John Sterling and Coleridge

 

    John Sterling, by Sir Anthony Coningham Sterling; early 1840s. National Portrait Gallery.

John Sterling died in 1844 of tuberculosis. He was only thirty-eight. A man of promise who in the end didn't have time to realise that promise, he's more famous now for the book his friend Thomas Carlyle wrote about him than for his own writings. And indeed, The Life of John Sterling (1851) is one of Carlyle's best books, though it is much more about Carlyle and his opinions than it is an account of the life of his friend. For example, and of relevance to this blog, it contains Carlyle's memories of visiting Coleridge during his late ‘Sage of Highgate’ phase: very entertainingly written if far from flattering:

To sit as a passive bucket and be pumped into, whether you consent or not, can in the long-run be exhilarating to no creature; how eloquent soever the flood of utterance that is descending. But if it be withal a confused unintelligible flood of utterance, threatening to submerge all known landmarks of thought, and drown the world and you!—I have heard Coleridge talk, with eager musical energy, two stricken hours, his face radiant and moist, and communicate no meaning whatsoever to any individual of his hearers,—certain of whom, I for one, still kept eagerly listening in hope; the most had long before given up, and formed (if the room were large enough) secondary humming groups of their own. He began anywhere: you put some question to him, made some suggestive observation: instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out.

His talk, alas, was distinguished, like himself, by irresolution: it disliked to be troubled with conditions, abstinences, definite fulfilments;—loved to wander at its own sweet will, and make its auditor and his claims and humble wishes a mere passive bucket for itself. He had knowledge about many things and topics, much curious reading; but generally all topics led him, after a pass or two, into the high seas of theosophic philosophy, the hazy infinitude of Kantean transcendentalism, with its “sum-m-mjects” and “om-m-mjects.” Sad enough; for with such indolent impatience of the claims and ignorances of others, he had not the least talent for explaining this or anything unknown to them; and you swam and fluttered in the mistiest wide unintelligible deluge of things

Harsh! 

Sterling also visited the elderly Coleridge, and was much more favourably struck than was his fellow Scotsman. As a twenty-year old student at Cambridge Sterling wrote to a friend: ‘I scarcely hold fast by anything but Shakespeare, Milton, and Coleridge and I have nothing serious to say to any one but to read the Aids to Reflection on the formation of a Manly character—a book the more necessary now to us all because except in England I do not see that there is a chance of any men being produced anywhere.’ Richard Holmes takes up the story:

When he came down to visit Coleridge at Highgate in 1828 [aged 22], sometimes accompanied by J S Mill, his impressions took on yet more apocalyptic tones. Coleridge looked “as if he belonged not so much to this, or to any other age, as to history.” They talked of everything, from landscape gardening to Pantheism to the missionary preaching of Edward Irving. But what remained with Sterling was something more unsettling, the sense of a man who had been through some great personal and historical storm. “It is painful to observe in Coleridge that, with all the kindness and glorious far-seeing intelligence of his eye, there is a glare in it, a light half unearthly, half morbid. It is the glittering eye of the Ancient Mariner. His cheek too shows a flush of over-excitement, the red of a storm cloud at sunset. When he dies, another of the greatest of their race, will join the few Immortals, the ill understood and ill requited, who have walked the earth.” [Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Darker Reflections (HarperCollins 1998), 549]

Sterling himself embarked upon a career as an essayist and journalist. He published one novel: the 1885 Dictionary of National Biography entry talks of ‘his suggestive but unsatisfying novel of Arthur Coningsby’ and adds ‘another novel, Fitzgeorge, brought out by the publisher of Arthur Coningsby in 1832, has been attributed to Sterling, but it is impossible that he should have written it’, which is rather tantalising (since I've not read the latter book I can't speak to this judgment). Sterling was also a poet. Not a very good poet, but a poet nonetheless. Here, from Poems (1839), its rhyming-couplets clanking as it stomps along like a knight in ill-fitting armour, is his tribute to STC, simply entitled ‘Coleridge’:

Like some full tree that bends with fruit and leaves,
While gentle wind a quivering descant weaves,
He met the gaze; with sibyl eyes, and brow
By age snow-clad, yet bright with summer's glow;
His cheek was youthful, and his features played
Like lights and shadows in a flowery glade.
Around him flowed with many a varied fall
And depth of voice ’mid smiles most musical,
Words like the Seraph's when in Paradise
He vainly strove to make his hearers wise.
In sore disease I saw him laid, — a shrine
Half-ruined, and all tottering, still divine.
'Mid broken arch and shattered cloister hung
The ivy's green, and wreaths of blossom clung;
Through mingling vine and bay the sunshine fell
Or winds and moonbeams sported round the cell;
But o'er the altar burnt that heavenly flame
Whose life no damps of earth availed to tame.
And there have I swift hours a watcher been,
Heard mystic spells, and sights prophetic seen,
Till all beyond appeared a vast Inane,
Yet all with deeper life revived again;
And Nature woke in Wisdom's light, and grew
Instinct with lore that else she never knew,
Expanding spirits filled her countless forms,
And Truth beamed calmly through chaotic storms,
Till shapes, hues, symbols, felt the wizard's rod,
And while they sank in silence there was God.
O! Heart that like a fount with freshness ran,
O! Thought beyond the stature given to man,
Although thy page had blots on many a line,
Yet Faith remedial made the tale divine.
With all the poet's fusing, kindling blaze,
And sage's skill to thread each tangled maze,
Thy fair expressive image meets the view,
Bearing the sunlike torch, and subtle clew;
Yet more than these for thee the Christian's crown
By Faith and Peace outvalued all renown.
This wearing, enter yon supernal dome,
And reach at last thy calm ideal home!
Enough for us to follow from afar,
And joyous track thy clear emerging Star.

