The Life of John Sterling

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"_To Thomas Carlyle, Esq., Chelsea, London_.
"VENTNOR, 7th December, 1843.

"MY DEAR CARLYLE,--My Irish Newspaper was _not_ meant as a hint that I
wanted a Letter. It contained an absurd long Advertisement,--some
project for regenerating human knowledge, &c. &c.; to which I prefixed
my private mark (a blot), thinking that you might be pleased to know
of a fellow-laborer somewhere in Tipperary.

"Your Letter, like the Scriptural oil,--(they had no patent lamps
then, and used the best oil, 7s. per gallon),--has made my face to
shine. There is but one person in the world, I shall not tell you
who, from whom a Letter would give me so much pleasure. It would be
nearly as good at Pekin, in the centre of the most enlightened
Mandarins; but here at Ventnor, where there are few Mandarins and no
enlightenment,--fountains in the wilderness, even were they
miraculous, are nothing compared with your handwriting. Yet it is sad
that you should be so melancholy. I often think that though Mercury
was the pleasanter fellow, and probably the happier, Saturn was the
greater god;--rather cannibal or so, but one excuses it in him, as in
some other heroes one knows of.

"It is, as you say, your destiny to write about Cromwell: and you
will make a book of him, at which the ears of our grandchildren will
tingle;--and as one may hope that the ears of human nature will be
growing longer and longer, the tingling will be proportionately
greater than we are accustomed to. Do what you can, I fear there will
be little gain from the Royalists. There is something very small
about the biggest of them that I have ever fallen in with, unless you
count old Hobbes a Royalist.

"Curious to see that you have them exactly preserved in the Country
Gentlemen of our day; while of the Puritans not a trace remains except
in History. Squirism had already, in that day, become the _caput
mortuum_ that it is now; and has therefore, like other mummies, been
able to last. What was opposed to it was the Life of
Puritanism,--then on the point of disappearing; and it too has left
its mummy at Exeter Hall on the platform and elsewhere. One must go
back to the Middle Ages to see Squirism as rampant and vivacious as
Biblicism was in the Seventeenth Century: and I suppose our modern
Country Gentlemen are about as near to what the old Knights and Barons
were who fought the Crusades, as our modern Evangelicals to the
fellows who sought the Lord by the light of their own pistol-shots.

"Those same Crusades are now pleasant matter for me. You remember, or
perhaps you do not, a thing I once sent you about Coeur-de-Lion. Long
since, I settled to make the Cantos you saw part of a larger Book; and
worked at it, last autumn and winter, till I had a bad illness. I am
now at work on it again; and go full sail, like _my_ hero. There are
six Cantos done, roughly, besides what you saw. I have struck out
most of the absurdest couplets, and given the whole a higher though
still sportive tone. It is becoming a kind of _Odyssey_, with a
laughing and Christian Achilles for hero. One may manage to wrap, in
that chivalrous brocade, many things belonging to our Time, and
capable of interesting it. The thing is not bad; but will require
great labor. Only it is labor that I thoroughly like; and which keeps
the maggots out of one's brain, until their time.

"I have never spoken to you, never been able to speak to you, of the
change in my life,--almost as great, one fancies, as one's own death.
Even now, although it seems as if I had so much to say, I cannot. If
one could imagine--... But it is no use; I cannot write wisely on
this matter. I suppose no human being was ever devoted to another
more entirely than she; and that makes the change not less but more
bearable. It seems as if she could not be gone quite; and that indeed
is my faith.

"Mr. James, your New-England friend, was here only for a few days; I
saw him several times, and liked him. They went, on the 24th of last
month, back to London,--or so purposed,--because there is no pavement
here for him to walk on. I want to know where he is, and thought I
should be able to learn from you. I gave him a Note for Mill, who
perhaps may have seen him. I think this is all at present from,

"Yours,
"JOHN STERLING."

Of his health, all this while, we had heard little definite; and
understood that he was very quiet and careful; in virtue of which
grand improvement we vaguely considered all others would follow. Once
let him learn well to be _slow_ as the common run of men are, would
not all be safe and well? Nor through the winter, or the cold spring
months, did bad news reach us; perhaps less news of any kind than had
been usual, which seemed to indicate a still and wholesome way of life
and work. Not till "April 4th, 1844," did the new alarm occur: again
on some slight accident, the breaking of a blood-vessel; again
prostration under dangerous sickness, from which this time he never
rose.

