Print Culture of Illustrated Travel and Topographical Literature and Art
A second influence, according to
Praeterita, was the familyʼs acquisition in
April 1833
of
Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany
by
Samuel Prout (1783–1852):
“I well remember going with my father into the shop where subscribers entered their names,
and being referred to the specimen print, the turreted window over
Moselle,
at
Coblentz. We got the book home to
Herne Hill before the time
of our usual annual tour”
(
Ruskin, Works, 39:79; and see
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 286 n. 1).
This work, which was indeed published that spring with
John James Ruskin among the printed list of subscribers,
is credited by
Ruskin, doubtless apocryphally, with having prompted the familyʼs tour spontaneously,
whereas the journey must in fact have long been in planning:
“as my mother watched my fatherʼs pleasure and mine in looking at the wonderful places, she said, why should we not go and see some of them in reality?
My father hesitated a little, then with glittering eyes said—why not? And there were two or three weeks of entirely rapturous and amazed preparation”
(
Ruskin, Works, 39:79). While
Proutʼs
lithographs cannot solely have prompted the tour as such, the book probably did help imaginatively to orient the family to the north of Europe,
just as
Rogersʼs
Italy
provided a vision of the southern region of the Continent.
The influence of these two publications is exaggerated in
Praeterita,
but the two books can be viewed as representative not only of
Ruskinʼs conceptualization of his familyʼs
northern and southern destinations, but also of how those destinations were materially embodied in the illustrated travel writing and publication of
the
1830s.
Proutʼs
Facsimiles
provides a pictorial tour through
Belgium and
Germany in fifty lithographic prints,
featuring picturesque medieval and Renaissance architectural sites. The book contains no letterpress; the locales depicted are identified only by place names
lettered directly onto the lithographic stone, as part of the image. The lithographs, then a new medium in
Britain,
would have struck the Ruskins by their dramatically large size (22 by 15 inches) and watercolor‐like texture. In contrast,
Rogersʼs
Italy leads the reader on the more traditional
Grand Tour through the
Alps into the south. The linked series of topographical and narrative poems forms a more conventional work,
less picturesque than historical and classically learned.
Rogersʼs verse and taste were late‐eighteenth‐century in manner,
and his
Italy could not compete in popularity with
Lord Byronʼs fourth part of
Childe Haroldʼs Pilgrimage,
which is set in
Venice. While not entirely ignored, the work gained popular acclaim only when
Rogers invested in the graphic enhancements that enabled him to repackage the poem as the
1830 illustrated edition,
exploiting the up‐to‐date technologies of steel engraving and mass production that had sponsored the boom in
Annuals and Other Illustrated Books
(see
Samuel Rogers [1763–1855]).
The edition was innovative also in combining an intaglio process—its finely etched, steel‐engraved vignettes (2–3 inches by 3–4 inches) that illustrate
Rogersʼs poems—with the relief printing of the poems on the same page. The exquisite vignettes
(a more typical size for the engraved area of steel‐engraved book illustration was larger, 7 by 5 inches [
Hunnisett, Steel‐Engraved Book Illustration in England, 35])
conveyed
Turnerʼs atmospheric effects on a scale that harmonized with
Rogersʼs
modest poems; and the genre vignettes by
Stothard—long a favorite artist of Rogersʼs—presented
a benignly colorful of peasant culture. For the Ruskins, both the contrasts and complements with
Proutʼs imposing lithographic plates detailing busy town squares
surrounding picturesque architectural monuments must have seemed dramatic.
As the compositional history is interpreted in
ERM,
Ruskinʼs
“Account”
underwent a development parallel to that of
Rogersʼs work, originating as a travelogue written solely in verse
and in an eighteenth‐century manner of topographical poetry, and then being elaborated as an illustrated composite‐genre travel narrative
typical of the steel‐engraved landscape
annuals
of the
1830s (see
Composition and Publication). The Ruskin family
was familiar with
Italy in one of its earlier, non‐illustrated versions, which they owned,
as well as with the
1830 illustrated version (although, as remarked in
Date of Composition, there is some ambiguity concerning when the family
acquired the illustrated version). Regardless of when this book entered the household, its influence is palpable from the start of
Ruskinʼs
MS IX fair copy of the
“Account”. While critics have focused too exclusively on
Rogersʼs
Italy
as
Ruskinʼs model, at the cost of recognizing his imitations of
Proutʼs
Facsimiles
(see, e.g.,
Spear, “Ruskinʼs Italy”), it is true that
Rogersʼs book frames the foundational layout and conception of the composite‐genre
“Account”.
Ruskin modeled his section divisions on
Rogersʼs layout, observing how text and illustration form a coherent unit.
Like
Rogers, he entitles his topographical sections so as to identify a landmark destination—
“Calais”,
“Cassel”,
“Lille”,
“Brussels”,
“The Meuse”,
“Aix la Chapelle”,
“Cologne”,
“Andernacht”,
“Ehrenbreitstein”,
“St. Goar”, and
“Heidelberg”—and
for these section titles, he uses a lettering that imitates
Rogersʼs restrained display type.
(The
“St. Goar” and
“Heidelberg”
sections are missing their headings, owing to the unfinished state of the fair copy.)
Ruskinʼs placement of illustration
vis‐à‐vis text likewise imitates
Rogersʼs layout, by heading the first page of each section
with a landscape vignette above the section title, in order to situate the reader in a distinct place, and by closing each section with a figure vignette as a tailpiece,
in order to caption some portion of the narrative.
In this arrangement of text and image,
Ruskin captured the
1830 Italyʼs
notable innovation of combining the intaglio effects of the vignette on the same page with the relief type.
Rogers
probably based his layout on the admired designs by
William Bulmer (
1757–1830)
for editions of English poets, published in the
1790s by his Shakspeare Press
(
Piggott, Turnerʼs Vignettes, 20).
The editions were decorated with wood‐engraved vignettes by
Thomas Bewick (
1753–1828),
set at the heads of title pages of the poems, and producing an elegant page layout, which was made possible by the conformity of the relief wood engraving with the relief type.
That conformity was not possible in the new mass‐produced
annuals,
which relied on the durability of steel engraving to achieve unprecedented print runs for illustrated books. To solve this problem, and achieve the elegant effects
of
Bulmerʼs and
Bewickʼs designs, and yet print the books on a massive scale,
Rogersʼs printers innovated a technique,
which was widely remarked in reviews of the
1830 Italy,
whereby precise registration allowed the sheets to be run through the press twice, once for the engraving, and once for the type
(
Powell, “Turnerʼs Vignettes and the Making of Rogersʼ ‘Italy’”, 3).
Ruskin was attentive to this up‐to‐date innovation.
In his drawings imitating steel engravings,
Ruskin strives to harmonize his illustrations with text in the manner of
Turnerʼs vignettes for
Rogers.
Turner
exploited the potential of fine‐lined but durable steel engraving to allow indefinite borders of an engraving to melt into the white space of the paper,
creating a world within the page (
Piggott, Turnerʼs Vignettes, 14–16).
Ruskinʼs drawings emphasize how such frameless, soft‐edged rectangular, square, or oval designs harmonize
with his left‐ and right‐justified blocks of text to make a unity of effect.
Ruskinʼs success in imitating Turnerʼs vignettes has drawn critical attention away
from his attention to the contrasting textures of Proutʼs lithographs. The young artistʼs most ambitious study
of Prout in the “Account” is a copy of the lithograph,
Palais du Prince, Liège, which Ruskin
places at the close of the section on “The Meuse”. Exacting as it is, the copy is not merely mechanical,
but an exploration of the anecdotal, touristic world of the travelerʼs picturesque, and how this world is captured by the fluid and watercolor‐like texture of a lithograph,
as compared with the fairy world of brilliant light and haunted shadow suggested by the exquisite intaglio of Turnerʼs vignettes.
To indicate the relative size of Proutʼs lithograph, Ruskin drew the image full‐page and
broadside in the MS IX notebook. Another copy after Prout is contained within the section on
“Cologne”. That section also begins far down on an otherwise blank page of MS IX,
the gap probably having been intended to feature a large architectural drawing in the manner of Prout, such as opens
“Aix la Chapelle”.
Ruskinʼs fair‐copy version of the
“Account” extends
beyond
Rogersʼs model in
Italy also by combining verse and illustration with prose.
Rogers
did include some prose in
Italy—brief essays and a tale,
in “Part the Second” (
1828) of the work (
“National Prejudices”,
“Caius Cestius”,
“Foreign Travel”,
and
“The Bag of Gold” in
Rogers, Italy (1828),
35–40, 51–52, 62–71, 107–19); and he reprinted these prose pieces and added three more tales to the
1830 edition
(
“Marcolini”,
“Montorio”,
and
“Marco Griffoni” in
Rogers, Italy (1830), 85–87, 140–43, 230–32).
But
Rogers subtitled his work
A Poem, and he dispersed the few prose pieces irregularly,
with at most a pattern of loose association with their immediately surrounding poems, whereas
Ruskin constructed
each of his topographical sections (with one exception) using both verse and prose. Unlike
Rogers,
Ruskin did not independently title his prose pieces, but subordinated them to the topographical unit,
typically separating prose from poem with a drawing, which serves as a hinge between the two kinds of writing and binds the parts into an associative,
but still coherent unit. At the same time, while complementing the poems,
Ruskinʼs prose pieces also contrast
with his rather generalized, picturesque poetic views, by bringing the tone down to earth with first‐person, anecdotal and comedic commentary
about specific locales.
Thus,
Ruskin amplified
Rogersʼs uniform pattern of text and illustration, which
in the
1830 Italy consists of a landscape vignette after a drawing by
Turner
serving as a header, placed above a poemʼs title; and following the poem, a figure vignette after a drawing by
Stothard,
serving as a tailpiece. (The prose pieces are not illustrated.) While in its present condition, the
MS IX fair copy
is missing many drawings (see
The Composite‐Genre Illustrated Travelogue),
the examples remaining in place indicate that
Ruskin intended, at the least, to complement each poem with a prose piece,
and to supply each poem and each prose piece with its own headpiece and tailpiece—four vignettes in total for each topographical unit.
And while
Ruskin typically honors
Rogersʼs pattern of using a landscape or cityscape as a headpiece,
and a figure drawing as tailpiece, he varies the pattern somewhat (as does
Rogers) by occasionally heading a section
with a more anecdotal, narrative vignette.
Ruskin carries his principle of amplification in the sister arts to an extreme in the sections on
“Andernacht”, “Ehrenbreitstein”,
and “St. Goar”. With each section fully elaborated in itself as a composite of verse, prose,
and illustration, the outer sections of the trio also work as contrasts to one another—the first, “Andernacht”,
composed and illustrated in a gothic mode; and the third, “St. Goar”, in a domestic mode.
Between them, “Ehrenbreitstein” both functions as and thematizes the topic of confluence,
as the meeting point of dark gothic and sunny domesticity. Confluence is topographically represented by the meeting point
of the Rhine River and the Moselle River at Coblenz,
where the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein looms over the riversʼ juncture.
Ruskinʼs landscape vignette for “Ehrenbreitstein”
is copied after one of Turnerʼs renderings of the fortress, not from Italy,
but from a full‐page steel engraving in an annual—Ruskin having appointed himself the exercise of reducing the bold scene
to a small oval.
Evidence in MS VIII draft suggests that Ruskin began a similar amplification in describing
the first sighting of the Alps from Schaffhausen. Two attempts at drafting poems
about this experience suggest the contrasting registers of the sublime and domestic, like “Andernacht”
and “St. Goar”. The earlier composed of the two poems, “There is a charmed peace, that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”],
builds up to its cry of discovery, “The Alps the Alps,—Full far away / The long successive ranges lay”,
by imaginatively coursing the Rhine, whereas a later‐composed fragment, “Schaffhausen”,
can be read as an alternate introduction to the scene, by tracing a stroll to the “summit of the hill” from whence presumably
the mountains would be sighted, had Ruskin continued with the poem. Biographically, the climb up that hill occurred on the same Sabbath evening
with which Ruskin opens his description of the Rhine in >“There is a charmed peace that aye>” [>“The Alps from Schaffhausen>”],
but the fragment, “Schaffhausen”, seems 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,
rendered in emphatically pounded dactylic lines, which stand out from the normal, amiable flow of iambic octosyllabic verse.
As a contrast with these large, amplified units of verse, prose, and picture, comprising contrasting genres, the section “Aix la Chapelle”
in MS IX consists only of a prose text and a single illustration. The headpiece is an imposing rendering of the cityʼs cathedral,
drawn in Proutʼs manner. Taking up nearly a full page like Ruskinʼs other ambitious copy after Prout,
the lithograph‐like drawing of Liège, the large rectangular image of the cathedral is not a vignette,
and was probably meant to imitate the comparatively large dimensions of Proutʼs portfolio. Beneath the drawing, Ruskin
allowed just enough space for the section heading and a few lines of text, just as place names are lettered directly onto Proutʼs plates.
Even here, however, where Ruskin pivots away from his grand multi‐genre and multi‐media amplifications of Rogersʼs design,
to exhibit a large‐scale but unitary plate in the manner of Prout, he cannot resist varying the single prose essay by combining in it
both comic and picturesque modes (the latter typically represented by verse in the “Account”).
First, the narrator riffs on the Peace of Aix la Chapelle to mock the somnolent “peace treaties” governing the local postillions,
but then the speaker is rhapsodically taken by the sublimity of the cathedralʼs interior in moonlight, described in the manner of Scott.
Finally, Ruskinʼs narrator parodies a guidebook writerʼs tour of antiquities inside the cathedral. As in the section,
“Ehrenbreitstein”, the condensation of multiple genres is thematically reflected in a geographical
situation that bespeaks confluence. Aix la Chapelle lay at the juncture of the Netherlands,
Germany, and the newly founded Belgium, and the city was historically distinctive for its imperial status.
In
Ruskinʼs liveliness of response to the material world of art production and reproduction that guided early Victorian picturesque travel, his achievement
in the
“Account” is overlooked by interpretations that insist on the neurotic constraints of
Ruskinʼs early self‐instruction
in drawing. For example,
Paul H. Walton sees
Ruskinʼs adoption of
Proutʼs
“outline style” of depicting old architecture with “broken lines and dots”
as one example of the youthʼs tendency “to revert to pen and ink in more factual studies of picturesque buildings and views”,
owing to a misguided direction of “his earliest art activity . . . along lines strictly defined by adult standards and ideas of what
was educationally desirable, so that he was not encouraged, nor did he have the time, to draw in a playful way the kinds of figure subjects in which a child
imaginatively expresses and defines a conception of himself within a framework of human relationships”. As a contrast with this alleged “crippl[ing]” of
Ruskinʼs
imagination, which “had much to do with the tragedy of his personal life”,
Walton points to “the happy, normal family life of a boy”
like
Ruskinʼs later sexual nemesis,
John Everett Millais, whose youthful drawings included the kind of “subjects usually preferred by boy artists:
soldiers, animals, machines, caricatures of family and friends”. As a consequence, even when a prospect of freedom opened up in
Ruskinʼs youthful art teaching,
such as when his first drawing master,
Charles Runciman (1798–1864) challenged the boy “to imitate the free,
controlled sweep of the pencil in . . . [the teacherʼs] models”,
Ruskin, according to
Walton, retreated to his more formal depictions of buildings in pen and ink
(
Walton, Drawings of John Ruskin, 13, 7, 8, 7, 6).
It is not true, however, that
Ruskinʼs writing and drawings neglect subjects appropriate to “boy artists”;
more importantly,
Waltonʼs division of the normative from the creative ignores how spontaneity and invention can be prompted
in surprising ways, and one of these is the young
Ruskinʼs playfulness in manipulating the material culture surrounding a youth of the
1830s.
In the
“Account”,
Ruskin not only contrasts
what he finds in print culture, such as the respective scales of
Prout lithographs and
Turner vignettes;
he also amuses himself by manipulating that culture—for example, reconceptualizing
Turnerʼs full‐page engraving,
Ehrenbreitstein, as a vignette, or shrinking one of
Proutʼs
market square scenes to a Lilliputian vignette heading
“Lille”, a section that in itself plays
with the topic of recession and expansion through motion (the travelers receding “Farther and farther . . . / From
Cassels
insulated crest” to where “Lille upon us sudden broke” in its “rich irregularity” of “form and figure fair, / . . .
moving, breathing, living there” [
“Lille”, lines 11–12, 32, 38–40]).
Viewed in this way, the
“Account” is far from the “unfinished folly” that
Ruskin dismissed in
Praeterita
(
Ruskin, Works, 35:81), much less evidence of neurosis.
While
Ruskin did leave the work unfinished, he had exhausted its potential and propelled him forward
to take his own place as a published author,
“J.R.”, in the material culture of ekphrastic and topographical
illustrated travel publication.
The Influence of Rogersʼs Poetry on Ruskinʼs Planned Extension of the Composite‐Genre Travelogue to Italy and Switzerland
The sole surviving authority for guiding a reconstruction of the unfinished
“Account” is
Ruskinʼs own
Plan for Continuation of the Account of a Tour on the Continent
(see the preceding discussion of the
Plan). As argued below in
Conjectural Extension of the Composite‐Genre Travelogue in Poems (1891) and Works (1903),
the editors of those volumes appear to have paid scant attention to the
Plan
when constructing their extensions of the
“Account”.
The
Plan is significant, not only as an authority for
Ruskinʼs intentions
for completing the work, but also as a key to revealing the influence of
Samuel Rogersʼs poetry on
Ruskinʼs design,
an influence that is strongest—at least on the evidence of surviving draft—in the representation of Alpine crossings,
from
Germany into
Italy, and from
Italy into
Switzerland.
That the young
Ruskin owed any debt at all to
Rogerʼs poetry may seem surprising, given
Ruskinʼs later story about his supposed contretemps, when he was introduced as a boy wonder to the famous man of taste, of
“congratulating . . . [
Rogers] with enthusiasm on the beauty of the engravings by which his poems were illustrated,”
thus implying that the youth knew “more of the vignettes [in
Italy]
than the verses” (
Ruskin, Works, 34:96).
Ruskin did respond insightfully and creatively to the poems, however, as becomes evident by comparing his draft writing for the Italian and
Swiss sections of the
“Account” to the positions these pieces would have occupied
in the
Plan, and then comparing
Rogersʼs own sequence of poems in
Italy. These comparisons show that, surprisingly,
Ruskin took from
Rogers
mainly ideas for representing the experience of mountain crossing, rather than what was surely
Rogersʼs own primary focus—the
arrival in the sunny plains below.
In the Plan for Continuation of the “Account”,
following [“Heidelberg”]—the title of the last section that
Ruskin succeeded in fair‐copying (incompletely) in MS IX—he
lists a group of titles relating to the first sighting of the distant Alps
and the first exposure to “Swiss” character in the borderland between Germany and Switzerland:
- “Strasburg”;
- “The swiss cottages”;
- “Schaffhausen”;
- “The Alps”;
- “The Fall of the Rhine”;
- “Constance”;
- “Werdenberg”;
- “Pfaffers”.
The
Plan does not make clear whether
Ruskin
meant these titles to refer to composite sections, or to individual pieces, some of which he had already composed, but we can only assume
that he intended to maintain the composite design of the
“Account”. For this cluster of titles,
the extant individual draft pieces that, in their content, most likely correspond to the proposed composite sections include the poem,
“Oh, the morn looked bright on hill and dale”,
which
Collingwood entitled
“The Black Forest”,
and which is suggestive of the title given in the
Plan as
“The swiss cottages”. (It was then common, if inaccurate,
to characterize
Black Forest peasant houses as “Swiss”.) This poem was drafted in
MS VIII,
where it is followed by a prose fragment,
“It was a wide stretchy sweep of lovely blue champaign”,
which is almost certainly intended as part a composite with the poem (see the glosses attached to this essay, which the editors of the
Library Edition,
erroneously associated with a different poem). Two other pieces pertinent to this cluster in the
Plan,
which were drafted in
MS VIII, are the poems,
“Schaffhausen”,
which
Ruskin himself entitled, although
Collingwood decided to rename it
“Entrance to Schaffhausen”; and
“There is a charmed peace that aye”,
which
Ruskin left untitled, and which
Collingwood called
“The Alps from Schaffhausen”.
As
Collingwoodʼs editorial titles suggest, he read these poems through the lens of
Ruskinʼs
representation of the
1833 tour in
Praeterita, which turns on the first sighting
of the
Alps from
Schaffhausen as a transformative experience.
Indeed,
Collingwood highlighted
“There is a charmed peace that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”],
by bestowing on it an epigraph from
Praeterita quoting the epiphany of first sighting. But rather than reconstructing a completed version
of the
“Account” by reading the autobiography backwards on the work,
a more compelling interpretation emerges by reading the
Plan,
along with the surviving draft corresponding to it, as a literary design derived from
Rogers.
(One consequence, then, is to perceive the long reach of
Rogersʼs influence, via the
“Account”,
on the narrative in the autobiography, rather than spuriously treating the poems as documentary evidence for what
Ruskin would write a half‐century later.)
At the center of this cluster turning on the first sighting of the
Alps,
Ruskin adopted the title of
Rogersʼs poem from
Italy,
“The Alps”. Moreover,
Ruskin placed strong allusions
to lines in
Rogersʼs
“The Alps” in the poem,
“There is a charmed peace that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”].
The poem not only contains
Rogersʼs title in the speakerʼs cry, “The
Alps the
Alps,—Full far away /
The long successive ranges lay”; the poem also concludes with the promise, “look once on the
Alps by the sunset quiver /
And think on the moment thenceforward for ever”—an adpatation of
Rogersʼs lines on first viewing the distant mountains,
“A something that informs him [i.e., the spectator] ʼtis an hour, / Whence he may date henceforward and forever!”
(
Rogers, Italy, 29–30).
(For further detail about these allusions to
Rogersʼs
“The Alps”,
see the contextual glosses attached to
Ruskinʼs
“There is a charmed peace that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”].)
We do not know how Ruskin would have played out the theme of first sightings of mountain country throughout this cluster—no known draft verse or prose survives
relating to Strasbourg, Constance, Werdenberg, or Pfaffers—but for the following cluster of titles listed in the Plan,
a cluster detailing the experience of physically crossing the Alps, he drafted poems unquestionably connected with nearly every title, and he drafted them
in the same sequence as the titles appear in the Plan.
And again, to develop the trope of mountain crossing, he drew on various aspects of Rogersʼs influence:
- “Passing the Alps”, for which the poem “Passing the Alps” is extant in MS IA, g.2;
- “Via Mala”, for which the poem “Via Mala” is extant in MS VIII;
- “Splugen”, for which the poem “Splugen” is extant in MS VIII;
- “The Summit”, for which the poem “The Summit” is extant in MS VIII;
- “The Descent”, for which the poem “The Descent” is extant in MS VIII,
and which corresponds to Rogersʼs "The Descent";
- “Italia, Italia”, for which no readily identifiable composition survives,
but which corresponds to Rogersʼs “Italy” (a poem within the larger work).
The draft poem connected with the first title, “Passing the Alps”, is particularly rich
with borrowings from Rogersʼs “The Alps”. In Rogersʼs poem,
following the trope which Ruskin used in the previous cluster—the first, revelatory sight of the mountains reorienting the self to a new era in the selfʼs history,
by “look[ing] once on the Alps . . . / And think[ing] on the moment thenceforward for ever”—the speaker
goes on to meditate on the Alps as a “barrier” determining the fate of nations rather than the self, whether of nations struggling to conquer that barrier or seeking its protection.
For the English during the Napoleonic era and afterward, this theme was resonant with recent threats of invasion. But writing in 1818 (and looking back to his tour taken
during the temporary peace of 1814), Rogers is able to contrast the danger and difficulty of nations struggling in the past against the barrier of the Alps,
using historical examples such as Hannibalʼs invasion of Rome, with the pleasure of the modern touristʼs ease and security of mountain travel.
That ease was afforded, ironically, by wartime engineering to overcome the Alpine barrier, bringing conquest. (Rogers entered Italy
from western Switzerland, using the broad carriage road through the Simplon Pass,
which had been laid by Napoleonʼs engineers.) In “Passing the Alps”,
Ruskin elaborates Rogersʼs brief historical example of Hannibalʼs crossing into a poem‐length spectacle,
his imagination likely fired not only by Rogersʼs lines but also by Turnerʼs vignette for that poem in the
1830 edition of Italy, which depicts Hannibalʼs army
filing with their elephants through the mountains. In his poem, Ruskin makes a corresponding effort at writing the sublime,
adumbrating the catastrophe for Rome in the menacing turmoil of the surrounding landscape and atmosphere. The poem is to some degree an ekphrasis,
based on Turnerʼs vignette
(see the contextual glosses for “Passing the Alps”).
In context of
Ruskinʼs
Plan,
“Passing the Alps”
can be viewed structurally either as a pivot between the two clusters—that on the first distant sighting of the
Alps,
and the cluster on crossing the mountains into
Italy—or the poem can be regarded as the first piece
in the series relating the physical crossing. It should be borne in mind that
Ruskin composed the poem earlier than and separately from the other poems
about mountain crossing. In its original context,
MS IA, g.2,
“Passing the Alps” was situated between the prose essay,
“Calais”, and the poem,
“Milan Cathedral”
(see
The Composite‐Genre Travelogue [MS IA, g.2]).
Here,
Ruskin was perhaps imitating
Rogersʼs structural function of
“The Alps” as a pivotal poem,
preparing the reader for passing through the “barrier” of the
Alps between north and south,
Calais and
Milan, by reflecting on history and spectacle—
Hannibalʼs crossing—just
as
Rogers causes the reader to trace and re–trace ground between west and east, by reflecting on both ancient and modern history.
By selecting only the one historical example of Hannibalʼs crossing for elaboration, however, from the several with which Rogers crowds “The Alps”,
Ruskin demonstrates a tendency to expand and attenuate what Rogers presents as layers of memory and history.
On the one hand, by positioning his Hannibal poem, “Passing the Alps”,
as a fulcrum between sections about approaching the Alps and sections about crossing the mountains, Ruskin acknowledges Rogersʼs procedure of concentrating and multiplying perspectives.
In Rogersʼs “The Alps”, the speaker describes multiple viewpoints,
first recalling his approach to the mountains from below, in western Switzerland (Rogers begins Italy in Lake Geneva and environs)
and then gazing over a wide prospect from above—retracing the winding road that he has climbed, and anticipating the path that he will follow to descend
into Italy. In Ruskinʼs sequence, these stages are drawn out as a succession of real‐time descriptions,
with each stage of the passage represented by a separate poem: the sublime terror of the Via Mala; a respite in the pastoral village of Splügen;
the turning point achieved amid the bleak landscape of the summit, with its dire remembrances of fallen travelers; and the breathtaking descent, winding among the precipitous cliffs, viewed first from above and then from below.
In Italy, Rogers places “The Alps”,
which describes (without naming) the Simplon, following the poem, “The Great St. Bernard”
(which he did not visit); and between these two poems falls another, “The Descent”,
which illogically leads the traveler downward from the Simplon (again without explicitly identifying it) before the traveler arrives at the pass in “The Alps”.
But Rogers was less concerned than Ruskin with tracing the journey linearly;
rather, he framed multiple and overlapping opportunites to contextualize the journey in both ancient and recent history. Anticipating the catalog of historical struggles
against the Alpine barrier in “The Alps”, the speaker in “The Descent”
relays his guideʼs tale of personally encountering Napoleon himself, marching his army to Italy and victory at Marengo.
Yet, while
Ruskin makes his sequences linear where
Rogersʼs are complex, he does learn from
Rogersʼs ability to discipline his proclivity
for digression and complexity by imposing neoclassical balance. In
Italy,
Rogers digresses between
“The Descent” and
“The Alps”
to relate two verse narratives, but the stories are balanced topographically and thematically.
“Jorasse”, a highland tale about an intrepid
Alpine hunter who delves into a cave,
is complemented by
“Marguerite de Tours”, a lowland tale about a girl who crosses from
Martigny,
on the Swiss side of the
St. Bernard, to the opposite
vale of Aosta
in order to attend to her dying father. Symmetrical and complementary arrangement when showcasing variety was characteristic of
Rogersʼs mix of Neoclassicism and Romanticism,
a principle reflected in the arrangement not only of his verse but also of his art collection in his famed
St. James Place bachelorʼs residence.
As one of visitors, the art historian
Gustav Friedrich Waagen, commented in
1835,
“one knows not whether more to admire the diversity or the purity of his taste” in exhibiting his treasures; “[p]ictures of the most different schools,
ancient and modern sculptures, Greek vases, alternately attract the eye, and are so arranged, with a judicious regard to their size, in proportion to the place assigned them,
that every room is richly and picturesquely ornamented, without having the appearance of a magazine, from being over–filled, as we often find”
(
Waagen,Works of Art and Artists in England, 2:132–33;
and see
Hale, introduction to The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, 26–27).
Waagen pointedly contrasts
Rogersʼs judicious arrangement with the helter‐skelter of
1830s print culture as represented by the modern magazine.
Just so, in both the
“Account” and the first publication derived from it,
“Fragments from a Metrical Journal”,
Ruskin observes
Rogersʼs
complementary balancing of variety by pairing, for example, the contrasting modes of gothic sublimity in
“Andernacht” with domestic beauty in
“St. Goar”;
and in the original version, he completed the design by bridging the two poems with a middle section,
“Ehrenbreitstein”,
which develops a trope of confluence (in the joining of two rivers, the
Rhine and the
Moselle).
In another example of arranging variety around a midpoint, he planned for
“The Summit” to serve as
the centerpiece of the cluster about crossing the
Alps. At the same time, in
“The Summit”
Ruskin tries out
Rogersʼs own way of allowing for variety within a symmetrical frame,
by digressing into a narrative. If
Rogers balances his two narrative poems,
“Jorasse”
and
“Marguerite de Tours”, as a complementary pair, highland tale and lowland tale,
he also digresses and elaborates: both
Marguerite and
Jorasse
cross mountains to maintain fidelity.
Ruskin is prompted by the wayside crosses on the summit of
Splügen Pass
to compare Alpine with
Lake District tales of fidelity in tragedy. He narrates the story of
Charles Gough,
who fell to his death while climbing
Mount Helvellyn, and whose corpse was loyally guarded by his
dog until discovered.
While
Ruskin adopted the story from
Scottʼs and
Wordsworthʼs poems
about
Goughʼs fate (see the contextual glosses to this poem),
it was the influence of
Rogers that prompted him to digress into such a story at the midpoint of the poems about mountain crossing.
For another instance of this technique of using topographical description to frame a narrative digression—a tale that
Ruskin again
probably intended to be English, but left incomplete—see
“The traditions of the Rhine have long been celebrated” [“The Rhine”] [essay].
Mentors
As an engagement with print culture, MS IX
reflects an awareness of professional roles and public voices. Ruskin is aware that landscape artists like
Prout and Turner traveled the Continent
in search of subjects both for exhibition in watercolor or oil and for wider distribution in engraving and lithography. He is practicing the complementary,
ekphrastic role of the letterpress writer, who provides on‐demand descriptive and historical verse or prose, in a voice that is variously authoritative or facetious,
and that does not necessarily depend for its authority on a personal acquaintance with the place being described. He is exploring style not only as a resource for artistic self‐expression
but also as a means of differentiation in the artistic market: he notices how stylistic differences accompany the roles
assigned to Turner, Stothard, and Prout;
and while his invariable model for verse remains the octosyllabic couplets of Walter Scottʼs narrative poems,
he at least tries out strategies for ekphrastic and topographical description borrowed from Rogers (whose voice for learning and anecdote he cannot match).
The personae of Hogg and Rogers each exhibited multiple and even contradictory sides, and the Ruskins must have been selective
about what aspects of these public figures they hoped to cultivate in the patronage of their precocious son.
Respecting Hogg, the Ruskins thought of him in his role as the Ettrick Shepherd, who was romantically imagined as having received his call to poetry
when he was shepherd in Ettrick Forest in the Scottish Borders,
and who still resided in georgic retirement on his farm in the Yarrow Valley.
The Ruskins would have played down Hoggʼs colorful and risqué character in the “Noctes Ambrosianae”
in Blackwoodʼs Edinburgh Magazine. This side of Hogg appealed to the Brontë siblings,
who imitated the bravado and swagger of these dialogues in their own collaborative and competitive writing,
but Ruskinʼs parents would hardly have considered such a persona as an appropriate model
for Ruskinʼs solitary and decorous authorship.
When the Ruskins met
Hogg personally in
1832, he was undertaking his first visit to the metropolis,
where he was lionized by
London society.
Hoggʼs introduction to the Ruskins came by way of the community of expatriate Scottish literati in
London
who surrounded the publishing firms of John Murray and Smith, Elder. The latter, in particular, as the publisher of
Friendshipʼs Offering,
served as the hub for these connections:
Hogg as a contributor to the annual;
Thomas Pringle (1789–1834),
as editor, and longtime friend of
Hogg; and even
Ruskinʼs cousin,
Charles Thomas Richardson (1811–34), as a shopboy with the firm,
who was the first to present
Ruskin with a copy of
Friendshipʼs Offering (probably the
1829
or
1830 volume, both of which contained contributions by
Hogg).
Rogers, in sharp contrast with Hogg, was the urbane “man of taste,” whose townhouse in St. James Place
was a showplace of exquisitely curated Regency neoclassicism, and the scene of his famous breakfasts at which Rogers acted the part of social arbiter
of the current London artistic and literary scene. In his most positive light, Rogers might have appeared to the Ruskins as a splendid embodiment
of John Jamesʼs tastes and aspirations. A former associate of Byron, and a habitué of at least the byways of fame,
Rogers had earned a sound reputation for his poem, The Pleasures of Memory (1792),
and, more recently, Italy. The latter may have paled in the popular glare of
Childe Haroldʼs Pilgrimage, but the poem was respectably and approachably
neoclassical, regular in its versification, and grounded in the tradition of the Grand Tour to Italy.
Rogers was also, like John James, a successful businessman, having made his fortune in banking;
and even though he lavished extravagant sums on artists, engravers, and printers in order to satisfy his perfectionism in crafting editions of his poetry,
Rogers recouped his huge investment in his illustrated edition of Italy
and profited handsomely by its unprecedented sales. The unattractive side of Rogers to the Ruskins would have been his notoriously acid wit and his worldliness at a time when middle‐class Evangelical earnestness
was turning the tide on Regency profligacy.
The two writers also differed profoundly in taste.
Rogers was so committed to his neoclassicism that
Turner
reined in his apocalyptic manner typical of his other works of the period in favor of a style that would harmonize with
Rogersʼs restraint–for
example, by using less dramatic perspective in his vignette designs for
Italy
(
Holcomb, “Neglected Classical Phase of Turnerʼs Art”).
The artist whom
Hogg most admired and hoped to secure as illustrator for his grandest gift book, a deluxe edition of
The Queenʼs Wake,
was
John Martin (
1789–1854)—the artist who,
far from restraining the apocalyptic sublime, made his career by carrying such subjects to unprecedented scale and histrionic theatricality.
(All too typically for the hapless author, and despite generous subscription donations by
John James Ruskin and others,
Hoggʼs deluxe edition was never produced owing to disruptions in trade caused by Reform agitation in
1832;
see
OʼHalloran, “Illustrations to The Queenʼs Wake”, c–civ.)
Of the two relationships, the Ruskinsʼ contact with
Hogg is the best documented
(see
James Hogg [ca. 1770–1835)]).
John Jamesʼs evident preference for the
Ettrick Shepherdʼs advice
about
Ruskinʼs future as a poet, at the time when the youth was laboring over the
“Account”, may be no accident. Compared to
Rogers,
Hogg may have seemed hapless in his fortunes: his
London venture ended in him foolishly mislaying his trust in an under‐financed publisher,
who went bankrupt and squandered the opportunity to produce a collected edition worthy of the author, whereas
Rogers boasted the means to encase his writing
in increasing splendor. In
1834, when
John James wrote to
Hogg about
Johnʼs “promise of very considerable talent,”
Rogers followed up the success of his
1830 Italy
with an edition of his collected
Poems,
likewise illustrated by
Turner,
Stothard, and others,
which the
Athenaeum declared to be a “volume which,
for true elegance and pictorial fancy, is unequalled, in an age remarkable for its love of splendid books”
(
Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 274;
Piggott, Turnerʼs Vignettes, 39).
Nonetheless, when writing to
Hogg,
John James sounds pointed in addressing
Hogg as a man “of talent and of heart,”
as compared with “the world at large,” which lacks “comprehen[sion] . . . patience . . . feeling . . . delicacy,”
suggesting that he trusted the humble Scottish “shepherd” over the urbane man of taste
(
Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 274).
Despite
John Jamesʼs sentiments, both
Rogersʼs successes and
Hoggʼs disappointments were endemic to a period of transition between publishing in the age of
Scott and the more entrepreneurial and innovative, yet also volatile and confusing print culture
in the age of
Dickens. In a time when critical discourse commonly bemoaned the decline of poetry in unpropitious circumstances
(see, e.g.,
Bristow, “Introduction,” Victorian Poet, 4–5),
both
Rogers and
Hogg appreciated how poetry could gain new life from its relation with the visual arts—a
relation that was rooted in tradition reaching back to the humanist dialogue or
paragone between the sister arts,
yet that was also undergoing renewal and transformation by mass‐market print technologies. Both men shrewdly exploited the changes in print technology
that created new venues and audiences for literature and art, such as the
annuals and other illustrated books.
(On
Hoggʼs enterprising approach to these venues during an otherwise depressed period in literary publishing, see
Currie, introduction to Hogg, Contributions to Annuals and Gift‐Books, xix-xxxii;
and on his appreciation of the fine arts—particularly modern painting, for its connection with literature and its accessibility to ordinary people—see
Hughes, “Hogg, Art, and the Annuals”.)
Ruskinʼs introduction to
Rogers is less helpfully documented. The sole anecdote to survive
concerning the youthʼs audience with the poet can be read in terms of commonalities shared by these mentors in the literary and artistic culture of the
1830s.
He was escorted into
Rogersʼs presence under the wing of
Thomas Pringle,
who enjoyed regular entrée to
St. James Place (see
Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 192).
Ruskinʼs later story about his supposed contretemps of “congratulating . . . [
Rogers] with enthusiasm
on the beauty of the engravings by which his poems were illustrated,” indicating that the youth knew “more of the vignettes
[in
Italy] than the verses,” and the consequent chiding by
Pringle “that, in future,
when . . . in the company of distinguished men, . . . [he] should listen more attentively to their conversation”
evokes a bygone era that valued polite conversation and dilettantish collecting (
Ruskin, Works, 34:96, 35:93).
Yet, while
Ruskin fits the anecdote into what he now regarded as his fatuous beginnings as a poet, his misplaced complements to the illustrator
only proves him to have been a boy of his decade, who had so carefully studied the visual culture represented by
Rogersʼs
Italy.
(While we do not know precisely when
Ruskinʼs introduction to
Rogers occurred—the
visit must have been made prior to
Pringleʼs illness and death in late 1834—it is a reasonable guess that
Pringle secured an audience on the strength of the youthʼs precocious achievement in the
MS IX fair copy of the
“Account”.)
In the early mentoring of
J.R., it is surprising that the only surviving mention by
John
himself of his productions pertains, not to
Pringle or
Rogers and
Friendshipʼs Offering, but
to
John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843), the editor
of botanical, landscaping, and other natural history publications. In a verse letter to his father dated
10 March 1834,
Ruskin refers to
Loudon as a “friend” of the family:
“To
Mr. Loudon, as a friend, / By way of some communication, / Some kind of little lucubration / On any sort of observation,
/ Among the
Alps, you know, / On Micaslate, or any slates, / Granite, and gold, or toads and snakes, / I think that I shall make a show”
(
Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 285).
Ruskin was alluding to his geological notes—dated
March 1834, but published later that year—in
Loudonʼs
Magazine of Natural History,
“Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine”, and
“Facts and Considerations on the Strata of Mont Blanc, and on Some Instances of Twisted Strata Observable in Switzerland”.
One is struck by the apparent anomaly that the one forthcoming publication to merit
Ruskinʼs attention—if he was as yet apprised of his other firsts for this year,
the poetry commissions for
Friendshipʼs Offering—were these geological observations. Later in life,
Ruskin would find it convenient
to stress his keenness of factual observation at the expense of his poetic effusion. Again, however, from the perspective of the
1830s, one can perceive commonalities in these mentorships.
Loudon, like
Pringle and
Hogg, was a Scot—a member of the extended “family”
of Scottish literati in
London who surrounded the boy wonder, many of whom visited
Herne Hill.
Loudonʼs publications also depended on the thriving visual culture
of illustrated books and magazines during the period, and they were perhaps not too distant from the poetry anthologies in their communal appraoch,
inviting amateurs to contribute to forums such as the
Magazine of Natural History,
and other “lucubrations” that did not necessarily expect its readers and contributors to be qualified by a professional status.