"Dame Paciencë sitting there I fonde,
With facë pale, upon an hill of sonde."
46. As I try to summon this vision of Chaucer's into definiteness, and as it fades before me, and reappears, like the image of Piccarda in the moon, there mingles with it another;—the image of an Italian child, lying, she also, upon a hill of sand, by Eridanus' side; a vision which has never quite left me since I saw it. A girl of ten or twelve, it might be; one of the children to whom there has never been any other lesson taught than that of patience:—patience of famine and thirst; patience of heat and cold; patience of fierce word and sullen blow; patience of changeless fate and giftless time. She was lying with her arms thrown back over her head, all languid and lax, on an earth-heap by the river side (the softness of the dust being the only softness she had ever known), in the southern suburb of Turin, one golden afternoon in August, years ago. She had been at play, after her fashion, with other patient children, and had thrown herself down to rest, full in the sun, like a lizard. The sand was mixed with the draggled locks of her black hair, and some of it sprinkled over her face and body, in an "ashes to ashes" kind of way; a few black rags about her loins, but her limbs nearly bare, and her little breasts, scarce dimpled yet,—white,—marble-like—but, as wasted marble, thin with the scorching and the rains of Time. So she lay, motionless; black and white by the shore in the sun; the yellow light flickering back upon her from the passing eddies of the river, and burning down on her from the west. So she lay, like a dead Niobid: it seemed as if the Sun-God, as he sank towards gray Viso (who stood pale in the southwest, and pyramidal as a tomb), had been wroth with Italy for numbering her children too carefully, and slain this little one. Black and white she lay, all breathless, in a sufficiently pictorial manner: the gardens of the Villa Regina gleamed beyond, graceful with laurel-grove and labyrinthine terrace; and folds of purple mountain were drawn afar, for curtains round her little dusty bed.
47. Pictorial enough, I repeat; and yet I might not now have remembered her, so as to find her figure mingling, against my will, with other images, but for her manner of "revival." For one of her playmates coming near, cast some word at her which angered her; and she rose—"en ego, victa situ"—she rose with a single spring, like a snake; one hardly saw the motion; and with a shriek so shrill that I put my hands upon my ears; and so uttered herself, indignant and vengeful, with words of justice,—Alecto standing by, satisfied, teaching her acute, articulate syllables, and adding her own voice to carry them thrilling through the blue laurel shadows. And having spoken, she went her way, wearily: and I passed by on the other side, meditating, with such Levitical propriety as a respectable person should, on the asplike Passion, following the sorrowful Patience; and on the way in which the saying, "Dust shalt thou eat all thy days" has been confusedly fulfilled, first by much provision of human dust for the meat of what Keats calls "human serpentry;" and last, by gathering the Consumed and Consumer into dust together, for the meat of the death spirit, or serpent Apap. Neither could I, for long, get rid of the thought of this strange dust-manufacture under the mill-stones, as it were, of Death; and of the two colors of the grain, discriminate beneath, though indiscriminately cast into the hopper. For indeed some of it seems only to be made whiter for its patience, and becomes kneadable into spiced bread, where they sell in Babylonian shops "slaves, and souls of men;" but other some runs dark from under the mill-stones; a little sulphurous and nitrous foam being mingled in the conception of it; and is ominously stored up in magazines near river-embankments; patient enough—for the present.
48. But it is provoking to me that the image of this child mingles itself now with Chaucer's; for I should like truly to know what Chaucer means by his sand-hill. Not but that this is just one of those enigmatical pieces of teaching which we have made up our minds not to be troubled with, since it may evidently mean just what we like. Sometimes I would fain have it to mean the ghostly sand of the horologe of the world: and I think that the pale figure is seated on the recording heap, which rises slowly, and ebbs in giddiness, and flows again, and rises, tottering; and still she sees, falling beside her, the never-ending stream of phantom sand. Sometimes I like to think that she is seated on the sand because she is herself the Spirit of Staying, and victor over all things that pass and change;—quicksand of the desert in moving pillar; quicksand of the sea in moving floor; roofless all, and unabiding, but she abiding;—to herself, her home. And sometimes I think, though I do not like to think (neither did Chaucer mean this, for he always meant the lovely thing first, not the low one), that she is seated on her sand-heap as the only treasure to be gained by human toil; and that the little ant-hill, where the best of us creep to and fro, bears to angelic eyes, in the patientest gathering of its galleries, only the aspect of a little heap of dust; while for the worst of us, the heap, still lower by the leveling of those winged surveyors, is high enough, nevertheless, to overhang, and at last to close in judgment, on the seventh day, over the journeyers to the fortunate Islands; while to their dying eyes, through the mirage, "the city sparkles like a grain of salt."