Appeared a vast Inane indeed. Eventually Sterling, deciding literature was not working out for him career-wise, embarked upon a life in the Church (when he died he was curate at the parish of Herstmonceux in Sussex); so it shouldn't surprise us that he presses the Christian Redemption of a Troubled Genius line in this poem.

Sterling also wrote a mildly comic epic called The Election; a Poem in Seven Books (1841). A parochial English borough loses its MP, and the bye-election is contested by Frank Vane (Sterling himself), and the blockheaded Peter Mogg. Campaigining gives Sterling the opportunity to sketch various types, but in the course of the poem Frank falls in love with Ann and decides to leave politics, in effect gifting the constituency to Mogg. My interest here is less in the Mudfog-esque satire of 1840s electoral practice and (considering under which bloggy aegis this post appears) more with glimpses of Coleridge. Here, for instance, from Book 5: the heroine Ann, having got herself ready for bed, and prayed, contemplates the cosmos in unschooled yet intuitively Coleridgean ways.

So mused the girl, with thoughts obscure though grand,
Whose worth she felt, but could not understand,
Nor heeded whence they came: for aught she knew,
From some hot, black, unearthly Timbuctoo,
Or danger-teeming doubt-infected land,
The soil of tenets marked as contraband.
For she nor sceptics read, nor dogmatists,
Nor knew how sophists bait theosophists;
Nor e'er had learnt, while sipping thought with tea,
To talk of Plato, Kant, and Koong-foo-tse.
She would have liked a fairy tale far more
Than Hegel's nay than Bentham's deepest lore;
Nor cared a scrap of curling-paper, if
Vorstellung is or is not mere Begriff;
Nor knew that virtue is but pleasure dressed
In what disguise opinion holds the best.
But she, though young, had been impelled to think
Without much help from printer's magic ink;
And her quick heart and sleepless fancy caught
Some wildfire sparks of philosophic thought;
And made her feel, not knowing why nor whence,
Nor finding words, although she had the sense,
That metaphysics, help they us or hurt,
Are nearer much to all than shift or shirt.

Coleridge isn't named here, obviously; but the reference to Kant and the use of those two Kantian terms, so important to Coleridge, surely give the game away. Kung Fu-tse (or as we now generally anglicise his name, Confucius) is an interesting referent in an 1841 poem, I think.

Carlyle had a low opinion of Sterling's novel Arthur Coningsby (1833):

The general impression it left on me, which has never since been renewed by a second reading in whole or in part, was the certain prefigurement to myself, more or less distinct, of an opulent, genial and sunny mind, but misdirected, disappointed, experienced in misery;—nay crude and hasty; mistaking for a solid outcome from its woes what was only to me a gilded vacuity. The hero an ardent youth, representing Sterling himself, plunges into life such as we now have it in these anarchic times, with the radical, utilitarian, or mutinous heathen theory, which is the readiest for inquiring souls; finds, by various courses of adventure, utter shipwreck in this; lies broken, very wretched: that is the tragic nodus, or apogee of his life-course. In this mood of mind, he clutches desperately towards some new method (recognizable as Coleridge's) of laying hand again on the old Church, which has hitherto been extraneous and as if non-extant to his way of thought; makes out, by some Coleridgean legedermain, that there actually is still a Church for him; that this extant Church, which he long took for an extinct shadow, is not such, but a substance; upon which he can anchor himself amid the storms of fate;—and he does so, even taking orders in it, I think. Such could by no means seem to me the true or tenable solution. Here clearly, struggling amid the tumults, was a lovable young fellow-soul; who had by no means yet got to land; but of whom much might be hoped, if he ever did. Some of the delineations are highly pictorial, flooded with a deep ruddy effulgence; betokening much wealth, in the crude or the ripe state. The hope of perhaps, one day, knowing Sterling, was welcome and interesting to me. Arthur Coningsby, struggling imperfectly in a sphere high above circulating-library novels, gained no notice whatever in that quarter; gained, I suppose in a few scattered heads, some such recognition as the above; and there rested. Sterling never mentioned the name of it in my hearing, or would hear it mentioned.

