The Life of John Sterling

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"The ignorance of the Neapolitans, from the highest to the lowest, is
very eminent; and excites the admiration of all the rest of Italy. In
the great building containing all the Works of Art, and a Library of
150,000 volumes, I asked for the best existing Book (a German one
published ten years ago) on the Statues in that very Collection; and,
after a rabble of clerks and custodes, got up to a dirty priest, who
bowing to the ground regretted 'they did not possess it,' but at last
remembered that 'they _had_ entered into negotiations on the subject,
which as yet had been unsuccessful.'--The favorite device on the walls
at Naples is a vermilion Picture of a Male and Female Soul
respectively up to the waist (the waist of a _soul_) in fire, and an
Angel above each, watering the sufferers from a watering-pot. This is
intended to gain alms for Masses. The same populace sit for hours on
the Mole, listening to rhapsodists who recite Ariosto. I have seen I
think five of them all within a hundred yards of each other, and some
sets of fiddlers to boot. Yet there are few parts of the world where
I have seen less laughter than there. The Miracle of Januarius's
Blood is, on the whole, my most curious experience. The furious
entreaties, shrieks and sobs, of a set of old women, yelling till the
Miracle was successfully performed, are things never to be forgotten.

"I spent three weeks in this most glittering of countries, and saw
most of the usual wonders,--the Paestan Temples being to me much the
most valuable. But Pompeii and all that it has yielded, especially
the Fresco Paintings, have also an infinite interest. When one
considers that this prodigious series of beautiful designs supplied
the place of our common room-papers,--the wealth of poetic imagery
among the Ancients, and the corresponding traditional variety and
elegance of pictorial treatment, seem equally remarkable. The Greek
and Latin Books do not give one quite so fully this sort of
impression; because they afford no direct measure of the extent of
their own diffusion. But these are ornaments from the smaller class
of decent houses in a little Country Town; and the greater number of
them, by the slightness of the execution, show very clearly that they
were adapted to ordinary taste, and done by mere artisans. In general
clearness, symmetry and simplicity of feeling, I cannot say that, on
the whole, the works of Raffaelle equal them; though of course he has
endless beauties such as we could not find unless in the great
original works from which these sketches at Pompeii were taken. Yet
with all my much increased reverence for the Greeks, it seems more
plain than ever that they had hardly anything of the peculiar
devotional feeling of Christianity.

"Rome, which I loved before above all the earth, now delights me more
than ever;--though at this moment there is rain falling that would not
discredit Oxford Street. The depth, sincerity and splendor that there
once was in the semi-paganism of the old Catholics comes out in St.
Peter's and its dependencies, almost as grandly as does Greek and
Roman Art in the Forum and the Vatican Galleries. I wish you were
here: but, at all events, hope to see you and your Wife once more
during this summer.

"Yours,
"JOHN STERLING."

At Paris, where he stopped a day and night, and generally through his
whole journey from Marseilles to Havre, one thing attended him: the
prevailing epidemic of the place and year; now gone, and nigh
forgotten, as other influenzas are. He writes to his Father: "I have
not yet met a single Frenchman, who could give me any rational
explanation _why_ they were all in such a confounded rage against us.
Definite causes of quarrel a statesman may know how to deal with,
inasmuch as the removal of them may help to settle the dispute. But
it must be a puzzling task to negotiate about instincts; to which
class, as it seems to me, we must have recourse for an understanding
of the present abhorrence which everybody on the other side of the
Channel not only feels, but makes a point to boast of, against the
name of Britain. France is slowly arming, especially with Steam, _en
attendant_ a more than possible contest, in which they reckon
confidently on the eager co-operation of the Yankees; as, _vice
versa_, an American told me that his countrymen do on that of France.
One person at Paris (M. ---- whom you know) provoked me to tell him
that 'England did not want another battle of Trafalgar; but if France
did, she might compel England to gratify her.'"--After a couple of
pleasant and profitable months, he was safe home again in the first
days of June; and saw Falmouth not under gray iron skies, and whirls
of March dust, but bright with summer opulence and the roses coming
out.

It was what I call his "_fifth_ peregrinity;" his fifth and last. He
soon afterwards came up to London; spent a couple of weeks, with all
his old vivacity, among us here. The AEsculapian oracles, it would
appear, gave altogether cheerful prophecy; the highest medical
authority "expresses the most decided opinion that I have gradually
mended for some years; and in truth I have not, for six or seven, been
so free from serious symptoms of illness as at present." So uncertain
are all oracles, AEsculapian and other!