49. But of course it does not in the least matter what it means. All that matters specially to us in Chaucer's vision, is that, next to Patience (as the reader will find by looking at the context in the "Assembly of Foules"), were "Beheste" and "Art;"—Promise, that is, and Art: and that, although these visionary powers are here waiting only in one of the outer courts of Love, and the intended patience is here only the long-suffering of love; and the intended beheste, its promise; and the intended art, its cunning,—the same powers companion each other necessarily in the courts and antechamber of every triumphal home of man. I say triumphal home, for, indeed, triumphal arches which you pass under, are but foolish things, and may be nailed together any day, out of pasteboard and filched laurel; but triumphal doors, which you can enter in at, with living laurel crowning the Lares, are not so easy of access: and outside of them waits always this sad portress, Patience; that is to say, the submission to the eternal laws of Pain and Time, and acceptance of them as inevitable, smiling at the grief. So much pains you shall take—so much time you shall wait: that is the Law. Understand it, honor it; with peace of heart accept the pain, and attend the hours; and as the husbandman in his waiting, you shall see, first the blade, and then the ear, and then the laughing of the valleys. But refuse the Law, and seek to do your work in your own time, or by any serpentine way to evade the pain, and you shall have no harvest—nothing but apples of Sodom: dust shall be your meat, and dust in your throat—there is no singing in such harvest time.
50. And this is true for all things, little and great. There is a time and a way in which they can be done: none shorter—none smoother. For all noble things, the time is long and the way rude. You may fret and fume as you will; for every start and struggle of impatience there shall be so much attendant failure; if impatience become a habit, nothing but failure: until on the path you have chosen for your better swiftness, rather than the honest flinty one, there shall follow you, fast at hand, instead of Beheste and Art for companions, those two wicked hags,
"With hoary locks all loose, and visage grim;
Their feet unshod, their bodies wrapt in rags,
And both as swift on foot as chased stags;
And yet the one her other legge had lame,
Which with a staff all full of little snags
She did support, and Impotence her name:
But th' other was Impatience, armed with raging flame."
"Raging flame," note; unserviceable;—flame of the black grain. But the fire which Patience carries in her hand is that truly stolen from Heaven, in the pith of the rod—fire of the slow match; persistent Fire like it also in her own body,—fire in the marrow; unquenchable incense of life: though it may seem to the bystanders that there is no breath in her, and she holds herself like a statue, as Hermione, "the statue lady," or Griselda, "the stone lady;" unless indeed one looks close for the glance forward, in the eyes, which distinguishes such pillars from the pillars, not of flesh, but of salt, whose eyes are set backwards.
51. I cannot get to my work in this paper, somehow; the web of these old enigmas entangles me again and again. That rough syllable which begins the name of Griselda, "Gries," "the stone;" the roar of the long fall of the Toccia seems to mix with the sound of it, bringing thoughts of the great Alpine patience; mute snow wreathed by gray rock, till avalanche time comes—patience of mute tormented races till the time of the Gray league came; at last impatient. (Not that, hitherto, it has hewn its way to much: the Rhine-foam of the Via Mala seeming to have done its work better.) But it is a noble color that Grison Gray;—dawn color—graceful for a faded silk to ride in, and wonderful, in paper, for getting a glow upon, if you begin wisely, as you may some day perhaps see by those Turner sketches at Kensington, if ever anybody can see them.
52. But we will get to work now; the work being to understand, if we may, what tender creatures are indeed riding with us, the British public, in faded silk, and handing our plates for us with tender little thumbs, and never wearing, or doing, anything else (not always having much to put on their own plates). The loveliest arts, the arts of noblest descent, have been long doing this for us, and are still, and we have no idea of their being Princesses, but keep them ill-entreated and enslaved: vociferous as we are against Black slavery, while we are gladly acceptant of Gray; and fain to keep Aglaia and her sisters—Urania and hers,—serving us in faded silk, and taken for kitchen-wenches. We are mad Sanchos, not mad Quixotes: our eyes enchant Downwards.