Thus it went on for some months at Herstmonceux;but thus it could not last.We said there were already misgivings as to health,&c.in September:[12]that was but the fourth month,for it had begun only in June.The like clouds of misgiving,flights of dark vapor,chequering more and more the bright sky of this promised land,rose heavier and rifer month after month;till in February following,that is in the eighth month from starting,the sky had grown quite overshaded;and poor Sterling had to think practically of departure from his promised land again,finding that the goal of his pilgrimage was _not_there.
Not there,wherever it may be!March again,therefore;the abiding city,and post at which we can live and die,is still ahead of us,it would appear!
"Ill-health"was the external cause;and,to all parties concerned,to Sterling himself I have no doubt as completely as to any,the one determining cause.Nor was the ill-health wanting;it was there in too sad reality.And yet properly it was not there as the burden;it was there as the last ounce which broke the camel's back.I take it,in this as in other cases known to me,ill-health was not the primary cause but rather the ultimate one,the summing-up of innumerable far deeper conscious and unconscious causes,--the cause which could boldly show itself on the surface,and give the casting vote.Such was often Sterling's way,as one could observe in such cases:though the most guileless,undeceptive and transparent of men,he had a noticeable,almost childlike faculty of self-deception,and usually substituted for the primary determining motive and set of motives,some ultimate ostensible one,and gave that out to himself and others as the ruling impulse for important changes in life.As is the way with much more ponderous and deliberate men;--as is the way,in a degree,with all men!
Enough,in February,1835,Sterling came up to London,to consult with his physicians,--and in fact in all ways to consider with himself and friends,--what was to be done in regard to this Herstmonceux business.
The oracle of the physicians,like that of Delphi,was not exceedingly determinate:but it did bear,what was a sufficiently undeniable fact,that Sterling's constitution,with a tendency to pulmonary ailments,was ill-suited for the office of a preacher;that total abstinence from preaching for a year or two would clearly be the safer course.To which effect he writes to Mr.Hare with a tone of sorrowful agitation;gives up his clerical duties at Herstmonceux;--and never resumed them there or elsewhere.He had been in the Church eight months in all:a brief section of his life,but an important one,which colored several of his subsequent years,and now strangely colors all his years in the memory of some.
This we may account the second grand crisis of his History.
Radicalism,not long since,had come to its consummation,and vanished from him in a tragic manner."Not by Radicalism is the path to Human Nobleness for me!"And here now had English Priesthood risen like a sun,over the waste ruins and extinct volcanoes of his dead Radical world,with promise of new blessedness and healing under its Wings;and this too has soon found itself an illusion:"Not by Priesthood either lies the way,then.Once more,where does the way lie!"--To follow illusions till they burst and vanish is the lot of all new souls who,luckily or lucklessly,are left to their own choice in starting on this Earth.The roads are many;the authentic finger-posts are few,--never fewer than in this era,when in so many senses the waters are out.Sterling of all men had the quickest sense for nobleness,heroism and the human _summum bonum_;the liveliest headlong spirit of adventure and audacity;few gifted living men less stubbornness of perseverance.Illusions,in his chase of the _summum bonum_,were not likely to be wanting;aberrations,and wasteful changes of course,were likely to be many!It is in the history of such vehement,trenchant,far-shining and yet intrinsically light and volatile souls,missioned into this epoch to seek their way there,that we best see what a confused epoch it is.
This clerical aberration,--for such it undoubtedly was in Sterling,--we have ascribed to Coleridge;and do clearly think that had there been no Coleridge,neither had this been,--nor had English Puseyism or some other strange enough universal portents been.
Nevertheless,let us say farther that it lay partly in the general bearing of the world for such a man.This battle,universal in our sad epoch of "all old things passing away"against "all things becoming new,"has its summary and animating heart in that of Radicalism against Church;there,as in its flaming core,and point of focal splendor,does the heroic worth that lies in each side of the quarrel most clearly disclose itself;and Sterling was the man,above many,to recognize such worth on both sides.Natural enough,in such a one,that the light of Radicalism having gone out in darkness for him,the opposite splendor should next rise as the chief,and invite his loyalty till it also failed.In one form or the other,such an aberration was not unlikely for him.But an aberration,especially in this form,we may certainly call it.No man of Sterling's veracity,had he clearly consulted his own heart,or had his own heart been capable of clearly responding,and not been dazzled and bewildered by transient fantasies and theosophic moonshine,could have undertaken this function.His heart would have answered:"No,thou canst not.