelity, pure and simple; and both the one and the other have drawn the portrait of their friend and hero in colors of their own mind. Archdeacon Hare has traced with regret the lapse of Sterling into unbelief, while Carlyle has seen in that very lapse a rise into transcendental faith of the highest order. Neither of them has neglected, but, on the contrary, both keenly appreciated Sterling's literary labors and merits; and both would concur in pointing him out as a type of that new creation of thinkers and supposed philosophers in whom doubt and trust are ever contending for the mastery—who are ever seeking, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth—a mongrel breed, sprung from an unnatural union between scepticism and Christianity.
John Sterling was born at Kaimes Castle, in the Isle of Bute, on the 20th of July, 1806. His father rented a small farm attached to the Castle, and the first four years of Johnny's life were spent on a wild-wooded, rocky coast, among headlands, storms, and thundering breakers. Nature gave him a good schooling; for, when he left the Isle of Bute, it was for the well-grassed, many-brooked village of Llanblethian, in the Vale of Glamorgan. Five years more passed in that pleasant spot, and time never effaced the lovely images it imprinted on Sterling's mind. Every line and hue, he said, were more deeply and accurately fixed in his memory than those of any scene he had since beheld. Beautifully and with deep feeling did he retrace the impressions they made on his childish fancy, in an article written in theLiterary Chroniclein his twenty-second year. He had not seen the spot since he was eight years old, yet he described the old ruin of St. Quentin's Castle, the orchard of his home, the school where he used to read the well-thumbedHistory of Greeceby Oliver Goldsmith, and the garden-sports of himself and his playmates, with as much distinctness as if they had beensouvenirsof the previous spring. Very precious are such recollections, for one personal experience is worth a hundred facts learnt from books.
When Napoleon returned from Elba, in 1815, little Sterling was in the midst of French school-boys, at Passy, shouting,Vive l'Empereur. His father had become a writer in theTimes, under the name ofVetus, and was in hopes of being appointed one of its foreign correspondents. The Hundred Days which convulsed Europe drove the Sterlings from France; and fortune, who tries literary aspirants with her ficklest moods, shifted the father from Russell Square and Queen Square, to Blackfriars Road and the Grove, at Blackheath. At last he rode at anchor, and was permanently connected with theTimes.John was sent to Dr. Burney's school, at Greenwich, and afterward came under the tuition of Dr. Waite, at Blackheath, and of Dr. Trollope, the master of Christ's Hospital. He was twelve years old when his younger brother, Edward, died. It was an early age to become familiar with death. John felt the loss as if he had been a Catholic. God or nature, one knows not which, taught him the communion of saints. "Edward is near me now," he used to say to himself. "Edward is watching me. He knows what I am doing and thinking. He is sad for my faults. I must, I will strive to do what he would approve." Very active was his mind at this period. His keen eye observed everything; his soul was winged. He read the entireEdinburgh Reviewthrough, from the beginning, and cart-loads of books from circulating libraries, "wading," as Carlyle says, "like Ulysses toward his palace, through infinite dung." No advantages of education were denied him. At the University of Glasgow he was tutored by Mr. Jacobson, since Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford and Bishop of Chester; and in 1824, when he was in his nineteenth year, he removed to Trinity College, Cambridge, where another man of eminence, Julius, afterward Archdeacon Hare, became his tutor and his lasting friend. He was in all respects worthy of such friendship. A youth who, with a delicate frame, could stand waist-deep in the river, to aid in passing buckets to and fro, when the buildings of King's Court were on fire, must have had a singular disregard of self, and readiness for all moral enterprise. "Somebody must be in it," he said, when his tutor remonstrated with him. "Why not I, as well as another?" Friendships were the best gift Sterling received from Cambridge. The classical knowledge he acquired there was not very exact, nor did he submit to any strict discipline. In the Union he was "the master-bowman," and out of such comrades as Charles Buller, Richard Milnes, John Kemble, Richard Trench, and Frederic Maurice, he made of the two last dear and intimate friends. He and Frederic Maurice, indeed, married two sisters; and to him and Coleridge he owed chiefly the formation of his opinions and character. The latter was at that time beginning to found a school of thought, and the former, Frederic Maurice, is now, and has long been, a recognized leader of the Broad Church party, in the Anglican communion.
If ever there was a moonstruck prophet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one. As a poet, he was a star; as a divine, anignis fatuus. He subjected faith to reason, coquetted with infidelity, embraced Germanism, and discoursed by the hour on the church and theLogosin language all musical and shining, but conveying no meaning whatever to any one of his hearers. [Footnote 228]
[Footnote 228: Carlyle'sLife of Sterling, p. 73.]
Your reason (Vernunft) bound you to accept a multitude of facts and principles which your understanding (Verstand) rejected. With a good understanding only you might be an unbeliever, but reason would exalt you into a Christian. Everything depended on this distinction, and if you could not comprehend it, (which nobody could,) so much the worse for you. Yet English society was fast being ensnared by such theosophic nonsense and hazy "Kantean transcendentalism." The clear dogmas of traditional faith and the simplicity of Scripture, likewise, were being observed in a cloud of jargon.Dr. Pusey in his youth was sliding into German subtleties; Isaac Taylor was watering Christianity down into human philosophy; Dr. Arnold was pleading for an Erastian church comprising all sects and denominations; Dr. Hampden's terminology was effacing the time-hallowed language of the schools; Coleridge, with his drunken imagination, and Milman, with his rationalistic solution of Scripture miracles, were paving the way for Strauss and Renan; and if it had not been for the Oxford revival of primitive tradition and patristic lore, the English mind would have wandered away into the bleak desert of infidelity without one oasis—one guiding path by which to return to the fresh pasture of truth and peace.
