[In the following essay, Robinson examines Cranch's friendship with Robert Browning and its effect on Cranch's poetry.]

The thirty year interval between Christopher Pearse Cranch's first collection of verse, Poems (1844), and the successive publications of Satan (1874) and The Bird and the Bell (1875)¹ is marked by many apparent changes in a man characterized as one of the most restless of the Transcendentalists.² Much of this period was spent overseas, where Cranch, in the company of numerous other American intellectuals, was establishing himself as a successful, if not brilliant, landscape painter, and somewhat later in America, as an accomplished translator of the Aeneid.³ But the themes to which he returned in his later poetry are remarkably similar to those of the early poems which won the praise of Emerson, and even Poe.⁴ What is striking, however, in the second collection, The Bird and the Bell, is the personal flavor of many of the poems which are written to, or about, the literary figures Cranch had come to know in Europe. While the early poems have rightly been characterized as poetic paraphrases of Emersonian doctrine,⁵ some of the later poems seem to test that doctrine in the vivid terms of a man whom Perry Miller characterizes as “a social being.”⁶

Despite his social graces, and his continuing reputation as “the most delightful of the Transcendental group,”⁷ Cranch was haunted by a conviction of loneliness, marred and imperfect friendship, and even rejection by others. One can note a hint of this feeling in “A Friend”:

          We smile and clasp the hands
With merry fellows o'er cigars and wine;
          We breakfast, walk, and dine
With social men and women. Yes, we are friends;
          And there the music ends!(8)

These may appear wistful, even maudlin sentiments until they are put in the context of one of the most striking, and puzzling, poems in the same volume, “Veils.” The poem begins with the memory of a friendship that transcends ordinary social bounds:

Once we called each other friends.
          'T was no formal greeting
When we clasped each other's hands;
          Soul with soul came meeting.

(100)

Here the clasp of the hands, the sign of merely formal friendship in “A Friend,” is the outward sign of a deeper communion of souls. But, turning away from the past, the poet depicts the current dissolution of this tie:

Other friends now come between,
          Other love outstrips me.
Can my light be then so dull
          That they all eclipse me?
Often have I longed for you;
          Often have I wondered
Why we two, whose thoughts were one,
          Ever should be sundered.

(100)

The presence in the volume of so many other poems of personal reference raises the question of an actual biographical source for the poem, and perhaps intentionally, Cranch provides enough evidence to identify Robert Browning as the unnamed friend and subject of the poem.

Cranch, through an introduction by Margaret Fuller, had met Robert Browning in Florence, in December 1848, and was immediately impressed by his “true, social, healthy, open, frank nature,” that of a man “entering into life and associating with men, while inwardly delicate and poetic.”⁹ When Browning returned Cranch's first visit with calls to his home and studio, Cranch called them “good, long, real and not formal visits.”¹⁰ After another visit of Browning to his studio in January 1849, he called him “a most genial man to whom I feel drawn exceedingly.”¹¹ In these early meetings, at which Elizabeth Barrett Browning was sometimes present, Cranch saw Browning as someone beyond social formality, and was drawn to what he felt was the inner delicacy, or “soul,” of the poet. As Cranch was to recall later in his “Personal Reminiscences” of Browning, “The natural feeling of remoteness in our first admission to the society of two such distinguished poets was soon dissipated by their frank and genial hospitality. We saw them often, and it is needless to say that the privilege of this acquaintance gave added charms to our residence that winter in Florence.”¹²

The impact of these meetings was all the greater for Cranch when one considers his feeling that he “knew” Browning before meeting him through his writings. Thus in “Veils,” the relationship is depicted as having begun before any actual meeting.

Long ago I loved your books,
          (They first drew me to you);
Loved you better than you thought;
          Ere I saw you knew you.

