ARTICLE

Mark Frost, University of Portsmouth
The Organic Impulse: Ruskin, trees, architecture, and society (1843-60)

Fifty years ago, and with typical acuity, Raymond Williams argued that it was ‘one of the most important facts about English social thinking in the nineteenth century that there grew up, in opposition to a laissez-faire society, [an] organic conception, stressing interrelation and interdependence’. Placing Ruskin at the heart of this movement, Williams contended that Ruskin’s organicist view, inimical to socialism in its belief in hierarchy and obedience, and less clearly defined than other political discourses, was amenable to all critics of liberalism (Williams 1982, 140). Martin Warnke notes that ‘involving the landscape in human affairs and feelings, and representing these by means of internal contrasts’ had already become ‘a familiar dialectic technique’ long before Ruskin, because ‘landscape could be treated in such a way as to impart a political message’ (Warnke, 1994, 80). The tendency to turn, as Ruskin did, to mediaeval societies as models of organic culture was hardly new. Ruskin’s own immersion in this idealistic atavism began with his love of Romantic poetry, but it did not end there. His own form of organicism developed out of Romanticism’s preoccupation with this subject, but it was also profoundly influenced by his own discoveries in the fields of architecture and natural history.1 Ruskin’s employment of organic analogies was not new, but was nonetheless wide-ranging and worthy of closer inspection.

The key task of this paper is to examine the manner in which trees operated as a significant source of Ruskin’s social organicism in a range of works from The Stones of Venice (3 vols, 1851-3) through to ‘Of Leaf Beauty’ from Modern Painters V (1860) and Unto This Last (1862). The significance of trees in Ruskin’s work has often been overlooked, and as a result there has been inadequate recognition that his abiding love of arboreal forms provided not merely material for his natural history or for his defence, in Modern Painters (5 vols, 1843-60), of Turner’s landscape art, but a powerful analogy for the construction of a beautiful environment and a just society. Ruskin’s first memory was of ‘the twining roots of trees’ on Friar's Crag in the Lake District (5. 365), and throughout his life trees remained a symbol of creative co-operation – from his earliest work, The Poetry of Architecture (1837-8), which argued in Wordsworthian terms for the fittedness of buildings to their natural environments, until his autobiography Praeterita (1885-6), where trees often occur at moments of epiphany.

In what follows I will analyse how and why trees shaped Ruskin’s work on environment, building, and social organisation. Beginning by briefly analysing the manner in which Ruskin turned from synthetic to organic models of epistemological organisation, I will argue that organic order became central to his thinking during the 1850s and 1860s, and that trees provided one of the most important means to articulate this notion of order. A brief historical review of the interplay in Europe between architecture, religion, and forests will contextualise the detailed study that follows of the relationship between trees and buildings in Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854). I will then turn to ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, in order to demonstrate that the interpenetration of architectural and organic discourse in Ruskin’s work was not unidirectional: his use of tree analogies to describe buildings is matched by employment of architectural figures to describe trees. I will suggest that the co-operative social principle found in the life of trees provided one template for the kind of society Ruskin envisaged in Unto This Last. These enquiries as a whole will reveal that for Ruskin, creativity – whether in art, architecture, nature, or society – was conceived as an act of growth, described in narratives of connection, development, interaction, mutuality, and generation. Trees acted as a multivalent analogy for creative process, so that the organic impulse Ruskin described in his work on trees extended to all of his discourses: as I intend to demonstrate, there was essentially no difference in Ruskin’s mind between the growth of a tree, the building of Gothic architecture, and the development of harmonious societies.

I. Organic order

In 1860, in the preface to Modern Painters V (1860), Ruskin acknowledged that many had found Modern Painters disorganised and digressive, but he responded by arguing that his evolving concerns were not evidence of weakness. Such ‘oscillations of temper, and progressions of discovery, extending over a period of seventeen years, ought not to diminish the reader’s confidence in the book’, he insisted, but instead indicated that the work was sound, its state of growth a marker of truthful creative energy. A thinker whose ideas became ossified was to be mistrusted, because ‘unless important changes are occurring in his opinions continually, all his life long, not one of those opinions can be on any questionable subject true’.2 In a statement that reveals the degree to which Ruskin’s intellectual vision was transformed during the writing of Modern Painters, he declared that ‘all true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable of nourishment; therefore of change’. ‘Their change’, he insisted, ‘is that of a tree – not of a cloud’ (7. 9).

The choice, at this time, of tree growth as the template for intellectual creativity is worth noting. This selection of an arboreal model for intellectual enquiry marked a clear rejection of the previous means by which he had shaped his intellectual enquiries. When he began Modern Painters in 1843, he had conceived of knowledge as a static realm of logical categorisations and synthetic abstractions, and had organised his work into an elaborate Lockean cabinet of parts, sections, chapters, and sub-divisions designed to ‘prove’ the superiority of J.M.W. Turner over ancient landscapists.3 In 1856, as Ruskin wrote the preface to Modern Painters III, his position was already in a state of transformation. There, he abruptly declared to readers that he would now follow a ‘not very elaborate structure’ (5. 5) in his art criticism, or ‘pursue the inquiry in a method so laboriously systematic’. His previous methods had become unhelpful to him: ‘the subject may, it seems to me, be more usefully treated by pursuing the different questions which arise out of it just as they occur to us, without too great scrupulousness in making connections, or insisting on sequence (5. 18). This liberating abandonment of the logical principles that his system had entailed meant rejecting linear systematics in favour of a seemingly haphazard organising principle. That one should study subjects without worrying about the order of connections was both a rejection of sequential systems and the announcement of a conviction that had been growing at least since The Stones of Venice. Spurning not just his earlier approach, but systematisation as a whole, he argued that ‘much time is wasted by human beings, in general, on establishment of systems’ which were ultimately made up of ‘artificial connection[s]’ (5. 18).

