SOURCE: Miller, F. DeWolfe. “Christopher Pearse Cranch—Poet, Painter, and Humorist.” In Christopher Pearse Cranch and His Caricatures of New England Transcendentalism, pp. 3-28. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951.

[In the following excerpt, Miller assesses Cranch's modest reputation as artist and writer.]

The character of Christopher Pearse Cranch presents no anomalies and no particularly difficult paradoxes. The even moral tenor of his long good life reveals him as a man to whom it was so natural to be good that no especial praise is suggested. Diffidence was his most marked characteristic, and the trait of course found its way into much of his work. We are bound to conclude that he would have made more mistakes had he been less timid. He did not have the vigor and vinegar which disposed his friend Theodore Parker toward barn-burning. On the other hand he did not have the great reserve of moral strength that enabled Emerson, his elder and master, to meet a storm of incrimination with placid composure. His temperament is rather to be compared to that of his lifelong intimate, John Sullivan Dwight, who resigned his pulpit like Cranch and became the gentle arbiter of America's taste in music.

Though it apparently never occurred to Cranch to be otherwise than good, he could have done otherwise than he did. In the early few years of service as a missionary Unitarian minister, he could have fallen in with the orthodox element and lived a comfortable—and probably anonymous—life. He chose instead the unpopular cause of transcendentalism. And it is by no means certain that he gave up the ministry because of the resulting insecurity. Landscape painting, to which he turned, was far more precarious, especially for a man of thirty who had had almost no previous training.

The latitude of behavior afforded an artist who resided in New York. Italy, and France, he of course never took advantage of. The history of his life is thus lacking in the dramatic element and sensationalism which biographers were seeking in the decades immediately following the appearance of The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch, published by his daughter in 1917, when the reaction against everything Victorian was at its height. The biography was prepared accurately and well, but through a shift in emphasis it creates an illusion of the comfortableness for which the twentieth century (partially through envy, no doubt) has so derided the nineteenth. One literary historian, reading it too hastily, actually got the impression that Cranch was a man of “ample means.”

The modest and diffident quality in Cranch's personality is the most difficult aspect of his character to explain. From youth to old age he was so handsome that nearly all who wrote about him were impelled to mention his appearance. Poe, who thought Cranch's profile “hard and disagreeable,” was the only dissenter, but even the admitted that Cranch was “not unhandsome,” though his description in the Literati article is not accurate enough to assure us that he knew Cranch well. There is evidence quite ample that of all the New England Brahmins Cranch was, if not the most striking, certainly one of the most handsome.

If his appearance gave him no grounds for modesty, neither did the variety of his talents, which were so diverse that he was looked upon as a colorful figure. His gentle humor, his flute and his plaintive singing, his ironic sketches and illustrated parodies—these casual things, added to his gradually accumulated knowledge of art and music and the literature of several languages, made him good company among those who were accustomed to the best, though what he himself preferred was the single companionship of a friend like Clarke, Dwight, Parker, Story, or Lowell. James Russell Lowell was so fond of him that when Cranch begged poverty as the reason for not going to Boston for a visit at the time of Lowell's half-century birthday, Lowell offered to “stump the rusty” for the trip from New York. “Cranch always reminds me of Clough,” he told Norton, as warrant of his desire to have Cranch with him.

Since a man with such capacities and bearing as Cranch's would have no apparent reason to be personally or intellectually shy, this quality in him can be explained only in the terms of inheritance. George William Curtis explained it thus; and Lowell said that Cranch had gifts enough for three—only his foolish fairy left the brass out when she brought her gifts to his cradle.¹

Yet Cranch's cradle was a good one, for through several generations it had united musical and artistic talents with strong character. The family was English for many generations back, though there was a tradition (which could have originated in jest) that the somewhat rare name Cranch was anglicized from the German family of painters, the Cranachs.² Richard Cranch, the grandfather, immigrated to America, where he became a lifelong friend of John Adams, he and Adams having married the remarkable Smith sisters, Mary and Abigail. Self-educated, he was well versed in theology, and ultimately became a judge and received an honorary degree from Harvard. The next generation, the cousins William Cranch and John Quincy Adams, went to Harvard together and were very intimate in early life. In 1801 William Cranch was appointed by John Adams to a judgeship in the District of Columbia, and despite his strong Federal politics, was made chief judge of the District Circuit Court by Jefferson in 1805. He held this position until he died in 1855 with one of the longest and most consistent records in the history of the nation. He is remembered among other things for his nine volumes of reports of cases argued before the Supreme Court, covering the era of John Marshall's most vital opinions on constitutional questions.

William Cranch married Nancy Greenleaf, whose sisters were the wives of Judge Thomas Dawes and Noah Webster. She bore him thirteen children in twenty-three years and lived to be seventy-seven. Some of the children were not so resilient. Three died in infancy and three others shortly after reaching maturity. John, an older brother of Christopher Pearse, became a portrait painter. Emerson in the journal of his first trip abroad recorded the conversations with him in Italy as the greatest experience of the trip, next to meeting Carlyle. Edward, another older brother, spent his life in Cincinnati, a lawyer who along with his other avocations designed and decorated pottery. Though they saw each other infrequently, Edward and Pearse (the family used Cranch's middle name) were intensely devoted to each other throughout their lives.