Sterling, unfortunately, was not brought under this happier influence. The seed sown in him by Coleridge and his compeers produced, as we shall see, its natural fruit, and made him a forerunner of that worship of humanity which is now to so large an extent superseding the worship of Christ. After spending a year in Trinity College, Cambridge, he migrated to Trinity Hall, and in 1827, quitted the university altogether. He had to seek a profession, and knew not what to choose. He tried a private secretaryship, and ended, of course, with literature—the profession of all clever men who have none. For that, and especially for periodical literature, he was best fitted, for his thoughts were quick and brilliant, "beautifullest sheet-lightning not to be condensed into thunderbolts," deriving their momentum from swift strokes, not from metallic weight.
The copyright of theAthenaeumbeing for sale, Sterling and his gifted friends thought it would make a fine opening for them. He wrote much in it in the years 1828 and 1829, together with Maurice, who was editor. His "Shades of the Dead," "Alexander the Great," "Joan of Arc," "Wycliffe," "Columbus," "Gustavus Adolphus," "Milton," and "Burns," are full of thought, color, and enthusiasm, but they produce a saddening effect. They are "a beautiful mirage in the dry wilderness; but you cannot quench your thirst there!" Sterling knew not the stand-point from which alone the characters of past times can be duly appreciated. He describes Joan of Arc as "perhaps the most wonderful, exquisite, and complete personage in all the history of the world," yet he maintains that "her persuasion of the outward appearance of divine agency was caused by adiseasedexcitability of the fancy." As if to hear a voice from heaven "to assist her in governing herself," to see an angel, and receive visits from the departed, implied of necessity a diseased imagination! He sees in Wycliffe a Gospel hero almost as full of "immortal wisdom" as Coleridge, his "Christian Plato," He couples him with Erigena, who "questioned transubstantiation—the master-sorcery," and Berengarius, who "opposed the same monstrous doctrine." But he tells us in praise of these new lights, what may well be regarded as dispraise, that "they encouraged themselves to cast away the belief of all that Luther afterward rejected by the simple study of the Bible,unaided by general knowledge, and without the guidance of sufficient interpreters." Such is the fatal admission of one of whom his friend and biographer, Archdeacon Hare, writes that "the most striking and precious quality in his writings is the deep sympathywith the errors and faults, and even with the sins, of mankind." Here, then, is another admission—an admission, not of the disciple, but of the master, that while Sterling combated that Catholic religion which is from first to last the worship of Christ, he was already exhibiting the most decided symptom of Positivism, or the worship of Humanity.He dwells, again, with delight on the goodness and greatness of Columbus; he assures us that he was a diligent student of the Bible, had a childlike simplicity of faith in the truths of religion; was, in his own belief, the chosen minister of providence, watched over by saints and angels, pointed in his path across the waters by the mother of the Lord, and holding in his hand the cross as the only ensign of triumph; and yet, with strange perversity, he comes to the conclusion that the mind of this fearless discoverer was "in many respects dark and weak," and that his faith, though nobler than that of the multitude around him, was "not the purest Christianity." Sterling himself, in short, held a purer creed, (if he could only have defined it,) and we shall see presently to what it led.
When his mind first came into Coleridge's plastic hands, it was simply chaotic as regards religion. Instructed by the oracle of Highgate, he engrafted a belief in Christianity, such as it was, on his original "piety of heart," (as Carlyle calls it,) and his "religion, which was as good as altogether ethnic." In this new phase of mental hallucination, his sceptical zeal against what he deemed superstition abated, and his radicalism, toning down, lost some of its wildest features. In this frame he wrote and published a novel calledArthur Coningsby. It was then his only book, and it brought him little satisfaction. The babe was still-born, and had it lived, the father, as it seems, would have had little love for his own offspring. Coleridge's moonshine glittered on his pages, but its outlooks into futurity were confused and sad. It was "gilded vacuity," opulent misery. The hero is himself—a youth plunging into life without any fixed principle to guide him; full of democratic, utilitarian, and heathenish theories; he suffers shipwreck—the shipwreck of the mind; and then by the hand of some semi-Christian quack, like dreamy Coleridge, is guided into a port which is no harbor, and a church where there is no anchorage. Such wasArthur Coningsby. But to Carlyle Sterling never mentioned the name of the novel, nor would hear it spoken of in his presence.
During the years in which it was planned, written, and published, from 1829 to 1832, Sterling wooed and won Susannah Barton, a kindly and true-hearted wife, to share his pleasures and trials; made an intimate friend of General Torrijos, a Spanish exile; and was silly enough to aid him and a little band of democrats (including an Irishman named Boyd, who had more money than wits) to purchase a ship in the Thames, arms and stores, for the purpose of invading Spain and proclaiming a republic! Sterling himself was to have taken part in the mad expedition; but Cupid, as usual, was stronger than Mars; and Susannah, who was not yet Mrs. Sterling, prevailed on her lover to lay his armor aside. Of course, the Spanish envoy got tidings of the plot; and the ship, with its crew and cargo, was seized in the king's name when dropping down the river. Coleridge's moonshine, it seems, was not strong enough yet to dispel the dark frowns of democracy.
