Both of them, without understanding the conversations conducted around them in a language different from that of their homeland, on this public square where their remote and distracted smile still glitters, continue to prolong among us their days from the twelfth century that they have intercalated into our days of today.
Yes, in the middle of this public square, in the midst of the present day whose reign it here interrupts, a little of the twelfth century, vanished so long ago, rises up in a thin double surge of pink granite. Everywhere around us, the present days – the days we live – circulate, crowd around the columns, buzz with activity but then suddenly stop and take flight like bees we have brushed aside, for those high, thin storehouses of the past are not in the present, they are in another time into which the present cannot penetrate.
All around those pink columns that shoot up toward their broad capitals, the days of the present crowd and buzz, but the columns inserted among them brush them aside, defining with their slender impenetrability the inviolable terrain of the Past:-a Past which has surged familiarly into the midst of the present, which has the slightly unreal look of things that a kind of illusion makes us see as though they were a few steps away when in fact they are many centuries away; their whole appearance aimed a bit too directly at the mind, exalting it a little, as one would expect from a ghost arisen from a buried time; nonetheless there, in our midst, approachable, crowded round, felt, unmoving, in the sun.
- In this preface I want only to reflect in my own way on the subject that Ruskin treats in ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’: the uses of Reading. These pages, where there is hardly any mention of Ruskin, also constitute, if you will, a sort of criticism of his position. By laying out my own ideas, I find myself involuntarily and pre-emptively setting them up against his.
In terms of direct commentary, the notes I have placed at the bottom of almost every page of Ruskin’s text are enough. So I would have nothing further to add here, were I not anxious to reiterate my acknowledgment of my friend Marie Nordlinger, who, with far better things to do — her beautiful work as a sculptor, in which she shows such great originality and mastery — was still willing to revise this translation in detail, often making it far less imperfect. I would also like to thank, for all the valuable information he was willing to give me, the poet and scholar Charles Newton Scott, to whom we owe The Church and Kindness to Animals and The Age of Marie Antoinette, two fascinating books full of knowledge, sensitivity, and spirit that deserve to be far better known in France.
P.S.— This translation was already at the printer’s when the volume containing Sesame and Lilies in the magnificent Library Edition of Ruskin’s works, published by George Allen and edited by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, appeared (July, 1905). I hastened to recall my manuscript, hoping to supplement certain of my notes with the help of Cook and Wedderburn’s. Unfortunately, though their edition was of immeasurable interest to me, it was not able to help me with my book as much as I would have liked. Most of the references were, of course, already given in my own notes.
The Library Edition did, however, supply some new information. I appended the words ‘the Library Edition informs us’ in such places, for I never took any information without immediately noting down where I was taking it from.
As for the connections to the rest of Ruskin’s works, it will be seen that the Library Edition refers to some works which I do not bring up, and that I refer to some other works unmentioned there. Readers unacquainted with my preface to the translation of The Bible of Amiens may perhaps feel that here, as a second commentator, I should have made more use of Cook and Wedderburn’s references.
Other readers, who understand what I intend with these translations, will not be surprised to learn that I have not done so. These connections to Ruskin’s other works, as I see them, are essentially individual.
They are a flash of memory and nothing more, a glimmer of one sensibility suddenly sparking between two different passages. And the light they cast is not as accidental as it seems. To supplement them with additional, artificially contrived connections that have not flashed forth from my own depths would be to falsify the view of Ruskin I am using them to try to give.
The Library Edition also supplies a vast amount of historical or biographical information, often of great interest. It will be seen that I have noted this information when I could, but on the whole seldom. First, this information did not absolutely answer the purpose which I had set for myself.
Second, the Library Edition, as a purely scholarly edition, does not provide any commentary on Ruskin’s text; it thus has more room for all the new documents and previously unpublished works whose publication is, in truth, the real purpose of the edition.
I, on the other hand, accompany Ruskin’s text with a constant stream of commentary, giving this unfortunately overburdened volume too large a size to permit the addition of unpublished documents, variants, and so forth. (I have had to forego including Ruskin’s Prefaces, as well as the third lecture which Ruskin later added to the two original lectures of Sesame and Lilies.)
All of this is said to excuse myself for not having made further use of Cook and Wedderburn’s notes, and also to express my admiration for their truly definitive edition of Ruskin, one which is of very great interest to all of his readers.
- What we called, for some reason, a village is actually the main city of the region, with almost 3,000 inhabitants, according to the Guide Joanne.
- I confess that a certain way of using the imperfect indicative in French – that cruel tense which gives us life as something both ephemeral and passive, and which, at the very moment it retraces our actions, stamps them with illusion and annihilates them in a bygone past, without leaving us the consolation of activity as the perfect tense does – has remained for me an inexhaustible source of mysterious sadnesses.
Even now, I may have thought about death calmly for hours, but if I merely open a volume of Sainte-Beuve’s Monday Conversations and stumble upon, for instance, this sentence spoken by Lamartine about Madame d’Albany: ‘Nothing about her at that time recalled….. She was a small woman whose figure, sinking slightly beneath her weight, had lost…’ – I suddenly feel myself overwhelmed by the deepest melancholy. In novels, authors so obviously intend to make us suffer that we brace ourselves for it a little more.
- We can attempt this, in a sort of roundabout way, in the case of books that have a historical basis and are not wholly fictional. Balzac, for example, whose works are in a sense impure mixtures of the spirit and an insufficiently transformed reality, lends himself singularly well to this kind of reading. Or at least he has found the best of these ‘historical readers’ in Albert Sorel, who has written incomparable essays about The Gondreville Mystery and The Wrong Side of Paris.
Reading itself, moreover – this pleasure at once ardent and level-headed – how well it seems to suit Sorel, with his seeker’s spirit and calm and powerful body: reading, during which the thousand sensations of poetry and obscure well-being, soaring jubilantly up from a foundation of good health, create around the reader’s reveries a pleasure as sweet and golden as honey.
It is not only in Sorel’s studies of semi-historical works, moreover, that his way of including so much original and strong reflection in an act of reading has been brought to perfection. I will always remember, with profound gratitude, that my translation of The Bible of Amiens was the subject of perhaps the most powerful pages he has ever written.
- This book was later enlarged by the addition of a third lecture, ‘The Mystery of Life and Its Arts’, to the original two. Popular editions still contain only ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ and ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’. The present volume translates only these first two lectures, and also omits the several prefaces Ruskin wrote for various editions of Sesame and Lilies. The scope of this volume and the abundance of my own commentary permit nothing more. Except for four editions (Smith, Elder, and Co.), the many editions of Sesame and Lilies have all been published by George Allen, the renowned publisher of all of Ruskin’s work and the head of Ruskin House.
- Sesame and Lilies, ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, §6.
- In truth, this sentence will not be found in Captain Fracasse, at least not in this form. Instead of ‘as stands written in the Odyssey of the Grecian Poet,’ the text has simply ‘as Homerus says’. But since the expressions ‘as stands written in Homerus’ and ‘as stands written in the Odyssey’, which do appear elsewhere in the book, gave me the same quality of pleasure, I have permitted myself to fuse these several beauties together into one to make the example more striking for the reader, especially since, truth to tell, I no longer have for them the same pious reverence.
In still other places in Captain Fracasse, Homer is described as ‘the Grecian Poet’, and I am