There had been so many sudden failings and happy risings again in our
poor Sterling's late course of health, we had grown so accustomed to
mingle blame of his impetuosity with pity for his sad overthrows, we
did not for many weeks quite realize to ourselves the stern fact that
here at length had the peculiar fall come upon us,--the last of all
these falls! This brittle life, which had so often held together and
victoriously rallied under pressures and collisions, could not rally
always, and must one time be shivered. It was not till the summer
came and no improvement; and not even then without lingering glimmers
of hope against hope, that I fairly had to own what had now come, what
was now day by day sternly advancing with the steadiness of Time.

From the first, the doctors spoke despondently; and Sterling himself
felt well that there was no longer any chance of life. He had often
said so, in his former illnesses, and thought so, yet always till now
with some tacit grain of counter-hope; he had never clearly felt so as
now: Here _is_ the end; the great change is now here!--Seeing how it
was, then, he earnestly gathered all his strength to do this last act
of his tragedy, as he had striven to do the others, in a pious and
manful manner. As I believe we can say he did; few men in any time
_more_ piously or manfully. For about six months he sat looking
steadfastly, at all moments, into the eyes of Death; he too who had
eyes to _see_ Death and the Terrors and Eternities; and surely it was
with perfect courage and piety, and valiant simplicity of heart, that
he bore himself, and did and thought and suffered, in this trying
predicament, more terrible than the usual death of men. All strength
left to him he still employed in working: day by day the end came
nearer, but day by day also some new portion of his adjustments was
completed, by some small stage his task was nearer done. His domestic
and other affairs, of all sorts, he settled to the last item. Of his
own Papers he saved a few, giving brief pertinent directions about
them; great quantities, among which a certain Autobiography begun some
years ago at Clifton, he ruthlessly burnt, judging that the best. To
his friends he left messages, memorials of books: I have a _Gough's
Camden_, and other relics, which came to me in that way, and are among
my sacred possessions. The very Letters of his friends he sorted and
returned; had each friend's Letters made into a packet, sealed with
black, and duly addressed for delivery when the time should come.

At an early period of his illness, all visitors had of course been
excluded, except his most intimate ones: before long, so soon as the
end became apparent, he took leave even of his Father, to avoid
excitements and intolerable emotions; and except his Brother and the
Maurices, who were generally about him coming and going, none were
admitted. This latter form of life, I think, continued for above
three months. Men were still working about his grounds, of whom he
took some charge; needful works, great and small, let them not pause
on account of him. He still rose from bed; had still some portion of
his day which he could spend in his Library. Besides business there,
he read a good deal,--earnest books; the Bible, most earnest of books,
his chief favorite. He still even wrote a good deal. To his eldest
Boy, now Mr. Newman's ward, who had been removed to the Maurices'
since the beginning of this illness, he addressed, every day or two,
sometimes daily, for eight or nine weeks, a Letter, of general
paternal advice and exhortation; interspersing sparingly, now and
then, such notices of his own feelings and condition as could be
addressed to a boy. These Letters, I have lately read: they give,
beyond any he has written, a noble image of the intrinsic
Sterling;--the same face we had long known; but painted now as on the
azure of Eternity, serene, victorious, divinely sad; the dusts and
extraneous disfigurements imprinted on it by the world, now washed
away. One little Excerpt, not the best, but the fittest for its
neighborhood here, will be welcome to the reader:--

"_To Master Edward C. Sterling, London_.
"HILLSIDE, VENTNOR, 29th June, 1844.

"MY DEAR BOY,--We have been going on here as quietly as possible, with
no event that I know of. There is nothing except books to occupy me.
But you may suppose that my thoughts often move towards you, and that
I fancy what you may be doing in the great City,--the greatest on the
Earth,--where I spent so many years of my life. I first saw London
when I was between eight and nine years old, and then lived in or near
it for the whole of the next ten, and more there than anywhere else
for seven years longer. Since then I have hardly ever been a year
without seeing the place, and have often lived in it for a
considerable time. There I grew from childhood to be a man. My
little Brothers and Sisters, and since, my Mother, died and are buried
there. There I first saw your Mamma, and was there married. It seems
as if, in some strange way, London were a part of Me or I of London.
I think of it often, not as full of noise and dust and confusion, but
as something silent, grand and everlasting.