Among the sisters there was Elizabeth, who married a cousin, Rufus Dawes, romancer and poet who catered to the annual and gift-book tastes; and Abby (named for Abigail Adams), who married her cousin William Greenleaf Eliot, Jr., and became the grandmother of T. S. Eliot.³

Cranch was the tenth child and was given the old family name, Christopher Pearse, after the brother before him, of the same name, died in infancy. He was born on March 8, 1813, in a section of the District of Columbia which has since been ceded back to Virginia and is now a part of Alexandria. Virginia librarians sometimes claim him, and he is represented in The Library of Southern Literature, but he is actually no more southern than Poe was the “Bostonian” which he early acclaimed himself. Cranch was quite New England.

Although the family was Unitarian in belief, its religious regimen revealed the tenacious pattern of Puritan habits and standards. Some of the children exhibited a very strong sense of religious duty,⁴ but none of the daughters became minister's wives and none of the sons ministers, save for Pearse, whose decision was at the best perfunctory. He was graduated at Columbian College (now George Washington University) in 1832 at the age of nineteen before he even considered the ministry. On the advice of his father and the urging of his cousin William Eliot, he made the decision which was to take him among the transcendentalists. After hasty tutoring in German, he entered the Harvard Divinity School, where he was instructed by the two Henry Wares and by Palfrey, “orthodox” ministers of the unorthodox Unitarian faith. The most notable divinity students there in his time were Theodore Parker and John Sullivan Dwight—and Cranch himself. Some of the other ministerial candidates later developed transcendental leanings, but among those who were in school at that time, it was these three friends who became the most outspoken adherents of the movement which began to make itself felt shortly after Cranch completed his training and entered the ministry in 1835.

Cranch and Parker were close friends until the latter's death, but it was between Dwight and Cranch that an almost idyllic friendship developed. Born in the same year, they never lost contact with each other after their love of music made them friends at the Divinity School. They both preached transcendentalism from the pulpit and they both left the pulpit, one to devote himself to music and poetry and translation, the other to painting and poetry and translation. They spanned a good part of the century together, and died within a twelvemonth. After their beards had grown white, Cranch's daughter Caroline painted their portraits, the one for love, the other for the Harvard Musical Association.

Dwight was ordained after a few years, but Cranch, whose diffidence may have made him a poor pulpit orator (though Dwight and his congregation thought otherwise), was never settled. Engaged by the Unitarian Association, he was a missionary at large, preaching for periods of varying length in churches from Maine to Richmond and as far west as Illinois and St. Louis. The first winter he spent snowbound in Andover, Maine, where he consoled himself by writing a ballad, “Childe Christopher,” in parody of “The Ancient Mariner,” and by illustrating it with marginal sketches.⁵ In this good-humored (if not particularly good) protest against having been sent into a land of Philistines, so cold that the very logs “Did beg for to be burned,” there can be discerned the first indication that he might not follow the pattern expected of a son of Judge Cranch. For a few years to come, however, he was to counter these mundane impulses by writing to Dwight of the glories of the pulpit and rededicating himself in his journal to his duties.

The next year (1836-37) had much in store for him. During the summer in Richmond, Virginia, two cultured, older Jewesses by sympathy and flattery seem to have quickened very greatly his poetic impulses. A second and different experience came that fall. Aged twenty-three, he had yet done no more than conventional reading in philosophy, but he responded with immediate eagerness to Emerson's Nature, which he found in St. Louis after he arrived in December. He absorbed this little book, and then read Sartor Resartus, which had been published some months earlier. He went on to the third and least important of the transcendental books of the year, his cousin William H. Furness's Remarks on the Four Gospels.

In December and January he wrote a long letter to Edward, exalting this rich reading. The letter can be said to be a prose draft of his poem “Enosis,” one of the most famous though hardly the best of the poems of the transcendental movement. “Enosis” was not actually composed until three years later, but the letter makes it clear that the ideas and much of the phraseology of the poem were developed at this time.⁶ It was recently pointed out that “Enosis” has suffered considerably in interpretation because subsequent anthologists perpetuated an error made in an anthology of 1882 which printed the title as “Gnosis” (“knowing”), a word vaguely appropriate for a part of the poem, but misleading for the piece as a whole.⁷ “Enosis” (“communion”) was inspired directly by an application of ideas which Cranch found in Sartor Resartus and applied to his lifelong desire to achieve an ideal rapport, both spiritual and intellectual, with some favored friend—in this case, his brother Edward. Cranch deplores the barriers, psychological and materialistic, which block the idealized, even mystical, relationship between two souls. The experience is just as elusive and, if achieved, just as fleeting as Shelley's mystical union with “awful Loveliness” and Keats' yearning after an idealized beauty. The psychology of the poem fascinated William James, with whom it was a favorite; and a line from it has supplied the title of a recent poem—“A Temple Once Complete,” which is one of the best poems in Edd Winfield Parks' Predestinate Iron (1948).

The tripping meter of “Enosis,” borrowed apparently from the hymns he gave out on Sunday, though unsuitable, could not spoil entirely the images and idea which have made the piece famous. This and another poem evoked warm praise from Emerson and won Cranch an invitation to come for a visit with him at Concord—alone. Two years later (five years after the poem was actually conceived) some of the same ideas and symbols appeared in Emerson's “Over-Soul,” but if there was any debt, as there probably was not, Emerson had already justified it in a letter to Cranch, in words which should do much to make reasonable the account books which critics keep: “If my thoughts have interested you, it only shows how much they were already yours.”

