DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0189
‘SESAME AND LILIES.’ I//
suffered all? In this great lecture Ruskin confesses
them one by one, in extremities of soul. And he is
aghast at the indifference not of the vulgar only, but
of poets. The seers themselves have paltered with the
faculty of sight. Milton’s history of the fall of the
angels is unbelievable to himself, told with artifice and
invention, not a living truth presented to living faith,
nor told as he must answer it in the last judgment of
the intellectual conscience.
“ Dante’s conception is far more intense, and by him-
self for the time, not to be escaped from; it is indeed
a vision, but a vision only. . . . And the destinies of
the Christian Church, under their most sacred symbols,
become literally subordinate to the praise, and are only
to be understood by the aid, of one dear Florentine
maiden. ... It seems daily more amazing to me that
men such as these should dare to . . . fill the open-
ings of eternity, before which prophets have veiled their
faces, . . . with idle puppets of their scholastic imagin-
ation, and melancholy lights of frantic faith in their lost
mortal love.”
The indifference of the world as to the infinite ques-
tion of religion, the indifference of all mankind as to the
purpose of its little life, of every man as to the effect
of his little life—in an evil hour these puzzles throng the
way to the recesses of thought. As it chanced, with the
irony of things, Ruskin had been bidden to avoid re-
ligious questions in Dublin for fear of offending some
of his hearers. What he had been moved to say, how-
ever, he thought would offend all if it offended any, and
M
suffered all? In this great lecture Ruskin confesses
them one by one, in extremities of soul. And he is
aghast at the indifference not of the vulgar only, but
of poets. The seers themselves have paltered with the
faculty of sight. Milton’s history of the fall of the
angels is unbelievable to himself, told with artifice and
invention, not a living truth presented to living faith,
nor told as he must answer it in the last judgment of
the intellectual conscience.
“ Dante’s conception is far more intense, and by him-
self for the time, not to be escaped from; it is indeed
a vision, but a vision only. . . . And the destinies of
the Christian Church, under their most sacred symbols,
become literally subordinate to the praise, and are only
to be understood by the aid, of one dear Florentine
maiden. ... It seems daily more amazing to me that
men such as these should dare to . . . fill the open-
ings of eternity, before which prophets have veiled their
faces, . . . with idle puppets of their scholastic imagin-
ation, and melancholy lights of frantic faith in their lost
mortal love.”
The indifference of the world as to the infinite ques-
tion of religion, the indifference of all mankind as to the
purpose of its little life, of every man as to the effect
of his little life—in an evil hour these puzzles throng the
way to the recesses of thought. As it chanced, with the
irony of things, Ruskin had been bidden to avoid re-
ligious questions in Dublin for fear of offending some
of his hearers. What he had been moved to say, how-
ever, he thought would offend all if it offended any, and
M