"When I fancy how you are walking in the same streets, and moving
along the same river, that I used to watch so intently, as if in a
dream, when younger than you are,--I could gladly burst into tears,
not of grief, but with a feeling that there is no name for.
Everything is so wonderful, great and holy, so sad and yet not bitter,
so full of Death and so bordering on Heaven. Can you understand
anything of this? If you can, you will begin to know what a serious
matter our Life is; how unworthy and stupid it is to trifle it away
without heed; what a wretched, insignificant, worthless creature any
one comes to be, who does not as soon as possible bend his whole
strength, as in stringing a stiff bow, to doing whatever task lies
first before him....

"We have a mist here to-day from the sea. It reminds me of that which
I used to see from my house in St, Vincent, rolling over the great
volcano and the mountains round it. I used to look at it from our
windows with your Mamma, and you a little baby in her arms.

"This Letter is not so well written as I could wish, but I hope you
will be able to read it.

"Your affectionate Papa,
"JOHN STERLING."

These Letters go from June 9th to August 2d, at which latter date
vacation-time arrived, and the Boy returned to him. The Letters are
preserved; and surely well worth preserving.

In this manner he wore the slow doomed months away. Day after day his
little period of Library went on waning, shrinking into less and less;
but I think it never altogether ended till the general end came.--For
courage, for active audacity we had all known Sterling; but such a
fund of mild stoicism, of devout patience and heroic composure, we did
not hitherto know in him. His sufferings, his sorrows, all his
unutterabilities in this slow agony, he held right manfully down;
marched loyally, as at the bidding of the Eternal, into the dread
Kingdoms, and no voice of weakness was heard from him. Poor noble
Sterling, he had struggled so high and gained so little here! But
this also he did gain, to be a brave man; and it was much.

Summer passed into Autumn: Sterling's earthly businesses, to the last
detail of them, were now all as good as done: his strength too was
wearing to its end, his daily turn in the Library shrunk now to a
span. He had to hold himself as if in readiness for the great voyage
at any moment. One other Letter I must give; not quite the last
message I had from Sterling, but the last that can be inserted here:
a brief Letter, fit to be forever memorable to the receiver of it:--

"_To Thomas Carlyle, Esq., Chelsea, London_.
"HILLSIDE, VENTNOR, 10th August, 1844.

MY DEAR CARLYLE,--For the first time for many months it seems possible
to send you a few words; merely, however, for Remembrance and
Farewell. On higher matters there is nothing to say. I tread the
common road into the great darkness, without any thought of fear, and
with very much of hope. Certainty indeed I have none. With regard to
You and Me I cannot begin to write; having nothing for it but to keep
shut the lid of those secrets with all the iron weights that are in my
power. Towards me it is still more true than towards 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. It is all very strange,
but not one hundredth part so sad as it seems to the standers-by.

"Your Wife knows my mind towards her, and will believe it without
asseverations.

"Yours to the last,
"JOHN STERLING."

It was a bright Sunday morning when this letter came to me: if in the
great Cathedral of Immensity I did no worship that day, the fault
surely was my own. Sterling affectionately refused to see me; which
also was kind and wise. And four days before his death, there are
some stanzas of verse for me, written as if in star-fire and immortal
tears; which are among my sacred possessions, to be kept for myself
alone.

His business with the world was done; the one business now to await
silently what may lie in other grander worlds. "God is great," he was
wont to say: "God is great." The Maurices were now constantly near
him; Mrs. Maurice assiduously watching over him. On the evening of
Wednesday the 18th of September, his Brother, as he did every two or
three days, came down; found him in the old temper, weak in strength
but not very sensibly weaker; they talked calmly together for an hour;
then Anthony left his bedside, and retired for the night, not
expecting any change. But suddenly, about eleven o'clock, there came
a summons and alarm: hurrying to his Brother's room, he found his
Brother dying; and in a short while more the faint last struggle was
ended, and all those struggles and strenuous often-foiled endeavors of
eight-and-thirty years lay hushed in death.