Cranch had hardly finished reading the new transcendental books when he began to contribute frequently to the Western Messenger, a New England magazine which like many a New England schoolteacher and minister of the day, had a western address. Since youth, Cranch had occasionally sent things to the newspapers, but his first magazine appearance had been in the Knickerbocker in the fall of 1836. For the Messenger he now produced both prose and poetry, and he unfortunately exhumed some juvenile writings from his portfolio. Jejune religiosity marked most of these productions. For two or three years the prose was largely uninspired arguments for Unitarianism. Far superior was his review of Emerson's The American Scholar; and his defense of transcendentalism in 1841 can still be read quite profitably.

In poetry he was early disposed toward the sonnet, a form which he ultimately mastered and in which his best work was at least equal to the best sonnets of any of his American contemporaries with the possible exception of Jones Very. Sonnets were frequent among the poems he gave the Western Messenger; and though the subtitle committed the magazine to both religion and literature, the religious note in Cranch's contributions was heavy. His personality, however, began to show signs of a slight shearing, for at the same time that he was publishing banalities in the Messenger he was writing fairly good nature poems unencumbered with a moral, and these he soon began to send off to the Southern Literary Messenger, as if to hide them from his fellows or himself. At a time when according to Clarke most of the poetasters were imitators of Shelley and Byron, Cranch's favorite was Wordsworth.⁸ In his worst moments, however, he could be guilty of a near-parody of the popular Mrs. Hemans.

Between 1836 and 1839 Cranch spent something less than two years in the “West,” never remaining in one location much more than a season. In the absence of editor James Freeman Clarke he prepared at least two numbers of the Messenger, which had begun to support the liberal side of the second Unitarian controversy and thus had become the first of the several transcendental magazines. In January 1839, shortly before he left the “West” for good, he was in Louisville with Clarke, who had just returned from Boston, exultant over the words and work of the new seer, Emerson. But, as the pages of the Messenger show, neither Clarke nor Cranch could be always serious, and they were soon drawing funny scraps about the man they would allow no one else to censure. Cranch's sketches were far the better, and soon after he departed on a six-month trip ending in Boston, Clarke sent the news of the drawings on ahead, and Cranch was called on for more and more cartoons.

In the winter of 1839-40 he attended Emerson's lectures on “The Present Age” and in visits to Theodore Parker discovered that his views coincided almost exactly with those of the “learned Theban” or, as Cranch at other times called Parker, “the very athlete of scholars.”⁹ Cranch, enjoying himself immensely now, wrote to his admiring sister Margaret:

We have transcendental and aesthetic gatherings at a great rate—and they make me sing at them all. I have worn my Tyrolese yodlers almost to the bones. People ask if I am not a German!—in fact I am quite a singing lion. My flute is unknown altogether—and my guitar almost as much … Sunday evenings I go into Ripleys about 9 and eat baked potatoes & drink ale. Sometimes I go to the oratorios—sometimes to lectures—sometimes to parties—So we keep it up.¹⁰

His drawings, he told her, had passed from house to house through the city, so that he heard reports of them wherever he went.

He wrote and sent to Emerson two poems (“Enosis” and another) for the newly projected Dial and then went on to Maine to preach transcendentalism to the heathen. Among the Philistines he met one cultured young married woman, whom Dwight had warmly recommended to him. Cranch was astonished and a little bewildered when after a few meetings together, playing the flute, singing, and reading German, he and Mrs. Little blurted out their mutual love. The consequences were not dreadful. He soon returned to Massachusetts, where he could write to Dwight that he was healing quickly, though he feared for the one he left behind, who “had never had her feelings drawn out in full sympathy before.”¹¹

Cranch was by this time outspoken in his support of the liberal point of view. Although he finally accepted and gloried in the name “transcendentalist,” he at first objected to it—and on very good grounds—as nothing better than a nickname. His father became alarmed when as far off as Washington he got hints of his son's inclinations; and Cranch, preaching at Quincy, “gave out quite a stream of transcendentalism” and provoked John Quincy Adams to one of the most famous of all the “common-sense” utterances on the “hurly-burly innovation.”¹²

In August of 1840 Cranch responded to Emerson's invitation and spent a few days with him at Concord. It was an ill-chosen time for Cranch, who during that month suffered the first attack of an illness—a nervous depression of some sort—which chronically annoyed him for three years. Despite Cranch's silence, Emerson talked a good deal, “read poetry—of his own—of his anonymous young lady correspondents, and of old Ben Jonson's.” They walked a great deal, went huckleberrying, and saw Walden Pond.¹³

The next summer, while at home in Washington, he discovered to his delight that he could paint a little in oils. Painting seemed to relax him during the spells of depression when he could neither write nor think. A shocking letter from Dwight,¹⁴ who had been forced from his pulpit because of his transcendental leanings, precipitated Cranch's decision not to become ordained, and to look about for something else to do—but it was two years yet before he made a final decision.

In the meanwhile he became one of the most frequent and important contributors to the Dial. Brook Farm, another transcendental adventure, he observed with personal interest, though he never did become a member. He visited the “Hive” at least twice, and by his presence made a permanent impression, especially on the younger members of the colony.