(100)

Cranch himself dates the beginning of his knowledge of Browning in the mid-1840s in his “Reminiscences” of 1892: “My first acquaintance with Browning's works dates back to over forty-five years ago, when I was one of a comparatively small circle of the readers and admirers of the first of his books known in America. I well remember with what fresh delight and enthusiasm we read them.”¹³ Cranch is recounting in personal terms the impact of Browning on the Transcendentalists, one of the earliest phases of his growing American popularity. This regard for Browning's poetry was no transient enthusiasm for Cranch, who wrote in a letter of 1853 that “He is, in my opinion, the great poet of the day. I don't know anyone teeming with such rich life and thought as Browning.”¹⁴

There is more, however, than the parallels of the relationship depicted in “Veils” and these 1848 and 1849 meetings to indicate Browning as its subject. Cranch closes the poem with the realization that the friendship can only continue in a realm totally apart from society, the imaginative realm where they first met as poet and reader:

You and I will speak in dreams
          Loves not unrequited,
As we met ten years ago,
          Happy and united.

(105)

The specific mention of the meeting “ten years ago” is significant in light of the date Cranch affixes to the poem, “Rome, 1859.” The growing possibility that the ten year period refers to the 1848-49 meetings of Cranch and Browning is confirmed by further evidence of their last meeting. Again in later years, Cranch briefly recalls the meeting: “I met Browning again in London in 1855—also in Paris—and in 1859 in Rome. But he was then moving much in aristocratic society, and we saw less both of him and his wife.”¹⁵ The reference is brief, but its lack of explanation is revealing. Cranch does not explain the apparent drifting apart because he himself fails to understand it. He only knows his own exclusion in favor of the “aristocrats” whom he feels do not really “know” the poet.

There are those who cling to you
          As their lamp and fuel,
Or who wear you on their fronts
          Like a glittering jewel;
.....Happy if they can be seen
          With you closely talking,
Proud, if arm in arm with you
          In the street they're walking.

(101)

The time between the first and last meetings of Cranch and Browning were years of accelerating fame for both Brownings, which certainly accounts for the social success Cranch observed from without. Men and Women had been published in 1855, and the popularity of both the Brownings was growing. With poetic success came social success, and Browning's love for Rome's society was confirmed in the winter of 1858-59, when, as Louise Greer notes, “Browning was caught up in the social whirl which his wife considered much giddier than that of Paris, and hardly spent one night at home in a fortnight.”¹⁶ Cranch himself was in Rome at this time, painting and seeking buyers for his works, but also caught in the round of parties and balls that made the city such an attraction to foreigners. “Every evening this week past has been occupied with visits or parties, except one,”¹⁷ he wrote his wife in January 1859. The immediate threat of war in Rome, and his eventual decision to return to America a few years later, prevented Cranch from returning, and, sadly, from meeting Browning again. Whatever prevented their satisfactory communication in Rome—the impenetrability of social forms, differing social circles, or in Cranch's words, “Time and space and circumstance” (102)—the split left Cranch to continue his relation with Browning only through Browning's works.

Whatever biographical interest the relation holds for us, it poses a much more important poetic problem, especially in light of Cranch's poetic career. It is significant that “The Bird and the Bell,” the title poem of the volume containing “Veils,” was read in manuscript and criticized by both Brownings, whose poetic opinion Cranch valued highly.¹⁸ More important, however, is the obvious allusion of the title of “Veils” to Cranch's most widely popular poem, “Enosis.” The second and third stanzas of “Enosis,” probably its most memorable, pose in abstract terms the actual problem Cranch later faced in his relation with Browning:

We are spirits clad in veils;
          Man by man was never seen;
All our deep communing fails
          To remove the shadowy screen.
Heart to heart was never known;
          Mind with mind did never meet;
We are columns left alone
          Of a temple once complete.(19)

The “veils” of this poem are unmistakably the veils Cranch faces in his relation with Browning. But in “Veils,” the metaphors of “Enosis” become less symbolic, and more literally descriptive. Thus the “shadowy screen” of “Enosis” becomes the shaded window barring Cranch from his friend:

Time and space and circumstance
          Barred me from your presence.
Then behind your veils you seemed
          Some dim phosphorescence.
Half-transparent window shades
          Told where you were sitting,
And your astral lamp, half blurred,
          Threw your shadow flitting
Up against the curtain-folds.

(102)

The similarity of both the theme and imagery of the two poems suggests a conscious echoing by Cranch, and as a result, a testing of transcendental doctrine. If “Enosis” suggested an Emersonian solution to the abstract question of isolation, “Veils” tests that solution emotionally in a concrete social situation.