In 1830, the marriage contract was sealed; but alas! in this fallen world the glad moment of our realized hopes is almost always dashed with some strange and unexpected sorrow. Sterling's health failed, and his lungs, menaced by consumption, asked for a warmer climate.The year 1831 found him in the island of St. Vincent in the midst of tropic vegetation, tornadoes, and slaves as yet unworthy of freedom. One hurricane, fiercer than its fellows, stripped the roof from the house where Sterling lived, and whirled about the cottages of the negroes as if they had been chaff. Meanwhile, in December, 1831, Torrijos, the deluded democrat general, reaches Spain, runs ashore at Fuengirola with fifty-five desperadoes like himself, seizes a farm, barricades it, is surrounded, surrenders, is haled with his comrades to Malaga, and with them all, the rich Irishman included, is swiftly fusiladed. "I hear the sound of that musketry," wrote Sterling; "it is as if the bullets were tearing my own brain." No wonder, for to his brain the folly of a wild enterprise was mainly due.
Repentance came; religion was his study; and prayer, earnest prayer for guidance, arose from his lips as he sat under the dates and palms, and gazed on the mirror of summer seas. Such prayer had been answered more fully if teachers such as Coleridge, with his gift of words, and Edward Irving, with his gift of tongues, had not already imbued him with a multitude of truths which were half untruths, and untruths which were half truths. He believed himself to be "in possession of the blessings of Christ's redemption;" and though he scarcely as yet knew the elements of Christianity, he began to think of teaching it. It is always the way with pious Protestant youths. They have vocations to preach before they are schooled; and what ought to be taken for presumption is hailed by their friends as the most signal proof of grace. So Sterling, wearied of West India life, formed a vague scheme of anti-slavery philanthropy, and turned his face toward Europe and his thoughts toward the ministry of the Established Church.
It was in June, 1833, and on the banks of the Rhine, that the unripe aspirant for holy orders met his old friend and tutor, the Rev. Julius Hare. That worthy gentleman encouraged a desire he should rather have checked, and Sterling was not long in arriving at a determination to become Mr. Hare's curate at Hurstmonceaux in Sussex, and wear, at least, the surplice and stole, though he had no hood or academical degree to adorn himself withal. So on Trinity Sunday of the following year, he came out of Chichester Cathedral a raw deacon, and established himself with his family in a modest mansion in a quiet, leafy lane of Hurstmonceaux. Very diligent was Sterling in his pastoral duties; but the fervor of his zeal soon cooled. In September he began to have misgivings, and in February following he had quitted the path he had prematurely chosen. The reason assigned was loss of health; but Carlyle guessed shrewdly, and with too much truth, that Sterling was disappointed even to despair by the church whose garment he had spasmodically caught by the hem. The virtue he expected did not go forth from it, and the glimmer of truth which reached him came through a dense cloud of confused writings. The very names of these betokened chaos, and the twilight that struggled through them was sufficient neither to cheer nor to guide. Many pages of Archdeacon Hare's memoir are filled with extracts from Sterling's letters, and accounts of his favorite studies at this period. They form a labyrinth none can thread, where he wanders to and fro without landmarks, bourn, light, or hope. The more he reads the Old Testament, the less can he believe in its miracles; and having no guide who speaks with authority, he applies for satisfaction in vain to one charlatan after another as confused, fanciful, and blind as himself.Fancy a system of theology taught by Tholuck, Schiller, and Olshausen; by Schleiermacher, Mackintosh, and Milman, by the Koran and Kant, by Jonathan Edwards, Coleridge, and Maurice! Such were Sterling's instructors, and it is not to be wondered at that they created more doubts than they removed, and that under their influence he discarded all faith in a hierarchy, a church, and a Bible written by plenary inspiration. Christianity, he thought, could only become true by changing with the times; and if any existing society or church was to be the nucleus of a new system, it could only be by the sloughing off of much that was old. How utterly deplorable would be the condition of the human race if left to the teaching of such philosophers and divines. After two thousand years of Christian schooling, it would know nothing more than ancient Greece and Rome of God and of its own destinies. All revelation must be doubted of anew in order that anything may be believed, and theimprovedChristianity to be given in these last days to the world would owe all its changes and improvements to men as feeble and fallible as ourselves. Better, far better, had it been for you, John Sterling, to be instructed by a simple parish priest bred among the mountains, and ministering in that church which is the pillar and ground of the truth, than be handed over as you were by Coleridge, Maurice, and Hare, to Strauss, Mill, and Carlyle—from unbelief in the bud to unbelief in full, gaudy, flaunting blossom.
We cannot discover anything imposing in Sterling's talents. Even in secular learning he was a reed shaken by the wind. His essays and poems want definite view and bold outline. It is a grand thing to see both sides of a question, but it is a pitiful thing to say as much for one side as for another. The want of first principles makes all Sterling's pages dreamy and pointless. He has no point to steer from, no harbor to steer to; he is always toiling against wind and tide, making no way, and accounting it triumphant success only not to be shipwrecked. Had he confined his criticisms to matters of taste, he might have been endured, but hewillbe piercing the clouds without any ballast to steady or rudder to guide his balloon.