In the course of his duties he found himself at Fishkill-on-the-Hudson, in the home of John Peter De Windt, whose seven daughters were descendants of John and Abigail Adams and therefore Cranch's cousins. His cousin Elizabeth wanted tutoring in German, and after a few lessons they were engaged. In October 1843, two years later, they were married, with Charles Fenno Hoffman as Cranch's groomsman. A gift of a thousand dollars from the wealthy father-in-law enabled the young couple to furnish a boarding house in New York, where Cranch could set up a studio. Among the boarders were William Henry Channing and family, Margaret Fuller, and Caroline Sturgis, transcendentalist friends all.¹⁵

He had ceased his contributions to the Dial, but he later continued his transcendental connections by sending the Harbinger some poetry and prose, and he contributed a bit to Channing's magazine, the Present. However, his poetical composition was much reduced by the necessity of learning to paint, and most of the little he did write went to magazines which paid him small sums—Graham's, Godey's, the Democratic Review—and to the gift annuals. In 1842, before he had published a volume of poetry, he had been generously represented in the first edition of Griswold's famous anthology, The Poets and Poetry of America.

In 1844 the most distinguished publishers of belles lettres in America, Carey and Hart, brought out his first volume, a thin, neatly printed book of selections, Poems, by Christopher Pearse Cranch. Poe, whose critical work in prosody originated in his analysis of Cranch's “My Thoughts,” said that the volume was most unmercifully treated and much injustice in his opinion done the poet, the “least intolerable of the school of Boston transcendentalists,” whose poetry was among the “truest” in America. Though none of the reviews contained any more superlative praise than Poe's later articles on Cranch, certainly none of them were as unmerciful as Poe was in his sarcastic treatment of some of Cranch's conceits.

The emphasis in the little book of poems is on the inner life as against the crass utilitarianism to which the New England group were consistently opposed. In the weaker poems the thought is so sentimentalized that the reader is almost bound to be ironically affected when he reaches “Field Notes,” in which Cranch addresses himself to the select few:

Him we will seek, and none but him,
Whose inward sense hath not grown dim;
Whose soul is steeped in Nature's tinct,
And to the Universal linked;
Who loves the beauteous Infinite
With deep and ever new delight,
And carrieth where'er he goes,
The inborn sweetness of the rose,
The perfume as of Paradise;
The talisman above all price;
The optic glass that wins from far
The meaning of the utmost star;
The key that opes the golden doors
Where earth and heaven have piled their stores;
The magic ring—the enchanter's wand,—
The title-deed to Wonder-land;
The wisdom that o'erlooketh sense,
The clairvoyance of Innocence.

The light measures in which all of the transcendentalist poets framed their thoughts if not immediately successful frequently made the poem ridiculous. The poet who presumes a title deed to the Universal is in danger when he dallies with the perfume of Paradise. Cranch's lines, however, are successful within their limits. He sustains both mood and imagery and does not lapse into the mechanical banalities found in a comparable passage in Emerson's “Woodnotes”:

Caesar of his leafy Rome,
There the poet is at home …
In the wood he travels glad,
Without better fortune had,
Melancholy without bad.

Poems, 1844, of which five hundred copies were printed,¹⁶ was no more salable than was Margaret Fuller's prose account, Summer on the Lakes, published in the same year. This he anticipated, but one of the reasons for publishing—to increase his magazine market—was thwarted by the fact that he soon went abroad, where he was absorbed in landscape painting.

In his new profession Cranch received very little formal training. Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand, the leading landscape painters of the era, gave him “useful hints,” and he took a few lessons from John Greenough in Boston. His brother John reports that he did no copying during his apprenticeship, having preferred to learn directly from nature.¹⁷ In this he may well have been following Durand's advice, though he did not in later years follow Durand's precedent of completing the entire picture out of doors.

In 1846, having received some sort of financial backing—apparently from Mr. De Windt—the Cranches departed rather hastily for Italy where they remained for three years, lacking not for good New England company. The country was swarming with Yankee artists, writers, and travelers, some of them transient and some rather fixed. The Cranches went over with their young friend George William Curtis, soon to become famous; and they sailed the same day that Margaret Fuller departed by another route for Italy. William Wetmore Story, who back in Boston had practiced his pencil on Cranch's profile, was in Italy, about to give up law and become a sculptor. He was wealthy and generous and his presence made life more pleasant for the Cranches. He thought so much of Cranch that he offered to share his purse: “Let us spend together and make life as happy as we can.”¹⁸

The Cranches lived in Rome and in Sorrento, finally going to Florence in December 1848 for their last six months abroad. There they were on friendly terms with the Brownings, both of whom helped Cranch revise the longest poem he had written. “The Bird and the Bell,” which was to become the title poem of a volume published many years later, was a symbolic polemic opposing authoritarian religion. The bird's clear and spontaneous notes are tokens of a free and natural worship, while the clangor of the bell summons men to worship by habit and command. One of the transcendentalists, Brownson, after a series of theological handsprings became a Roman Catholic at last, but as the rest of the group objected even to the mild restrictions of a liberal faith like Unitarianism, they would naturally not be well disposed toward the formalism of the Roman church. Prompted by Parker, who begged an illustrated letter from abroad, Cranch had, before he wrote the poem, sketched out in rhymed prose and in india-ink drawings many of his objections to the religious practices in Italy.¹⁹

