John Sterling.
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 the Literary Chronicle in 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-thumbed History of Greece by Oliver Goldsmith, and the garden-sports of himself and his playmates, with as much distinctness as if they had been souvenirs of 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 the Times, under the name of Vetus, 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 the Times. 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 entire Edinburgh Review through, 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, an ignis fatuus. He subjected faith to reason, coquetted with infidelity, embraced Germanism, and discoursed by the hour on the church and the Logos in language all musical and shining, but conveying no meaning whatever to any one of his hearers. [Footnote 228]
[Footnote 228: Carlyle's Life 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.