To be fair, it's a pretty bad novel. At the beginning of the story Arthur, an English gentleman of means, is a passionate radical, looking forward to the revolution that will right the wrongs of the world. His political views get in the way of his love for English rose, Isabel. For most of the book Arthur wanders about, moons after his girl and meets various people who tell their, sometimes lengthy stories. My favourite of these involves a Frenchman called Dumond. Having served as a soldier in Canada Dumond recalls how he become ‘indifferent to life’, since ‘rations were bad, and we had no claret in Canada’. His patrol is surprised by Indians:

After having killed thirteen of them with my own hand, I was taken prisoner. To avenge the death of their comrades, they resolved to inflict on me the most exquisite tortures; and to render their triumph the more signal, they carried me to the summit of a hill, at the distance of two leagues from the fortress in the garrison of which I had been the most distinguished soldier. An old chief offered to save me, if I would become his adopted son and marry his daughter. But my religion, my country, my fidelity to my mistress forbade it; and I indignantly refused. They tied me to the stake, and crowded round me, brandishing their knives and torches. [Sterling, Arthur Coningsby (1833), 3:34-35]

Things are looking grim, until, glancing up, Dumond sees ‘a small black body in the sky.’ It is a cannon-shell, fired from the fort, which ordnance has the following fortuitous effect: ‘the whole tribe of Indians was destroyed by the bursting of the shell, which lifted me into the air, and I fell at the feet of the colonel's lady, on one of the bastions of the fort.’ 

True story, bro.

The novel isn't all as bizarre as this, although it certainly takes its time, as fiction, getting started. Eventually Arthur travels to Paris just as the French Revolution is kicking off, the experience of which cures him of his earlier moon-headed radicalism. At one point Arthur encounters a crowd on the street: ‘squalid, blood-stained, and many of them intoxicated, they clashed their pikes and sabres to the music of the murderous Hymn of the Revolution.’ [3:70] Oh no!

He's arrested, released, and, utterly disillusioned of all his earlier political hope, pursued by ‘Disappointment, Grief, Remorse, Doubt, and, following behind, the darkest of all, Despair’, goes to live with a beautiful Frenchwoman called Victoria. The final third of the novel devolves into a series of lengthy extracts from Arthur's memorandum book, as the two lovers swap lecturettes on topics such as ‘Infinity’, ‘Human Perfectibility’ and ‘Hamlet’. Victoria sickens and dies of a Mystery Ailment, hanging-on just long enough to bestow upon Arthur several-hundred-pages-worth of her life story before she goes. He wanders Europe grief-stricken and finally returns to England, resolved to withdraw from society: ‘I would not utter a syllable or stir a finger to become as celebrated as Sesostris or Mahomet ... a man can propose to himself but one of two objects,—the world without and the world within. I have almost equal contempt for both.’ [3:371]

What, then, shall I do? Whither shall I betake myself? This was the question which I asked some months ago when I first came to this retreat. It stands but a few yards from the sea which I have always so much loved. I was born upon the shore and an Englishman has almost an innate propensity to delight and exult in the presence of his national element. In childhood I thought of it as a watery garden of God. Its birds, its winds, its never-ceasing melody, the innumerable colours born of its depths or reflected on its surface, all seemed to me divine. I have lived for days and nights alone in my own small skiff on the waste of waves, and been elevated by the conception of that unbounded elemental power, on whose breast I felt myself no more than a bubble of its spray. I have seen, on a sudden, through the enormous portals of a range of mountains, the ocean barrier rising solid and blacky as if from earth's foundations to the stars. ... in hours of vacuity and dejection, I have seen in the ocean a symbol of a blind, impersonal, eternal, self-existent, godless nature, in whose abysses man might lose his perplexed individual being, and find a fitting and final consummation to his despair.

These waves are now no more than so much brine, — a mighty piece of hydrostatic mechanism, splendid to the eye, astonishing to the intellect. Yet I have a certain dim and mournful pleasure, arising probably from the remembrance of former feelings, in walking along the sands on which the billows break, and catching the murmurs which are borne on the night-breeze through my chamber windows; or when morning opens on the waters. I still love to watch the spreading foam which brightens the sands into a mirror of the various heaven, and, fast disappearing, leaves them again a momentary blank. [Arthur Coningsby, 3:379-83]

The novel ends with Arthur living beside the sea (he calls it ‘this vast and mysterious girdle of the globe’ [3:381]; I wonder if Arnold read this novel prior to writing ‘Dover Beach’?) in a ruined castle, resolving to quit Europe and go live in a cabin in the middle of the American wilderness somewhere. I certainly don't find in it the passage from gloom through Coleridge towards a reconciliation with the Church of England that Carlyle implies is the novel's throughline: Arthur discovering ‘there actually is still a Church for him’ and ‘taking orders in it’, as Carlyle says in his summary simply doesn't describe the novel. Perhaps he never finished reading it.