CHAPTER VII.
CONCLUSION.

Sterling was of rather slim but well-boned wiry figure, perhaps an
inch or two from six feet in height; of blonde complexion, without
color, yet not pale or sickly; dark-blonde hair, copious enough, which
he usually wore short. The general aspect of him indicated freedom,
perfect spontaneity, with a certain careless natural grace. In his
apparel, you could notice, he affected dim colors, easy shapes;
cleanly always, yet even in this not fastidious or conspicuous: he
sat or stood, oftenest, in loose sloping postures; walked with long
strides, body carelessly bent, head flung eagerly forward, right hand
perhaps grasping a cane, and rather by the middle to swing it, than by
the end to use it otherwise. An attitude of frank, cheerful
impetuosity, of hopeful speed and alacrity; which indeed his
physiognomy, on all sides of it, offered as the chief expression.
Alacrity, velocity, joyous ardor, dwelt in the eyes too, which were of
brownish gray, full of bright kindly life, rapid and frank rather than
deep or strong. A smile, half of kindly impatience, half of real
mirth, often sat on his face. The head was long; high over the
vertex; in the brow, of fair breadth, but not high for such a man.

In the voice, which was of good tenor sort, rapid and strikingly
distinct, powerful too, and except in some of the higher notes
harmonious, there was a clear-ringing _metallic_ tone,--which I often
thought was wonderfully physiognomic. A certain splendor, beautiful,
but not the deepest or the softest, which I could call a splendor as
of burnished metal,--fiery valor of heart, swift decisive insight and
utterance, then a turn for brilliant elegance, also for ostentation,
rashness, &c. &c.,--in short, a flash as of clear-glancing
sharp-cutting steel, lay in the whole nature of the man, in his heart
and in his intellect, marking alike the excellence and the limits of
them both. His laugh, which on light occasions was ready and
frequent, had in it no great depth of gayety, or sense for the
ludicrous in men or things; you might call it rather a good smile
become vocal than a deep real laugh: with his whole man I never saw
him laugh. A clear sense of the humorous he had, as of most other
things; but in himself little or no true humor;--nor did he attempt
that side of things. To call him deficient in sympathy would seem
strange, him whose radiances and resonances went thrilling over all
the world, and kept him in brotherly contact with all: but I may say
his sympathies dwelt rather with the high and sublime than with the
low or ludicrous; and were, in any field, rather light, wide and
lively, than deep, abiding or great.

There is no Portrait of him which tolerably resembles. The miniature
Medallion, of which Mr. Hare has given an Engraving, offers us, with
no great truth in physical details, one, and not the best, superficial
expression of his face, as if that with vacuity had been what the face
contained; and even that Mr. Hare's engraver has disfigured into the
nearly or the utterly irrecognizable. Two Pencil-sketches, which no
artist could approve of, hasty sketches done in some social hour, one
by his friend Spedding, one by Banim the Novelist, whom he slightly
knew and had been kind to, tell a much truer story so far as they go:
of these his Brother has engravings; but these also I must suppress as
inadequate for strangers.

Nor in the way of Spiritual Portraiture does there, after so much
writing and excerpting, anything of importance remain for me to say.
John Sterling and his Life in this world were--such as has been
already said. In purity of character, in the so-called moralities, in
all manner of proprieties of conduct, so as tea-tables and other human
tribunals rule them, he might be defined as perfect, according to the
world's pattern: in these outward tangible respects the world's
criticism of him must have been praise and that only. An honorable
man, and good citizen; discharging, with unblamable correctness, all
functions and duties laid on him by the customs (_mores_) of the
society he lived in,--with correctness and something more. In all
these particulars, a man perfectly _moral_, or of approved virtue
according to the rules.

Nay in the far more essential tacit virtues, which are not marked on
stone tables, or so apt to be insisted on by human creatures over tea
or elsewhere,--in clear and perfect fidelity to Truth wherever found,
in childlike and soldier-like, pious and valiant loyalty to the
Highest, and what of good and evil that might send him,--he excelled
among good men. The joys and the sorrows of his lot he took with true
simplicity and acquiescence. Like a true son, not like a miserable
mutinous rebel, he comported himself in this Universe. Extremity of
distress--and surely his fervid temper had enough of contradiction in
this world--could not tempt him into impatience at any time. By no
chance did you ever hear from him a whisper of those mean repinings,
miserable arraignings and questionings of the Eternal Power, such as
weak souls even well disposed will sometimes give way to in the
pressure of their despair; to the like of this he never yielded, or
showed the least tendency to yield;--which surely was well on his
part. For the Eternal Power, I still remark, will not answer the like
of this, but silently and terribly accounts it impious, blasphemous
and damnable, and now as heretofore will visit it as such. Not a
rebel but a son, I said; willing to suffer when Heaven said, Thou
shalt;--and withal, what is perhaps rarer in such a combination,
willing to rejoice also, and right cheerily taking the good that was
sent, whensoever or in whatever form it came.

A pious soul we may justly call him; devoutly submissive to the will
of the Supreme in all things: the highest and sole essential form
which Religion can assume in man, and without which all forms of
religion are a mockery and a delusion in man. Doubtless, in so clear
and filial a heart there must have dwelt the perennial feeling of
silent worship; which silent feeling, as we have seen, he was eager
enough to express by all good ways of utterance; zealously adopting
such appointed forms and creeds as the dignitaries of the World had
fixed upon and solemnly named recommendable; prostrating his heart in
such Church, by such accredited rituals and seemingly fit or half-fit
methods, as his poor time and country had to offer him,--not rejecting
the said methods till they stood convicted of palpable unfitness and
then doing it right gently withal, rather letting them drop as
pitiably dead for him, than angrily hurling them out of doors as
needing to be killed. By few Englishmen of his epoch had the thing
called Church of England been more loyally appealed to as a spiritual
mother.

And yet, as I said before, it may be questioned whether piety, what we
call devotion or worship, was the principle deepest in him. In spite
of his Coleridge discipleship, and his once headlong operations
following thereon, I used to judge that his piety was prompt and pure
rather than great or intense; that, on the whole, religious devotion
was not the deepest element of him. His reverence was ardent and
just, ever ready for the thing or man that deserved revering, or
seemed to deserve it: but he was of too joyful, light and hoping a
nature to go to the depths of that feeling, much more to dwell
perennially in it. He had no fear in his composition; terror and awe
did not blend with his respect of anything. In no scene or epoch
could he have been a Church Saint, a fanatic enthusiast, or have worn
out his life in passive martyrdom, sitting patient in his grim
coal-mine, looking at the "three ells" of Heaven high overhead there.
In sorrow he would not dwell; all sorrow he swiftly subdued, and shook
away from him. How could you have made an Indian Fakir of the Greek
Apollo, "whose bright eye lends brightness, and never yet saw a
shadow"?--I should say, not religious reverence, rather artistic
admiration was the essential character of him: a fact connected with
all other facts in the physiognomy of his life and self, and giving a
tragic enough character to much of the history he had among us.

Poor Sterling, he was by nature appointed for a Poet, then,--a Poet
after his sort, or recognizer and delineator of the Beautiful; and not
for a Priest at all? Striving towards the sunny heights, out of such
a level and through such an element as ours in these days is, he had
strange aberrations appointed him, and painful wanderings amid the
miserable gaslights, bog-fires, dancing meteors and putrid
phosphorescences which form the guidance of a young human soul at
present! Not till after trying all manner of sublimely illuminated
places, and finding that the basis of them was putridity, artificial
gas and quaking bog, did he, when his strength was all done, discover
his true sacred hill, and passionately climb thither while life was
fast ebbing!--A tragic history, as all histories are; yet a gallant,
brave and noble one, as not many are. It is what, to a radiant son of
the Muses, and bright messenger of the harmonious Wisdoms, this poor
world--if he himself have not strength enough, and _inertia_ enough,
and amid his harmonious eloquences silence enough--has provided at
present. Many a high-striving, too hasty soul, seeking guidance
towards eternal excellence from the official Black-artists, and
successful Professors of political, ecclesiastical, philosophical,
commercial, general and particular Legerdemain, will recognize his own
history in this image of a fellow-pilgrim's.

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