[In the following essay, Levenson suggests that Cranch's indolence resigned him to a career of mediocrity as a writer and an artist.]

A great literature is more than the sum of a number of great writers. … The continuity of a literature is essential to its greatness: it is very largely the function of secondary writers to preserve this continuity, and to provide a body of writing which is not necessarily read by posterity, but which plays a great part in forming the link between those writers who continue to be read.

—T. S. Eliot.

Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1892) is mentioned today in a number of different contexts ranging from the Hudson River School of painters to the American expatriate colony of Italy, but he is most interesting in the context of New England Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalist movement, to which our American tradition owes so great a debt, drew a large part of its liberating energy from the sheer weight of numbers, and through Cranch one can get directly at the constructive role of the minor figure in a genuine literary and artistic movement.

Cranch may seem a somewhat remote New Englander although he passed his most formative years in that section and later, when he had reached his threescore and ten, made his pilgrimage back to Cambridge to die; actually he was a son of the provincial tradition in one of its most cosmopolitan strains, and his life is a constant affirmation of that lineage. He was born in Alexandria, then a part of the District of Columbia, the son of William Cranch, chief justice of the District Court. His father had been a Harvard classmate of John Quincy Adams and had obtained his judicial office by one of John Adams's midnight appointments in 1801. Equally conservative in his Unitarianism and his Federalism, Judge Cranch had his wife and children kneel about him daily for their family prayers and maintained, south of Mason and Dixon's line, an island of strict New England observance of the Sabbath. Within the passage of a generation the old judge was to suffer the shock of learning that his son Pearse was indulging in the new intellectual radicalisms of the day; indeed, his informat may have been his friend and classmate from Quincy, former President Adams, who made a caustic comment in his journal at about this time on the unexpected frivolity of the youngest Cranch. The gulf between the generations became clear when, in 1841, the father wrote the son as strong a letter as only a Federalist judge in Democratic times knew how and drew from the prodigal a reply which was perhaps the most courageous act of his life. Pearse Cranch protested to his father:

Somehow the name “Transcendentalist” has become a nick-name here for all who have broken away from the material philosophy of Locke, and the old theology of many of the early Unitarians, and who yearn for something more satisfying to the soul. It has almost become a synonym for one who, in whatever way, preaches the spirit rather than the letter.¹

He went on to defend Emerson, the epitome of all that was dangerous, and ended defiantly: “All Unitarians should be of this school.”²

We have very little information to help us with the problem of how the Boston-Washington-Federalist tradition that so early took its stand against any new views whatever managed to become involved with Transcendentalism. As far as we know, Pearse Cranch passed an exceptionally uneventful youth in Washington, and there is no reason to suspect that he learned anything dangerous at Columbian College there. The answer seems to lie in the fact that his older brother Edward was, when Pearse graduated in 1832, already preparing to succeed their father in the law and that Pearse was not interested in medicine. The only gentlemanly profession left open to him was the ministry, and so he packed his carpetbag and made his way north to the Harvard Divinity School. There he fell in with heterodoxy almost at once: among his classmates were Cyrus Bartol and Samuel Osgood; John Sullivan Dwight and Theodore Parker became his particular friends. We have a story from Edward Emerson that shows how quickly he slipped from a proper high seriousness of purpose: he and Dwight, we are told, used to spend so much time playing duets in their room at Divinity Hall that “their outraged friend, Theodore Parker, who disliked music, was driven in self-defense to saw wood outside their door.”³ This anecdote records Cranch's first step away from the creed of his ancestors and toward a Transcendentalist independence.

With his time spent so ill at the Divinity School, it is natural that later Cranch should have had professional difficulties. Although licensed to preach after his graduation in 1835, he never did well enough in any one place to be ordained. His wanderings in search of a pulpit took him as far north as Bangor, where he was for a time assistant to Frederic Hedge, and as far south as Richmond, Virginia. There, where the elder William Ellery Channing had learned his radicalism, Cranch learned his radicalism, too, the love of fine company whose interests were music and literature. The year 1836, the annus mirabilis of Transcendentalism that produced Emerson's Nature and so many of the lesser manifestoes, was a climax in Cranch's life in that he turned west to grow up with the country. This climax was not very great: his first stop in the West was St. Louis, where he became assistant to his cousin William Greenleaf Eliot. Eliot established in St. Louis the first Unitarian Church of that city and a family that was to produce the renegade Anglo-Catholic poet quoted at the outset of this essay; Cranch's destiny was only to move on once more.