During this visit, he made one new acquaintance which he much valued;
drawn thither, as I guess, by the wish to take counsel about
_Strafford_. He writes to his Clifton friend, under date, 1st July
1842: "Lockhart, of the _Quarterly Review_, I made my first oral
acquaintance with; and found him as neat, clear and cutting a brain as
you would expect; but with an amount of knowledge, good nature and
liberal anti-bigotry, that would much surprise many. The tone of his
children towards him seemed to me decisive of his real kindness. He
quite agreed with me as to the threatening seriousness of our present
social perplexities, and the necessity and difficulty of doing
something effectual for so satisfying the manual multitude as not to
overthrow all legal security....

"Of other persons whom I saw in London," continues he, "there are
several that would much interest you,--though I missed Tennyson, by a
mere chance.... John Mill has completely finished, and sent to the
bookseller, his great work on Logic; the labor of many years of a
singularly subtle, patient and comprehensive mind. It will be our
chief speculative monument of this age. Mill and I could not meet
above two or three times; but it was with the openness and freshness
of school-boy friends, though our friendship only dates from the
manhood of both."

He himself was busier than ever; occupied continually with all manner
of Poetic interests. _Coeur-de-Lion_, a new and more elaborate
attempt in the mock-heroic or comico-didactic vein, had been on hand
for some time, the scope of it greatly deepening and expanding itself
since it first took hold of him; and now, soon after the Naples
journey, it rose into shape on the wider plan; shaken up probably by
this new excitement, and indebted to Calabria, Palermo and the
Mediterranean scenes for much of the vesture it had. With this, which
opened higher hopes for him than any of his previous efforts, he was
now employing all his time and strength;--and continued to do so, this
being the last effort granted him among us.

Already, for some months, _Strafford_ lay complete: but how to get it
from the stocks; in what method to launch it? The step was
questionable. Before going to Italy he had sent me the Manuscript;
still loyal and friendly; and willing to hear the worst that could be
said of his poetic enterprise. I had to afflict him again, the good
brave soul, with the deliberate report that I could _not_ accept this
Drama as his Picture of the Life of Strafford, or as any _Picture_ of
that strange Fact. To which he answered, with an honest manfulness,
in a tone which is now pathetic enough to me, that he was much grieved
yet much obliged, and uncertain how to decide. On the other hand, Mr.
Hare wrote, warmly eulogizing. Lockhart too spoke kindly, though
taking some exceptions. It was a questionable case. On the whole,
_Strafford_ remained, for the present, unlaunched; and _Coeur de-Lion_
was getting its first timbers diligently laid down. So passed, in
peaceable seclusion, in wholesome employment and endeavor, the autumn
and winter of 1842-43. On Christmas-day, he reports to his Mother:--

"I wished to write to you yesterday; but was prevented by the
important business of preparing a Tree, in the German fashion, for the
children. This project answered perfectly, as it did last year; and
gave them the greatest pleasure. I wish you and my Father could have
been here to see their merry faces. Johnny was in the thick of the
fun, and much happier than Lord Anson on capturing the galleon. We
are all going on well and quietly, but with nothing very new among
us.... The last book I have lighted on is Moffat's _Missionary Labors
in South Africa_; which is worth reading. There is the best
collection of lion stories in it that I have ever seen. But the man
is, also, really a very good fellow; and fit for something much better
than most lions are. He is very ignorant, and mistaken in some
things; but has strong sense and heart; and his Narrative adds another
to the many proofs of the enormous power of Christianity on rude
minds. Nothing can be more chaotic, that is human at all, than the
notions of these poor Blacks, even after what is called their
conversion; but the effect is produced. They do adopt pantaloons, and
abandon polygamy; and I suppose will soon have newspapers and literary
soirees."

CHAPTER V.
DISASTER ON DISASTER.

DURING all these years of struggle and wayfaring, his Father's
household at Knightsbridge had stood healthful, happy, increasing in
wealth, free diligence, solidity and honest prosperity: a fixed sunny
islet, towards which, in all his voyagings and overclouded roamings,
he could look with satisfaction, as to an ever-open port of refuge.

