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 the Times. 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 essential animus of 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 am quite 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 into the 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.
Saint Columba.
Columba, gentlest of all names! Bequest
Of a strong Celtic mother to a child
Who, unto life's meridian, kept the wild,
Impassioned grandeur of his race; his guest
The patriot bard; while innocence oppressed
Flew, with the instinct of souls undefiled,
To his great heart, who, to the guileless mild.
Called heaven's swift curse upon the lifted crest
Of lawless power. And still the generous mind
Pores, kindling, o'er heroic legends quaint,
In which grave history dips her brush to paint
That nature fierce and tender; but combined
With grace celestial, till the man we find
Crowned with th' eternal glories of the saint.