These were hard times for a young man of artistic bent trying to get started in a profession for which his calling was none too sure. In the midst of his distress Cranch wrote sadly and a little pompously, in a letter of August, 1837:

I have never been accustomed to give full vent to my feelings and thoughts: I cannot do it. … In general, I am reserved, secretive, proud, indolent, but above all diffident. This besetting diffidence lies at the root of all my reserve, and keeps me again and again silent and seemingly cold. …⁴

Had he only known it, Cranch was on the threshold of his great opportunity. In Louisville, James Freeman Clarke was becoming restless, and someone was needed to fill his pulpit temporarily so that he might take his excursion back east. In assuming Clarke's pulpit Cranch also undertook responsibility for Clarke's magazine, the Western Messenger. It was this episode that offered him the first real opportunity to employ his hitherto frustrated literary talents.⁵

The Western Messenger was a periodical less of the West than of New England. Even in its earliest days, when it was seeking out Western poets and Western writers, Easterners made up the overwhelming majority of its contributors. It lived up to its title as a journal of religion and literature: published side-by-side in one issue, for example, were an article called “Brief Review of Trinitarian Proof Texts” and a sketch, “Foot-Prints on the Sea-Shore,” “by the Author of Twice-Told Tales.” Although it reviewed all the newest books by Emerson, Brownson, Ripley, and Alcott, its articles indicate that there was, nevertheless, a slight cultural lag in Louisville; they were mostly polemics in the rear-guard action of the Unitarian controversy. The taste of the editors was scarcely infallible since they offered in the same number of the Messenger Emerson's “Rhodora” and Cranch's “Lines on the Death of an Aged Relative,” which begin:

She hath passed away—her soul hath fled,
          That meek, pure-hearted one;
She is numbered with the sainted dead;—
          Her Pilgrimage is done.(6)

This questionable taste of the editors is responsible for the one thing for which Cranch is most frequently remembered: as a parlor game he and Clarke used to draw caricatures to illustrate particularly fantastic lines from Emerson, such as the famous “I am a transparent eyeball” passage of Nature. (To illustrate this passage, Cranch drew a cartoon figure, all legs and eyeball, gazing over the sunlit vistas of a spreading New England landscape.) Cranch's sense of humor did not have the courage of its convictions, and he spent the rest of his life disclaiming any intent to ridicule. It is all too easy to believe his disclaimers since about this time he preached on the great eclipse of 1838, denouncing the low masqueraders of Cincinnati who celebrated the occasion of God's handiwork so impiously by revels.

At the moment of America's greatest movement to the frontier Cranch found the West too full for him and took his solitary way back to Boston. This was one of the great pilgrimages of his life, and almost as soon as he was settled, he wrote excitedly:

New England is the place of places for all sorts of views. Things new and old are brought to light, and have their advocates and believers, and deniers. We have one Miller here, an ignorant preacher, who teaches that the world is coming to an end in 1843. We have another man who is zealous as a flaming fire in lectures upon English grammar!—defying his antagonists like a second David. We have had lectures on the Turks by a Turk; on Switzerland by a German, the lamented Dr. Follen; on Geology, on carbonic acid gas, on Eastern customs, on storms, on Shakespeare, and on the Smithsonian legacy. … In fact this Boston is a very Athens.⁷

In the excitement Cranch came to the conclusion that he was not made for the ministry and decided to drop it. He thought seriously of joining the experiment of Brook Farm; though he never quite brought himself to that, he did manage to visit the little band there as often as possible and help their morale with his flute-playing and singing, which often brought tears to their eyes. He even overcame his “besetting diffidence,” and having heard of the “New Magazine” that was projected, screwed up his courage sufficiently to submit a couple of poems to Emerson.

These two poems were printed in the very first issue of the Dial. The first of them, “To the Aurora Borealis,” is, for the first half at least, uniquely brilliant in Cranch's work, worthy of the praise that Emerson so lavishly bestowed. The other poem, “Gnosis,” is, unfortunately perhaps, far more representative of Cranch and of Transcendental poetry in general, so that it is through this latter poem that one can best approach a critical estimate of Cranch's work:

Thought is deeper than all speech,
          Feeling deeper than all thought;
Souls to souls can never teach
          What unto themselves was taught.
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.
Like the stars that gem the sky,
          Far apart though seeming near,
In our light we scattered lie;
          All is thus but starlight here.
What is social company
          But a babbling summer stream?
What our wise philosophy
          But the glancing of a dream?
Only when the sun of love
          Melts the scattered stars of thought,
Only when we live above
          What the dim-eyed world hath taught,
Only when our souls are fed
          By the fount that gave them birth,
And by inspiration led,
          Which they never drew from earth,
We like parted drops of rain,
          Swelling till they melt and run,
Shall be all absorbed again,
          Melting, flowing into one.(8)

The theme of “Gnosis” is a recurrent one in the work of Cranch and his contemporaries, expressing as it does the atomistic side of Transcendental social theory. The epistemological revolution ultimately derived from John Locke had led to the issues of romantic philosophy whereby the individual came to question his own and the world's existence so profoundly as to neglect such intermediate groupings as society offered. The homely reference of Emerson's imagination in a poem like “Each and All” could save him from such an implicit solipsism, but Cranch had no such resource.

Cranch's limitations are again revealed in his attempts to use the Emersonian dialectic, most noticeably in the brace of poems which he called “Inworld” and “Outworld.” Together these poems make up a kind of Kantian reverie on the great epistemological dilemma in which Man and the Over-Soul, alone in the universe, debate the thesis that “Nothing is, if thou are not.”⁹ Emerson had the ability so to express his contradictions in symbols as to force an unconscious synthesis in the mind of his audience; Cranch's efforts in the same mode fall flat just because of his limited powers of expression, so that his product is a little more than the inanity of an unresolved contradiction.¹⁰

Cranch's intellectual grasp of the richness and uses of symbolism was far less competent than Emerson's. Emerson saw in the fact “a double, a quadruple, a centuple” meaning, whereas Cranch usually saw in the fact only a one-to-one correspondence to some spiritual truth. So he tended to limp through his verse explicitly philosophizing far more often than he employed even his limited command of the symbol. As late as 1873, in an article called “Symbolism and Language,” he was still serving a much-watered broth from Emerson's Nature as news and promising of Emmanuel Swedenborg that “the time is coming when this great seer will be recognized as one of the most resplendent lights of modern thought.”¹¹ But, for Cranch, symbolism and correspondence meant a much too simple progression from the world of substance to the world of idea so that in his highly mechanical poem, “Correspondences,” he could offer lines like:

Every thought that speaks to the senses was meant for the spirit:
          Nature is but a scroll, God's handwriting thereon.(12)

Devotee of Emerson that he was, he went too often to the schools of Felicia Hemans and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow for his technical inspiration.

Cranch was deceived, as many a young Transcendentalist poet was deceived, into putting too great reliance on his “genius” as against his “talent,” on “nature” as against “reason,” on “Reason” as against “Understanding”:

Speak not, reason not—but live;
Reins to thy true nature give,
And in each unconscious act
Forth will shine the hidden fact.(13)

Unfortunately, this program did no more for his command of language than it did for his mastery of the Emersonian dialectic. For Cranch, Reason and Understanding were uncannily alike. It is pitiful to read in one of his best scanned poems the ludicrous cliché, “my wild, broken verse.”¹⁴ The reason his “wild, broken verse” reads so tamely is not far to seek: if we inspect his bravest intuitions, we find that Cranch's inner world, like that of the “Blind Seer” of his poem,¹⁵ is a world of thought and thought alone, at least so far as he is able to express himself. Locked in a world of banal conventionality, his philosophical poetry was one day to degenerate into a grim parody of his early work.¹⁶

The unrelieved ordinariness of Cranch's mind concealed the fact that he was a man who had feelings and a very real love of nature. He was never able to unify the modes of experience sufficiently to give us what we call “metaphysical” poetry; his responses to life and the natural world tended to remain in a totally different category from the conceits of his philosophical poetry. This is by no means to say that he was devoid of sensitivity. Thus, with the feeling of liberation that he got by coming back to Boston in 1840, he wrote in his journal:

What should we be but for the gentle teachings of this green summer time? I feel that I am at God's school, when I sit on the grass, under the elms, and look about me, and think upon Nature's impersonality. Man has not broken into the charmed circle in any way. Least of all does Nature imitate the obtrusiveness of our moral codes. She reads her mysterious fables, but we are not pestered by the word “application” at the bottom of the picture.¹⁷

Thirty-five years later he published his pair of sonnets called “The Garden”:

Nought know we but the heart of summer here.
On the tree-shadowed velvet lawn I lie,
And dream up through the close leaves to the sky,
And weave Arcadian visions in a sphere
Of peace. The steaming heat broods all around,
But only lends a quiet to the hours.
The aromatic life of countless flowers,
The singing of a hundred birds, the sound
Of rustling leaves, go pulsing through the green
Of opening vistas in the garden walks.
Dear summer, on thy balmy breast I lean
And care not how the moralist toils or talks;
Repose and Beauty preach a gospel, too,
Deep as that sterner creed the Apostles knew.
Is there no praise of God amid the bowers
Of summer idleness? Still must we toil
And think, and tease the conscience, and so soil
With over careful fingering the flowers
That blow within the garden of the heart?
Still must we be machines for grinding out
Thin prayers and moralisms? Much I doubt,
Pale priest of a thorn-girded church, thy part
Is small in this wide breathing universe.
Least can I find thy title and thy worth
Here, where with myriad chords the musical earth
Is rhyming to the enraptured poet's verse.
Better thy cowl befits the cloister's gloom;
Its shadow blots the garden and its bloom.(18)

“The Garden” represents the best of Cranch's poetry. As so often in this period, the form of the sonnet with its strict requirements served to make a writer who was less than a master craftsman aware of technical problems that he was unable to formulate for himself. Further, Cranch here succeeded in fusing sensation, emotion, intellectual structure, and expression into an organic poetic whole. The internal rhythms declare that here Cranch wrote with an integration beyond the reach of his usual self: the first lines of the second sonnet invite comparison without embarrassment with “The Collar,” by George Herbert; yet the Transcendentalist piety of Cranch calls him, not to duty, but to the languor and repose reflected in the rhythm of the whole and dominant in the first sonnet. In its moral and rhetorical development, “The Garden” is a rewriting and reversal of the great Herbert poem, not unworthy of its model.

In these two sonnets Cranch passionately expressed the stand that he resolved on at the end of his great pilgrimage to Boston. In 1841, while he was recovering from some slight illness, he amused himself with paints and brushes and discovered that it was landscape painting to which he wanted to devote his life. When he gave up the ministry for this, he renounced much more than a pulpit he had never won. In taking the path of “repose and leisure,” he squared himself against all the worldly demands implicit in the dominant tradition of his social world.¹⁹ He rejected not only the role of “pale priest of a thorn-girded church” but his very livelihood. He said with Emerson, “Why so busy, little man?” With Hawthorne, he openly defied his ancestors. With Alcott, he undertook a long “apprenticeship to leisure.” When he came to marry, he offered his wife, not the security and status of a ministerial position, but the opportunity to keep a boardinghouse in New York so that he might paint. Without any financial justification whatsoever he elected himself into the leisure class and betook himself to Europe. Tilting at the windmill of “the Protestant ethic,” he revolutionized his New England conscience; and what is more, for the rest of his life he kept writing to his older brother, Edward, urging him to quit the bar and join him in his indolence.

In his attitude toward the arts Cranch compensated for the “besetting diffidence” that he had felt as a minister. Just as he was overconfident about his natural gifts as a writer, so, in painting, he was always sure that he needed only a couple of lessons and that he could carry on with his newly chosen métier from there. There seems to be no way of learning directly whether this breezy confidence was justified. His landscapes are not listed in the museums, and the most complete records do not disclose that even a single one of them has been sold on the American market. All that we know of his painting, to which he devoted the best fifty years of his life, is the appraisal of Henry Tuckerman, whose estimate might serve for Cranch's poetry as well:

There is, perhaps, a want of emphasis in the landscapes of Cranch, especially in the details of rock and foliage; but in the more ethereal elements, he often exhibits a skill and feeling which win the spectator; his clouds, atmosphere, and all the traits which bear generalization, evidence the hand of one in true though often vague relation with nature, especially in her loveliest and most serene moods.²⁰

Although Cranch's service to American art is not to be learned about in museums, there is perhaps no better memorial to the quiet courage and profound earnestness which he lent to a movement of greater artists than himself than his own poem, “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis.” This poem is superb autobiography, for which the mediocrity of the verse is its own poignant commentary. The poem starts with Cranch's recollection of the “lonely read” on which he started with but a few companions:

To live for Nature, finding truth
          In beauty, and the shrines of art;
To consecrate our joyous youth
          To aims outside the common mart.

While he often “turned aside and lingered long,” his comrades moved on more purposefully, and some, enjoying “blithe self-confidence,” achieved their highest aims; some even won recognition from the very public that had rejected them. Neither kind of success ever came for Cranch.

