Ruskin and the Alps

Ruskinʼs and the Alps

Note under development.
So far as is known, the most direct outcome of Ruskinʼs first encounter with the Alps, gained during the Tour of 1833, was drawing rather than writing: see Drawings from the Tour of 1833. His writing about the mountains is often generalized and literary in origin. The trope of first sighting frames the sublime spectacle of the distant Alps, which are understood as a “barrier” both between nations on earth and between planes of earthly and spiritual existence. One influential source of these tropes for Ruskin was the poem “The Alps” in Italy by Samuel Rogers (1763–1855), on which Ruskin modeled “Passing the Alps” in Account of a Tour on the Continent (see especially The Influence of Rogersʼs Poetry on Ruskinʼs Planned Extension of the Composite‐Genre Travelogue to Italy and Switzerland). As explained in connection with another important first‐sighting poem for the “Account”, “There is a charmed peace, that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”] and its companion poem, “Schaffhausen” [“Entrance to Schaffhausen”], Ruskin fails to specify which range of the Alps he first saw illuminated by the setting sun, leading to speculation later by both himself and critics about what would in fact have been visible from a vantage point above the town of Schaffhausen.
Respecting certain kinds of sublime experience, the specific chain of the Alps that travelers first sighted would not have mattered. The Nonconformist clergyman, Thomas Raffles (1788–1863), first viewed the Alps from a height near Dole in the Jura—an approach through France to the western Alps, a chain that would have been invisible to the Ruskins approaching the mountains from the north in Germany. Nonetheless, Raffles was moved to pious reflections, which he expressed using tropes similar to Ruskinʼs:
[T]he carriage suddenly stopped, and the postilion cried out, Thereʼs Mont Blanc! There are the Alps! I started from a deep reverie into which I had fallen, and lifting up my eyes, beheld the whole chain of Alps, forming the line of the horizon, at the immense distance of one hundred and thirty miles, and yet distinctly seen with the naked eye. Mont Blanc appeared towering above them all, and glittering in the sunbeams like a crystal lake. The emotions of my mind at that moment were unutterable. I had not power to speak—my heart beat with increased rapidity within my bosom—and now that the sublime and stupendous objects, upon which my imagination had dwelt so long and with so much ardour,were actually before me, I could scarcely realize the scene, or believe the vision true. And, indeed, there was something so unearthly in their appearance—distance, and the splendours of a summer noon had so melted and softened them down—that they looked like a singular combination of dark and brilliant clouds resting on the earth; while the suddenness and unexpectedness of their appearance, all contributed to heighten the effect, and give it more the air of enchantment than reality. You may smile, perhaps, that I should make so much of what some would deem a very little thing, and occupy so many lines in telling you where and when I first saw the Alps. But if there are any scenes that interest me, next to the important discoveries of the sacred volume, they are the sublime and beautiful in nature—such objects as surround me now, and such as are to feast my eyes and fill my heart, if life and health are spared, through the ensuing week. The man who does not kindle at these displays of the Creatorʼs power—that has no spirit stirring in his breast to harmonize and mingle with them, had better stay in cities, and study man! But I am happy sometimes to escape from man, to study nature—and amidst her awful or her lovely scenes, to converse with God. I send you a sketch of the scenery to which I have now alluded. It was committed immediately to paper, while the outline was before me. It has the merit of correctness, therefore, though I am well aware it is destitute of every other.
—ʼTwas noon,
And from the summit of the hill I gazed
Over the fertile plains of southern France,
That lay outstretched beneath a cloudless sky,
Rich in the produce of the bounteous year.
But, oh! the amazing barrier that afar
Stayed my adventʼrous sight, and fixed my eyes
As in aerial regions betwixt earth and heaven.
I saw the Alps—the everlasting hills,—
A mighty chain, that stretched their awful forms
To catch the glories of the mid‐day sun,
And cast their shadows oʼer the “realms of noon”.
Oh! ʼtwas a goodly sight;
Like some delicious summer eveningʼs dream,
When worlds etherial float before the mind,
Peopled with beings of celestial mould,
That glide and glitter mid the cloudless sky,
And sip the dew from amaranthine flowers,
And drink the splendour of unsetting suns.
Yet, fair as fiction, ʼtwas an earthly scene;
A lovely portion of this lower world
By distance softened to the gazing eye.
Some rearʼd their fronts and stretchʼd their mighty length
Like heaps of shadow from the abyss of night;
And some like crystal seas and lakes of glass,
Hung by Omnipotence in middle air,
Appeared the boundary of this earthly scene—
This side the wondʼrous ocean all was earth;
Beyond—the aereal billows rollʼd and broke
In gentle murmurs on celestial shores.
(Raffles, Letters, 153–56).
In such an approach to “the amazing barrier”, specific geographical references are nearly consumed in the spiritual fire of Dantean and Miltonic language for Paradise; and Ruskinʼs innovation on Rogersʼs Italy is to substitute this spiritualized idea of the Alps for the borne of Italy that draws the speaker toward the ultimate goal of the journey. Although Ruskin left the Account unfinished, he clearly meant to locate that ultimate destination in the Chamonix valley overlooked by Mont Blanc, as proven by the spiritual experiences described in the essays “Source of the Arveron” and “Chamouni”, and the poems “Chamouni”, “I woke to hear the lullaby”, and others.
This is not to say that, on this first major Continental tour, Ruskin failed to learn the names in various languages of famous peaks such as Mont Blanc, Mont Rigi, and Monte Rosa—or for that matter, of heights in the Siebengebirge along the Rhine, or in what portions of the Apennines the family crossed. In the Account, he started to employ the names of the Alpine ranges, as well, but mainly in order to gesture at the vast scope of the entire chain. In The Travellerʼs Guide through Switzerland by J. G. Ebel, which may have served as his first reference for these names (not his geography textbook, Goldsmithʼs Grammar of General Geography, which lists only the heights of the greatest mountains around the world), Ruskin learned that the “ancient appellations of the Alps have been preserved, to the present day, as they were in the time of the Romans”, and he learned to measure the scope of the chain rhetorically, using such sweeping word lists as this:
The Alps, properly speaking, extend from the borders of the Rhone, in the south of France, to the frontiers of Hungary, a space of twelve degrees of longitude. They traverse Provence and Dauphiné in France; the whole of Savoy; a great part of Piémont; and, in the new Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, the Milanese, the Venetian states; again the whole of Switzerland, the Tyrol, Salzbourg, Carinthia, Carniola, Styria, Croatia, Sclavonia, the southern parts of Bavaria, Swabia, and of Austria. In breadth they are from two to four degrees of latitude.
(Ebel, Travellerʼs Guide through Switzerland, 61)
Thus, in the two ranges named in the Account, the Rhetian Alps and the Dinaric Alps, Ruskin appears to have selected the names to express extreme distances. At the end of the prose section of “Cologne”, “And this is the birthplace of Rubens”, the narrator sets out on the Rhine journey, promising “to trace the mighty Rhine to his source among the Rhetian Alps”—the mountains extending, Ebel explains, “from the Bernardine [i.e., the San Bernardino Pass, the watershed for the Hinterrhein, on the eastern edge of the western Alps] to the Dreyherrnspitz, on the confines of Tyrol, Carinthia, and the country of Salzbourg”, filling “the whole of the Grisons and of Tyrol, and serv[ing] as boundaries to Germany, also to Milanese and Venetian Lombardy” (Ebel, Travellerʼs Guide through Switzerland, 62). The Hinterrhein exits the mountains through the Via Mala, where in 1833 the Ruskins crossed from Germany into Italy.
Similarly, Ruskin names the Dinaric Alps in the poem, “The Rhine”, to signify the farthest extent of the Alpine chain and not to identify a place he had observed. The Dinaric Alps run along the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, extending along the left bank of the Danube to Sophia, as Ebel says, to become “confounded with the Balkan, or mont Hemus, which reaches the Black Sea” (Ebel, Travellerʼs Guide through Switzerland, 63).
(More to come.)