In February, 1835, Sterling first became personally acquainted with that extraordinary writer, Thomas Carlyle. He met him in his natural element, the society of brilliant free-thinkers. He was side by side with John Stuart Mill at the India House, and then at Sterling's father's with the Crawfords and otherliterati, with whom unbelief was wisdom. His writings, and particularlySartor Resartus, made a great impression on Sterling, though he saw the strange and extravagant defects of its style, and labored hard to convince the author of his own belief in a "personal God." But the poison did its work. The strong inward unrest, the Titanic heaving of Teufelsdröckh's spirit communicated itself to Sterling's, and whirled it away still further from central peace. Carlyle could only stimulate the intellect, and fill it with exuberant images. He had heard without regret of Sterling's abandonment of democracy, and he saw with greater satisfaction his defection from parochial work. He regarded the pen as his vocation, and the greatest instrument for good in the world. Not that Sterling broke outwardly with the church, or declared himself a renegade.On the contrary, he now and then performed service for a friend at Bayswater, but it became more and more evident that his faith in Christianity was partial and unsound. His mind was not in the highest degree devotional, nor had he that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom.
His knowledge of German writers hitherto was confined to semi-sceptics and self-appointed evangelists, Neander and the like. Carlyle introduced him to higher souls, if literary merit constitutes height. He brought him to the feet of Goethe, Richter, Schiller, and Lessing, and with these he tried to satisfy the void which an imperfect religion had been unable to fill. Mr. Dunn, an amiable Irish clergyman, became one of their chosen circle, and we learn from Sterling himself thathistheology was compounded of the Greek fathers, mystics and ethical philosophers, and that its main defect was an insufficient apprehension of the reality and depth of sin. The very word sin is considered objectionable in the school of Carlyle and Mill, because it, is the correlative of grace. Sterling's friends seemed fated to be the enemies of his soul. He had another named Edgeworth, a nephew of Miss Edgeworth the novelist. He was well read in Plato and Kant, yet even less of a believer than they. "He entertained not creeds, but the Platonic or Kanteanghostsof creeds." So says Carlyle, of whom Sterling bears witness, that "hisfundamental position is the good of evil, and the idleness of wishing to jump off one's own shadow."
Deplorable health again, in 1836, drove Sterling to a sunnier clime. He was always dodging and jerking about "to escape the scythe of Death." At Bordeaux his feeble frame revived, and he delved in the mines of literature for fine gold. The theological fever in his mind had abated. Such is Carlyle's account—and the health of pure reason returned, or almost returned. He had done with theology, rubrics, church articles, and "the enormous ever-repeated thrashing of the straw." But did he find the grain? If theology is chaff, where shall we look for wheat? Will the heart of mankind accept literature as thesummum bonum, the guide of life, the antidote of sin, sorrow, and death? Yet for it Carlyle and Sterling bid farewell to Christianity, and cry: "Adieu, ye threshing-floors of rotten straw, with bleared tallow-light for sun; to you adieu!"The Sexton's Daughterwas a poem which indicated Sterling's gradual renunciation of those fragments of Christianity which still clung to him. He even began to think of attacking revelation, on the principle of folly rushing in where angels fear to tread. The Christian religion, he believed, would be really indebted to him for meddling with its foundations, and he should be "doing good to theology," by writing what would for ever exclude him from ministering even in the Church of England. His letters at this period are full of distressing jumble, which Archdeacon Hare records as Christian with a certain unction, and Carlyle, more sagacious, claims as antichristian with a chuckle of delight.
Asicklyshadow of the parish church still hung over Sterling's compositions, according to the latter biographer, and he gives an amusing description of the parson-like way in which his friend read aloud theSexton's Daughterat Blackheath, and gave painful effect to its maudlin morality. It was "a dreary pulpit, or even conventicle manner; that flattest moaning hoo-hoo of predetermined pathos, with a kind of rocking canter introduced by way of intonation, each stanza the exact fellow of the other, and the dull swing of the rocking-horse, duly in each."
The invalid poet had returned from Bordeaux, but he did not remain long at Blackheath. Again he crossed the waters in cheerful quest of balmier air, and the manifold bliss of health. Daily he rode among the rocky slopes and redundant foliage of Madeira, writing to Carlyle often for recreation, and reading Goethe's Life and Works with fear and delight. He called him "the most splendid of anachronisms," and spoke of his life as "thoroughly, nay, intensely pagan, in an age when it is men's duty to be Christian. In truth," he adds, "I am afraid of him, I enjoy and admire him so much, and feel I could so easily be tempted to go along with him." Thus all things conduced to lead Sterling's mind down the steep. Lyell'sGeologyopened a new flutter (not line) of thought, and bewildered him with the view it presented of "the abysmal extent of time."