And still though oft I bind my sheath
          In fields my comrades have not known;
Though Art is long and life is brief,
          And youth has now forever flown,
I would not lose the raptures sweet,
          Nor scorn the toil of earlier years;
Still would I climb with eager feet,
          Though towering height on height appears.
And up the mountain road I see
          A younger throng with voices loud,
Who side by side press on with me,
          Till I am lost amid the crowd.(21)

Cranch's significance, just as he so candidly remarked, did decline as a younger generation brought reinforcements of new blood and strength; yet, had his achievement been even slighter than it was, Cranch would deserve remembrance as a private in the ranks of those who struggled for the birth of American art. The magnanimity with which he accepted his being “lost amid the crowd” underscores for us the devotion he was able to bring as a minor talent to the making of a great literature.

Notes

1. Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch (Boston and New York, 1917), p. 50.

2. Ibid., p. 51.

3. Edward Waldo Emerson, The Early Years of the Saturday Club, 1855-1870 (Boston and New York, 1918), p. 47.

4. Scott, op. cit., p. 35.

5. It is interesting to note, as a sidelight on Cranch's career, the progress he made in the periodicals he wrote for, since his progress was to be significant of the Transcendental movement in general. His first vehicle was the Western Messenger, Devoted to Religion and Literature; later he would write for the Harbinger, Devoted to Social and Political Progress; eventually his work was to be printed in the Galaxy, an Illustrated Magazine of Entertaining Reading. The subtitles describe the path of a great intellectual Odyssey.

6. Western Messenger, VII, 199 (July, 1839).

7. Scott, op. cit., pp. 47-48.

8. Dial, I, 98 (July, 1840).

9. Dial, II, 288-290 (Jan., 1842). Because of the printer's cuts, “Inworld” had appeared without its mate in the previous issue (II, 271-272).

10. This persistent disproportion between conception and rendering is evident not only in his lyric poetry but in the trials he made of other literary modes. The two children's books on which he put at least some financial hopes are The Last of the Huggermuggers (Boston, 1855) and Kobboltozo (Boston, 1857). These fantastic tales fail to achieve the circumstantial interest of Gulliver, or even of Jack-o'-the-Beanstalk, much less the satirical interest of which they are capable. The island on which the last of a great-hearted race of giants wither and die through the machinations of a mean-spirited dwarf is fine scaffolding, but the plot is not solidly executed; only a minor figure among the shipwrecked visitors, that Barnum-like Yankee Zebedec Nabbum, really engages the imagination of the reader. Equally unmemorable is Cranch's contribution (Aeneid, 2 vols., Boston and New York, 1872) to the series of epic translations by Longfellow, Bryant, and Bayard Taylor, all of which appeared within a single lustrum. Cranch chose blank verse as the medium for Vergil's epic in order to escape “that seductive siren Rhyme” whose “jingling chains” had imprisoned Dryden. His translation is literal, his language clear, his scansion unexceptionable, but there is a pervading lack of elegance; he banished the heroic with the couplet.

11. Galaxy, XVI, 375 (Sept., 1873).

12. Dial, I, 381 (Jan., 1841).

13. Dial, II, 484 (April, 1842).

14. In “Memory,” Western Messenger, VI, 183 (Jan., 1839).

15. Dial, II, 47-48 (July, 1841).

16. This was to be his challenge to Darwinian philosophy in “Survival of the Fittest”:

    “Raise your scientific lore,
              Grant us larger definitions,
    Souls are surely something more
              Than a bundle of cognitions.”

    And this is a sample of his commemoration verse from “The Victories of Peace”:

    “Boast not when musketry rattles
              O'er corpses of landsmen and seamen.
    Gains that are greater than battles
              Come with the ballots of freemen.”

    Both poems are in Ariel and Caliban, with Other Poems (Boston and New York, 1887), pp. 100, 107.

17. Dial, I, 379 (Jan., 1841).

18. The Bird and the Bell, with Other Poems (Boston, 1875), pp. 290-291.

19. It is interesting that there is but one grating word in each of these sonnets that comprise Cranch's confession of faith—“moralist” in the former, “moralisms” in the latter.

20. Book of the Artists, American Artist Life (New York, 1867), p. 461. As against the paragraph devoted to Cranch by H. T. Tuckerman, S. G. W. Benjamin gives him a sentence in his Art in America, a Critical and Historical Sketch (New York, 1880), saying that he “has exhibited in his Venetian landscapes a correct perception of color, while his method lacks a firmness of drawing, and shows traces of foreign influence more than that of many of our artists who studied abroad at this time” (p. 76).

21. Ariel and Caliban, pp. 90-91.