The Life of John Sterling | Page 4

hues in the memory of all that knew him,--what is he doing here in
inquisitorial sanbenito, with nothing but ghastly spectralities prowling
round him, and inarticulately screeching and gibbering what they call
their judgment on him!
"The sin of Hare's Book," says one of my Correspondents in those
years, "is easily defined, and not very condemnable, but it is
nevertheless ruinous to his task as Biographer. He takes up Sterling as a
clergyman merely. Sterling, I find, was a curate for exactly eight
months; during eight months and no more had he any special relation to
the Church. But he was a man, and had relation to the Universe, for
eight-and-thirty years: and it is in this latter character, to which all the
others were but features and transitory hues, that we wish to know him.
His battle with hereditary Church formulas was severe; but it was by no
means his one battle with things inherited, nor indeed his chief battle;
neither, according to my observation of what it was, is it successfully
delineated or summed up in this Book. The truth is, nobody that had
known Sterling would recognize a feature of him here; you would
never dream that this Book treated of him at all. A pale sickly shadow
in torn surplice is presented to us here; weltering bewildered amid
heaps of what you call 'Hebrew Old-clothes;' wrestling, with impotent
impetuosity, to free itself from the baleful imbroglio, as if that had been
its one function in life: who in this miserable figure would recognize
the brilliant, beautiful and cheerful John Sterling, with his ever-flowing
wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations; with his frank affections,
inexhaustible hopes, audacities, activities, and general radiant vivacity
of heart and intelligence, which made the presence of him an
illumination and inspiration wherever he went? It is too bad. Let a man
be honestly forgotten when his life ends; but let him not be

misremembered in this way. To be hung up as an ecclesiastical
scarecrow, as a target for heterodox and orthodox to practice archery
upon, is no fate that can be due to the memory of Sterling. It was not as
a ghastly phantasm, choked in Thirty-nine-article controversies, or
miserable Semitic, Anti-Semitic street-riots,--in scepticisms, agonized
self-seekings, that this man appeared in life; nor as such, if the world
still wishes to look at him should you suffer the world's memory of him
now to be. Once for all, it is unjust; emphatically untrue as an image of
John Sterling: perhaps to few men that lived along with him could such
an interpretation of their existence be more inapplicable."
Whatever truth there might be in these rather passionate representations,
and to myself there wanted not a painful feeling of their truth, it by no
means appeared what help or remedy any friend of Sterling's, and
especially one so related to the matter as myself, could attempt in the
interim. Perhaps endure in patience till the dust laid itself again, as all
dust does if you leave it well alone? Much obscuration would thus of
its own accord fall away; and, in Mr. Hare's narrative itself, apart from
his commentary, many features of Sterling's true character would
become decipherable to such as sought them. Censure, blame of this
Work of Mr. Hare's was naturally far from my thoughts. A work which
distinguishes itself by human piety and candid intelligence; which, in
all details, is careful, lucid, exact; and which offers, as we say, to the
observant reader that will interpret facts, many traits of Sterling besides
his heterodoxy. Censure of it, from me especially, is not the thing due;
from me a far other thing is due!--
On the whole, my private thought was: First, How happy it
comparatively is, for a man of any earnestness of life, to have no
Biography written of him; but to return silently, with his small, sorely
foiled bit of work, to the Supreme Silences, who alone can judge of it
or him; and not to trouble the reviewers, and greater or lesser public,
with attempting to judge it! The idea of "fame," as they call it,
posthumous or other, does not inspire one with much ecstasy in these
points of view.--Secondly, That Sterling's performance and real or
seeming importance in this world was actually not of a kind to demand
an express Biography, even according to the world's usages. His
character was not supremely original; neither was his fate in the world
wonderful. What he did was inconsiderable enough; and as to what it

lay in him to have done, this was but a problem, now beyond
possibility of settlement. Why had a Biography been inflicted on this
man; why had not No-biography, and the privilege of all the weary,
been his lot?--Thirdly, That such lot, however, could now