From Professor Wilson, alias Christopher North, the presiding spirit of Blackwood, Sterling received great encouragement—perhaps more than he deserved. But ingenious madness is all that the public requires in the magazines of some countries.Laudari a Laudatois always a rare delight. Had Carlyle been editor, his criticisms on Sterling's Tales and Poems would have been more severe, yea, and more just than Wilson's—he of theIsle of Palms. Thus he says ofThe Onyx Ring: "There wants maturing, wants purifying of clear from unclear; properly there wants patience and steady depth. The basis is wild and loose; and in the details, lucent often with fine color, and dipt in beautiful sunshine, there are several things misseen, untrue, which is the worst species of mispainting." This it was that blurred and marred all poor Sterling's productions; everything wasmisseen, and therefore mispainted. In one particular he was to be praised and envied—he saw things on the sunny side. In spite of sickness, he was cheerful, and buoyancy of spirit kept him afloat on a sea where many would have sunk. John Stuart Mill was now editingThe London and Westminster Review, and Sterling was sufficiently vague and unsound to be thought a valuable contributor. In thatReviewhe discoursed of Montaigne, Simonides, and Carlyle, while in theQuarterlyof 1842, he criticised Tennyson. Of these critiques the best is that on Simonides, for the subject was best fitted to Sterling's taste and powers. He was a better judge of Greek poetry and Greek character than of writers like Montaigne, Carlyle, and Tennyson, who have lived in Christian times, and must be judged by Christian rules. He could hardly wander wide of his theme while dealing with the bright wine, luscious fruit, honey, and crystal founts of Ceos, while gathering up the costly fragments of its gifted bard, and rendering in English the chaste and delicately chiselled verses of him who has "not left a single line inspired by love."
But the case was altered when Sterling tried to appreciate Montaigne, The task was above him. He was neither a believer nor an unbeliever, but partly both. He could neither wholly praise nor wholly blame Montaigne's scepticism. He had an instinctive leaning toward the writer who adoptedQue sçay-je?as his motto, and followed the natural religion of Sébonde. He honored one whose writings were condemned at Rome, and thought, for that very reason, they must have some good in them.He admired an essayist who sat loose to the received opinions and belief of his time, chose Plutarch for his favorite author, (as Rousseau and Madame Roland did after him,) and "of all men seemed most thoroughly to have revered and loved the saint, prophet, and martyr of pagan wisdom, Socrates."
Perhaps Socrates would not be in such good odor with the sceptics of our day, if he too had not been in some sense an unbeliever. Perhaps it is in hisprotestingcharacter that they chiefly admire him, and trace in him some resemblance to the sage of Wittemburg. They admire him, and set him up as a model, because he was a witness against the established and popular religion of his country. Yet it may be that Socrates had really more faith than they have, and with all the disadvantages of paganism, made, if we may so speak, a better deist than nineteenth-century sceptics. Perhaps his mind was clearer, after all, than Montaigne's, or than Sterling's, who wrote of Montaigne that, "in the bewilderment of his misunderstanding at the immensity and seeming contradictions of the universe, perhaps he even hoped thatone day or otherthe puzzle of existence would find its solution inthe accompanying puzzle of revelation."
We have not time, in this place, to follow Sterling's review of his friend Carlyle's works. Suffice it to say, what we believe to be the fact, that he discovered Carlyle's intellectual stature to be high because the literary world had already recognized it as such; but he did not discover the extent of Tennyson's powers because the literary world had not yet recognized them. This is not very complimentary to Sterling's critiques or penetration—but dreamy and indistinct beauty is all that he ever reaches, and hisexposéof Carlyle's philosophy is as hazy and unsatisfactory as his appreciation of Tennyson is hesitating and imperfect.
After founding the Sterling Club, our hero once more turned his face toward the sweet south. In company with his friend. Dr. Calvert, he crossed the Alps, and wandered from city to city through the garden of Europe, till he reached, in the winter of 1838-9, the city without a rival. Perhaps Sterling was apt to let other people reflect for him. If he had set his own thoughts originally to work, he could hardly have failed to detect in the metropolis of Christendom something more than he pretended to find. A philosophic mind, even of a minor order, could not allow itself to dwell on Rome, the Holy See, and the pontifical line, without finding in them matter for the greatest consideration and most searching inquiry. Whence the mighty, the enduring influence of these on mankind and mankind's history, if there lie not at their root, principles which escape the glance of superficial observers? Whether divine, human, or diabolical, they must deserve philosophical research, were it only for the magnitude of their results. Yet Sterling is bold enough to affirm that "one loses all tendency to idealize the metropolis and system of the hierarchy into anything higher than a piece of showy stage-declamation, at bottom thoroughly mean and prosaic." Again he tells us that "The modern Rome, pope and all inclusive, are a shabby attempt at something adequate to fill the place of the old commonwealth." So warped was his judgment that St. Peter's itself found little favor in his eyes. His artistic notes are as unsound as his religious ones. Prejudice jaundiced all. "I have seen the pope," he says, "in all his pomp at St. Peter's; and he looked to me a mere lie in livery."But to him perhaps St. Peter on his cross would not have appeared truth in undress. He derived, it is to be feared, little good from his visit to the tombs of the apostles. To him they were tombs indeed—vaults, charnel-houses, painted sepulchres. Mrs. Sterling's premature confinement recalled him to England, and in the summer of 1839 he was housed at Clifton, and enjoying the noxious friendship of an amiable deist, Mr. Frank Newman, brother of the great convert to Catholicism of the same name. He, too, had once professed Anglican Christianity, but he resigned his fellowship at Oxford, and openly combated the divinity of the Holy Ghost.
