[In the following essay, Norko discusses Cranch's personal struggle in choosing between a career in the ministry, which he believed was his duty, and art and literature, which he found more appealing.]

In may 1874, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a letter to Christopher Pearse Cranch containing his assessment of the younger man's talents: “I have always understood that you are the victim of your own various gifts; that all the muses, jealous of each other, haunt your brain, and I well remember your speech to the frogs, which called out all the eloquence of the inhabitants of the swamp, in what we call Sleepy Hollow in Concord, many years ago.”¹

The critical assessments of the individual who entertained children with sounds of barnyard animals at Brook Farm and adults with Emersonian caricatures have not varied significantly in the past century. In The Flowering of New England, Van Wyck Brooks depicts Cranch as a man “having ample means and mundane tastes, [who] had gradually ‘sunk the minister in the man’ and followed the call of the Muses … a man who had taken Emerson at his word and planted himself on his instincts, wherever they led him.”² In The Transcendentalists, Perry Miller concludes with a mixture of admiration and disappointment: “One of the most delightful of the Transcendental group—if only because he alone had a feeling for frivolity—he ultimately proved one of the most futile and wasted talents.”³

While these depictions touch on important aspects of Cranch's character (his humor, his variety of talents, and his self-acknowledged failure to excel at poetry, painting or music), they seem too simplistic. Cranch has usually been reduced to a spokesman for Emerson and the Transcendentalists, a derivative poet, an unexceptional artist, and above all, a dilettante. F. DeWolfe Miller claims that he became the “true pattern of a Transcendentalist of the New England fashion.”⁴ While evidence from Cranch's correspondence supports this conclusion, we often ignore Cranch's struggle, and assume that he effortlessly divorced himself from the ministry in order to devote himself to “unabashed aestheticism.”⁵ This struggle helps to account for the often overlooked melancholy strain in one of the more lighthearted Transcendentalists. Cranch spent a large portion of his early years attempting to ignore or unsuccessfully reconcile his concept of duty with his natural inclinations. He was “closer to a purely artistic temperament than Emerson”⁶ even before he left the ministry to pursue a career in the arts. His prose of the period after he accepted the call to preach Unitarianism in the Ohio Valley demonstrates the development of the tension between vocation and inclination. In the prose, missionary zeal confronts his love of art, poetry, and music. These conflicting interests foreshadow his eventual movement from religion to aestheticism.

Although born in Alexandria, Virginia, as the tenth child and youngest son of William and Nancy Greenleaf Cranch, Cranch inherited a “New England” sense of responsibility. William Cranch, friend and cousin of John Quincy Adams, served as assistant justice, and later chief justice of the Circuit Court of District Columbia. According to F. DeWolfe Miller, William Cranch, “though one of the eminent lay Unitarians of his day, was in character as true a Puritan as the Post-Revolutionary period produced … God's immanence and man's duty to God were real truths for him.”⁷ Cranch's recollections support this description; he speaks admiringly of his father as “one of that noble fraternity of quiet thinkers and workers, of all times and professions, who are content to do their duty thoroughly and well, careless of shining honors and fame.”⁸ According to Elizabeth McKinsey, Cranch was not forced to succeed as is often the case with oldest and only sons.⁹ While this assessment may be true, the devotion to duty admired in the father impressed the son and was adopted when he became a minister.

The family moved to an area of Alexandria named the “Village” in 1832. Cranch recalls it as the place where “I first began to amuse myself with drawing, and in learning to play on the flute. And it was there that I first attempted my first versification, a paraphrase from Ossian.”¹⁰ The phrase, “began to amuse myself,” indicates Cranch's early attitude toward the arts. According to Cranch, his father's artistic inclinations were always associated with leisure and with his propensity for order. He remembers his father's days of leisure when he would sometimes spend a morning “tuning his piano or parlor organ, in a thorough and methodical way.¹¹ Although William Cranch had a deep love of poetry, art, and especially music, his son received no formal training in these areas. Perhaps William Cranch's classification of the arts as leisure activities explains not only why Cranch could not be formally trained in them, but also why he could not seriously consider a career in them. Leonora Cranch Scott describes her father's predicament: “At that time in America painting and music as professions were generally very lightly regarded. When my father was about to decide upon a profession, he considered the ministry the only one left him to his taste. His brother Edward was a lawyer, and for a doctor he seemed entirely unfitted.”¹² It appears that the elder Cranch also shared this general opinion. After his son's graduation from Columbian College in 1832, he urged Cranch to select one of the three learned professions. Based on the recommendation of his father and his cousin (and future brother-in-law), William G. Eliot, Jr., who was then a divinity student at Harvard, he decided on the ministry. “Of the three professions, this was most to my taste; and as it accorded with my father's inclination, I decided to go to Cambridge and Theological School.”¹³ The diffident nineteen-year-old had not yet clearly articulated his own “inclination,” and relied mainly on the advice of others to choose the ministry.

While Cranch's decision apparently was largely motivated by the wishes of other individuals, once he committed himself to the ministry, he conscientiously attempted to prepare himself for his duties at Harvard. His daughter assesses her father's Harvard days in The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch: “The atmosphere was very religious and prayerful, and my father earnestly strove to work conscientiously. … He could always do better with his pen than in extemporaneous speech. But nevertheless, he persisted.”¹⁴ Cranch's instruction, from men like John Palfrey, Dr. Henry Ware, Sr., and Dr. Henry Ware, Jr., reinforced the Unitarian belief in man's accountability to God.¹⁵ Nothing in Cranch's correspondence indicates that he did not accept this idea. Miller describes the resulting tension that haunted Cranch as long as he remained in the ministry: “Cranch developed while he was at divinity school a kind of self-conscious devotion to his appointed work, a devotion that was not of the same spirit that became his when during the years of supply preaching, he was quickened by his contacts with the new philosophy.”¹⁶ The tension between religious duty and an inclination toward the arts became more pronounced after Cranch became a preacher and left “cultured” Boston. Although a novice minister, who had not yet defined where “self-culture” ended and duty began, Cranch began to intuit a conflict of interests that he carried with him throughout his public ministry.

