If we omit the Poems of his boyhood and youth, and his early minor scientific contributions to journals, and begin his career as a writer for the public with the year 1842, when he wrote the first volume of _Modern Painters_, published next year, we have sixteen years of authorship for the Early Period. We have also, oddly enough, sixteen years of authorship, 1858 to 1874, for his Middle Period, shortly to be described; and if we give sixteen years for the mature period also, that brings us to 1890, only a few months after the last number of _Præterita_ struggled into the light from his failing pen. He wrote no more. We thus have three periods, Early, Middle, and Mature, each of sixteen years, not difficult to remember, 1842-1858, 1858-1874, and 1874-1890. It is a testimony to his utter frankness and undimmed candour that we are able thus to map out the growth of his convictions.
For a growth it was, all the time, though apparently 1858 was a year of wreck and ruin. We cannot put new wine into old wineskins. His middle period was the time for the analytical tendency of his mind to have its way. Mazzini had already said that Ruskin had the most analytic mind in Europe; and now that searching analysis which had discovered Luini and placed Tintoretto, and had penetrated, by a way of its own, far into the hidden secret of Beauty, could not be denied when it faced the stronghold of the Christian revelation, even though his own heart and every fibre of his sensitive nature was within the fortress attacked.
His economic crusade began in 1860; and on his spiritually desolated heart was piled the sorrow of the social system. Hermit and heretic he became, in religion and economics alike. Victorious in his championship of Turner and the Pre-raphaelites, whom single-handed he had placed on the pinnacle they have never lost, he had the literary and artistic world at his feet. This great position he cast aside to enter on a sterner battle. The recognized leader of taste, the arbiter of reputations, turned aside to abuse so good a man as John Stuart Mill, to say the most shocking things about the clergy and the clergy’s wives, to testify against rent and interest, to blaspheme that steam power by which England was conquering the world, and to utter strange hesitating sayings which showed that he was not sure of a life to come. Nor could he brave the storm with the self-confident dogmatism of youth. “I seldom now feel sure of anything,” he wrote in the first Christmas issue of _Fors_, “still seldomer, however, do I feel sure of the contrary of anything.”[13] When we add that this period was marked by the loss of his parents, who had been everything to him, and by a grievous disappointment in love--for the girl who loved him would not marry him because he was not orthodox, so far as reasons can ever be given for such decisions, but died of a decline instead--we shall see how heavy was the lonely task set before him to do. Nor had the veneration of disciples and the growing recognition of all good men come to him yet; it came afterwards, built the prophet’s shrine, in his lifetime certainly,[14] but only after the world’s neglect, and his failure even to carry his own friends with him, had helped to break the powers of his mind and set his brain reeling in recurring attacks of delirious inflammation. He was, in that madness, being offered upon the sacrifice and service of our faith.