Synthetic systems, which had underpinned his activities a decade earlier, now seemed unnatural. Ruskin’s attack on his former purposes tellingly evoked a natural analogy. ‘System-makers’, he argued, ‘are not of much more use, each in his own domain, than, in that of Pomona, the old women who tie cherries upon sticks, for the more convenient portableness of the same’ (5. 18). Ruskin argued that it was better if the cherries ‘can be had in their own wild way of clustering about their crabbed stalk’. This original organic order, he insisted, was ‘a better connection for them than any other’, so that if it had to be disrupted by an act of external ordering, ‘it makes to a boy of a practical disposition not much difference whether he gets them by handfuls, or in beaded symmetry on the exalted stick (5. 18). Only the original, organic organisation was genuinely truthful. All subsequent efforts to take this original apart in acts of analysis, to isolate and re-organise components, were inherently flawed. Whether one chose to take ‘handfuls’ or ‘beads’ of truth was irrelevant once dismemberment had occurred. How to proceed became in part a personal choice, and in declaring this, Ruskin divested himself of the absolute commitment to objectivity upon which his earlier work had insisted, and re-modelled himself as ‘a boy of practical disposition’ whose subsequent studies would follow organic order. His crucial realisation in Modern Painters III – that whatever order of enquiry was chosen, all subjects were connected at an organic level – had already begun to be articulated in the major architectural works of the early 1850s, to which I will turn shortly. By the time he wrote the preface to Modern Painters V, he had fully embraced this organic model, and elaborated it further. By examining The Stones of Venice and other architectural writings, it will become clear that the organic model that became useful to Ruskin as a template for intellectual enquiry and personal growth, arose out of its genesis in his descriptions of the process of building.

II. The Verdant Cross

A second context now needs to be addressed. Simon Schama’s studies of forest iconography in Christian art and architecture are useful in contextualising the discussion that will follow of Ruskin’s contribution to debates about forests and Gothic. Schama points out that the impact of forest landscapes on the built environment was located in processes of cultural formation that helped societies define themselves in relation to history, spirituality, and ethics. Use of forest iconography within Christian iconography derived from pagan nature-worship. While the spread of Christianity into northern Europe was often disrupted by tree cults, with missionaries taking draconian measures to curb adherence to sacred groves, pagan tree cults profoundly influenced the culturally acquisitive Christianity that sought their destruction (Schama 1995, 214-8). Throughout Europe, the image of a dead tree which sprang to life was a persistent feature of paganism, and had obvious parallels with church teachings. Christianity, Schama argues, was unable to resist ‘the irresistible analogy between the vegetable cycle and the theology of sacrifice and immortality’, and instead drew upon a tradition in which holy trees ‘function as symbols of renewal’ (Schama 1995, 218). The story of the crucifixion (on a wooden cross) of the carpenter Christ incorporated this iconography, and the verdant cross retained symbolic potency in Christian art (Davies, 1988, 39-40). The tradition of sacred pagan groves was transmuted into holy trees, such as the Glastonbury Thorn, while Marian pilgrimage sites were frequently found in woods or next to venerable trees (Schama, 217-8; Davies, 34). Schama identifies a physical destruction of pagan groves, but also their re-working as sites for churches, hermitages or monasteries – a re-inscription of the sacredness of the original site (Schama 1995, 217-8).

The relationship in Ruskin’s Venetian work between trees and architecture was, therefore, already deeply embedded within the complex of European religious culture. In charting a relationship between forest and cathedral, Ruskin followed another well-established tradition. Vitruvius’s De Architectura (c.15 BCE) provided the first argument that architecture evolved from the primitive wooden hut. In the middle ages, fanciful variations on Vitruvius’s narrative abounded, suggesting that early humans had fashioned rude shelters from the branches of trees; that the use of tree trunks prefigured Classical columns; or that Gothic arches owed their genesis to the lashing together of crude tree branches to form roofs (Schama 1995, 228-9). The organic spirit behind such ideas formed a strong thread in the minds of Gothic builders themselves, particularly in fifteenth and sixteenth century Germany, where a style developed that was ‘something like the opposite of classical theory’ because ‘instead of conceiving sacred space as a shelter closed off against the forest wilderness, it was meant to embody it’. This ‘attempt to inscribe organicism into the features of the building itself, to dissolve the boundaries between nature and architecture’, was ‘the culmination of the long process by which the ancient Germanic and Celtic pagan groves had become fully converted to Christian use’ (Schama 1995, 228). The eighteenth century witnessed a resurgence of interest in mediaeval architecture that led a host of writers to speculate on the relationship between Gothic and environment. At the heart of their concerns was an attempts to explore and sometimes to dissolve the ‘boundaries between nature and architecture’.4 While Ruskin clearly shared such concerns, his project was broader still in its implications.

As a Christian, Ruskin faced difficulties in reconciling his abiding love of nature with an Evangelical creed that promoted distrust of physicality and nature. Just as the early church was unwilling to acknowledge appropriations of arboreal symbols, so Ruskin faced the problem of celebrating a natural realm described in Genesis as fallen. In so doing, he reclaimed nature as a positive force, and found there an originary model of creativity. For many early Christians, he noted, ‘the indeterminate, boundless forest’ was ‘Europe’s version of the Hebraic desert wilderness’ to be reclaimed and pastoralised by missionaries. For mediaeval minds, woods were morally suspect: ‘to Dante the idea of a forest is [so] exceedingly repulsive [that] he cannot express a general despair about life more strongly than by saying he was lost in a wood so savage and terrible, that “even to think or speak of it is distress”’ (5. 273). Ruskin’s geographical determinism contrasted a southern European love of ‘open air and open meadows’ to an ‘English’ passion for woodlands: while Southern European forests were remote, ‘a type of lonely and savage places’, English woods came ‘up to the very walls of the towns, [and] it was possible to be “merry in the good greenwood,” in a sense which an Italian could not have understood’ (5. 273-4). In ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, he would go further, describing trees as a ‘race of plants, deserving boundless affection and admiration from us’ and which represented such a ‘perfect test of our being in right temper of mind’ that ‘no one can be far wrong in either who loves the trees enough, and every one is assuredly wrong in both who does not love them, if his life has brought them in his way’ (7. 16). This devotion to forests, like his passion for Catholic architecture, sat uneasily alongside Evangelical doctrine, but his enthusiasm for both was unwavering.

III. The Naturalness of Gothic

In The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Ruskin argued that Gothic spires evoked the form of coniferous trees and a desire to ascend to heaven. Gothic forms were beautiful, ‘not because they are copied from nature’ but because ‘it is out of the power of man to conceive beauty without her aid’ (8. 141). That Ruskin rooted aesthetic pleasure in nature inevitably had broader implications. By drawing on the animate energies of nature, rather than on formalistic human laws of design, Gothic workers expressed faith in a God who had ‘stamped those characters of beauty which He has made it man’s nature to love’ (8. 142). Classical architecture, seen as mechanical, repetitive, and obsessed with symmetrical proportion, was condemned as a denial of the aesthetic gifts bestowed upon humanity.

In defining ‘the Nature of Gothic’ in The Stones of Venice II (1853), Ruskin identified key characteristics (Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesqueness, Rigidity and Redundance) which, when ‘mingled’, revealed its essence. All of these reflected its roots in northern European forests (10. 184). Savageness recalled the forest’s ‘creatures of ungainly shape and rigid limb […] full of wolfish life’ (10. 187). Changefulness reflected both natural cyclicality and the individual expressive freedom of the Gothic worker: anticipating the preface to Modern Painters V, he argued that ‘change and variety is as much a necessity to the human heart and brain in building as in books’. Only Gothic innovation produced forms ‘capable of perpetual novelty’ (10. 207, 208). ‘Of Truth of Vegetation’ in Modern Painters I had already elegised this ‘perpetual novelty’, but also argued that changefulness was kept within bounds by organic laws that meant nature was capable of self-expression, but incapable of arbitrary forms:

One of the most remarkable characters of natural leafage is the constancy with which, while the leaves are arranged on the spray with exquisite regularity, that regularity is modified in their actual effect [and] gives rise to a thousand strange and differing forms in the group; and the shadows [...] still farther disguise and confuse the mass, until the eye can distinguish nothing but a graceful and flexible disorder (3. 588).

In a letter to a Miss Lockwood, Ruskin commented that the ‘anatomical laws in trees are […] just as stern as laws as those of the growth of animals’ (5. 431): as he would reveal in ‘Of Leaf Beauty’ (1860) leaf buds occurred on branches according to a series of species-specific patterns (opposite, alternate, or spiral forms), and in ‘Of Truth of Vegetation’ he pointed out that the exigencies of climate and accident ensured that actual tree growth was never entirely formalised. Nature avoided Classicist regularity, on the one hand, and disorder on the other, so that ‘however regular and mathematical may be the structure of parts, what is composed out of them is as various and infinite as any other part of nature (3. 588). Ruskin’s rapture at the multiplicity of forms arising from the mathematical-environmental organisation of leaf formation led to a significant eulogy. In discovering that ‘there is no bush on the face of the globe exactly like another bush’, no ‘two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network’, nor even ‘two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other’ he found a maxim for what he found valuable about the forms of environment: ‘the truths of nature are one eternal change, one infinite variety’ (3. 145). By closely examining this ‘mass of various, yet agreeing beauty’ in leaf form, one could identify ‘the conception of the constant character—the ideal form—hinted at by all, yet assumed by none’ (3. 145- 6). Leaving aside – until later – the seemingly Classicist tone of the final sentence, it is clear that Ruskin recognised that trees were involved in a dynamic and complex series of environmental interactions.

All of the features of Gothic reveal Ruskin’s belief in its natural roots. Naturalism, the third feature, represented ‘the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws’ (10. 215). The Grotesque, a ‘delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as in sublime images’, arose from experience of forests and moorlands (10. 239). Within Ruskin’s complex definition of Rigidity was an evocation of an ‘active rigidity’, a ‘peculiar energy which gives tension to movement’, demonstrated in the laws of organic growth which made ‘the stoutest oak-branch angular rather than bending’ (10. 239). In Gothic tracery Ruskin found ‘a stiffness analogous to that of [the] fibres of a tree’ (10. 240). The final characteristic – Redundance, or the accumulation of lavish decoration – acted as tribute to nature’s abundant variety. Rather than reproaching Gothic architecture for its embellishments, as one might expect of an Evangelical writer, Ruskin regarded decorative luxury as a mark of humility, superior to the ‘haughty’ architecture, consisting of ‘a few clear and forceful lines’ which implied, ‘in offering so little to our regards, that all it has offered is perfect’ (10. 244). In opposition to an ascetic Protestant withdrawal from physicality, Ruskin delighted in exuberance, excess, and growth, and this five years before his famous ‘unconversion’ from Evangelicalism. During the 1840s and 1850s, Ruskin stood apart from fellow Evangelicals in his passion for nature. By 1860, he even doubted the relevance of its doctrines, arguing that ‘there may, indeed, have been a Fall of Flowers’ but that ‘creatures such as we are can now fancy nothing lovelier than roses and lilies, which would grow for us side by side, leaf overlapping leaf, till the Earth was white and red with them, if we cared to have it so’ (7. 13). For Ruskin the promise of redemption through nature was not withdrawn, but remained immanent, a daily opportunity to be actively sought in woods, meadows and mountains, and amongst architecture that expressed the organic impulse inscribed upon Creation.

IV. The trees of Venice

Denis Cosgrove (1995, 88) argues that Ruskin followed a mediaeval system of dividing the world into frigid, temperate and torrid climatic zones. Ruskin located ‘Venice as axis mundi, at the centre of the world, the meeting point of the three great cultural streams, each originating in one of the broad climatic zones: the Gothic from the frigid zone, the classical from the temperate, and the Arab from the torrid’ (Cosgrove 1995, 88). The key architectural styles of Europe – Greek, Byzantine, and Gothic – each reflected the physical conditions in which they arose. Nature acted both as template for art and architecture, and as one of the principal factors in the creation of cultures. The perfection of Venetian architecture lay in its ability to assimilate what Ruskin believed to be the three great cultures of the world. In this geographical conceptualisation of cultural formation, vegetation was crucial, for gardens were seen as key markers of civilisation: ‘wherever men exist in a perfectly civilized and healthy state, they have vegetation around them’. Such a ‘dressing of garden’ might ‘approach’ a state ‘of innocence or perfectness,’ or even ‘of Paradise’, for even the most ‘abstract or fragmentary form’ of natural decoration had value: ‘a single leaf laid upon the angle of a stone, or the mere form or framework of the leaf drawn upon it, or the mere shadow and ghost of the leaf’ all possessed ‘a charm which nothing else can replace; a charm not exciting, nor demanding laborious thought or sympathy, but perfectly simple, peaceful, and satisfying’ (9. 279). Vegetation and civilisation collide in these writings, their boundaries blurring in a manner that indicated a retreat from Evangelical mistrust of nature and of pre-Christian cultures. While Ruskin suggested that ‘the full recognition of leaf forms, as the general source of subordinate decoration, is one of the chief characteristics of Christian architecture’, he also traced the roots of this tendency to ‘pagan’ cultures. ‘The Greek acanthus, and the Egyptian lotus’ were foundational sources of decoration, so that ‘all the florid capitals of the richest Northern Gothic on the one hand, and the arrowy lines of the severe Lombardic capitals on the other’ would be ‘founded on these two gifts of the dust of Greece and the waves of the Nile’. (9. 279-80).

Ruskin’s frequent references to leaves, flowers and trees in The Stones of Venice make clear that he viewed Gothic as sylvan architecture:

Many forest trees present, in their accidental contortions, types of most complicated spiral shafts […] nor, indeed, will the reader ever find models for every kind of shaft decoration, so graceful or so gorgeous, as he will find in the great forest aisle, where the strength of the earth itself seems to rise from the roots into the vaulting (9. 358).

Arguing for an arboreal source for Gothic, Ruskin saturated his description of trees with architectural terminology: the avenue of trees became an ‘aisle’, the canopy ‘vaulting’, and, as the description continued, the tree trunk became a ‘shaft’, ‘barred as it expands’, ‘fretted with traceries of ivy’, ‘marbled’ with moss, and ‘veined’ with lichen. This reading of the source of Gothic ornament attended to tree structure, but also to the ‘decoration’ that grew on their surfaces as part of dynamic relationships with other organisms. The blurred boundaries between vegetation and architecture indicated their shared creative practices. In addition, what Ruskin perceived as the free creativity of the Gothic worker in the production of decoration meant that the process of building was also organic, rather than delimited by restrictive prior design. These central features of Gothic – the primacy of ornament and the free creativity of the sculptor – were at the heart of the generally flawed attempts of Ruskin and others to produce an organic Gothic architecture for the modern world.5

The relationship between forests and architecture was more widespread and complex, illustrating the multivalent power of organic metaphors. Earlier in the volume, for example, trees symbolise the development of Gothic itself:

For some time […] the sculpture of trees was confined to bas-relief; but it at last affected even the treatment of the main shafts in Lombard Gothic buildings, —as in the western façade of Genoa, where two of the shafts are represented as gnarled trunks: and as bas-relief itself became more boldly introduced, so did tree sculpture, until we find the writhed and knotted stems of the vine and fig used for angle shafts on the Doge’s Palace, and entire oaks and apple-trees forming, roots and all, the principal decorative sculptures of the Scala Tombs at Verona (9. 278).

Ornament engaged directly with living forest forms, and again the emphasis was on trees as dynamic organisms: shafts are ‘gnarled’, ‘writhed and knotted’, and rooted into the earth. As the passage unfolded, the tree analogy even provided a narrative of Gothic decline:

It was then discovered to be more easy to carve branches than leaves [...] The system reached full development in a perfect thicket of twigs, which form the richest portion of the decoration of the porches of Beauvais. It had now been carried to its richest extreme; men wearied of it and abandoned it, and like all other natural and beautiful things, it was ostracised by the mob of Renaissance architects […] The Renaissance frosts came, and all perished (9. 278).

By using the figure of a tree’s development as a seamless image of maturation and decline, Ruskin implied that Gothic architecture was organic, limited by the same environmental exigencies as trees, while at the same time rendering Renaissance architecture a wintry, inorganic force. In a pre-echo of his remarks in the preface to Modern Painters V, Ruskin described Gothic creativity as inextricably linked to organic processes and natural forms:

It is interesting to observe how the human mind, in its acceptance of this feature of ornament, proceeded from the ground, and followed as it were, the natural growth of the tree. It began with the rude and solid trunk as at Genoa; then the branches shot out, and became loaded with leaves; autumn came, the leaves were shed, and the eye was directed to the extremities of the delicate branches (9. 278).

As I will now demonstrate, Ruskin argued that because Renaissance thinkers were unable to express the broader truths of nature – and in particular its creativity and growth – they were only able to idealise and distort its forms through Classicist rules (9. 278).

V. Gothic and Classical Trees tree

Having indicated the manner in which Ruskin conflated vegetation, civilisation, and spirituality, it is also evident that he erected a sharp division between Gothic organicism and Classical synthetics. His critique of Classicism was amplified in one of his 1853 Edinburgh public engagements, published in Lectures on Architecture and Painting (1854), where trees were again at the heart of attempts to persuade the audience of the primacy of Gothic. In the first lecture, ‘Architecture’, and echoing his remarks in Lamps, he contended that the pointed arch was beautiful ‘because its form is one of those which, as we know by its frequent occurrence in the work of Nature around us, has been appointed by the Deity to be an everlasting source of pleasure to the human mind’ (12. 24). Engaging audience and readers in an imaginary empirical investigation of woodlands, Ruskin asked them to gather a branch of a mountain ash tree, and offered ‘a sketch of the clusters of leaves which form the extremity of one of its young shoots’, a sketch, he argued, that ‘will furnish us with an interesting illustration of another error in modern architectural systems (12. 24; see fig. 4 below). Mountain ash leaves, he noted, ‘spring from the stalk precisely as a Gothic vaulted roof springs, each stalk representing a rib of the roof, and the leaves its crossing stones’ so that their beauty was ‘altogether owing to its terminating in the Gothic form, the pointed arch’ (12. 25).

Having established a correlation between nature and Gothic, Ruskin used apostrophe to draw an Edinburgh audience into an unlikely alliance against neo-Classicism: ‘you know how fond modern architects, like foolish modern politicians, are of their equalities, and similarities; how necessary they think it that each part of a building should be like every other part’, he told them (12. 25). Nature, though, ‘abhors equality, and similitude, just as much as foolish men love them’. The characteristic leaves of the mountain ash take ‘the form of a cross’, but while the audience might ‘at first […] suppose the four arms of the cross are equal’, the truth was more complex (12. 25-6). Urged to look ‘more closely’, they would find ‘that two opposite arms or stalks have only five leaves each, and the other two have seven; or else, two have seven, and the other two nine; but always one pair of stalks has two leaves more than the other pair’ (12. 25). As in ‘Of Truth Of Vegetation’, leaf forms united mathematical law and environmental dynamics, defying perfect symmetry, and achieving a beauty unavailable to Classical design:

Do you think you would have liked your ash trees as well, if nature had taught them Greek, and shown them how to grow according to the received Attic architectural rules of right? I will try you. Here is a cluster of ash leaves, which I have grown expressly for you on Greek principles [fig. 6 above]. How do you like it? (12. 26).

The deft critique, emphasised by the sarcastic title of the illustrations to figures 4 and 6 – ‘Spray of Ash-tree, and Improvement of the same on Greek Principles’ – echoed an attack in The Stones of Venice I on Classicist ‘improvements’ on nature, where he argued that ‘there is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals’ and that new designers might build ‘a score of cathedrals, each to illustrate a single flower’ (9. 406).

Against this position, Ruskin quoted ‘not the least intelligent’ of modern architects, Mr Garbett, who suggested that architecture involved exactly the ‘renovation’ of nature that Ruskin would parody in ‘Architecture’. Garbett argued that ‘it is not true that all natural forms are beautiful’ and that when natural forms, such as individual leaves are ‘exhibited alone (by sculpture or carving)’ they are ‘not all fitted for ornamental purposes’. Perhaps none of them, he argued, ‘are so fitted without correction’. Garbett’s emphasis was unambiguous:

Yes, I say correction, for though it is the highest aim of every art to imitate Nature, this is not to be done by imitating any natural form, but by criticising and correcting it,—criticising it by Nature’s rules gathered from all her works, but never completely carried out by her in any one work.

This ‘correction’ rendered forms ‘more natural, i.e., more conformable to the general tendency of Nature (9. 407).6 Garbett invoked Raphael’s maxim that, ‘“the artist’s object was to make things not as Nature makes them, but as she WOULD make them;” as she ever tries to make them, but never succeeds’ (9. 407). Ruskin’s reference in ‘Of Truth of Vegetation’ to nature’s ‘mass of various, yet agreeing beauty’ from which is found ‘the conception of the constant character—the ideal form—hinted at by all, yet assumed by none’ (3. 145- 6) must now be understood. At first, this appears to coincide with Garbett’s notion of ‘ideal form’, but Ruskin’s ‘ideal nature’ was never an attempt to improve upon or to correct nature. Ruskin described Raphael’s maxim as ‘stale, second-hand, one-sided, and misunderstood’, arguing that as ‘a painter of humanity’, he ‘assuredly [..] had something to mend’, but that nature was a different matter: ‘I should have liked to have seen him mending a daisy!—or a pease-blossom […] or any other of God’s slightest works’. If he could do that, ‘one might have found for him more respectable employment,—to set the stars in better order, perhaps (they seem grievously scattered as they are, and to be of all manner of shapes and sizes,—except the ideal shape, and the proper size)’. Increasingly acerbic, Ruskin bemoaned ‘these unhappy arrow shots of Nature’, regretting that as ‘she will never hit her mark with those unruly waves of hers, nor get one of them into the ideal shape’ we must ‘send for a Greek architect to do it for her’ (9. 407-9). For Ruskin, a Classicist preoccupation with form never acknowledged that nature was in a state of growth. The artist’s work, Ruskin concluded, was not to merely ‘copy, and again copy, for ever, the imagery of the universe’ but to respond to a universe that was ‘infinite’, ‘unfathomable’, and ‘inconceivable, in its whole’ in order to ‘set forth what he [sic] has learned of it for those beneath him’. Through contemplation of divine nature, it became possible for a human being to ‘write upon it the history of his [sic] own soul’ (9. 409-10).

VI. The building of trees

Ruskin’s architectural writing demonstrates that trees provided a primary exemplar for architectural endeavour, and offered physical templates for particular features, direct metaphors for the building process, and for the development of Gothic. At the heart of this was his rejection of Classical synthetics in favour of organicism. In turning to Ruskin’s descriptions of tree growth, we find the relationship between vegetation and architecture remained intact, though inverted. In ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, as Ruskin sought to describe the development of trees from germination to maturation, he drew on architectural terminology, and made direct comparisons between stone and wood. The botanical classification he outlined in 1860 depicted trees as ‘building plants’, and as ‘architectural edifices’ (7. 21). Each stage of growth which Ruskin subsequently narrated extended these metaphors. Trees were ‘a spire built downwards from the heaven’; the spiral formation of leaf buds on oak twigs recalled ‘a twisted spire’; whilst one year of a twig’s growth represented ‘one pinnacle of the tree-cathedral (7. 62, 34, 25). Such metaphors emphasised the designing hand of the Maker in the processes shared by tree growth and Gothic building. These parallel metaphors were sustained until they became analogies for the construction of just societies. For Ruskin, building was a basic – and deeply significant – act, through which cultures could be understood: the morality of Venice or Britain was inscribed in stone, and their morality rested not merely upon faith, but upon love of nature. Ruskin’s painstaking descriptions of tree growth in ‘Of Leaf Beauty’ and of the construction of Gothic forms in The Stones of Venice carried the same fundamental message: good buildings arise from good builders, and good builders learn from the divinity of nature.

In both texts, architecture represented a means of entry to political commentary. For Ruskin, it was impossible to speak of architectural work without analysing the societies from which they arose: the decline of Gothic coincided, he felt, with the decline of Guild social organisation and a turn towards Renaissance corruption. In his narrative of the contribution of each individual leaf bud to the eventual form and style of the finished ‘tree building’, there was the same recognition of the role of builders. In the analogy between tree development and architectural construction, and in his description of the yearly work of each tree bud within the grand architectural project, Ruskin stressed the dependence of present generations on the acts of their forbears. In ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, leaves were endowed with a form of will that permitted them to express a Gothic faith in God, nature, and community:

Each [leaf bud] works hard with solemn forethought all its life. Perishing, it leaves its work in the form which will be most useful to its successors - its own monument, and their inheritance (7. 21).

The monumental nature of tree building revealed that each human generation also had the opportunity to foster the spiritual, creative and cultural growth of the next. The long development of his ideas in the direction of social policy, and towards an attack on Victorian liberalism was, by 1860, being articulated even in his botany.

In Ruskin’s architectural figures trees were likened to buildings, but also described as builders. It might appear paradoxical that these ‘architectural edifices’ constructed themselves, but this merely emphasised that the boundary between builders and building had dissolved: interchangeable, indivisible, both articulated an organic order which Ruskin wished modern architects and society to adopt. His attempts to highlight the shared practices of nature and architecture called upon contemporaries to learn from tree growth that only co-operation and faith could produce beauty. Ruskin’s trees pursued a creative process that was neither taught nor learnt, but inherent: by taking a tree model for the act of building, Ruskin argued that social progress was possible only by willing adherence to the needs of others, and by the renunciation of personal gain. Beautiful trees, buildings, and societies were all reliant on a careful balance between freedom and submission. The failure of Victorian Gothic to become anything more than a shadow of its illustrious forebear was in the end an illustration of a modern inability to understand the lessons of tree life.