The elder Sterling, after many battles, had reached his field of
conquest in these years; and was to be regarded as a victorious man.
Wealth sufficient, increasing not diminishing, had rewarded his labors
in the _Times_, which were now in their full flower; he had influence
of a sort; went busily among busy public men; and enjoyed, in the
questionable form attached to journalism and anonymity, a social
consideration and position which were abundantly gratifying to him. A
singular figure of the epoch; and when you came to know him, which it
was easy to fail of doing if you had not eyes and candid insight, a
gallant, truly gifted, and manful figure, of his kind. We saw much of
him in this house; much of all his family; and had grown to love them
all right well,--him too, though that was the difficult part of the
feat. For in his Irish way he played the conjurer very much,--"three
hundred and sixty-five opinions in the year upon every subject," as a
wag once said. In fact his talk, ever ingenious, emphatic and
spirited in detail, was much defective in earnestness, at least in
clear earnestness, of purport and outcome; but went tumbling as if in
mere welters of explosive unreason; a volcano heaving under vague
deluges of scoriae, ashes and imponderous pumice-stones, you could not
say in what direction, nor well whether in any. Not till after good
study did you see the deep molten lava-flood, which simmered steadily
enough, and showed very well by and by whither it was bound. For I
must say of Edward Sterling, after all his daily explosive
sophistries, and fallacies of talk, he had a stubborn instinctive
sense of what was manful, strong and worthy; recognized, with quick
feeling, the charlatan under his solemnest wig; knew as clearly as any
man a pusillanimous tailor in buckram, an ass under the lion's skin,
and did with his whole heart despise the same.

The sudden changes of doctrine in the _Times_, which failed not to
excite loud censure and indignant amazement in those days, were first
intelligible to you when you came to interpret them as his changes.
These sudden whirls from east to west on his part, and total changes
of party and articulate opinion at a day's warning, lay in the nature
of the man, and could not be helped; products of his fiery impatience,
of the combined impetuosity and limitation of an intellect, which did
nevertheless continually gravitate towards what was loyal, true and
right on all manner of subjects. These, as I define them, were the
mere scoriae and pumice wreck of a steady central lava-flood, which
truly was volcanic and explosive to a strange degree, but did rest as
few others on the grand fire-depths of the world. Thus, if he stormed
along, ten thousand strong, in the time of the Reform Bill,
indignantly denouncing Toryism and its obsolete insane pretensions;
and then if, after some experience of Whig management, he discerned
that Wellington and Peel, by whatever name entitled, were the men to
be depended on by England,--there lay in all this, visible enough, a
deeper consistency far more important than the superficial one, so
much clamored after by the vulgar. Which is the lion's-skin; which is
the real lion? Let a man, if he is prudent, ascertain that before
speaking;--but above and beyond all things, _let_ him ascertain it,
and stand valiantly to it when ascertained! In the latter essential
part of the operation Edward Sterling was honorably successful to a
really marked degree; in the former, or prudential part, very much the
reverse, as his history in the Journalistic department at least, was
continually teaching him.

An amazingly impetuous, hasty, explosive man, this "Captain
Whirlwind," as I used to call him! Great sensibility lay in him, too;
a real sympathy, and affectionate pity and softness, which he had an
over-tendency to express even by tears,--a singular sight in so
leonine a man. Enemies called them maudlin and hypocritical, these
tears; but that was nowise the complete account of them. On the
whole, there did conspicuously lie a dash of ostentation, a
self-consciousness apt to become loud and braggart, over all he said
and did and felt: this was the alloy of the man, and you had to be
thankful for the abundant gold along with it.

Quizzing enough he got among us for all this, and for the singular
_chiaroscuro_ manner of procedure, like that of an Archimagus
Cagliostro, or Kaiser Joseph Incognito, which his anonymous
known-unknown thunderings in the _Times_ necessitated in him; and much
we laughed,--not without explosive counter-banterings on his
part;--but, in fine, one could not do without him; one knew him at
heart for a right brave man. "By Jove, sir!" thus he would swear to
you, with radiant face; sometimes, not often, by a deeper oath. With
persons of dignity, especially with women, to whom he was always very
gallant, he had courtly delicate manners, verging towards the
wire-drawn and elaborate; on common occasions, he bloomed out at once
into jolly familiarity of the gracefully boisterous kind, reminding
you of mess-rooms and old Dublin days. His off-hand mode of speech
was always precise, emphatic, ingenious: his laugh, which was
frequent rather than otherwise, had a sincerity of banter, but no real
depth of sense for the ludicrous; and soon ended, if it grew too loud,
in a mere dissonant scream. He was broad, well-built, stout of
stature; had a long lowish head, sharp gray eyes, with large strong
aquiline face to match; and walked, or sat, in an erect decisive
manner. A remarkable man; and playing, especially in those years
1830-40, a remarkable part in the world.

