[In the following excerpt, McKinsey provides a brief overview of Cranch's career as a Transcendentalist writer in the West.]

Christopher Pearse Cranch, like Clarke, was twenty-three when he went west in 1836. He shared a sense of dedication to the Unitarian mission, but had no definite role into which to fit himself. He went not to fill a particular pulpit but to visit his cousin, William Eliot, the Unitarian minister in St. Louis, and he stayed in Cincinnati (where his older brother Edward was a lawyer) as “minister at large.” This meant he would establish some sort of ministry among the poor, outside the formal structure of the church, and would be expected to act as substitute in pulpits empty because of travel or illness. Otherwise he was completely free to determine the particular forms of his work, to read, write, travel. Taking advantage of this freedom, he spent some time preaching in Peoria, Illinois, and more time in Louisville, working with Clarke on the Messenger, and taking full responsibility for it when Clarke was absent.

More a free spirit than Clarke, without the same ambition for power or obsession with order, Cranch was not destined to undergo the same kind of disillusionment. The tenth child and youngest son, Cranch had not been pressured to succeed in the way oldest or only sons often are. He was fathered by a gentleman of the old school, a devout New England Federalist, but he grew up in the suburbs of Washington where he had great freedom to roam, The father's position, too, may have contributed to the son's sense of freedom: although a Federalist, he held a Jeffersonian appointment to the Circuit Court, having broken out of the confines of party and section. Young Cranch was encouraged to pursue all his many interests: painting, music, philosophical study, and frequent visits to the Senate to listen, enraptured, to the utterances of Clay and Webster. He would have liked to continue such a varied existence, certain that there was more of life in painting and poetry than in conventional professions; but there was no secure living to be got in the arts. Needing gainful employment of some sort, he settled upon the ministry and set off for the Harvard Divinity School. There exposed to German Romanticism, he soon aligned himself with those young idealists who would be called Transcendentalists. Cranch was unique among them, however, in his sense of irony and playfulness, even vis-à-vis the movement. Perhaps his not having grown up amidst the tensions of crumbling Federalism, the Unitarian controversy, and the Puritan heritage of New England freed him from the high seriousness of many of his colleagues. In any event his delightful caricatures of Emerson and Transcendental ideas, extravagant but never insulting or irreverent, provide comic relief from the philosophical issues.

Also relatively carefree was Cranch's approach to his own life. He took a pulpit in Richmond, Virginia, immediately after his divinity school graduation, but intended no permanent commitment. Although he “should prefer settling here to almost any other place,” he was “possessed of the Western mania in some degree”¹ and soon set off for St. Louis, yielding to his restlessness.

The western years that followed constitute a classic example of the Wanderjahre: positively pursuing a non-committal, experimental life, Cranch was happy as a dilettante preacher, poet, and philosopher. “Living in a dusty, noisy law-office, and sleeping in the same on a most extemporaneous couch-bed, without a pillow,” he was free to be “a regular loafer” or to pick up and travel at a moment's notice.² The Messenger provided a convenient and appreciative artistic outlet, publishing many of his poems, parables, and critical and philosophical articles. It was an indispensable apprenticeship, even though the poetry that resulted was, as Perry Miller pointed out, largely banal and maudlin.³

Though Cranch could handle his freedom in a way that Clarke never could, he was unable to control it—his indulgence as the baby of the family grew into self-indulgence and restlessness; even in the freedom of the West he was not satisfied. “Still I dream of travelling, night after night it is the same. I am a second Peter Schlimmel [sic] with his seven-leagued boots. If I ever get crazy, I suppose it will be on this subject, possessed with the demon of perpetual motion.”⁴ Traveling constantly through the West, he was never quite satisfied; his “Lines” on the prodigal son are indicative of his state of mind,⁵ but he could never “come home.” Indeed, apart from the erotic aspect, the similarity between Cranch and Byron is striking. Many of Byron's characteristics describe Cranch equally well: “relies on his absolute self against all institutional … trammels on the display of individuality,” “passionate and willful,” “capable of taking an ironic attitude toward his own foibles as well as those of other men.”⁶ Both were artists, dedicated to Truth. Even in their shyness and extraordinary handsomeness, the likeness holds. Never compromising his individual integrity (not only an ideal, “self-reliance” was an intimate part of Cranch's character), ever wandering in search of experience and intensity, he was a “good,” American version of the Byronic hero.

