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Life of John Sterling-Part1_Thomas Carlyle(1795-1881)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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continue in it. Gradually, if facts simple enough in themselves can



be narrated as they came to pass, it will be seen what kind of man

this was; to what extent condemnable for imaginaryheresy and other



crimes, to what extent laudable and lovable for noble manful

_orthodoxy_ and other virtues;--and whether the lesson his life had to



teach us is not much the reverse of what the Religious Newspapers

hitherto educe from it.



Certainly it was not as a "sceptic" that you could define him,

whatever his definition might be. Belief, not doubt, attended him at



all points of his progress; rather a tendency to too hasty and

headlong belief. Of all men he was the least prone to what you could



call scepticism: diseased self-listenings, self-questionings,

impotently painful dubitations, all this fatal nosology of spiritual



maladies, so rife in our day, was eminently foreign to him. Quite on

the other side lay Sterling's faults, such as they were. In fact, you



could observe, in spite of his sleeplessintellectual vivacity, he was

not properly a thinker at all; his faculties were of the active, not



of the passive or contemplative sort. A brilliant _improvisatore_;

rapid in thought, in word and in act; everywhere the promptest and



least hesitating of men. I likened him often, in my banterings, to

sheet-lightning; and reproachfully prayed that he would concentrate



himself into a bolt, and rive the mountain-barriers for us, instead of

merely playing on them and irradiating them.



True, he had his "religion" to seek, and painfully shape together for

himself, out of the abysses of conflicting disbelief and sham-belief



and bedlam delusion, now filling the world, as all men of reflection

have; and in this respect too,--more especially as his lot in the



battle appointed for us all was, if you can understand it, victory and

not defeat,--he is an expressiveemblem of his time, and an



instruction and possession to his contemporaries. For, I say, it is

by no means as a vanquished _doubter_ that he figures in the memory of



those who knew him; but rather as a victorious _believer_, and under

great difficulties a victorious doer. An example to us all, not of



lamed misery, helplessspiritualbewilderment and sprawling despair,

or any kind of _drownage_ in the foul welter of our so-called



religious or other controversies and confusions; but of a swift and

valiant vanquisher of all these; a noble asserter of himself, as



worker and speaker, in spite of all these. Continually, so far as he

went, he was a teacher, by act and word, of hope, clearness, activity,



veracity, and human courage and nobleness: the preacher of a good

gospel to all men, not of a bad to any man. The man, whether in



priest's cassock or other costume of men, who is the enemy or hater of

John Sterling, may assure himself that he does not yet know him,--that



miserable differences of mere costume and dialect still divide him,

whatsoever is worthy, catholic and perennial in him, from a brother



soul who, more than most in his day, was his brother and not his

adversary in regard to all that.



Nor shall the irremediable drawback that Sterling was not current in

the Newspapers, that he achieved neither what the world calls



greatness nor what intrinsically is such, altogetherdiscourage me.

What his natural size, and natural and accidental limits were, will



gradually appear, if my sketching be successful. And I have remarked

that a true delineation of the smallest man, and his scene of



pilgrimage through life, is capable of interesting the greatest man;

that all men are to an unspeakable degree brothers, each man's life a



strange emblem of every man's; and that Human Portraits, faithfully

drawn, are of all pictures the welcomest on human walls. Monitions



and moralities enough may lie in this small Work, if honestly written

and honestly read;--and, in particular, if any image of John Sterling






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