VII. Building the Society of Trees

As ‘Of Leaf Beauty’ unfolded, social metaphors emerged from Ruskin’s botany, clearly revealing the context in which his tree studies must be located. Ruskin’s invocation of trees as builder-communities was one means by which he advanced his social critique at the end of the 1850s. That his tree studies and the incendiary collection of essays on political economy in The Cornhill Magazine (published in 1862 as Unto This Last) were both released in 1860 was not coincidental, for both works articulated the same critique of liberalism and the same call for the creation of organic communities.

In ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, each leaf bud was described as an architect or builder, a decidedly Gothic individual restrained willingly by social network and blood ties, and immersed in a monumental collective act of creativity. The ‘perfect fellowship’ of tree buds was dependent on ‘harmony, obedience, distress, and delightsome inequality’ (7. 98). Individual buds were permitted to follow their ‘individual pleasure, freedom, and caprice’, but only ‘so far as may be consistent with the universal good’ (7. 98). Each leaf bud struggled to add to the architectural edifice of the tree, but many perished in this articulation of common will. Indeed, it was only through ‘trouble and death’, ‘distress, trial, and pleasure’ that buds experienced fellowship and created beauty (7. 98). Ruskin wholeheartedly commended this society as a model:

We men, sometimes, in what we presume to be humility, compare ourselves with leaves; but we have as yet no right to do so. The leaves may well scorn the comparison. We, who live for ourselves, and neither know how to use nor keep the work of past time, may humbly learn [that] the power of every great people, as of every living tree, depends on its not effacing, but confirming and concluding, the labours of its ancestors (7. 99-100).

Against Victorian mechanical values, Ruskin promoted an organicism which, like his concept of Vital Beauty in Modern Painters II (1846), promised ‘the felicitous fulfilment of function in living things [...] of the joyful and right exertion of perfect life in man’ (4. 64). Ruskin’s attack on liberalism and its materialisation of the human soul was predicated on a call for a return to Guild-style communitarianism, an organic social organisation that might reverse the disintegration of society into unconnected individuals. His tree metaphor was both conservative and radical. Quite unlike Edmund Burke and other eighteenth-century conservatives, Ruskin was uninterested in figuring trees as symbols of an unchanging aristocratic order – the tree iconography of the French Revolutionary period is barely relevant here – but at the same time his trees called for the adoption of values of self-abnegation and subservience to broader needs that could certainly be described as conservative.7 At the same time, his primal model of growth, interaction, mutuality, co-operation and change, located in nature, but also in Gothic architecture, rested upon a radical refusal to envisage human beings as walking matter, atoms disconnected in sympathy from those around them, and motivated only by competition. As I will suggest a little later, one could also find almost anarchistic views in Ruskin’s tree figuration.

Both Ruskin’s architectural work and his tree studies articulated a concern for the social repercussions of building, but it was in ‘Of Leaf Beauty’ that he first articulated in full the organicist social vision that had begun to form in The Stones of Venice. Ruskin had long argued that Gothic workers, rooted in Guild culture, freely expressed their organic social values in stone. On an individual and collective level, tree societies were equally engaged in co-operative social dynamics:

Every branch has others to meet or to cross, sharing with them, in various advantage, what shade, or sun, or rain is to be had. Hence every single leaf-cluster presents the general aspect of a little family, entirely at unity among themselves, but obliged to get their living by various shifts, concessions, and infringements of the family rules, in order not to invade the privileges of other people in their neighbourhood (7. 48).

These social units regulated their growth ‘by the sense of each other’s remote presence, and by a watchful penetration of leafy purpose in the far future’ (7. 48). Leaves refused to compete with one another for light, and instead arranged themselves in ways which sought to enable all to share common resources. Leaf communities presented a figurative model for a highly organised society, composed of individuals who expressed in their building the spiritual and physical hurdles they had overcome: the ‘ruggedness and ill-temperedness’ of many branches was ‘an essential source of branch beauty: being in reality the written story of all the branch’s life, – of the theories it formed, the accidents it suffered, the fits of enthusiasm to which it yielded in certain delicious warm springs; the disgusts at weeks of east wind, the mortifications of itself for its friends’ sakes; or the sudden and successful inventions of new ways of getting out to the sun’ (7. 93). The life of tree builders was a narrative of struggle in the face of seemingly insurmountable environmental difficulties. What saved them was an unerring instinct for co-operation. Ruskin directed readers to emulate a leaf’s ‘steady inheritance of resolution to reach forward in a given direction, or bend away from some given evil influence’ (7. 86). The desires of leaf and Gothic builder alike to reach towards God were exemplars for a Victorian society which Ruskin believed was becoming irreligious and immoral.

Ruskin’s evocation of a harmonious tree society in which ‘every leaf [...] connects its work with the entire and accumulated result of the work of its predecessors’ (7. 99) acted as a call to abandon the competitive, industrial society that had arisen in his lifetime. In the dramatic culmination of ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, this unambiguous call was couched in tones of biblical prophecy, as he casts an eye ‘back to the history of nations’ in order to ‘date the beginning of their decline from the moment when they ceased to be reverent in heart, and accumulative in hand and brain’. If only humans had ‘protected the precious works of their fathers, with half the industry they have given to change and to ravage, they would not now have been seeking vainly, in millennial visions and mechanic servitudes’, the promise God had long ago made to them: ‘“As the days of a tree are the days of My people, and Mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands; they shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their offspring with them”’ (7. 100; Isaiah, lxv. 23). Here, Ruskin’s own spiritual doubts were overcome in yet another arboreal metaphor, and his continuing belief that the pages of the Divine book of nature were still legible was forcefully expressed.

VIII. The economics of trees

The ‘family’ of leaves at the heart of Ruskin’s figuration of tree behaviour were not exemplars of the self-interested Homo economicus of mainstream economics, but co-operative builders who produced beauty through solidarity. Ruskin unfavourably compared the formation of mineral crystals with the growth of a tree, taking the former as a symbol of laissez-faire economics: ‘mineral crystals group themselves neither in succession, nor in sympathy’ but instead ‘recklessly strive for place, and deface or distort each other as they gather into opponent asperities’ so that ‘the confused crowd fills the rock cavity, hanging together in a glittering, yet sordid heap, in which nearly every crystal, owing to their vain contention, is imperfect or impure’ (7. 49). Tree builders, on the other hand, eschewed competition, and ‘the order of the leaves is one of soft and subdued concession’ to a shared will, in which each individual leaf bud ‘awaits its appointed time, accepts its prepared place [and] yields its required observance’. Despite the pressures of environment, ‘the group yet follows a law laid down in its own heart; and all the members of it, whether in sickness or health, in strength or languor, combine to carry out this first and last heart law’ (7. 49-50).

This inbuilt sense of community, a challenge to human social organisation, was extended in Ruskin’s treatment to the ‘economic’ organisation of leaves. Because ‘the more leaves the stalk has to sustain, the more strength it requires’ it made sense that this physical expenditure should be funded:

Each [leaf], from the moment of his complete majority, pays a stated tax to the stalk; that is to say, collects for it a certain quantity of wood, or materials for wood, and sends this wood, or what ultimately will become wood, down the stalk to add to its thickness (7. 59).

The community of leaves, made up of households or families, operated in Ruskin’s mind as an ideal society, in which harmonious relations were dependent upon sense of place, belonging, and duty. As Ruskin’s account continued, political analogies became more elaborate:

A tree is born without a head. It has got to make its own head. It is born like a little family from which a great nation is to spring; and at a certain time under peculiar external circumstances, this nation, every individual of which remains the same in nature and temper, yet gives itself a new political constitution, and sends out branch colonies, which enforce forms of law and life entirely different from those of the parent state. That is the history of the state. It is also the history of a tree (7. 73).

A society that builds itself from its most humble constituents shares little with a society based on rule and hierarchy. There is, perhaps, something anarchistic about the idea of a nation that makes its own ‘head’ and which provides for itself a constitution. Despite the anti-democratic tone of much of Ruskin’s later work, the society conceived in Ruskin’s tree narrative was built from below, empowered by creative acts of building. Rather than a passive society, submitting to environment, this one strived against external imperatives, and in doing so, came to define itself. The ruling authority was not an embodied authority (a ruler), but a shared conviction. When, in the 1870s and 1880s, Ruskin attempted to put his social ideas into practice, he was unable to reproduce the harmonious order he discerned in the realm of trees. Instead of an unreflexive adherence to shared principles of co-operation, Ruskin’s St. George’s Guild, conceived as a series of environmentally-sustainable communities of co-operative artisans, inflicted a top-down structure on its members, in which ‘a hierarchy raging from the supreme ‘Master’ through provincial ‘Marshals’, ‘Landlords’, and ‘Labourers’, was drawn up’ (Armytage, 1961, 291). The breakdown of the Guild amidst recrimination and failure was in part a result of a failure by Ruskin to effectively pursue the Carlylean leadership role he envisaged for himself. That he eschewed the more open and libertarian model of trees was perhaps also a marker of the impossibility of putting into practice the social organicism articulated there, but it is clear that in practice he diverged from the vision he had celebrated in ‘Of Leaf Beauty’.

IX. Afterword: Unto This Last

Despite his later difficulties, the social order that Ruskin had described in tree communities had substantial echoes in the economic work that emerged in the same year as ‘Of Leaf Beauty’. The co-operative principles at the heart of Unto This Last shared much with the vision articulated in his botany. Unto This Last rejected the tenets of laissez-faire liberalism on a number of issues. One of these was its failure to recognise that human beings, like leaf buds, were living organisms engaged in organic relations with those around them. The fundamental error of economists, Ruskin contended, was their belief ‘that an advantageous code of social action may be determined irrespectively of the influence of social affection’ (17. 25). In ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, Ruskin claimed that the beauty and strength of the tree society was based upon a sense of ‘fellowship’, but mainstream economics, according to Ruskin, believed that ‘the social affections […] are accidental and disturbing elements in human nature’, whilst ‘avarice and the desire for progress are constant elements’ (17. 25). By reducing the human being to ‘a covetous machine’, such economists aimed to ‘examine by what laws of labour, purchase, and sale, the greatest accumulative result in wealth is obtainable’ (17. 25). To do so was to claim that political economy was a discrete discipline, entirely unconnected from aesthetics, ethics, biology, or religion. Constituting itself as a separate ‘social science’, Victorian political economy had pretensions to grand and lofty impartiality that Ruskin wanted to undercut. The ‘economic laws’ offered by its practitioners were to Ruskin unworthy of association with the scientific laws of physical or organic phenomena, and one of the aims of Unto This Last was to examine economic ‘laws’ carefully in a context that would deliberately embrace exactly those fields excluded from mainstream study. ‘I neither impugn nor doubt the conclusions of the science [of political economy], if the terms are accepted’, he claimed. Rather, he was ‘simply uninterested in them, as I should be in those of a science of gymnastics which assumed that men had no skeletons’ (17. 26). He added that such a science of gymnastics might show ‘that it would be advantageous to roll the students up into pellets, flatten them into cakes, or stretch them into cables’ and that economists would argue from this only that ‘the re-insertion of the skeleton would be attended with various inconveniences to their constitutions’. Because ‘modern political economy’ assumed that human beings were ‘all skeleton’, it based ‘an ossifiant theory of progress on this negation of a soul’ (17. 26). By assuming that in economic terms human beings were reducible to essentially antagonistic relations, like the mineral crystals he described in ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, competition became a byword for social relations: by following mainstream political economy it became ‘convenient to consider men as actuated by no other moral influences than those which affect rats or swine’ (17. 27). Economists, Ruskin remarked, assert that ‘the greatest average of work will be obtained from the servant’ by providing the minimum quantity of wages, and the minimum quality of accommodation and working conditions which would still permit the servant to continue functioning:

It would be so if the servant were an engine of which the motive power was steam, magnetism, gravitation, or any other agent of calculable force. But he being, on the contrary, an engine whose motive power is a Soul, the force of this very peculiar agent, as an unknown quantity, enters into all the political economist’s equations, without his knowledge, and falsifies every one of their results (17. 29).