At Clifton Sterling became familiar with Strauss; we do not mean Strauss in person, but in his still more dangerousLife of Christ. Here was, indeed, a "lie in livery," yet Sterling pronounced it "exceedingly clever and clear-headed, with more of insight, and less of destructive rage than he expected." It would work, he said, deep and far, and it was well for partisans on one side and the other to have a book of which they could say, "This is our Creed and Code—or, rather, Anti-Creed and Anti-Code." Alas! John Sterling, are you come to this? The "lie in livery" whom you saw in Rome would have taught you better. He bid you adore him whom Strauss denies, and hold fast to him as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
There is little to be said of Sterling's poetry, and that little such as his ghost might not like to hear. It never caught the public ear, and if it had caught, could not have charmed it. He had not the slightest taste for music, nor any tune in him. His verses were merely rhymed, and barely rhythmicalspeeches, notsongs. "The thoughts were not much above the sound, and the latter was as unmusical as a drum. Carlyle strongly advised him to stick to prose, and declared that his "poetry" had "a monstrous rub-a-dub, instead of a tune." Whether in prose or verse, haze, insufficiency, and failure marked all he attempted. At Falmouth, as at Clifton, he moved in a luminous atmosphere of intellects gone astray. While there he publishedThe Election, a poem in eleven books, which describes in heroic verse the contest between Frank Vane and Peter Mogg for an English borough. There were graceful touches here and there; but the pages wanted that originality which is the only passport to permanent success. TheElectionwas followed byStraffordandCoeur de Lion, but the one subject wastoodramatic, and the other onetooepic, for Sterling's muse.
In 1842, he was listening to rhapsodists reciting Ariosto on the mole at Naples, or boating round the promontory of Sorrento. His spoiled and purposeless existence was drawing near its close. A painful sense of its uselessness forced itself frequently on his mind. His life, he wrote, had ceased to be a chain, and fell into a heap of broken links. Versatility in his father became irresolution in him. That father, Edward Sterling, possessed an improvising faculty without parallel, and had a fair field for its display in the pages of theTimes. There, conjurer-like, he set forth "three hundred and sixty-five opinions in the year upon every subject." There, day after day, he hit the essentialanimusof the great Babylon with extraordinary precision. There he performed to admiration his marvellous somersaults, not only without shame, but with the ease and daring of one who is always right.There he appeared as Whig or Tory, Peelite or Anti-Peelite, not as the whim took him, but as it took the blatant public for whom he wrote. There "Captain Whirlwind," as Carlyle used to call him, let loose his winds, and, securely anonymous, looked forth from his cave on the seething seas and thundering surges which he rolled on the shore. The son could not but reflect in a degree the father's face. Hence, in John Sterling we find, to his misfortune, great and habitual uncertainty. "Christianity," he wrote, not long before his death, "is a great comfort and blessing to me, although I amquite unable to believe all its original documents." What kind of Christianity was this which comforted him, and whence did it derive its evidences? The same inconsistency and vagueness appears in his remark—and it was one of his latest—that he had gained but little good from what he had heard or read of theology, but derived the greatest comfort from the words, "Thy will be done." As if these words did not involve the whole circle of theology, as the egg contains the chicken, and the acorn the oak.
In the beginning of 1843, Sterling broke a blood-vessel; his mother also became seriously ill; and his father's mansion at Knightsbridge, "built on the high table-land of sunshine and success," was filled at once with bitterness and gloom. Very affectionate and pious were Sterling's letters to his mother; nor can it be said that death came to either of them unawares. They saw the grim shadow approach, and awaited his stroke with such fortitude as their sense of religion gave them. "Dear mother," wrote Sterling, "there is surely something uniting us that cannot perish, I seem so sure of a love which shall last and reunite us, that even the remembrance, painful as that is, of all my own follies and ill tempers cannot shake this faith. When I think of you, and know how you feel toward me, and have felt for every moment of almost forty years, it would be too dark to believe that we shall never meet again."
On Good Friday, 1843, Sterling's wife had borne him another child, and, with her infant, was doing well. The post arrived on the Tuesday following, and Sterling left her for a moment to read the tidings brought of his mother. He returned soon with a forced calm on his face, but to announce his mother's death. Alas! another bereavement, still more desolating, was at hand. In two hours more his beloved wife also was numbered with the dead. His two best friends were cut down by a single blow; to him they died in one day—almost in one hour. A mother's love is unique: there is nothing like it in the world; a wife's love is all that imagination can picture of earthly affection; and to Sterling they were now both things of the past. Alone, alone he must pursue his pilgrimage, haunted by the perpetual remembrance of joys never to return. "My children," he cried, "require me tenfold now. What I shall do, is all confusion and darkness."
