It
certainly has always struck me as singular that Sterling, who in his
life accomplished so little and left so little of the work by which men
are generally pronounced to be gifted with exceptional ability, should
have been the subject of two such interesting biographies as those
written of him by Julius Hare and Carlyle. I think he must have been one
of those persons in whom genius makes itself felt and acknowledged
chiefly through the medium of personal intercourse; a not infrequent
thing, I think, with women, and perhaps men, wanting the full vigor of
normal health. I suppose it is some failure not so much in the power
possessed as in the power of producing it in a less evanescent form than
that of spoken words, and the looks that with such organizations are
more than the words themselves. Sterling's genius was his _Wesen_,
himself, and he could detach no portion of it that retained anything
like the power and beauty one would have expected. After all, the world
has twice been moved (once intellectually and once morally), as never
before or since, by those whose spoken words, gathered up by others, are
all that remain of them. Personal influence is the strongest and the
most subtle of powers, and Sterling impressed all who knew him as a man
of undoubted genius; those who never knew him will perhaps always wonder
why.
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