INTRODUCTION xxxix

me, and become too eccentric, because I have no time or energy to correct in quietness.... And as, whenever I say anything they don’t like, they all immediately declare I must be out of my mind, the game has to be played neatly.”¹

And neatly it was played to the end. But the effect of the successive brain-storms was cumulative, and Ruskin had at last to bow before them. The brain had been sound, and after several of the attacks, its recovery had been complete in function, if not in strength. But in the end the functions succumbed to gradual decay. When the last chapter of Præterita was written, Ruskin’s work, and in the true sense his life, were ended.

1889-1900

There are three great divisions in all men’s lives, Ruskin had written in Fors Clavigera,² “the days of youth, of labour, and of death. Youth is properly the forming time-that in which a man makes himself, or is made, what he is for ever to be. Then comes the time of labour, when, having become the best he can be, he does the best he can do. Then the time of death, which, in happy lives, is very short; but always a time. The ceasing to breathe is only the end of death.” He had marked this passage in his own copy of the book, but with him the “time of death” lasted nearly eleven years. The attack of brain-fever which followed his return to Brantwood in August 1889 was severe, and it was not till the following summer that he was able to leave his room. Henceforth he recognised that absolute rest and quiet were essential, and gradually even the will to exert himself passed away. It is needless to follow in any detail these years of waiting for the end-years in which times of storm were intermingled with peaceful old age. He wrote nothing more, and except to the most intimate friends spoke scarcely a word. “After the summer of 1889 it was at very rare intervals that he took pen in hand. Disuse seemed to deprive him of the power of writing at all. At last, one day being asked for his signature, he set down with shaking fingers the first few letters of it, and broke off with ‘Dear me! I seem to have forgotten how to write my own name.’ And he wrote no more.”³ The actually last letter which he ever wrote with

¹ John Ruskin: a Biographical Sketch, by R. Ed. Pengelly, pp. 124, 107.

² Letter 33 (Vol. XXVII. p. 584).

³ W. G. Collingwood, Ruskin Relics, p. 145.

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