33
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 2
opinions continually, all his life long, not one of those opinions can be on any questionable subject true’. 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 3
of J.M.W. Turner over ancient landscapists. 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).