The personal problem developing in the two decades between “Enosis” and “Veils” was what one critic has called Cranch's “extraordinary diffidence,” an intense personal shyness that “made everyday life a trial.”²⁰ One can, of course, account for Cranch's reputation as an engaging social personality in terms of a need to compensate for his deeper shyness, but, whatever its other causes and results, it has poetic and philosophical ramifications. The transcendental doctrine of the unity of man, which stressed an ultimate personal communion beyond ordinary social contact, offered Cranch a theoretical solution to his loneliness. Shyness or diffidence, viewed ideally, only meant the recognition of the infinity of the soul of each individual, ultimately unknowable in a social context because of its infinite nature. Interpreters of “Enosis” have tended to stress the opening despair and isolation of the poem rather than its closing affirmation, seeing it, in Levenson's terms, as an expression of “the atomistic side of Transcendental social theory.”²¹ Perhaps Cranch speaks more honestly of isolation than communion, or perhaps his images of isolation conform more readily to a modern view of human relations. His intention, however, was to depict the superficial isolation of individuals in order to emphasize their deeper, or higher, unity. Thus the poem turns when Cranch attacks the superficiality of society: “What is social company / But a babbling summer stream?” (Poems, p. 51). After this question, Cranch spends the last three stanzas establishing a communion transcending social intercourse, culminating the poem in a final image of unity rather than isolation:

We like parted drops of rain
          Swelling till they meet and run,
Shall be all absorbed again,
          Melting, flowing into one.

(Poems, p. 52)

In abstract terms, then, Cranch affirms Emerson's “great discovery that there is one Mind common to all individual men; that what is individual is less than what is universal.”²²

But can one live out such a philosophy? The question plagued Emerson, who struggled against guilt for his “coldness,” and almost every other Transcendentalist made at best a partial truce with the dilemma posed by the unsatisfactory nature of social relations and the unrequited need for human contact. Transcendental communion answered the problem philosophically, but how rare was the person who could, in Thoreau's unforgettable image, “talk across the pond to a visitor on the opposite side.”²³

Cranch's more concrete approach to the problem in the later poem, “Veils,” suggests the emotional cost of trying to maintain a transcendental friendship. The three part structure of the poem suggested by Cranch's spatial divisions offers an opening meditation on the possible causes of the friendship's end (ll. 1-44), and a closing attempt to respond to the breakup (ll. 97-124), but centers on the actual social exclusion that signals the end of the friendship. Cranch pictures himself waiting for Browning who, “When the guests are gone” will “come / Where I'm waiting lonely” (102). The vision is one of restored communion, a reference to the four year interval (1855-59) since their last meeting.

We will pace his garden-walks,
          Of the past discoursing.
All his heart will open, free
          From convention's forcing

(103)

But instead, Cranch feels a “chill between his [Browning's] words” as he asks him to return “to-morrow” (103). The pain he feels as a result is not, as he depicts it, the result of a social snub, but rather a realization that there is less in the relation than he expected or hoped. Again, fashionable society is the problem for Cranch, coming between real communion between the two men. Thus he begins the final section of the poem with a bitter admission of the “veils” between them:

“Were we far from fashion's forms
          In some desert gloomy,
You might learn to know me then;
          For you never knew me!”

(104)

The poetry of “Veils” is far inferior to that of “Enosis,” but the pain of loneliness seems more real, or at least more accessible. Perhaps for that reason, Cranch's final attempt to return to the purely ideal communion of poet and reader as a source of solace fails to convince even himself:

“I will read your books again;
          They at least will lead me
Into walks where we may meet,
          Though you do not need me.”

(105)

The final despairing line of this quatrain carries far more emotional weight than the earlier attempt at self-comfort. Similarly, the images of “cold estrangement” and “Loves not requited” in the last lines of the poem overshadow the “fancy” and “dreams” (105) which are left as alternatives to an actual relation between the men.

