"The King of the Golden River" is a delightful fairy tale told with allRuskin's charm of style, his appreciation of mountain scenery, and withhis usual insistence upon drawing a moral. None the less, it is quiteunlike his other writings. All his life long his pen was busyinterpreting nature and pictures and architecture, or persuading tobetter views those whom he believed to be in error, or arousing, withthe white heat of a prophet's zeal, those whom he knew to beunawakened. There is indeed a good deal of the prophet about JohnRuskin. Though essentially an interpreter with a singularly fineappreciation of beauty, no man of the nineteenth century felt morekeenly that he had a mission, and none was more loyal to what hebelieved that mission to be.
While still in college, what seemed a chance incident gave occasion anddirection to this mission. A certain English reviewer had ridiculed thework of the artist Turner. Now Ruskin held Turner to be the greatestlandscape painter the world had seen, and he immediately wrote anotable article in his defense. Slowly this article grew into apamphlet, and the pamphlet into a book, the first volume of "ModernPainters." The young man awoke to find himself famous. In the nextfew years four more volumes were added to "Modern Painters," and theother notable series upon art, "The Stones of Venice" and "The SevenLamps of Architecture," were sent forth.
Then, in 1860, when Ruskin was about forty years old, there came agreat change. His heaven-born genius for making the appreciation ofbeauty a common possession was deflected from its true field. He hadbeen asking himself what are the conditions that produce great art, andthe answer he found declared that art cannot be separated from life,nor life from industry and industrial conditions. A civilizationfounded upon unrestricted competition therefore seemed to himnecessarily feeble in appreciation of the beautiful, and unequal to itscreation. In this way loyalty to his mission bred apparent disloyalty.Delightful discourses upon art gave way to fervid pleas for humanity.For the rest of his life he became a very earnest, if not always verywise, social reformer and a passionate pleader for what he believed tobe true economic ideals.
There is nothing of all this in "The King of the Golden River." Unlikehis other works, it was written merely to entertain. Scarcely that,since it was not written for publication at all, but to meet achallenge set him by a young girl.
The circumstance is interesting. After taking his degree at Oxford,Ruskin was threatened with consumption and hurried away from the chilland damp of England to the south of Europe. After two years offruitful travel and study he came back improved in health but notstrong, and often depressed in spirit. It was at this time that theGuys, Scotch friends of his father and mother, came for a visit to hishome near London, and with them their little daughter Euphemia. Thecoming of this beautiful, vivacious, light-hearted child opened a newchapter in Ruskin's life. Though but twelve years old, she sought toenliven the melancholy student, absorbed in art and geology, and badehim leave these and write for her a fairy tale. He accepted, and afterbut two sittings, presented her with this charming story. The incidentproved to have awakened in him a greater interest than at firstappeared, for a few years later "Effie" Grey became John R