It is in such seasons of bereavement especially that the Catholic realizes his church as the mourner's solace and the outcast's home. But Sterling, unhappily, was debarred from this best and sweetest consolation. Friends he had in abundance, but they were almost all errant meteors like himself, and stars shining in mist. By the death of his mother he became rich, when riches could no longer purchase increase of joy. He took a house at Ventnor in the Isle of Wight, and there strove to live for his children and in a sphere of poetry.But his lyre had few listeners; and it would be but loss of time to criticise at length what is now forgotten. Now and then he went up to town, and even entertained friends in his father's desolate dwelling at Knightsbridge. It was like "dining in a ruin in the crypt of a mausoleum." His silent sadness was manifest to all through the bright mask he sometimes wore. "I am going on quietly here, rather than happily," he wrote from Ventnor to Mr. Frank Newman; "sometimes quite helpless, not from distinct illness, but from sad thoughts and a ghastly dreaminess. The heart is gone out of my life." That life was fast ebbing away, and he knew it; he was drifting into the vast ocean of eternity, and he watched without regret the receding shore. A certain piety sustained him. "God is great," he would exclaim with Moslem fervor, "God is great." His heart yearned especially toward Carlyle, and the Maurices were constantly at his side. Infidelity and semi-Christianity, in death as in life, were his presiding genii. He clasped the Bible in his feeble hand, though he believed it but in part. He prayed to be forgiven; he thanked the all-wise One; but it was long since he had begun "to deem himself the opponent, the antagonist of everything that is," and antagonism is a frame of mind little conducive to peace and joy. A few days before his death he wrote to Carlyle: "I tread the common road intothe great darkness, without any thought of fear, and with very much of hope. Certainty, indeed, I have none. ... Toward me it is more true than toward England, that no man has been and done like you. Heaven bless you! If I can lend a hand when THERE, that will not be wanting." To this same friend, four days before his death, he addressed some stanzas which Carlyle has not published, but says they were written as if in starfire and immortal tears." His eyes were closed on this world on the 18th of September, 1844. He sleeps in the burying-ground of Bonchurch, and is embalmed in the memory of his friends.
His natural virtues were of the highest order; his life was correct, his temper uncomplaining, his soul transparent, and his imagination lively. Standing, as he did, midway between belief and unbelief, he conciliated the esteem and friendship of believers and unbelievers, if Archdeacon Hare and Mr. Maurice are to be reckoned among the former. The archdeacon, indeed, goes far in the excuses he makes for Sterling, saying, "Such men we honor, although they fall; nay,we honor them the more because they fall;" a sentiment so extravagant that the most liberal Catholic will condemn it without hesitation.
Every life has its moral; and that of Sterling's is certainly no exception to the rule. He is a type of educated England in the present day—half-Christian, half-infidel. Nature and cultivation had given him all that was requisite to make him a useful member of society, and to cheer his dying hours with the retrospect of an existence applied to the happiest and highest ends. But one thing was wanting in him, a steady purpose and a clear view of the means by which it was to be obtained. If he had been fortunate enough to know, enjoy, and exemplify the Catholic religion, it would have supplied him with a definite scope, and have laid down a rule of faith and obedience by which to compass his ends; it would have collected all his scattered forces, given edge to his arguments, sober color to his imagination, satisfaction to his yearnings, rest to his disquiet, comfort to his sadness.It would have enabled him to realize with all the certitude of faith facts which by the light of nature he could not credit, and truths which he could not comprehend. It would have taught him with authority things which his teachers propounded in doubt, asserted feebly, or distinctly denied. It would have saved him from a wasted existence, from the shallow theology of Archdeacon Hare and his "Guesses at Truth," from the puzzle-headed metaphysics of Coleridge, the wild utterances of Edward Irving, the Arian tendencies of Maurice and Dean Stanley, the supercilious incredulity of Carlyle, the proud unbelief of Francis Newman, and the efforts, intentional or unintentional, of them all to bring about an unnatural and odious alliance between infidelity and Christian faith. They have labored hard to establish a school, and in England the results of their toil is unhappily everywhere apparent. Unbelief is wearing a Christian mask; and often has the language of Christ on its lips. Ministers of religion scatter doubts in evangelical terms, and scoffers mimic the tones and language of honest disciples. Atheists and Deists do homage to the son of Mary, and speak respectfully of saints, doctors, and popes. Protestant divines apologize for sincere unbelievers, and quote with approval the writings of the apostles of doubt. Conciliation and compromise are loudly called for on both sides, and hatred of all law and dogma is extolled as charitable and wise. The proposal of marriage between Christianity and Infidelity is openly published; and the Catholic Church alone solemnly and persistently forbids the banns.
Columba, gentlest of all names! BequestOf a strong Celtic mother to a childWho, unto life's meridian, kept the wild,Impassioned grandeur of his race; his guestThe patriot bard; while innocence oppressedFlew, with the instinct of souls undefiled,To his great heart, who, to the guileless mild.Called heaven's swift curse upon the lifted crestOf lawless power. And still the generous mindPores, kindling, o'er heroic legends quaint,In which grave history dips her brush to paintThat nature fierce and tender; but combinedWith grace celestial, till the man we findCrowned with th' eternal glories of the saint.
Columba, gentlest of all names! BequestOf a strong Celtic mother to a childWho, unto life's meridian, kept the wild,Impassioned grandeur of his race; his guestThe patriot bard; while innocence oppressedFlew, with the instinct of souls undefiled,To his great heart, who, to the guileless mild.Called heaven's swift curse upon the lifted crestOf lawless power. And still the generous mindPores, kindling, o'er heroic legends quaint,In which grave history dips her brush to paintThat nature fierce and tender; but combinedWith grace celestial, till the man we findCrowned with th' eternal glories of the saint.
