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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. 6
407). 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