In 1849 the Cranches returned to New York with the two children, George William and Leonora, who had been born in Italy. During the three years abroad Cranch had sold pictures totaling ＄2000—less than ＄700 a year. His earnings in New York for 1850 were “over ＄800.” Judge Cranch, who had worked through all his debts, sent him ＄250; and about the time the third child, Caroline Amelia, was born in 1853 he inherited ＄400 from an uncle. When Judge Cranch died in 1855 Pearse's inheritance was less than ＄70. If Mr. De Windt was continuing his aid, it could not have been great, for Cranch continued to allude to his precarious position on up until 1870, when after her father's death Mrs. Cranch was made beneficiary of a trust which in 1890 amounted to about ＄54,000 and earned about ＄3,600 annually.²⁰

As early as 1844 Cranch was represented in the annual exhibits of the National Academy of Design, but his paintings passed with only cursory notice. Upon returning to New York he immediately sold three Italian scenes to the American Art-Union, which soon thereafter purchased a newly painted Hudson River landscape. In the spring of 1850 he was represented in the National Academy with five pictures which received what he considered “favorable notice.” The criticism actually was not enthusiastic, but he at least had emerged from a horde of artists; his name appeared in the notices along with men like Durand and Kensett; and he was made an associate in the Academy that summer. The picture which was considered his best was a landscape, “The Deserted Hut at Sunset,” which was described as a quiet lake, shut in by hills, with an old hut in the foreground.²¹ This of course was a conventional subject, though a dead tree (which appeared ad infinitum) was a much more frequent gothic vestige than a decayed building.

Upon his reintroduction in New York Cranch took a position as a kind of major mediocrity in landscape painting. None of the critics charged him with being servilely imitative; some noticed a degree of individuality; but none ever remarked any particular strength. The critic who was warmest would more than likely turn out to be the one who found absolutely no place in art for work like W. S. Mount's “Eel Spearing”!

He busily spent the next four summers exploiting the favorite scenes of the Hudson River School—the Catskills, the Berkshire Hills, Lake George, and Lake Mohonk, and of course Niagara and the Hudson. He occasionally went on painting junkets with other “Hudson River” men. In the summer of 1852 he took his family to Lenox, where he rented the small red house which the Hawthornes had moved out of the previous November. They had just settled themselves in the rooms where The House of Seven Gables had been written, when they were called to Fishkill. When they arrived they found that Mrs. De Windt, her son-in-law, the landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing, and Hawthorne's sister had been drowned in the burning of a river steamer.

The following year they received a letter from Story (enclosing one each from the Brownings), begging them to come abroad. The Cranches suddenly decided to beat winter across the Atlantic. They sailed for Paris, and intending to remain for a year or two stayed ten. The family lived in Paris, while Cranch foraged during the summer for subjects. He went several times to Barbizon to join the artists who were crowding the Forest of Fontainebleau. During two summers he visited Switzerland, and one winter he spent in Rome. He made two trips to Venice and, residing in the rooms which Félix Ziem had previously occupied, made Venetian pictures somewhat after the manner of Ziem's popular work. After the Civil War these became Cranch's most popular paintings.

The year 1855 was a happy one. Lowell sought him out in Paris and made a lifelong friend of him; with Lowell he visited Story in London, saw the Brownings several times, and was entertained by Thackeray; he hurried back to Paris for the birth of Quincy Adams Cranch, the fourth and last child; he exhibited two pictures of Niagara in the Universal Exhibition;²² and late in the year he published his first book for children.

But a vague melancholy clouds the rest of the Paris decade. Ada Shepard, the clever young woman who was shortly to become a governess in Hawthorne's family, was much impressed by the gentle, handsome Cranch, the happy home life, and the good music and musicians which one could usually expect in the home.²³ Appearances deceived her. Despite good friends—Henry James, Sr., and his family, and Frank Boott among many others—Cranch was not happy. “One must be of good stuff to be always merry,” he wrote Edward at a time when he thought he was seldom merry. In depressed mood he would ask Curtis whether to come home. Of Lowell, who was busy with a new professorship, a new wife, and the new Atlantic, he would pitifully beg another letter.²⁴

Cranch's story for children, The Last of the Huggermuggers, was followed by a sequel, Kobboltozo, published well in advance of the 1856 Christmas season. The first story, though late on the market, had been quite successful, and the publishers offered Cranch ＄500 for the next, and probably got a bargain, for the books were reprinted frequently and were referred to at the end of the century as familiar favorites. Illustrated by Cranch, they were beautifully printed and bound, and the sequel was widely advertised. Cranch prepared a third book the following year, but an international depression intervened, and the book was never published, unless bits of it appeared among the prose and poems which he supplied for St. Nicholas and other children's magazines up until the last year of his life. Huggermugger and Kobboltozo were allegorical tragedies about benevolent giants and envious dwarfs, which set no new standard. They survived longer than most juvenile literature of their time, but they were forgotten after sixty or seventy years.

Cranch with his family returned to America in 1863. George, sixteen years old, went immediately to a military school and the father went immediately to work. The Venice scenes were at once more popular than anything Cranch had yet painted, and by virtue of them he was made a full member of the National Academy in 1864. During the nine years after his return from abroad he enjoyed a minor sort of success, exhibiting a number of oils and water colors in the Academy each year and getting two and three times the price he had asked before.

The Hudson River School and subsequent landscape painters whose names are loosely associated with it enjoyed a rather wide contemporary vogue, but they were soon almost forgotten. If they were revived from oblivion in the early twentieth century, it was only for obloquy; however, with what may be termed the neonationalistic spirit of the past two decades, a certain historical interest has been developed. In 1945—the same year in which universities throughout the country began almost suddenly to offer programs in American civilization—the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York prepared an elaborate exhibition of the Hudson River School. Fifty nineteenth-century painters were represented, yet Cranch was omitted.²⁵ This neglect seems quite arbitrary, for no matter how strictly the term Hudson River School is limited, Cranch is among the group. He began his career among them, set up his easel alongside theirs, and was counted among them by his contemporaries. He perhaps yielded more to foreign influences than many of them did—especially later in his career—but several of his fellows also learned much abroad. Some of the artists represented in the 1945 exhibition received no more attention than he among their contemporaries, and have received little or none since. The intrinsic worth of all but a few of the Hudson River pictures is at best questionable, so that present interest in them is in the main historical. Valued thus, Cranch should not have been neglected if as many as fifty painters were to be represented. Like those of many contemporaries, his pictures have scarcely any market value today; the museums have only a token canvas or two, and in some cases none at all.

In his paintings Cranch seems to have attempted only once the humor which inspires the rough transcendental sketches and is less successful in his later poetry. In 1869 he exhibited in the Academy a satirical picture which, out of deference to the public, he called “A Visit to the Studio.” In writing to Lowell, who had seen it and ordered a copy, Cranch used a more specific title, “The Geese; or the Critics,” and reported that it had been much complimented.

At about this time Cranch began as a personal amusement to translate the Aeneid into blank verse. As the work progressed it became earnest, and with the aid of three young friends and the criticism of Lowell he completed the whole, which was published in 1872 in an edition uniform with Longfellow's Dante, Bryant's Homer, and Taylor's Faust. It was a faithful and accurate translation, in the placid measures and diction which he had already mastered. The book was quite favorably reviewed by men who had had much experience in translation, although the epic quality was not Cranch's and it therefore could not inform his work. New editions were called for and the translation was issued both in very cheap and in expensive large format editions, and it was listed as in print until recent years. It was not so successful, however, as Conington's earlier octosyllabic translation, done in the manner of Scott and Byron. Longfellow later urged Cranch to complete his Virgilian work, and he subsequently translated the Georgics in blank verse and the Eclogues in hexameters, but he was never able to find a publisher.²⁶

When he began work on the Aeneid, Cranch's composition of original poetry and prose was very considerably accelerated. Though he was abroad when the Atlantic was established, he was represented in the first volume, and he continued with some degree of regularity to contribute to it until his last years. He was never a prolific writer, but after 1869 he wrote more than he had ever done before, and his name thereafter appeared from time to time in most of the prominent national magazines. This renewed interest in literature marked a decline in painting, which he all but abandoned when he moved to Cambridge in 1873.

A transcendental poem, Satan: A Libretto, came out in a thin volume in 1873, received good reviews, and passed without a sale. The following year Cranch published his largest collection, The Bird and the Bell, with Other Poems. The inconsonant moods and subjects in this potpourri of thirty years' work represent Cranch at his best—which is frequently in sonnets—as well as in his most commonplace philosophizing.

“The Bird and the Bell,” composed three decades earlier, had more recently been among the poems and papers which Cranch had read before the Radical Club, a group of aging transcendentalists and some latter-day recruits who were sound and solid enough to risk the dangerous name. The meetings of this club amounted to something vastly better than pretentious discussions beyond the scope of the participants, but Cranch in a bit of humorous verse admitted that after the talk of Higginson, Longfellow, Weiss, and Emerson and others they went home with the universe still firm on its base, and he also admitted that the Tribune was prone to write Hic Jacet over their reports (which occasionally informed the public of little details such as the fact that Emerson sat in a chair that came over on the Mayflower while he listened to Cranch's parody of his poetry).²⁷ Life in Cambridge was sometimes mellow and pleasant. There were occasional invitations to meetings of the Saturday Club, and at the great birthday dinners and breakfasts Cranch was present, with testimonial verse in hand. At the Whittier dinner, a newspaper reporter looked over the forgathered great of New England and marked Cranch, among all these poets, as the most poetic looking, Emerson the most venerable.²⁸

Mr. and Mrs. Cranch during these years endured some personal sorrows. Shortly after the War the oldest son died of a fever, and later the other son, who had joined the crew of the Surprise for a round-the-world trip, fell from the rigging, struck the deck, and fell into the sea. It was months afterwards when the parents learned of the fact, and of the terse log, “Ship kept her course.” Caroline, whom the parents in 1880 had taken for a two-year painting trip abroad,²⁹ began in 1884 to give Cranch grave concern for her nervous health.

