Ruskin and Nature in 'The King of the Golden River'

Denis Cosgrove believes that the foundation of Ruskin’s geographical imagination was due to three influences. Ruskin was, as Cosgrove puts it, ‘a child of late romanticism’ and it was because of his exposure to the Romantics, especially Walter Scott, that he became fascinated by mountain scenery, an interest which later blossomed into a more formal study of geology. The second influence was the regular holidays spent, by the Ruskins, in both England and Europe, which helped to fuel the young boy’s imagination. It was during this period, Cosgrove argues, that Ruskin developed his phenomenological approach to the appreciation of landscape, which would later become his doctrine of relaying visual information through direct experience. The final influence on Ruskin cited by Cosgrove was his religious upbringing which stressed a analytical approach to the Bible. These three influences created an environment conducive for the development of Ruskin’s philosophies which are seen in The King of the Golden River; his fascination with Alpine scenery is made apparent by his choice of setting as his relaying of the subject matter to the reader on the basis of a visual interpretation of information.

Ruskin wrote in Mountain Gloom, ‘I do not know any district possessing a more pure or uninterrupted fullness of mountain character (and that of the highest order)...than that which borders the course of the Trient between Valorcine de Martigny’. His description of this region becomes in Landow’s phrase a ‘word painting’: the texture of the words paint a vivid picture of the winding river cutting through the walnut groves. His description of the landscape is poetic and, again, details man’s relationship to his natural environment. Man who dwells in this idyllic countryside, tends to understand, somewhat more readily than their English counterparts, ‘love, patience, hospitality, faith’, rather than mere virtue. It seems that living in such a utopian world, where there is little need for reminders of an industrialised society-books and other thoughts of material attachments, increases man’s capacity for compassion towards his fellow man. Such lives are governed by the natural rhythms of nature.

Ruskin traces the mountaineers, an idyllic race of people, with almost anthropological precision from the German valley of Zermatt and, eventually, to the Italian Alps, where as Ruskin puts it, ‘the gloom deepens’. He believes that there was a general feeling of melancholy which manifests itself through the ‘most painful aspects of disease’ which is allowed to ‘exist openly’ and had its roots in the ‘obscurity of [one’s] soul.’. This evil becomes ‘a chill and a plague, as if risen out of a sepulchre, which partly deadens, partly darkens, the eyes and hearts of men and breathes a leprosy of decay through every breeze and every stone.’. Ruskin believed that there was an inevitable degree of darkness associated with mountains; and this, he thought, was an embodiment of God’s fashioning of man to work against his inherent potential for sin. ‘It is a grave mistake on man’s part , wrote Ruskin, ‘to turn our hearts away from such a warning and to assume that there is nothing but benevolence and opportunity to be found in god’s creation.’ Such ‘mountain gloom’ becomes bearable only to those living in penance; all others avoid it almost entirely because of fear; this binary image becomes symbolic for Ruskin of both god’s love and anger.

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