Part of Cranch's restlessness was the gnawing feeling that he was far from the world's artistic and philosophical centers. As he complained in his first letter from the West, “Truly, I am in a desert in more ways than one.”⁷ Although he soon positively enjoyed western life and felt himself and his colleagues very much a part of the New School, his review of Emerson's “American Scholar” address betrays his longing, however subtle, to be at the fountainhead of the new impulses. “Would that we had been in the church of old Harvard when the thinker, the orator, the poet charmed the multitude to silence.”⁸

Cranch was propelled to perpetual motion by his constant fear of stagnation. Whenever he lost his intensity he despaired. “I stop at times and wonder at myself, and fear. At times so alive, so excited, so full of one or another faith or aim; and at others so dead, immovable, ennui-ish, a dumb beast, a clod, an animal.”⁹ This is more than just a recognition of the human rhythm of activity and rest; it points up Cranch's paralysis, paradoxical as it may seem, in spite of his frenzied motion, and hints at the compulsiveness of his wandering. Chained to his ideal of freedom, he was unable to commit himself to a single pulpit, indeed to the ministry as a career. He wrote in defense of the New School, “Their sympathies embrace the secluded scholar, the active preacher, the devoted schoolmaster, the enthusiastic artist, the true poet—every man who feels that life should not be a mechanical routine, but be filled with earnestness, soul and spiritual energy.”¹⁰ Mortally afraid of a routinized life, he was attempting to be all these men at once—the preacher, the poet, the artist.

Providing fuel for the fire of his restiveness was his second demon, an extraordinary diffidence; perhaps it was easier for him to move on than to deal intimately with people. His self-consciousness and great sensitivity (born also of self-indulgence) may have made him a poet and a Transcendentalist, but they made everyday life a trial. It is interesting that his own shyness prevented his perceiving Clarke's lack of self-confidence: Cranch envied his colleague's “independence of character … It does me good to be with him.”¹¹ As he had hoped, Cranch learned the West's lessons—“boldness” and “an habitual independence”—on at least the elementary level, although he eventually gave up preaching and formal association with large groups. Learning to use his humor to communicate with people, he developed a real facility for entertainment; this later made his visits to Brook Farm memorable events. “His powers of entertainment were almost unlimited: he had a good baritone voice; he played piano, guitar, flute, or violin as the occasion came; he read from his own poems or travesties; and his ventriloquism, which embraced all the sounds of nature and of mechanical devices … held the younger members spellbound.”¹² But he recognized—for he experienced it painfully—that the logical extension of man's individuality is his eventual isolation.

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.(13)

To compensate for such existential isolation, Cranch clung to his ideals of transcendence and communion; through artistic expression he tried to restore the “temple once complete.”

After less than two years of aimlessness in the West, the tensions underlying his restlessness rose to a level demanding some kind of resolution. Cranch wrote to Clarke in the spring of 1838, “Well, here I am—again a wanderer—another, and still another parting have I endured. For nearly three years it has been my lot to rove about from place to place, North, South, East and West—making friends and parting from them—verily I am growing aweary of such an intinerant way of living. It hardly seems the appropriate destiny for one who has so much of that quiet home-loving propensity which phrenologists term Inhabitiveness.”¹⁴ By the next year his inhabitiveness prevailed and he was ready to settle down. Without clearly defined work to do, lacking identification with a particular community, with his extreme self-consciousness, Cranch was frightened by the dissipation inevitable in continued lack of commitment. Having provided no place for him to “hang his hat,” the West also failed to give him any sense of coherence or identity. Ready for commitment and responsibility, he therefore turned back to the East. “Think I shall candidate at the North,” he wrote, “and settle there. Heartily tired am I of wandering. I want a home, quiet steady work, and a wife. I shall not find them this side of the mountains.”¹⁵ He returned to the East “Tuesday next,” in February 1839.