For it may be said, the emphatic, big-voiced, always influential and
often strongly unreasonable _Times_ Newspaper was the express emblem
of Edward Sterling; he, more than any other man or circumstance, _was_
the _Times_ Newspaper, and thundered through it to the shaking of the
spheres. And let us assert withal that his and its influence, in
those days, was not ill grounded but rather well; that the loud
manifold unreason, often enough vituperated and groaned over, was of
the surface mostly; that his conclusions, unreasonable, partial, hasty
as they might at first be, gravitated irresistibly towards the right:
in virtue of which grand quality indeed, the root of all good insight
in man, his _Times_ oratory found acceptance and influential audience,
amid the loud whirl of an England itself logically very stupid, and
wise chiefly by instinct.

England listened to this voice, as all might observe; and to one who
knew England and it, the result was not quite a strange one, and was
honorable rather than otherwise to both parties. A good judge of
men's talents has been heard to say of Edward Sterling: "There is not
a _faculty of improvising_ equal to this in all my circle. Sterling
rushes out into the clubs, into London society, rolls about all day,
copiously talking modish nonsense or sense, and listening to the like,
with the multifarious miscellany of men; comes home at night; redacts
it into a _Times_ Leader,--and is found to have hit the essential
purport of the world's immeasurable babblement that day, with an
accuracy beyond all other men. This is what the multifarious Babel
sound did mean to say in clear words; this, more nearly than anything
else. Let the most gifted intellect, capable of writing epics, try to
write such a Leader for the Morning Newspapers! No intellect but
Edward Sterling's can do it. An improvising faculty without parallel
in my experience."--In this "improvising faculty," much more nobly
developed, as well as in other faculties and qualities with
unexpectedly new and improved figure, John Sterling, to the accurate
observer, showed himself very much the son of Edward.

Connected with this matter, a remarkable Note has come into my hands;
honorable to the man I am writing of, and in some sort to another
higher man; which, as it may now (unhappily for us all) be published
without scruple, I will not withhold here. The support, by Edward
Sterling and the _Times_, of Sir Robert Peel's first Ministry, and
generally of Peel's statesmanship, was a conspicuous fact in its day;
but the return it met with from the person chiefly interested may be
considered well worth recording. The following Letter, after
meandering through I know not what intricate conduits, and
consultations of the Mysterious Entity whose address it bore, came to
Edward Sterling as the real flesh-and-blood proprietor, and has been
found among his papers. It is marked _Private_:--

"(Private) _To the Editor of the Times_.
"WHITEHALL, 18th April, 1835.

"SIR,--Having this day delivered into the hands of the King the Seals
of Office, I can, without any imputation of an interested motive, or
any impediment from scrupulous feelings of delicacy, express my deep
sense of the powerful support which that Government over which I had
the honor to preside received from the _Times_ Newspaper.

"If I do not offer the expressions of personal gratitude, it is
because I feel that such expressions would do injustice to the
character of a support which was given exclusively on the highest and
most independent grounds of public principle. I can say this with
perfect truth, as I am addressing one whose person even is unknown to
me, and who during my tenure of power studiously avoided every species
of intercourse which could throw a suspicion upon the motives by which
he was actuated. I should, however, be doing injustice to my own
feelings, if I were to retire from Office without one word of
acknowledgment; without at least assuring you of the admiration with
which I witnessed, during the arduous contest in which I was engaged,
the daily exhibition of that extraordinary ability to which I was
indebted for a support, the more valuable because it was an impartial
and discriminating support.--I have the honor to be, Sir,

"Ever your most obedient and faithful servant,
"ROBERT PEEL."

To which, with due loftiness and diplomatic gravity and brevity, there
is Answer, Draught of Answer in Edward Sterling's hand, from the
Mysterious Entity so honored, in the following terms:--

"_To the Right Hon. Sir Robert Peel, Bart., &c. &c. &c_.

