Volume 4 — CARLYLE'S LIFE OF STERLING[3]

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.

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

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.

"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."

Every one not personally acquainted with Sterling will feel that the great interest of the book is in the light thrown by it on Mr. Carlyle's own belief. For good or evil, Mr. Carlyle is a power in the country; and those who watch eagerly the signs of the times have their eyes fixed upon him. What he would have us leave is plain enough, and that too with all haste, as a sinking ship that will else carry us—state, church, and sacred property—down along with it. But whither would he have us fly? Is there firm land, be it ever so distant? or is the wild waste of waters, seething, warring round as far as eye can reach, our only hope? the pilot-stars, shining fitfully through the parting of the storm-clouds, our only guidance? There are hearts on this land almost broken, whose old traditional beliefs, serving them at least as moral supports, Mr. Carlyle and teachers like him have undermined. Some betake themselves to literature, as Sterling did; some fill up the void with the excitement of politics; others feebly bemoan their irreparable loss, and wear an outward seeming of universal irony and sarcasm. Mr. Carlyle has no right, no man has any right, to weaken or destroy a faith which he cannot or will not replace with a loftier. We have no hesitation in saying, that the language which Mr. Carlyle is in the habit of employing towards the religion of England and of Europe is unjustifiable. He ought to have said nothing, or he ought to have said more. Scraps of verse from Goethe, and declamations, however brilliantly they may be phrased, are but a poor compensation for the slightest obscuring of "the hope of immortality brought to light by the gospel," and by it conveyed to the hut of the poorest man, to awaken, his crushed intelligence and lighten the load of his misery. Mr. Carlyle slights, after his contemptuous fashion, the poetry of his contemporaries: one of them has uttered in song some practical wisdom which he would do well to heed:

This life of Sterling will be useful to the class whose beliefs have given way before Mr. Carlyle's destroying energies; because it furnishes hints, not to be mistaken though not obtrusive, as to the extent to which they must be prepared to go if they would really be his disciples. If the path has in its very dangers an attraction for some, while others are shudderingly repelled, in either case the result is desirable, as it is the absence of certainty which causes the pain and paralyzes the power of action. At any rate, the doctrines of this teacher must be so much more intelligible to the mass when applied, as they are here, in commentary upon a life all whose details are familiar, because it is the life of a contemporary and a countryman, that all who read must inevitably be impressed with that great lesson of the philosophic poet—

Though John Sterling is of course the principal figure in the composition, and Mr. Carlyle's treatment the great attraction of the book, yet the figures in the background will be those to make most impression on the general reader. Coleridge stands there in striking but caricatured likeness; and even his most devoted admirers will not be sorry to see a portrait of their master by such a hand: and all will curiously observe the contrast between the sarcastic bitterness which colors the drawing of the philosophic Christian, and the kindly allowance through which the character of John Sterling's father, the famous "Thunderer" of the Times, is delineated. We half suspect that Coleridge would have appeared to Mr. Carlyle a much greater man, if he had allowed him to declaim—"Harpocrates-Stentor," as Sterling calls him—with trumpet voice and for time unlimited on the divine virtues of Silence. There are besides, as in all Mr. Carlyle's works, passages of wise thought expressed in most felicitous language: of which not the least important is this advice given to Sterling in reference to his poetic aspirations:

"You can speak with supreme excellence; sing with considerable excellence you never can. And the Age itself, does it not, beyond most ages, demand and require clear speech; an Age incapable of being sung to, in any but a trivial manner, till these convulsive agonies and wild revolutionary overturnings readjust themselves? Intelligible word of command, not musical psalmody and fiddling, is possible in this fell storm of battle. Beyond all ages, our Age admonishes whatsoever thinking or writing man it has: Oh speak to me, some wise intelligible speech; your wise meaning, in the shortest and clearest way; behold, I am dying for want of wise meaning, and insight into the devouring fact: speak, if you have any wisdom! As to song so-called, and your fiddling talent,—even if you have one, much more if you have none,—we will talk of that a couple of centuries hence, when things are calmer again. Homer shall be thrice welcome; but only when Troy is taken: alas, while the siege lasts, and battle's fury rages every where, what can I do with the Homer? I want Achilleus and Odysseus, and am enraged to see them trying to be Homers!—"

These bricks from Babylon convey but scanty intimation of the varied interest of the book. However the readers of it may differ from its opinions, they cannot but find, even in Mr. Carlyle's misjudgments and prejudices, ample matter for serious reflection: for if he misjudges, it is generally because he is looking too intently at a single truth, or a single side of a truth; and such misjudgments are more suggestive than the completest propositions of a less earnest, keen-sighted, and impassioned thinker. He is indeed more a prophet than a logician or a man of science. And one lesson we may all learn from this, as from everything he writes,—and it is a lesson that interferes with no creed,—that honesty of purpose, and resoluteness to do and to say the thing we believe to be the true thing, will give heart to a man's life, when all ordinary motives to action and all ordinary supports of energy have failed like a rotten reed.