After reading “Veils” in the context of the friendship of Cranch and Browning, one cannot but be struck by the following brief passage from Cranch's late reminiscences after Browning's death:

At the time I first knew him he was thirty-seven years old. He wore no beard or moustache, and his hair was nearly black. This was his appearance the last time I saw him. The later photographs of him, with gray hair and full gray beard, do not help me in the least to a recollection of his face.²⁴

This is Cranch in old age recalling as fact what, in earlier years, he only feared:

“I will fancy you the same
          As in that bright weather
Ere this cold estrangement came,—”

(105)

Notes

1. Christopher Pearse Cranch, Poems (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1844); Satan: A Libretto (Boston: Roberts, 1874); The Bird and the Bell, with Other Poems (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1875). Cranch's volumes of poetry have recently been collected in a facsimile edition, Collected Poems of Christopher Pearse Cranch, ed. Joseph M. De Falco (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971).

2. Elizabeth R. McKinsey, The Western Experiment: New England Transcendentalists in the Ohio Valley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 36-39.

3. The Aeneid of Virgil Translated into English Blank Verse, trans. Cranch (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1872).

4. Emerson greeted Cranch's submission of two poems to the Dial in 1840 with a letter of acceptance calling them “true” and “brilliant” and “one more authentic sign—added to four or five I have reckoned already—of a decided poetic taste, and tendency to original observation in our Cambridge circle” (Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917], p. 59; hereafter cited as Life and Letters). Poe offered grudging, but impressive, praise, considering his contempt for the Transcendentalists, calling Cranch, “one of the least intolerable of the school of Boston transcendentalists,” possessing an “unusual vivacity of fancy and dexterity expression.” Poe's liking for Cranch was so out of character that he concluded that Cranch “has at last ‘come out from among them [the Transcendentalists],’ abandoned their doctrines (whatever they are).” Poe's sketch of Cranch is included in “The Literati of New York City” (1846); see The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902; rpt. ed., New York: AMS Press, 1965), 15:69-72.

5. Perry Miller calls his contributions to the Dial “resolute attempts to turn Transcendental metaphysics into poetry” (The Transcendentalists: An Anthology [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950], p. 385). J. C. Levenson, noting the Emersonian themes of Cranch's earlier poems, concludes that “Cranch's intellectual grasp of the richness and uses of symbolism was far less competent than Emerson's” (“Christopher Pearse Cranch: The Case History of a Minor Artist in America,” American Literature, 21 [January 1950]: 421).

6. Miller, The Transcendentalists, p. 179.

7. Miller, The Transcendentalists, p. 179. The most well-known sketch of Cranch is that of Van Wyck Brooks who characterizes him as “the all-attractive entertainer” to the friends he visited in the commune at Brook Farm (The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936], p. 250).

8. The Bird and the Bell, p. 59; hereafter cited in the text by page.

9. Life and Letters, p. 156.

10. Life and Letters, p. 157.

11. Life and Letters, p. 157.

12. Cranch, “Personal Reminiscences,” In Memoriam; Memorial to Robert Browning (Cambridge: Browning Society of Boston, 1892), p. 49; hereafter cited as “Personal Reminiscences.”

13. “Personal Reminiscences,” p. 48.

14. Life and Letters, p. 215.

15. “Personal Reminiscences,” p. 49.

16. Louise Greer, Browning and America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), p. 65.

17. Life and Letters, p. 237.

18. Life and Letters, pp. 157-61.

19. Poems (1844), p. 51. First published as “Stanzas” in the first issue of the Dial, 1 (July 1840): 98.

20. McKinsey, The Western Experiment, p. 38. McKinsey's characterization of Cranch is supported both by the evidence of his problematic friendship with Browning, and by Hazen C. Carpenter's discussion of his somewhat unsuccessful attempts to maintain a relation with Emerson. His letter of 1855 to Emerson, complaining of his “need of a voice and touch that come near to me in my solitude” is quoted at length by Carpenter in “Emerson and Christopher Pearse Cranch,” New England Quarterly, 37 (March 1964): 34.

21. Levenson, “Cranch,” 420. Paul O. Williams, “The Persistence of Cranch's ‘Enosis,’” Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 57 (4th Quarter 1969): 44, concurs, arguing that “such laments for lost organic unity were common among transcendental poets.” Carpenter, the exception here, stresses the affirmative ending of the poem (24).

22. The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959-72), 2:11.

23. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971-), vol. 1, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (1971), p. 141.

24. “Personal Reminiscenses,” p. 49.