I do not know exactly what the terrors which Ruskin suffered were—­ very few people will tell the tale of the valley of hobgoblins, or probably cannot!  In the Pilgrim’s Progress itself, the unreality of the spirits of fear, their secrecy and leniency, is very firmly and wittily told.  They scream in their dens, sitting together, I have thought, like fowls in a roost.  They come padding after the pilgrim, they show themselves obscurely, swollen by the mist at the corners of the road.  They give the sense of being banded together in a numerous ambush, they can deceive eye and ear, and even nose with noisome stenches; but they cannot show themselves, and they cannot hurt.  If they could be seen, they would be nothing but limp ungainly things that would rouse disdain and laughter and even pity, at anything at once so weak and so malevolent.  But they are not like the demons of sin that can hamper and wound; they are just little gnomes and elves that can make a noise, and their strength is a spiteful and a puny thing.

Ruskin had no sordid or material fears; he had no fear of poverty, for he flung his father’s hard-earned wealth profusely away; nor did he fear illness; indeed one of the bravest and most gallant things about him was the way in which he talked and wrote about his insane fits, described his haunted visions, told, half-ruefully, half-humorously, how he fought and struggled with his nurses, and made fun of the matter.  That was a very courageous thing to do, because most people are ashamed of insanity, no doubt from the old sad ignorant tradition that it was the work of demoniacal agencies, and not a mere disease like other diseases.  Half the tragedy of insanity is that it shocks people, and cannot be alluded to or spoken about; but one can take the sting out of almost any calamity if one can make fun of it, and this Ruskin did.

But he was wounded by his fears, as we most of us are, not only through his vanity but through his finest emotions.  He felt his impotence and his failure.  He had thought of his gift of language as one might think of a magic wand which one can wave, and thus compel duller spirits to do one’s bidding.  Ruskin began by thinking that there was not much amiss with the world except a sort of pathetic stupidity; and he thought that if only people could be told, clearly and loudly enough, what was right, they would do it gladly; and then it dawned upon him by slow degrees that the confusion was far deeper than that, that men mostly did not live in motives but in appetites.  And so he fell into a sort of noble rage with the imperfection of mortal things; and one of the clearest signs, as he himself knew, that he was drifting into one of the mind-storms which swept across him, was that in these moods everything that people said or wrote had power to arouse his irritation, to interrupt his work, to break his sleep, and to show him that he was powerless indeed.  What he feared was derision, and the good-natured indifferent stolidity that is worse than any derision, and the knowledge that, with all his powers and perceptions, his common-sense, which was great, and his sense of responsibility, he was treated by the world like a spoilt child, charming even in his wrath, who had full license to be as vehement as he liked, with the understanding that no one would act on his advice.