[CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING][3]
No work has yet appeared this season in which the better portion of the reading public have felt so deep an interest as in the Life of John Sterling, by Thomas Carlyle. But this is less a consequence of the subject than of the authorship. Any thing from the hand of Carlyle is sure of a large audience, but he has hitherto done nothing in which his personality was likely to be so much involved as in this life of his friend "Archæus." We copy from the London Spectator the following reviewal of it:
"The domain of political economy is not unlimited; the laws of supply and demand are not the only or the strongest forces at work in nature. Here is a man whom the world would have been well content to leave quiet in his early grave by the sea-shore in the sweetest of English islands; to leave him there to the soft melodies of the warm wind and the gentle rain, and the pious visits now and then of those who knew and loved him when his eye was bright and his voice eloquent with sparkling thoughts and warm affections. He had done nothing that the public cared for; had left no traces on the sands of Time that the next tide would not have effaced. But he lived amongst men who write books, amongst some of the very best of such; and two of the foremost of them loved him so well, that they could not let his memory die,—thought that the positive actual results of his life made known to the public were but faint indications of the power that lay in him though sorely foiled and baffled, and that he in his individual spiritual progress typified better than most the struggle that the age is passing through, its processes, and its results. But the two men, though united in affection for Sterling, were so different in other respects, that the memorial raised by the one could scarcely fail to be unsatisfactory to the other. Archdeacon Hare, the author of the earlier biography, is a man of encyclopœdic knowledge,—a profound classical scholar, the most learned and philosophical of modern English theologians, at once accurate and wide in his acquaintance with European history and literature. And this large survey of the forms under which the men of the past have thought and acted, has not led in him to an indifference to all forms, but rather to a keener sense of the organic vitality of forms, especially of national institutions, whether civil or ecclesiastical polities, states or churches. Moreover, apart from this general characteristic, which would lead to an intellectual and practical reverence for the institutions of his own land, and a hesitating caution in the introduction of constitutional changes, Mr. Hare is an English churchman of no ordinary cast. He has passed from the region of traditional belief, has skirted the bogs and quicksands of doubt and disbelief, and has found firm footing where alone it seems possible, in a revelation whose letter is colored by the human media through which it has passed, and in a faith whose highest mysteries are not only harmonious with but necessary complements to the truths of reason. The English Church is to him the purest embodiment of his religious idea, as the English constitution was to him, in common with Niebuhr, Coleridge, and other great thinkers, of the idea of a state. Such a man could not write a life like Sterling's without feeling that his relation to Christianity and the Church was the great fact for him as for all of us; and that the change in him, from hearty acceptance of Christian doctrine and church organization to a rejection of the former and something very like contempt for the latter, needed explanation. That explanation he has sought in the overthrow of the balance of Sterling's life through repeated attacks of illness, which shut him out from practical duties, and threw him entirely upon speculation, thereby disproportionately developing the negative side of him, already too strong from early defects of education: and few persons will, we should think, be found to deny Mr. Hare's general position, that the pursuit of speculative philosophy as the business of life has this tendency; Mr. Carlyle, we should have supposed least of all men. But a special cause interferes with Mr. Carlyle's recognition of the principle as applicable to Sterling. Christianity, as understood commonly perhaps everywhere, except, it may be, at Weimar and Chelsea, and church formulas certainly as understood everywhere, he is in the habit of classing under a category which in his hands has become an extensive one—that of shams. He calls them by various forcible but ugly names,—as "old clothes," "spectral inanities," "gibbering phantoms," or, with plainer meaning, "huge unveracities and unrealities." That Sterling at any time of his life accepted these for "eternal verities" he cannot consider a step from the "no" to the "yes," nor their repudiation as a step backwards from the "yes" to the "no." Let him speak for himself. He is commenting on Sterling's entry into orders as Mr. Hare's curate at Hurstmonceaux:
"Concerning this attempt of Sterling's to find sanctuary in the old Church, and desperately grasp the hem of her garment in such manner, there will at present be many opinions; and mine must be recorded here in flat reproval of it, in mere pitying condemnation of it, as a rash, false, unwise and unpermitted step. Nay, among the evil lessons of his time to poor Sterling, I cannot but account this the worst; properly indeed, as we may say, the apotheosis, the solemn apology and consecration, of all the evil lessons that were in it to him. Alas! if we did remember the divine and awful nature of God's Truth, and had not so forgotten it as poor doomed creatures never did before,—should we, durst we in our most audacious moments, think of wedding it to the world's untruth, which is also, like all untruths, the devil's? Only in the world's last lethargy can such things be done, and accounted safe and pious! Fools! 'Do you think the living God is a buzzard idol,' sternly asks Milton, 'that you dare address Him in this manner?' Such darkness, thick sluggish clouds of cowardice and oblivious baseness, have accumulated on us; thickening as if towards the eternal sleep! It is not now known, what never needed proof or statement before, that Religion is not a doubt; that it is a certainty,—or else a mockery and horror. That none or all of the many things we are in doubt about, and need to have demonstrated and rendered probable, can by any alchemy be made a 'Religion' for us; but are and must continue a baleful, quiet or unquiet, Hypocrisy for us; and bring—salvation, do we fancy? I think it is another thing they will bring; and are, on all hands, visibly bringing, this good while!—--"
Herein consists the whole difference between Hare and Carlyle in their views of Sterling's career. They looked at it from such opposite points that what is the zenith to one is the nadir to the other. What Sterling himself thought of it, was strikingly expressed to his brother, Captain Anthony Sterling, by a comparison, of his case "to that of a young lady who has tragically lost her lover, and is willing to be half-hoodwinked into a convent, or in any noble or quasi-noble way to escape from a world which has become intolerable." The truth seems to be, that Sterling went into orders under the combined influence of remorse for the share he had inadvertently had in causing the disastrous fate of a near relative (Mr. Boyd, who was shot with Torrijos in Spain), and of a gradual disenchantment from trust in mere political schemes for the regeneration of mankind,—a disease more common to the genial young men of his time than of ours. That while in the exercise of his duties as a parish-priest he was energetic, useful, and happy, the evidence in Mr. Hare's book is fully sufficient to show. It is impossible to say whether his scepticism would have come upon him had he continued in that active career; but it is certainly a gratuitous supposition of Mr. Carlyle that the ill-health which put an end to it was only the outward and ostensible cause of its termination, and does not appear to be borne out by a single letter or expression of Sterling's own. Indeed, for years after he left Hurstmonceaux, he seemed to continue as firm in his attachment to Christianity as when he was there; though, on the other hand, it may well be doubted whether a man of Sterling's intellect, who would surrender his beliefs to Strauss's Leben Jesu, is likely in the present day to keep them under any conceivable circumstances. We think that Mr. Hare on the one hand has attributed too exclusive an influence to Sterling's forced inactivity, and Mr. Carlyle has certainly not taken it sufficiently into account as a determining cause of his skepticism.
[3] The Life of John Sterling. By Thomas Carlyle. Published by Chapman & Hall. [Boston, republished by Ticknor, Reed & Fields, 1851.]
But whatever subject Mr. Carlyle takes up, and whether he be right or wrong in his opinions, he is sure to write an interesting book. He is never wearisome, and whether his tale have been twice told or not, he clothes it by his original treatment with an attractive charm that few writers can lend even to an entirely new subject. The maxim of the author of Modern Antiquity, that
"True genius is the ray that flings
A novel light o'er common things,"
has seldom been better illustrated than by this life of Sterling. The facts are most of them neither new nor of a nature in themselves to excite any very strong interest, but the details of the life are told with such simplicity, and yet with such constant reference to the grand educational process which they collectively make up, that one seems listening to a narrative by Sterling's guardian angel, loving enough to sympathize in the smallest minutiæ, and wise enough to see in each of them the greatness of the crowning result. Nor is this impression in the least impaired by the insignificance of the sum total of Sterling's actual achievements. For had they been tenfold greater than they were, they would have been as nothing in the presence of that which Mr. Carlyle looks to as the soul's great achievement—heroic nobleness of struggle and a calm abiding of the issue. After noticing the purity of Sterling's character, and his conformity to "the so-called moralities," his biographer goes on to say:
"In clear and perfect fidelity to Truth wherever found, in childlike and soldierlike, 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.