But who could repeat the exact
words of Patience? His was a language used by none but himself; it was a
mixture of the limited, though forcible, vocabulary of the peasants and
of the boldest metaphors of the poets, whose poetic turns he would often
make bolder still. To this mixed idiom his sympathetic mind gave order
and logic. An incredible wealth of thought made up for the brevity of
the phrases that clothed it. You should have seen how desperately his
will and convictions strove to overcome the impotence of his language;
any other than he would have failed to come out of the struggle with
honour. And I assure you that any one capable of something more serious
than laughing at his solecisms and audacities of phrase, would have
found in this man material for the most important studies on the
development of the human mind, and an incentive to the most tender
admiration for primitive moral beauty.
When, subsequently, I came to understand Patience thoroughly, I found a
bond of sympathy with him in my own exceptional destiny. Like him, I
had been without education; like him, I had sought outside myself for
an explanation of my being--just as one seeks the answer to a riddle.
Thanks to the accidents of my birth and fortune, I had arrived at
complete development, while Patience, to the hour of his death, remained
groping in the darkness of an ignorance from which he neither would nor
could emerge.
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