The King of the Golden River | Page 3

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The King of the Golden River
by John Ruskin

PREFACE
"The King of the Golden River" is a delightful fairy tale told with all
Ruskin's charm of style, his appreciation of mountain scenery, and with
his usual insistence upon drawing a moral. None the less, it is quite
unlike his other writings. All his life long his pen was busy interpreting
nature and pictures and architecture, or persuading to better views those
whom he believed to be in error, or arousing, with the white heat of a
prophet's zeal, those whom he knew to be unawakened. There is indeed
a good deal of the prophet about John Ruskin. Though essentially an
interpreter with a singularly fine appreciation of beauty, no man of the
nineteenth century felt more keenly that he had a mission, and none
was more loyal to what he believed that mission to be.
While still in college, what seemed a chance incident gave occasion
and direction to this mission. A certain English reviewer had ridiculed
the work of the artist Turner. Now Ruskin held Turner to be the
greatest landscape painter the world had seen, and he immediately
wrote a notable article in his defense. Slowly this article grew into a
pamphlet, and the pamphlet into a book, the first volume of "Modern
Painters." The young man awoke to find himself famous. In the next
few years four more volumes were added to "Modern Painters," and the
other notable series upon art, "The Stones of Venice" and "The Seven
Lamps of Architecture," were sent forth.

Then, in 1860, when Ruskin was about forty years old, there came a
great change. His heaven-born genius for making the appreciation of
beauty a common possession was deflected from its true field. He had
been asking himself what are the conditions that produce great art, and
the answer he found declared that art cannot be separated from life, nor
life from industry and industrial conditions.