DURING all these years of struggle and wayfaring,his Father's household at Knightsbridge had stood healthful,happy,increasing in wealth,free diligence,solidity and honest prosperity:a fixed sunny islet,towards which,in all his voyagings and overclouded roamings,he could look with satisfaction,as to an ever-open port of refuge.
The elder Sterling,after many battles,had reached his field of conquest in these years;and was to be regarded as a victorious man.
Wealth sufficient,increasing not diminishing,had rewarded his labors in the _Times_,which were now in their full flower;he had influence of a sort;went busily among busy public men;and enjoyed,in the questionable form attached to journalism and anonymity,a social consideration and position which were abundantly gratifying to him.Asingular figure of the epoch;and when you came to know him,which it was easy to fail of doing if you had not eyes and candid insight,a gallant,truly gifted,and manful figure,of his kind.We saw much of him in this house;much of all his family;and had grown to love them all right well,--him too,though that was the difficult part of the feat.For in his Irish way he played the conjurer very much,--"three hundred and sixty-five opinions in the year upon every subject,"as a wag once said.In fact his talk,ever ingenious,emphatic and spirited in detail,was much defective in earnestness,at least in clear earnestness,of purport and outcome;but went tumbling as if in mere welters of explosive unreason;a volcano heaving under vague deluges of scoriae,ashes and imponderous pumice-stones,you could not say in what direction,nor well whether in any.Not till after good study did you see the deep molten lava-flood,which simmered steadily enough,and showed very well by and by whither it was bound.For Imust say of Edward Sterling,after all his daily explosive sophistries,and fallacies of talk,he had a stubborn instinctive sense of what was manful,strong and worthy;recognized,with quick feeling,the charlatan under his solemnest wig;knew as clearly as any man a pusillanimous tailor in buckram,an ass under the lion's skin,and did with his whole heart despise the same.
The sudden changes of doctrine in the _Times_,which failed not to excite loud censure and indignant amazement in those days,were first intelligible to you when you came to interpret them as his changes.
These sudden whirls from east to west on his part,and total changes of party and articulate opinion at a day's warning,lay in the nature of the man,and could not be helped;products of his fiery impatience,of the combined impetuosity and limitation of an intellect,which did nevertheless continually gravitate towards what was loyal,true and right on all manner of subjects.These,as I define them,were the mere scoriae and pumice wreck of a steady central lava-flood,which truly was volcanic and explosive to a strange degree,but did rest as few others on the grand fire-depths of the world.Thus,if he stormed along,ten thousand strong,in the time of the Reform Bill,indignantly denouncing Toryism and its obsolete insane pretensions;and then if,after some experience of Whig management,he discerned that Wellington and Peel,by whatever name entitled,were the men to be depended on by England,--there lay in all this,visible enough,a deeper consistency far more important than the superficial one,so much clamored after by the vulgar.Which is the lion's-skin;which is the real lion?Let a man,if he is prudent,ascertain that before speaking;--but above and beyond all things,_let_him ascertain it,and stand valiantly to it when ascertained!In the latter essential part of the operation Edward Sterling was honorably successful to a really marked degree;in the former,or prudential part,very much the reverse,as his history in the Journalistic department at least,was continually teaching him.
An amazingly impetuous,hasty,explosive man,this "Captain Whirlwind,"as I used to call him!Great sensibility lay in him,too;a real sympathy,and affectionate pity and softness,which he had an over-tendency to express even by tears,--a singular sight in so leonine a man.Enemies called them maudlin and hypocritical,these tears;but that was nowise the complete account of them.On the whole,there did conspicuously lie a dash of ostentation,a self-consciousness apt to become loud and braggart,over all he said and did and felt:this was the alloy of the man,and you had to be thankful for the abundant gold along with it.
Quizzing enough he got among us for all this,and for the singular _chiaroscuro_manner of procedure,like that of an Archimagus Cagliostro,or Kaiser Joseph Incognito,which his anonymous known-unknown thunderings in the _Times_necessitated in him;and much we laughed,--not without explosive counter-banterings on his part;--but,in fine,one could not do without him;one knew him at heart for a right brave man."By Jove,sir!"thus he would swear to you,with radiant face;sometimes,not often,by a deeper oath.With persons of dignity,especially with women,to whom he was always very gallant,he had courtly delicate manners,verging towards the wire-drawn and elaborate;on common occasions,he bloomed out at once into jolly familiarity of the gracefully boisterous kind,reminding you of mess-rooms and old Dublin days.His off-hand mode of speech was always precise,emphatic,ingenious:his laugh,which was frequent rather than otherwise,had a sincerity of banter,but no real depth of sense for the ludicrous;and soon ended,if it grew too loud,in a mere dissonant scream.He was broad,well-built,stout of stature;had a long lowish head,sharp gray eyes,with large strong aquiline face to match;and walked,or sat,in an erect decisive manner.A remarkable man;and playing,especially in those years 1830-40,a remarkable part in the world.