"Dame Pacience sitting there I fonde,
With face 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
_Down_wards.
53. For one instance only: has the reader ever reflected on the
patience, and deliberate subtlety, and unostentatious will, involved in
the ordinary process of steel engraving; that process of which engravers
themselves now with doleful voices deplore the decline, and with
sorrowful hearts expect the extinction, after their own days?
By the way--my friends of the field of steel,--you need fear nothing of
the kind. What there is of mechanical in your work; of habitual and
thoughtless, of vulgar or servile--for that, indeed, the time has come;
the sun will burn it up for you, very ruthlessly; but what there is of
human liberty, and of sanguine life, in finger and fancy, is kindred of
the sun, and quite inextinguishable by him. He is the very last of
divinities who would wish to extinguish it. With his red right hand,
though full of lightning coruscation, he will faithfully and tenderly
clasp yours, warm blooded; you will see the vermilion in the
flesh-shadows all the clearer; but your hand will not be withered. I
tell you--(dogmatically, if you like to call it so, knowing it well)--a
square inch of man's engraving is worth all the photographs that ever
were dipped in acid (or left half-washed afterwards, which is saying
much)--only it must be man's engraving; not machine's engraving. You
have founded a school on patience and labor--only. That school must soon
be extinct. You will have to found one on thought, which is Phoenician
in immortality and fears no fire. Believe me, photography can do against
line engraving just what Madame Tussaud's wax-work can do against
sculpture. That, and no more. You are too timid in this matter; you are
like Isaac in that picture of Mr. Schnorr's in the last number of this
Journal, and with Teutonically metaphysical precaution, shade your eyes
from the sun with your back to it. Take courage; turn your eyes to it
in an aquiline manner; put more sunshine on your steel, and less burr;
and leave the photographers to their Phoebus of Magnesium wire.
54. Not that I mean to speak disrespectfully of magnesium. I honor it to
its utmost fiery particle (though I think the soul a fierier one); and I
wish the said magnesium all comfort and triumph; nightly-lodging in
lighthouses, and utter victory over coal gas. Could Titian but have
known what the gnomes who built his dolomite crags above Cadore had
mixed in the make of them,--and that one day--one night, I mean--his
blue distances would still be seen pure blue, by light got out of his
own mountains!
Light out of limestone--color out of coal--and white wings out of hot
water! It is a great age this of ours, for traction and extraction, if
it only knew what to extract from itself, or where to drag itself to!
55. But in the meantime I want the public to admire this patience of
yours, while they have it, and to understand what it has cost to give
them even this, which has to pass away. We will not take instance in
figure engraving, of which the complex skill and textural gradation by
dot and checker must be wholly incomprehensible to amateurs; but we will
take a piece of average landscape engraving, such as is sent out of any
good workshop--the master who puts his name at the bottom of the plate
being of course responsible only for the general method, for the
sufficient skill of subordinate hands, and for the few finishing touches
if necessary. We will take, for example, the plate of Turner's "Mercury
and Argus," engraved in this Journal.[68]
56. I suppose most people, looking at such a plate, fancy it is produced
by some simple mechanical artifice, which is to drawing only what
printing is to writing. They conclude, at all events, that there is
something complacent, sympathetic, and helpful in the nature of steel;
so that while a pen-and-ink sketch may always be considered an
achievement proving cleverness in the sketcher, a sketch on steel comes
out by mere favor of the indulgent metal: or perhaps they think the
plate is woven like a piece of pattern silk, and the pattern is
developed by pasteboard cards punched full of holes. Not so. Look close
at that engraving--imagine it to be a drawing in pen and ink, and
yourself required similarly to produce its parallel! True, the steel
point has the one advantage of not blotting, but it has tenfold or
twentyfold disadvantage, in that you cannot slur, nor efface, except in
a very resolute and laborious way, nor play with it, nor even see what
you are doing with it at the moment, far less the effect that is to be.