The Belgian Kempen Land is a vast stretch of sandy plains in the provinces of Anvers, Brabant, and Limburg. Its chief parish, Gheel, has a population of some 12,000, about one fifteenth of which are lunatics in family treatment, and many of them occupied in the usual routine of domestic, field, and garden work. This custom has prevailed there for a thousand years. In the seventh century, a chapel was built and dedicated to Saint Martin, the apostle of the Gauls. Some cells of pious hermits surrounded it and formed the principal nucleus of Gheel. Here the young daughter of a pagan king of Ireland sought a refuge from his incestuous love, accompanied by Gerrebert, the priest who had converted herself and her mother to Christianity. Her father, discovering her traces, pursued her, caused Gerrebert to be put to death, and his servants refusing to execute his sanguinary orders against his daughter, he cut off her head with his own hands, thus avenging, by the most horrible crime, the defeat of his guilty passion. Certain lunatics who witnessed this terrible martyrdom, and others whom piety led to the grave of the victims, as the legend runs, were cured. Gratitude and faith attributed the merit of these cures to the holy young virgin, henceforth honored as the patroness of the insane. Attracted by hopes of a miracle, other families brought their afflicted to the foot of the memorial cross and double bier. The visitors, on their departure, confided their patients to the charity of the residents. This custom became an institution. Little by little, a village was formed here, animated by work as well as prayer, and which became, at last, an important burgh. A large and beautiful church, built in honor of Saint Dymphna, replaced Saint Martin's chapel, early in the twelfth century, and was consecrated on its completion in 1340, by the Bishop of Cambrai. The popular devotion there was approved by a brief of Pope Eugene IV., in 1400. A vicariate composed of nine priests and a director was instituted in 1538, and in 1562 changed into a chapter consisting of nine canons and a deacon.
From these times up to our own day, a current of pilgrimage has been sustained by the malady and by faith.
This fountain of prayer in the desert, these pious cares solicited and granted, have become a source of industry and liberty for the insane, and of prosperity for the district. This is readily explained. The barren soil of the Kempen renders it difficult to live there, hospitality was more onerous there than elsewhere, and economy as well as religious charity counselled the host to have but one board with his guest. To keep him apart would have been losing the time of those occupied in taking care of him. Left at liberty, he would naturally accompany them to the fields, and there, before the soil which solicited arms, another step of progress was accomplished. So, without any constraint, by the attractions of social labor and of gentle influences, many of the insane became useful members of the family.The first inspirations of religion, reenforced by considerations of economy, came to be organized in a secular practice of humble virtues by the habit of affectionate cares. Thus, in the rude middle ages, the Gheel folk, without the light of science, but in that of a religious faith made fruitful by the heart and sustained by their interest, practised a treatment of insanity based on the liberty of movement, on rural and domestic industry, and on the sympathy of an adoptive family, far from all that might recall a sinister past.
The arbitrary discipline founded on geometrical and military ideas in modern times has not spared Gheel; yet, whatever abuses ten centuries had introduced and habit protected there, as well as its good services, were ascertained by a most thorough inquest. The new regulations for Gheel in 1851-'52-'57 and '58 secure, as far as written laws can go, the well-being of the insane.
The insane are admitted at Gheel without distinction as to nation, religion, age, sex, or fortune. Every one is welcomed with sincere sympathy, and receives the same hygienic and medical care, though nothing prevents the rich from enjoying their fortune, or whatever, in the way of luxuries, their relatives may provide for them. One English gentleman, for instance, consumes in festive entertainments the income of a large estate. Of late years, the Belgian administration has excluded from Gheel certain dangerous forms of lunacy, such as homicidal and incendiary monomanias, and those who are constantly bent upon escaping from any place to which they may have been taken, or whose affections are of such a nature as to disturb public decency. It does not appear, however, that this recent transfer of 250 patients had been called for by any disasters. It was rather a concession to administrative routine, and Mr. Parigot, the inspector at that time, regrets that the colony should thus have lost a class of patients the control of whom best attested its moral power. Both the patients and their guardians felt aggrieved by this arbitrary measure.
No distinctive dress is worn by the insane; their garments are such as are worn by the country folk in general, so that nothing calls public attention to them, nor reminds them of their peculiar situation.
Liberty under all its forms is the good genius which has inspired, protects, and preserves this colony: especially the liberty to come and go, to sleep or get up, to work or to rest, to read or write or talk at pleasure, to receive one's friends or correspond with them without any restriction. The supreme science of government consists in not contradicting the insane, but humoring their innocent fantasies, or imposing nothing by force, but obtaining all by persuasion. Unless some evident and particular inconvenience prevents it, they enter public places, smoke a pipe at thecafé, play a hand of cards, read the papers, or drink a glass of beer with the neighbors. The tavern-keepers are not allowed to sell wine or distilled liquors.
If liberty, equality, and fraternity are notpoliticalterms there, they are the realities of common life. The lunatic is a man, and is treated as such by the same right as all his brothers in God.
You would never hear at Gheel such a complaint as this, by a poor lunatic confined in an asylum, where, indeed, he was the subject of intelligent and devoted cares: