“Passing the Alps” [poem]
“To day we pass the Alps” (MS IA, g.2; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—The Ruskin family approached the Alps for the first time from the north, traveling from Schaffhausen and Constance, and they crossed into Italy through the Via Mala and the Splügen Pass (see Tour of 1833).
See, in the apparatus for the “Account”, Sources and Influences—Rogersʼs Poetry. Ruskin modeled “Passing the Alps” on “The Alps” in Italy by Samuel Rogers (1763–1855), in both particulars and structural function. In Rogersʼs poem, the speaker retraces imaginatively the experience of mountain crossing (nominally via the Great St. Bernard Pass, actually via the Simplon Pass), from eyeing the distant Alps when “[t]he level plain I travelled silently”, to surveying the “silver zone” of the mountain road “[s]een oʼer the wall by him who journies up”, to feeling “ravishment” at “the first glimpses of fair Italy” (Rogers, Italy [1830], 30–31). While Ruskin does not allow his spectator to review the entire span of crossing, preferring to divide the stages of crossing among different poems, he adopts Rogersʼs structural device of one poem serving as an epitome of the experience of mountain crossing.
Specifically, Ruskin adopts Rogersʼs trope of the Alps as “the barriers of a World” (in his travel journal, Rogers reacted to his first view of the Alps as “the barrier of another world” that “seemed to say to the curiosity of Man ‘Hitherto shalt thou go & no further’” [Hale, ed., The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, 144]). In his poem, Rogers develops this trope from a historical perspective. Historically, civilizations were divided by the barrier of the Alps (e.g., barbarians from Rome); and from a modern perspective, the spectator looks back on a past when civilizations struggled against this barrier with danger and difficulty, whereas to the nineteenth‐century traveler the Alps present the “fairy‐course” of a “path of pleasure”—referring, presumably, to the convenience afforded by modern engineering. Traveling the Continent in 1814, during the year of peace established by the Treaty of Fontainebleau and Napoleonʼs exile to Elba, Rogers in his journal, like the guidebook writers, glamorized Napoleonʼs engineering feat in the Simplon Pass, which transformed what had been a mere zigzag mule path into “a road, wide & smooth as any that lead from town to town”, enabling travelers to gaze on the sublime scenery from a vantage of safety. One “could not but wonder at the boldness that planned, & the genius & industry that executed” the carriage road built for military invasion, and now paving the way for revival of the Grand Tour on modernized terms (Hale, ed., The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, 159, 160, and see 82). Similar achievements were made in the decade prior to the Ruskinsʼ visit, with Austriaʼs engineers laying a carriage road through the Splügen Pass, and the Kingdom of Sardinia backing the easement of trade and communication through the San Bernardino Pass.
In “The Alps”, Rogers compares the struggles of several historical Alpine travelers, including Hannibal and his army, which is the solitary example that Ruskin selects for elaboration in his poem. Johnʼs imagination was doubtless fired by Turnerʼs Hannibal Passing the Alps—the vignette for Rogersʼs “The Alps” in the 1830 illustrated edition of Italy. The vignette depicts the Carthaginian invaders filing through the mountains with their horse cavalry and elephants, as archers defend the columns (perhaps against the local peoples who, Polybius relates, harried them along the way [Polybius, Histories, bk. 3, chaps. 50–53]). Ruskin develops this spectacle in his poem, although substituting the commotion of a storm in the sky for Turnerʼs warfare on the mountainside. Turnerʼs vignette must be what he identifies simply as “Hannibal” as his source for illustrating the poem in the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”. Even the title of his poem appears to be based on Turnerʼs vignette title, which Ruskin must have taken from a separate issue of the plates since Rogersʼs Italy contains no list of artistsʼ illustrations by title (see Benchmark Acquisitions of Influential Illustrated Travel Publications.
Hannibalʼs crossing into Italy via a western passage was more pertinent to Rogersʼs travelogue than to the Ruskinsʼ route. In their own path through the Splügen Pass, however, the Ruskins could hearken to a Revolutionary‐era parallel in the invasion led through the Splügen in 1800 by Napoleonʼs Scottish general, Etienne‐Jacques‐Joseph‐Alexandre Macdonald (see the proposed illustrations for “The Descent” in the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”; and see “Marshal Etienne‐Jacques‐Joseph‐Alexandre Macdonald” in Jensen, The French Empire).
Structurally, Ruskin captures Rogersʼs idea of one poem serving as an epitome of the experience of mountain crossing, an idea that is elaborated topographically, historically, and anecdotally. Ruskinʼs structural intention is sketched in his Proposed Additional Contents, which shows the poem (or a composite section containing the poem) at the start of a cluster related to the Alpine crossing between Germany and Italy (each title in the cluster presumably representing a cluster in itself, made up of verse, prose, and graphic illustration):
In Italy, Rogers positions his poem, “The Alps”, as the culmination of a series of poems that, after the introductory poems about Lake of Geneva and the valley of the Rhône, approach Italy from the west. The poem, “The Great St. Bernard”, is followed by “The Descent” and (after two intervening narrative poems) by “The Alps”. Ruskin places his adaptation, “Passing the Alps”, at the start of his mountain‐crossing sequence, rather than at the end; and he stretches and attenuates the experience of mountain crossing over several poems, whereas Rogers condenses his poetry by layering retrospection with observation in present time. Similarly, Ruskin develops the spectacle of Hannibalʼs invasion as the primary topic in his “Passing the Alps”, rather than enumerating several historical examples, as Rogers does in “The Alps”, layering the contrasts of the turbulent past with his speakerʼs present “path of pleasure”.
As another way of viewing Ruskinʼs proposed structure, one can see on a larger scale that he positions “Passing the Alps” not only as the start of the cluster about mountain crossing, but also as a fulcrum between that cluster and a preceding one detailing the first sighting of the Alps from the forests and plains to the north of the mountains (again each of these titles listed in the Proposed Additional Contents presumably meant to stand for a cluster in itself of verse, prose, and illustration):
  • “Strasburg”;
  • “The swiss cottages”;
  • “Schaffhausen”;
  • “The Alps”;
  • “The Fall of the Rhine”;
  • “Constance”;
  • “Werdenberg”;
  • “Pfaffers”;
  • “Passing the Alps”.
This cluster presents another example of Ruskinʼs lengthening into linear narrative where Rogers condenses and layers. As discussed in the contextual glosses for “There is a charmed peace that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”], Ruskin adapted a passage in Rogersʼs “The Alps” describing the impression made by the first sighting of the Alps, but he situated this trope as part of a drawn‐out cluster describing the first distant sighting of the Alps from the borderland between Germany and Switzerland, along with the first signs of “Swiss” character in the cottages of the Black Forest.
In this broader view of the plan, in which “Passing the Alps” serves as the hinge between the cluster about the first sighting of the Alps and the cluster about crossing the Alps, Ruskin can be seen as using the title of Rogersʼs poem, “The Alps”, to name a composite section, “The Alps”, at the center of the cluster about first sighting. For this proposed composite, he may have intended a poem drafted in MS VIII, “There is a charmed peace that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”], which contains the allusion to Rogersʼs hail to the distant Alps: “Who first beholds” the Alps “instantly receives into his soul / A sense, a feeling that he loses not, / A something that informs him ʼtis an hour, / Whence he may date henceforward and forever!” (Rogers, Italy, 29–30; and see the textual and contextual notes attached to “Schaffhausen” and to “There is a charmed peace that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”]).
At the same time, Ruskin was observant of how Rogers uses narrative poems both to entertain with the charm of linear narrative and to add the complexity of digression. Between “The Descent” and “The Alps”, Rogers digresses into complementary verse tales, “Jorasse”, a highland tale about an intrepid Alpine hunter, and “Marguerite de Tours”, a lowland tale about a dedicated peasant girl. For what Ruskin learned about these techniques, see Sources and Influences—Rogersʼs Poetry.
According to this interpretation of the derivation and function of “Passing the Alps”, W. G. Collingwood must be understood as violating Ruskinʼs structural intentions. As the first editor to reconstruct the “Account” by appending draft to Ruskinʼs MS IX fair copy, Collingwood erred in placing “Passing the Alps” between “Genoa” and “Chamouni” (the latter collected from MS VII), causing Ruskinʼs poem to function as a transition between Italy and Switzerland, rather than between Germany and Italy. The latter arrangement appears to have been in Ruskinʼs mind as early as the MS IA, g.2 sequence, which pairs “Passing the Alps” with “Milan Cathedral”—even though the reference in “Passing the Alps” to Hannibalʼs crossing is more appropriately connected with the western passage.
Collingwood further obscured Rogersʼs influence in this segment of the “Account” by omitting the tale of Gough and his dog from Ruskinʼs “The Summit”, in which the young poet experimented with narrative digression (see contextual glosses for “The Summit”).
In one respect, however, Collingwoodʼs erroneous placement of “Passing the Alps” can be justified by the Proposed Additional Contents, which suggests that Ruskin did plan to mirror the cluster about a north to south crossing with a cluster about the east to west crossing. The Splügen Pass cluster, extending from the sections entitled “Passing the Alps” through “The Descent” and poems on the Italian lakes, were to be reflected in reverse by a cluster including “The Ascent” and “The Grand St. Bernard” leading to “The Lake of Geneva”. Had Ruskin completed these latter poems and essays, he would likely have exploited Rogersʼs tropes about crossings here, as well. Collingwoodʼs mistaken ordering is an understandable outcome of Ruskinʼs tendency to have abandoned his grandiose schemes, once he realized his goals in a portion of the plan.


“The barrier of boundless length” (MS IA, g.2; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—Compare “To me they [the Alps] seemed the barriers of a world” (Rogers, Italy [1830], 30).


“The Queen of nations” (MS IA, g.2; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—Ancient Rome.


“The Carthaginian foe . . . Avalanches roar” (MS IA, g.2; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—In 218 BC, near the start of the Second Punic War between Carthage and Rome, the Carthaginian leader, Hannibal, led his army on an unprecedented march across the Alps, invading Italy and surprising Rome via a western passage somewhere in present‐day Piedmont.


“Cannæs plain” (MS IA, g.2; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—An area in Apulia, in southeast Italy, where Hannibalʼs army won a major victory over a large Roman force in 216 BC.