Of Trees and Men: The Law of Help in Modern Painters V

Abstract

Examining “The Law of Help” and “Of Leaf Beauty” from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters V (1860), I argue that Ruskin used both bot-any and aesthetics to pursue an organic conception of organization and creativity, and attempted to articulate a vision of harmonious order that could be equally applicable to art, politics, and society. Ruskin’s belief that composition consisted in the mutual relationships of parts within a whole was founded on his reading of environment and then applied to human concerns, making his work a site of proto-ecological and biocen-tric enquiry. However, at the same time his natural history was also marked by commitment to anthropocentric notions of hierarchy and de-sign. The co-existence of these competing visions of environment made Ruskin’s natural history a realm of tension and unresolved conflict, but also generated a unique conceptualization of nature that he sought to ap-ply to politics. Through the botanical narratives of “Of Leaf Beauty” Ruskin created the most extended and profound of his social-environmental analogies, insisting that the “building” of trees rested on the sustained fellowship of leaves that are guided by an innate sense of duty, purpose, and cooperation. An extended example of the Law of Help in action, “Of Leaf Beauty” was motivated by clear political pur-pose. By analyzing Ruskin’s later political work – in the theoretical realm of Unto This Last (1862) and in the practical arena of the Guild of St. George – I argue that the dual impulse of his natural history is writ large in his social thought. I also suggest that he was unable to translate the unreflexive communitarianism of the tree communities of “Of Leaf Beauty” into the field of utopian praxis, and that the Guild was caught between commitments to hierarchy and to decentralized interdependence.