You must _feel_ what you are doing with it, and know precisely what you
have got to do; how deep--how broad--how far apart--your lines must be,
etc. and etc. (a couple of lines of etc.'s would not be enough to imply
all you must know). But suppose the plate _were_ only a pen drawing:
take your pen--your finest--and just try to copy the leaves that
entangle the nearest cow's head and the head itself; remembering always
that the kind of work required here is mere child's play compared to
that of fine figure engraving. Nevertheless, take a strong magnifying
glass to this--count the dots and lines that gradate the nostrils and
the edges of the facial bone; notice how the light is left on the top of
the head by the stopping at its outline of the coarse touches which form
the shadows under the leaves; examine it well, and then--I humbly ask of
you--try to do a piece of it yourself! You clever sketcher--you young
lady or gentleman of genius--you eye-glassed dilettante--you current
writer of criticism royally plural,--I beseech you--do it yourself; do
the merely etched outline yourself, if no more. Look you,--you hold your
etching needle this way, as you would a pencil, nearly; and then,--you
scratch with it! it is as easy as lying. Or if you think that too
difficult, take an easier piece;--take either of the light sprays of
foliage that rise against the fortress on the right, put your glass over
them--look how their fine outline is first drawn, leaf by leaf; then
how the distant rock is put in between, with broken lines, mostly
stopping before they touch the leaf outline, and--again, I pray you, do
it yourself; if not on that scale, on a larger. Go on into the hollows
of the distant rock--traverse its thickets--number its towers--count how
many lines there are in a laurel bush--in an arch--in a casement: some
hundred and fifty, or two hundred, deliberately drawn lines, you will
find, in every square quarter of an inch;--say three thousand to the
inch,--each with skillful intent put in its place! and then consider
what the ordinary sketcher's work must appear to the men who have been
trained to this!
57. "But might not more have been done by three thousand lines to a
square inch?" you will perhaps ask. Well, possibly. It may be with lines
as with soldiers: three hundred, knowing their work thoroughly, may be
stronger than three thousand less sure of their game. We shall have
to press close home this question about numbers and purpose
presently;--it is not the question now. Supposing certain results
required,--atmospheric effects, surface textures, transparencies of
shade, confusions of light,--more could _not_ be done with less. There
are engravings of this modern school, of which, with respect to their
particular aim, it may be said, most truly, they "_cannot_ be better
done."
58. Whether an engraving should aim at effects of atmosphere, may be
disputable (just as also whether a sculptor should aim at effects of
perspective); but I do not raise these points to-day. Admit the aim--let
us note the patience; nor this in engraving only. I have taken an
engraving for my instance, but I might have taken any form of Art. I
call upon all good artists, painters, sculptors, metal-workers, to bear
witness with me in what I now tell the public in their name,--that the
same Fortitude, the same deliberation, the same perseverance in resolute
act--is needed to do _anything_ in Art that is worthy. And why is it,
you workmen, that you are silent always concerning your toil; and mock
at us in your hearts, within that shrine at Eleusis, to the gate of
which you have hewn your way through so deadly thickets of thorn; and
leave us, foolish children, outside, in our conceited thinking either
that we can enter it in play, or that we are grander for not entering?
Far more earnestly is it to be asked, why do you _stoop_ to us as you
mock us? If your secrecy were a noble one,--if, in that incommunicant
contempt, you wrought your own work with majesty, whether we would
receive it or not, it were kindly, though ungraciously, done; but now
you make yourselves our toys, and do our childish will in servile
silence. If engraving were to come to an end this day, and no guided
point should press metal more, do you think it would be in a blaze of
glory that your art would expire?--that those plates in the annuals, and
black proofs in broad shop windows, are of a nobly monumental
character,--"chalybe perennius"? I am afraid your patience has been too
much like yonder poor Italian child's; and over that genius of yours,
low laid by the Matin shore, if it expired so, the lament for Archytas
would have to be sung again;--"pulveris exigui--munera." Suppose you
were to shake off the dust again! cleanse your wings, like the morning
bees on that Matin promontory; rise, in noble _im_patience, for there is
such a thing: the Impatience of the Fourth Cornice.
"Cui buon voler, e giusto amor cavalca."
Shall we try, together, to think over the meaning of that Haste, when
the May mornings come?
FOOTNOTES:
[67] A small portion of this chapter was read by Mr. Ruskin, at Oxford,
in November 1884, as a by-lecture, during the delivery of the course on
the "Pleasures of England."--ED.
[68] The rest of this and the whole of the succeeding paragraph is also
reprinted in _Ariadne Florentina_, Sec. 115, and para. i. of 116.--ED.