John Sterling [pp. 811-823]

Bohin Sterling.
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
I839 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, AntiCreed 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 un musical 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 Corur de Lion, but
the one subject was too dramatic, and
the other one too epic, for Sterling's
muse.
In i842, 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
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