Like Clarke, Cranch did not articulate his identity crisis; yet he was never able to strike a satisfactory working compromise with life, even after returning to the familiarity and relative stability of the East (as Clarke did do in Boston). His disquiet continued; two years after his return he was still unsettled, searching, the future “a cheerless blank … Conscious of capabilities, yet unable to choose, unable to decide what I am to work at, as first and foremost. Where am I to go? What am I to do?”¹⁶ Despite his eventual marriage¹⁷ and his decision to give up the ministry in order to devote himself primarily to painting, he was always dissatisfied and never very productive. Remaining a Unitarian, clinging to Transcendentalism as a means of self-definition as well as embracing it philosophically, he did not identify completely with either group; he really was too self-reliant to relinquish his identity to any group, cause, or creed, no matter how freely conceived, but he was unable to achieve integration on his own.

Writing for The Dial, publishing scattered volumes of poetry and, after “some instruction” from Thomas Cole and Asher Durand, concentrating on landscape painting, he remained artistically and personally unfulfilled, finally unable even to turn his sense of humor to account; he drew almost no more caricatures and his playful poems became pathetic. Transcendentalism provided some comfort but no solution. Cranch spent the rest of his life a restless wanderer—in New England, New York, Europe, dabbling in his paints. Having failed during his “prolonged adolescence” in the West to find the tools with which to work out the commitments of adult life, “he ultimately proved one of the most futile and wasted talents” of the age.¹⁸

Notes

1. Cranch to John S. Dwight, 15 June 1836, Scott, Life and Letters of Cranch, p. 26.

2. Cranch to Clarke, Feb. 16, 1839, ibid., p. 45.

3. Miller, Transcendentalists, p. 385.

4. Cranch to Catherine Myers, 24 Nov. 1838, Scott, Life and Letters of Cranch, p. 43.

5. Cranch, “Lines,” Western Messenger, 4 (Sept. 1837): 62-63.

6. These quotations are from M. H. Abrams' Introduction to Byron in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York: Norton, 1962), II, 252-258. That Cranch himself identified with Byron to some extent is evident in his poem “Childe Christopher.”

7. Cranch to Catherine Myers, 29 March 1837, Scott, Life and Letters of Cranch, p. 32.

8. Western Messenger, 4 (Nov. 1837): 184-188.

9. Cranch to Catherine Myers, 24 Nov. 1838, Scott, Life and Letters of Cranch, p. 42.

10. Cranch, “The New School in Literature and Religion,” Western Messenger, 6 (Nov. 1838): 47.

11. Cranch to his sister Margaret, 15 Oct. 1837, Scott, Life and Letters of Cranch, pp. 39-40; see also p. 35.

12. Lindsay Swift, quoted ibid., p. 52. Erikson has pointed out the possibilities of identity formation based on one's sense of humor, in lectures and in writing of Gandhi's playful streak in Gandhi's Truth (New York: Norton, 1969).

13. Usually called “Gnosis,” these lines are titled “Stanzas” in Miller, Transcendentalists, p. 385.

14. Cranch to Clarke, Western Messenger, 5 (June 1838): 183.

15. Cranch to Clarke, Feb. 16, 1839, Scott, Life and Letters of Cranch, p. 44.

16. Cranch to John S. Dwight, June 8, 1841, ibid., p. 70.

17. He married Elizabeth DeWindt, Oct. 10, 1843, after a two-year engagement.

18. Miller, Transcendentalists, p. 179.