John Ruskin: Sesame and Lilies

John Ruskin · Down to Earth Series · 87 pages

John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, reproduced in full at eighty-seven pages: the author's own preface, the two lectures “Sesame: Of Kings' Treasuries” and “Lilies: Of Queens' Gardens,” and the later Irish lecture “The Mystery of Life and Its Arts,” with a note by the series editor at the front and a list of further reading at the back. The first two lectures were delivered to Mancunians in December 1864 in aid of local libraries and schools, and published the following year.

The series editor's note sets out how the book is presented here. Ruskin's prose is described as beginning by deploring the onset of the industrial revolution and the malignance of free enterprise, with the aim of lifting his audience beyond the cruelty and social injustice of his time to loftier vistas of perception and ethics; his references to Woman are read as allegories of compassionate Nature supporting and nurturing consciousness through its journey from the light of be-ness down to sentient existence and back, and the reader is pointed to paragraphs 65–66 of the second lecture for his treatment of heroines rather than heroes, with a line from Blavatsky on the freedom of the pre- and post-Vedic woman quoted alongside. Ruskin's own preface, written for a new edition, is unusually severe on the lectures it introduces: he detaches the earlier preface about the Alps for use elsewhere, adds the Irish lecture, and says he is painfully struck by the waste of good work in the two — they cost him much thought and strong emotion, but it was foolish to suppose he could bring an audience quickly into a temper he had reached by years of thinking over painful subjects, and phrases written for oral delivery become ineffective when quietly read. He declines to translate them into the language of books on the ground that doing so would remove what good is in them, and undertakes instead to say briefly and clearly what he meant his hearers to understand and what he wanted them to do, so that some better service might afterwards be found in the passionately written text.

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