A sickly shadow 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 the Sexton's Daughter at 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's Geology opened 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 Laudato is 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 the Isle of Palms. Thus he says of The 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 was misseen, 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 editing The London and Westminster Review, and Sterling was sufficiently vague and unsound to be thought a valuable contributor. In that Review he discoursed of Montaigne, Simonides, and Carlyle, while in the Quarterly of 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 adopted Que 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 his protesting character 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 that one day or other the puzzle of existence would find its solution in the 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 his exposé of 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 dangerous Life 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 rhythmical speeches, not songs. "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 published The 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. The Election was followed by Strafford and Coeur de Lion, but the one subject was too dramatic, and the other one too epic, for Sterling's muse.