William Dean Howells in his idealized reminiscences gives this account of Cranch:

Of like gentleness, but of more pensive temper, with bursts of surprising lyrical gayety, was the poet Christopher Pearse Cranch, who came to live in Cambridge rather late in my own life there. I had already met him in New York at a house of literary sympathies and affiliations, where he had astonished me by breaking from his rather melancholy quiet and singing comic character songs … [Later] I heard him at Longfellow's supper table sing the old Yankee ballad, “On Springfield Mountain there did dwell.” The tragical fate of the “young man” who was bitten by a rattlesnake on his native hill took a quality from the pathetic gravity of the singer which still affects me as heartbreakingly funny. It was a delightful piece of art in its way, and Cranch could not only sing and play most amusing songs, but was as much painter as he was poet. I especially liked his pictures of Venice for their simple, unconventionalized, unsentimentalized reality, and I like and printed many of his poems … I recall his presence with a tender regard, and I would fain do my part to keep his memory alive, for I think he did things that merit remembrance.³⁰

Lowell and, by inference, several others told Cranch that he had talents which should be appreciated. “Get rid of your whoreson modesty,” Lowell advised,³¹ but Cranch could do no more than continue to write poems in which he consoled himself that men who please “the public's facile thought” will be soon forgotten, while the artist who is “Scornful of fashion and heedless of chances” will be known only after the grave closes over him. He was pathetically unaware that his “fashion” and even his liberal theology were already recorded history.

As he grew older he pondered much the question of individual as well as literary immortality, vacillating sometimes between opposite convictions. From this shearing impulsion come two of his better sonnets. “The Pines and the Sea,” first published eight years after “Dover Beach,” is not weakened when read along with Arnold's poem, though “Dover Beach” is more comprehensive in purpose than the shorter sonnet in which the doubt of the poet is concerned only with immortality. In “If Life Be Final” Cranch struggles to affirm immortality by making the alternative, mortality, appear abhorrent. The argument is identical with that which was already on record in Emerson's yet unpublished journals: “July [1855]. The blazing evidence of immortality is our dissatisfaction with any other solution.” Whatever the reader's view of this assumption, he will admit the cogency of Cranch's imagery as he compares mortal man with madrepore.

These two sonnets appeared in Cranch's final volume, Ariel and Caliban (dated 1887 but published late in 1886), which brought the total number of Cranch's collected sonnets to ninety-eight. The title poem in the volume allows Ariel to ameliorate the condition of Caliban and to give him some hope for the future. It thus is in the same tradition with Satan, Cranch's best longer poem, in which he had blithely and perhaps blindly served up again the optimism of the transcendentalists in their youth. Ariel and Caliban as a whole has more unity and finish than the preceding collections. It was genially reviewed by old friends—Hedge, Curtis, Higginson—who said what one would expect good friends to say in old age. Woodberry, however, who was neither a friend nor of Cranch's generation, admitted in the Atlantic the merit of his soft nostalgic tones.

Cranch was the chief performer at the memorial service held for Robert Browning at King's Chapel in Boston, where the crowd was so great that Lowell, who was a bit late, could not make his way to the church. Cranch gave his reminiscences of Browning, and concluded with a sonnet:

Themes strong—verse bloodwarm with the limbs and veins Of life at full-flush …³²

What Santayana called New England's Indian summer of the mind had long since passed when the last tenacious leaves began to fall in clusters in the early nineties. Cranch had not long since helped the photographer pose Lowell for his last photograph and then become his pallbearer,³³ when he himself died on January 20, 1892.

Shortly before Cranch's death Holmes wrote to Whittier that he had been looking over the headstones in Griswold's cemetery, The Poets and Poetry of America. In commenting on five of the poets who still survived, he said that Cranch's “poetical gift has too rarely found expression.”³⁴ Much earlier, when Cranch had not seen Emerson during the long years abroad, Emerson wrote, “I have always understood that you are the victim of your own various gifts; that all the muses, jealous each of the other, haunt your brain.”³⁵ This was intended as a compliment, but the word “victim” has the tone of consolation. Both Holmes and Emerson were generous, at least. We cannot conclude that if Cranch had concentrated his energies or had written much more poetry, he would have been a better poet. His English contemporaries, William Morris and Samuel Butler, had a wider range of similar talents, and the achievement of each was far greater. Holmes rightly says that the volume of his poetry is small. Besides the translation of the Aeneid there were fewer than two hundred and fifty poems in the three collections, and most of them were short. The four longer poems taken together are comparable in bulk to a short play. By writing much, Cranch might have hit upon two or three more memorable poems, but we would expect little general improvement save in form and polish. And it was not for lack of these that he failed.

The comments on Cranch that have been made here, and those that can be gleaned elsewhere will do little more than verify and amplify an estimate that has already been made. Henry James, Jr., in masterful cadences has given a description of his friend Cranch which is at once delicately appreciative and soundly critical:

Christopher Pearse Cranch, painter, poet, musician, mild and melancholy humourist, produced pictures that the American traveller sometimes acquired and left verses that the American compiler sometimes includes. Pictures and verses had alike, in any case, the mark of his great, his refined personal modesty; it was not in them at least, for good or for ill, to emphasise or insist.³⁶

The comical sketches concerned with the transcendental movement have heretofore been known only through two published samples and through the descriptions of them found in the lives and letters of his contemporaries. Since they are a unique, accurate, and delightful commentary on one of the most important movements in American intellectual history, they may serve to give Cranch a bit more of the appreciation he so deeply desired. The incisiveness lacking in poem and painting was here exhibited in impromptu drawings, some of them hastily done, none of them meant for the public. Cranch, with his sense of rightness and fitness and finish, much of which was the common property of his age and climate, managed never again to be so bold as he was in these youthful pencilings.

Notes

1. Horace E. Scudder, James Russell Lowell (Boston, 1901), II, 96; Curtis, “Editor's Easy Chair,” Harper's Monthly, LXXXIV (1892), 800-801; Lowell, Complete Writings (Boston, 1904), XIV, 325.

2. The tradition was related to me by two different members of the family. See F. P. Stearns, Cambridge Sketches (Philadelphia, 1905), p. 126.

3. The best record of the Cranch family is found in the Greanleaf genealogy, a manuscript volume deposited in the State House in Boston.

4. See Scott, chap. i, and the William Cranch Papers in the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

5. The only copy I have discovered is in another hand and does not have the marginal drawings. It is in the Boston Public Library.

6. CPC to Edward Pope Cranch, St. Louis, December 22, 1836, and January 2 and 9, 1837.

7. Sidney E. Lind, “Christopher Pearse Cranch's ‘Gnosis’: An Error in Title,” Modern Language Notes, LXII (1947), 486-488.

8. James Freeman Clarke, “Ars Critica. A Conversation on Modern Poetry,” Western Messenger, VII (1839), 105-112. This article, signed “C. F. J.” at the end and “C. J. F.” (both anagrams of Clarke's initials) on the cover, is actually a criticism of Cranch's poetry, with emphasis on the poem “True Beauty,” which Clarke had “stolen” from Cranch's portfolio and published, unaware that it had recently appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger. Cranch's preference for Wordsworth is made apparent in his letters dated during these years.

9. MS Autobiography, pp. 45-48, which copies directly from his journal entries concerning the visits.

10. CPC to Margaret Cranch (Mrs. Erastus Brooks), Boston, February 23, 1840.

11. CPC to John Sullivan Dwight, Portland, Me., May 13, 1840; Quincy, Mass., June 19 and August 16, 1840.

12. Scott, pp. 49-51; Memoirs of John Quincy Adams (Philadelphia, 1874-1877), X, 344-345.

13. CPC to Dwight, Quincy, Mass., August 16, 1840.

14. See Cranch's reply, Washington, D. C., July 22, 1841.

15. MS Autobiography, p. 90.

16. Record Books, II, 34, Carey & Hart MSS, in Historical Society of Pennsylvania collection. The manufacturing costs were only ＄164.80, but the book was printed and bound with taste.

17. MS entitled “Reminiscences of a Landscape Painter”; John Cranch to Rufus W. Griswold, Washington, June 7, 1855, in Boston Public Library; and MS Autobiography.

18. Scott, p. 181. In March 1843, Story did three pencil sketches of Cranch, all presently among the Scott Papers.

19. CPC to Theodore Parker, Rome, Italy, January 21-March 8, 1848.

20. CPC to William Cranch, New York, January 11, January 25, March 24, and April 4, 1850, and January 17, 1851; Scott, p. 191; William Cranch's will, 1855, Probate Court, Washington, D. C.; John Peter De Windt's will, 1870, Surrogate's Court, Dutchess County, Poughkeepsie, N. Y.; and January 1, 1892, statement of the trustee to E[lizabeth] D[e Windt] Cranch, in Cranch papers, Boston Public Library.

21. Bulletin of the American Art-Union, II (1849), 45, 46; Transactions of the American Art-Union, 1850; see for an example of criticism, Literary World, VI (1850), 423-425.

22. Scott, pp. 201, 213-218; CPC to Lowell, Paris, August 17, 1855, Harvard College Library. This letter reveals that Hiram Powers had recommended Cranch to Lowell.

23. Ada Shepard to H. C. Badger, Paris, September 17 and 23, 1857. Through the combined courtesy of Robert L. Straker and Norman Holmes Pearson I learned of these allusions to Cranch in the unpublished letters, transcriptions of which Prof. Pearson has made.

24. Scott, pp. 242, 243; CPC to Lowell, Paris, January 14, 1858, Harvard College Library.

25. See Frederick A. Sweet, The Hudson River School (Chicago, 1945).

26. CPC to the editors of the Critic, Cambridge, Mass., August 31, 1890, in the Massachusetts Historical Society.

27. See Mrs. John T. Sargent, Sketches and Reminiscences of The Radical Club (Boston, 1880), pp. 406-407; and an unidentified newspaper clipping in Cranch's scrapbook of clippings.

28. Unidentified newspaper clipping in Cranch's scrapbook of clippings.

29. There is an oral tradition that while they were abroad Henry James, Jr., was so attentive to Caroline that she had reason to believe his intentions were serious. After maturity their paths could have crossed in Cambridge in 1874, in London in July and August 1880, and possibly but not probably in Venice the next spring. However, in October 1880 James made it clear that none of the numerous rumors about him had any foundation. (See p. 35 in Robert C. LeClair's “Henry James and Minny Temple,” American Literature, March 1949.)

30. From “Some Literary Memories of Cambridge,” Harper's Monthly, CI (1900), 823-839; included, with some revision, in Literary Friends and Acquaintance (New York, 1900).

31. Scott, p. 256.

32. See The Browning Society; Boston; In Memoriam (Cambridge, n.d.).

33. Cambridge Tribune, XIV, 1 (February 20, 1892). This was a Lowell memorial issue, but it came out after Cranch's death and contains an editorial on Lowell and Cranch's friendship, a complete text of A. W. Steven's memorial address on Cranch, and other Cranch material.

34. S. T. Pickard, Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston, 1894), II, 756.

35. Scott, p. 281.

36. William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Boston, 1903), I, 110-111.