Instead of a competitive model that rendered human beings machine-like automata, Ruskin desired that human relations be more like those of leaves.8 Underpinning all of the recommendations of Unto This Last and his other social works of the 1860s and 1870s (welfare for all; re-training programmes; the minimum wage; regulated work hours; rent controls; public inspection of company accounts; graduated income tax; legal limits to income and profit; fixed prices for essential items; banning of advertising and sales; national agencies for the arts and for heritage), was a desire for a co-operative social model rooted in the organic way of life that he had described in the same year in ‘Of Leaf Beauty’.9

Ruskin’s immersion in the scientific, architectural, and social lessons of the forests are, I hope to have demonstrated, worthy of analysis. The sustained power of tree analogies in Ruskin’s work was articulated throughout the 1850s and 1860s, displaying an ability to grow in a manner that indicated its own creative development. From the way in which Ruskin’s descriptions of the forms and processes of Gothic architecture were saturated with arboreal analogies to the manner in which trees were used to deny Classicist logic and to promote an organic method of building, and from here to the manner in which trees themselves were celebrated as organic constructions that taught Christian ethics, social co-operation, and communitarian purpose, trees are pivotal in Ruskin’s work as a central and significant metaphor for all purposive and moral creativity.

Notes

1. In particular, I believe that Ruskin responded to modern discoveries in a range of sciences, including ecology, geology, and anatomy, in a way that has not been adequately acknowledged. To treat the subject of Ruskin and science, however, is not possible within the remit of this article.
2. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds., The Library Edition of John Ruskin’s Works. London: George Allen, 1903-12, 39 vols, 7. 9. All subsequent references to this edition will be given parenthetically within the text, in the form of volume and page numbers.
3. J. C. Sherburne was the first to point out similarities between the first two volumes of Modern Painters and Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). See Sherburne, J. C. 1972. John Ruskin, or Ambiguities of Abundance: A Study in Social and Economic Criticism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, p. 11.
4. In the century before Ruskin writers, including Marc-Antoine Laugier, Goethe, Rousseau, William Stukeley, and Sir James Hall, commented on the relationship between Gothic and organicism. Hall, writing at the close of the eighteenth century, believed that Gothic architecture evolved from green buildings made by planting fresh rods in the ground and tying them together to form arches, and whilst many of Hall’s contemporaries, including Schlegel, ridiculed his ideas, they indicate the growing interest in Gothic architecture which would reach perhaps its finest expression in the work of A. W. Pugin. Schama describes the work of Bishop Warburton, who argued in 1751 that a combination of Visigothic and Moorish influence created wholly new architectures which were ‘conscious imitations of the ancient Germanic groves’. Warburton found correspondence between pointed arches and the ‘curve which branches make by their intersection with one another’, and between stained glass and ‘the openings between leaves “concurring to preserve that gloomy light inspiring religious horror”’ (Schama 1995, 230; Schama quotes from William Warburton, ‘an Epistle to Lord Burlington’ in Pope, Alexander, Collected Works (London, 1751).
5. Ruskin’s involvement in the building of the Oxford Museum in the 1850s was illustrative of the difficulties of implementing his vision of Gothic architecture as organic, creative building. While Benjamin Woodward, the architect of the museum, was deeply indebted to Ruskinian ideas, and while the team of legendary Irish sculptors who worked on the decoration of the building were given a great deal of freedom, the building was seen by Ruskin, in later life, as something of a failure. In 1877, he wrote to Richard St. John Tyrwhitt acknowledging his own responsibility for the building, but declaring that ‘I knew from the moment [Woodward] allowed iron work, it was all over with the building’ and claiming in retrospect that ‘nor did I ever approve the design’ (Claiborne, 1969, 345-6). His early enthusiasm for the project – he hoped to ‘get all the pre-Raphaelites to design me each an archivolt and some capitals and we will have all the plants in England and all the monsters in the museum’ (Surtees, 1979, 95) – gave way to frustration and disillusionment. It could be argued that the museum exemplifies what Michael W. Brooks (1989, 128) describes as ‘the same problem that we face with all Ruskinian architecture: that of determining how far Ruskin’s doctrines were altered when they were applied by his admirers’. The key difficulty illustrated by the Oxford Museum debacle, however, was the impossibility of transferring a spiritually-rooted mediaeval organicism into a modern, industrial context. For Ruskin, the museum was built, but it simply did not grow.
6. Ruskin is probably referring to Edward Lacy Garbett’s Rudimentary Treatise on the Principles of Design in Architecture (1850), but provides no clear reference. Edward Lacy was one of at least three generations of Garbett’s who wrote on architectural theory, and represents the more orthodox views of trained architects against which Ruskin was contending in Lamps and Stones.
7. Although not particularly recent, probably the best account of the figurative uses of trees in eighteenth-century political culture is Stephen Daniel’s ‘The Political Iconography of Woodland in later Georgian England’ (Daniels and Cosgrove, 1988, 43-73). Daniels demonstrates the manner in which trees offered iconographic potential to both radical and conservative figures in the years surrounding the French Revolution, and discusses the work of Burke, Thomas Paine, William Cobbett, Robert Southey, Oliver Goldsmith, and a range of romantic poets. Daniels argues that trees were deployed as symbols to naturalise the political positions adopted by various figures.
8. In John Ruskin, Economist (Edinburgh: William Brown,1884), one of Ruskin’s most influential acolytes, Patrick Geddes, saw Unto This Last as a work of biological and environmental economics, arguing that ‘the general correspondence in principle and detail between biological principles on the one hand, and Mr Ruskin’s most “unpractical” teaching on the other, is most remarkable’ (Geddes, 1884, 34-5). If followers of Darwin ‘are indeed to draw full consequences from their greatest law – that organism is made by function and environment’, they must recognise – as Geddes claimed Ruskin had done – that ‘man, if he is to remain healthy and become civilised […] must take especial heed of his environment’ (Geddes, 1884, 35). Geddes rubbished the idea that in the ‘sentiment versus science’ debate, Ruskin was on the (wrong) side of sentiment’. Instead, ‘his aesthetic economics was, because of its recognition of the lessons of function-environment, more scientific than the abstractions of mainstream economists’, who fall prey to ‘sheer blindness to the actual facts of human and social life’ and produce a metaphysical mish-mash of ideas ‘frozen into dismal and repellent form by a theory of moral sentiments which assumed moral temperature at its absolute zero’ (Geddes, 1884, p. 36).
9. I am indebted to Professor Jim Spates for the listing of Ruskin’s practical proposals. The list appears in ‘Why Ruskin?’, a paper given on February 23, 2001 as part of the Faculty Lunch Presentation series at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York; and now forthcoming in The Friends of Brantwood Newsletter, June 2009.

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