Title with epigraph, “The Alps from Schaffhausen”; and title, “Entrance to Schaffhausen”
(Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—W. G. Collingwood gave the title
“The Alps from Schaffhausen” to the poem that begins with the line,
“There is a charmed peace that aye”, which is untitled in the
MS VIII draft, the sole surviving text.
He failed to signal this editorial intervention by surrounding his title with square brackets; instead, confusingly, in his reconstruction he preceded this poem with another,
which
Ruskin did entitle in
MS VIII draft (again, the sole surviving text) as
“Schaffhausen”,
yet which
Collingwood renamed “Entrance to Schaffhausen”.
Collingwood did at least, in this instance, indicate his intervention
by enclosing the editorial title in square brackets.
Collingwoodʼs rationale for his retitling is evident in the epigraph he added to
[“The Alps from Schaffhausen”], which he took from
Ruskinʼs autobiography,
Praeterita.
He expected the reader to approach the
“Account” as documentary evidence for the revelatory
Pisgah sight that structures the autobiographical account. As he commented in a note appended to
“Schaffhausen” [“Entrance to Schaffhausen”],
the poems are “worth comparing” with the autobiographyʼs narrative as “two accounts” composed “at an interval of more than fifty years apart,
the one in verse and the other in prose”, describing the familyʼs first sighting of the
Alps from
Schaffhausen—the later prose version,
he added, being distinguished by “a power of recollective imagination resembling that of
Turner”
(
Poems [4o, 1891], 1:283;
Poems [8o, 1891], 1:285).
(In the
Library Edition, the quotations in
Collingwoodʼs epigraph
are dropped into notes [
Works, 2:366–67].)
Ruskin does not explicitly identify the town of
Schaffhausen in the body of either of these poems,
but
Collingwoodʼs assumption is supported by the poemsʼ details, which, as the contextual notes explain,
correspond to touristsʼ experience of
Schaffhausen and its enviorons in the
1830s,
as described in guidebooks and travel accounts, including the
1833 diary kept by
Ruskinʼs cousin,
Mary Richardson.
More direct textual evidence for identification of place corresponding to
Collingwoodʼs assignment of titles lies in
Ruskinʼs
Plan for Continuation of the “Account”,
which lists one section heading as
“Schaffhausen”, though not two corresponding to
Collingwoodʼs
elaborated titles for the two poems.
If it is possible to situate either or both of these poems in
Ruskinʼs
Plan,
they likely belonged under one of three proposed section headings:
“Schaffhausen”,
“The Alps”, and
“The fall of the Rhine”.
We have no definitive way of knowing where among these composite sections
Ruskin might have placed these two poems about
Schaffhausen.
The most straightforward approach is to assume that
Ruskin destined the poem he entitled
“Schaffhausen” in draft
for the composite section of the same title,
“Schaffhausen”, in the
Plan;
and there is less direct, but still solid grounds for connecting
“There is a charmed peace that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”]
with the section listed in the
Plan as
“The Alps”,
since
Ruskinʼs poem contains echoes of lines from the poem of that title by
Samuel Rogers,
“The Alps”.
That said, the positions that the two draft poems would likely have occupied in Ruskinʼs Plan
are not distorted by Collingwoodʼs invented titles and their arrangement in his all‐verse version of the “Account”.
The poem Ruskin entitled “Schaffhausen”, while compositionally falling later in MS VIII (70v) than the other poem (56v–57v),
corresponds to the section named “Schaffhausen”, which comes first in Ruskinʼs
Plan, followed immediately by the section named “The Alps”.
Indeed, “Schaffhausen” reads like an alternate opening to “There is a charmed peace, that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”],
both beginning on the Sabbath. But while Collingwood maintains Ruskinʼs intended sequence, the editor,
by designating the lines entitled “Schaffhausen” as forming an “entrance”
to “The Alps”, disguises the contrasting registers that Ruskin designed for the two poems.
In “There is a charmed peace, that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”],
the lines build up to the cry of discovery, “The Alps the Alps,—Full far away / The long successive ranges lay”,
rising to that climax by imaginatively coursing the Rhine. Thus, this poem seeks the sublime, whereas the fragment “Schaffhausen”
traces a stroll to the “summit of the hill”. “Schaffhausen” is the start of a domestic complement
to the sublimity of the earlier‐composed, longer piece, with its description of the river driving toward the Rhine Falls,
emphatically pounded in dactylic lines—a contrast to Ruskinʼs usual, amiable flow of iambic octosyllabic verse.