"SIR,--It gives me sincere satisfaction to learn from the Letter with
which you have honored me, bearing yesterday's date, that you estimate
so highly the efforts which have been made during the last five months
by the _Times_ Newspaper to support the cause of rational and
wholesome Government which his Majesty had intrusted to your guidance;
and that you appreciate fairly the disinterested motive, of regard to
the public welfare, and to that alone, through which this Journal has
been prompted to pursue a policy in accordance with that of your
Administration. It is, permit me to say, by such motives only, that
the _Times_, ever since I have known it, has been influenced, whether
in defence of the Government of the day, or in constitutional
resistance to it: and indeed there exist no other motives of action
for a Journalist, compatible either with the safety of the press, or
with the political morality of the great bulk of its readers.--With
much respect, I have the honor to be, Sir, &c. &c. &c.

"THE EDITOR OF THE 'TIMES.'"

Of this Note I do not think there was the least whisper during Edward
Sterling's lifetime; which fact also one likes to remember of him, so
ostentatious and little-reticent a man. For the rest, his loyal
admiration of Sir Robert Peel,--sanctioned, and as it were almost
consecrated to his mind, by the great example of the Duke of
Wellington, whom he reverenced always with true hero-worship,--was not
a journalistic one, but a most intimate authentic feeling,
sufficiently apparent in the very heart of his mind. Among the many
opinions "liable to three hundred and sixty-five changes in the course
of the year," this in reference to Peel and Wellington was one which
ever changed, but was the same all days and hours. To which, equally
genuine, and coming still oftener to light in those times, there might
one other be added, one and hardly more: fixed contempt, not
unmingled with detestation, for Daniel O'Connell. This latter
feeling, we used often laughingly to say, was his grand political
principle, the one firm centre where all else went revolving. But
internally the other also was deep and constant; and indeed these were
properly his _two_ centres,--poles of the same axis, negative and
positive, the one presupposing the other.

O'Connell he had known in young Dublin days;--and surely no man could
well venerate another less! It was his deliberate, unalterable
opinion of the then Great O, that good would never come of him; that
only mischief, and this in huge measure, would come. That however
showy, and adroit in rhetoric and management, he was a man of
incurably commonplace intellect, and of no character but a hollow,
blustery, pusillanimous and unsound one; great only in maudlin
patriotisms, in speciosities, astucities,--in the miserable gifts for
becoming Chief _Demagogos_, Leader of a deep-sunk Populace towards
_its_ Lands of Promise; which trade, in any age or country, and
especially in the Ireland of this age, our indignant friend regarded
(and with reason) as an extremely ugly one for a man. He had himself
zealously advocated Catholic Emancipation, and was not without his
Irish patriotism, very different from the Orange sort; but the
"Liberator" was not admirable to him, and grew daily less so to an
extreme degree. Truly, his scorn of the said Liberator, now riding in
supreme dominion on the wings of _blarney_, devil-ward of a surety,
with the Liberated all following and huzzaing; his fierce gusts of
wrath and abhorrence over him,--rose occasionally almost to the
sublime. We laughed often at these vehemences:--and they were not
wholly laughable; there was something very serious, and very true, in
them! This creed of Edward Sterling's would not now, in either pole
of its axis, look so strange as it then did in many quarters.

During those ten years which might be defined as the culminating
period of Edward Sterling's life, his house at South Place, Knights
bridge, had worn a gay and solid aspect, as if built at last on the
high table-land of sunshine and success, the region of storms and dark
weather now all victoriously traversed and lying safe below. Health,
work, wages, whatever is needful to a man, he had, in rich measure;
and a frank stout heart to guide the same: he lived in such style as
pleased him; drove his own chariot up and down (himself often acting
as Jehu, and reminding you a little of _Times_ thunder even in
driving); consorted, after a fashion, with the powerful of the world;
saw in due vicissitude a miscellany of social faces round
him,--pleasant parties, which he liked well enough to garnish by a
lord; "Irish lord, if no better might be," as the banter went. For
the rest, he loved men of worth and intellect, and recognized them
well, whatever their title: this was his own patent of worth which
Nature had given him; a central light in the man, which illuminated
into a kind of beauty, serious or humorous, all the artificialities he
had accumulated on the surface of him. So rolled his days, not
quietly, yet prosperously, in manifold commerce with men. At one in
the morning, when all had vanished into sleep, his lamp was kindled in
his library; and there, twice or thrice a week, for a three-hours'
space, he launched his bolts, which next morning were to shake the
high places of the world.

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