After his graduation from Harvard in 1835, Cranch served as an itinerant preacher in Providence, Dover, Andover, and Richmond. His divorce from “civilized,” Unitarian-controlled Boston underscored the tension between self-fulfillment and occupation. Evidence indicates that he truly believed in the necessity of a “more liberal and rational”¹⁷ religion than the faith he saw in Andover, a town which contained a seminary devoted to the protection of orthodox calvinism.¹⁸ Indeed, according to one of his parishioners, he preached “‘spiritual sermons’ … that were much liked by liberal members of the congregation,”¹⁹ but he continually voiced doubts about his suitability for the ministry. In a letter to John Sullivan Dwight in 1836, he expresses concern about the insubstantiality of his faith:

I would to heaven that I understood more clearly the great laws of that invisible world within my mind. I would that my faith could support itself more trustingly upon the knowledge of my mental operations—their laws and relations and connections with the world without … my conceptions of the ideal True, which I feel to be something more than vain and empty imaginings, are crushed in the bud.²⁰

Although he lightheartedly asked Dwight to post a note requesting prayers for his return from the “wilderness” of Andover,²¹ Cranch's complaints moved beyond merely his dissatisfaction with the lack of culture in the town. They reflected an internal struggle, a crisis which would become more pronounced as he slowly realized the necessity for a stable faith in order to excel in the duties of his chosen vocation.

The conflict between religion and aestheticism appeared again in Richmond, where Cranch indicated a degree of satisfaction with the ministry and another form of satisfaction prompted by the beauty of the natural world. He recognized the empowering aspects of his position, viewing the pulpit as a lonely throne that impressed upon him the importance of the Unitarian ministry for the dissemination of liberal religion. He writes to John Sullivan Dwight: “It was glorious to arrest the attention of a passer-by, or a door-lingerer … to catch his eye and a new inspiration at the same moment, to blaze right at him and to hold him like the Ancient Mariner to his seat, and address him in an appeal, which it almost seemed as if Providence had brought him expressly to hear.”²² However, in the same letter, he describes a different kind of inspiration, the inspiration to write a sonnet on one of the local flowers, the magnolia grandiflora: “Something in the powerful and delightful fragrance that carries the imagination so into the dark and deep forests of Florida and the banks of the Mississippi.”²³ Cranch confronted two sources of inspiration: direct, from the works of nature, and indirect, from the effect of his preaching on the listener. It is in Richmond that Cranch first began to compose poetry with some assurance, and he sent his brother a sonnet entitled “To the Magnolia Grandiflora” in 1836. Cranch's belief in the necessity of “duty” and “action” soon pitted his inspiration to create art against his inspiration from the pulpit.

Considering his doubts about his ministry and his discomfort with the “wilderness” on the Eastern seaboard, why would Cranch have seriously considered his next move to the Ohio Valley? Again, family influenced Cranch's career decisions. His brother Edward lived in Cincinnati, and his cousin William Greenleaf Eliot, who was preaching in St. Louis, urged him to come West. Eliot, a man whose “life was a consecration to the highest ideals of duty,”²⁴ had helped to found the Western Messenger, a periodical promoting Unitarian interests in the West. Miller cites the purpose of the Messenger as “identical with Cranch's ideal for his own life at that date.”²⁵ Robert Habich offers insight into the motives of Cranch's fellow laborers in the vineyard, claiming that the opportunity to shape a society free from the weight of tradition enticed idealistic young Unitarians.²⁶ They saw the West as an area where the seed of liberal religion could take root in untrammeled ground. The presence of his cousin and James Freeman Clarke, who had aligned himself with this magazine “devoted to Religion and Literature” in the West, must have further facilitated Cranch's move. Therefore, claiming that he had been “possessed by the Western mania to some degree,”²⁷ Cranch arrived in St. Louis near the end of 1836 and supplied his cousin's pulpit.

When Cranch “settled” in the West, he immediately began contributing to the Western Messenger. He steadily produced prose and poetry and edited the periodical twice during his years in the Ohio Valley. In the “General Preface” to the first volume, the editors declared the periodical “devoted to the spread of a liberal and rational religion.” In light of the purpose of the magazine, Cranch contributed primarily religious poetry and verse that hinted at his evolving Transcendentalism and demonstrated his propensity for creative expression over didactic prose.

These artistic inclinations, the nomadic nature of his ministry, and increasing insecurities about his suitability for such a life complicated Cranch's years in the West. The exigencies of the missionary situation, as well as certain personality traits, compounded this insecurity. Cranch spent from 1836 to 1839 travelling in the West, usually spending less than a season in any place. In a letter of August 1837, he describes himself as “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, when no one could tell how deep and strong the stream which ran hidden within.”²⁸ In this year he attempted to further consecrate himself to his task by requesting that James Freeman Clarke ordain him. As Cranch searched for a course of action to correct the flaws that interfered with his religious obligations, wholehearted devotion appeared to him to be the best method. Clarke wisely ignored Cranch's request, and Cranch himself would later express relief in avoiding the “ordination noose.”²⁹

When Cranch compared himself to ministers like Clarke, he usually detected his own inadequacy. In mid-1837 Cranch supplied the pulpit for Clarke and also took over responsibility for writing and editing the Messenger. In October 1837, Cranch praises Clarke in a letter to his sister. He claims that Clarke

possesses in a marked degree that which I am perpetually conscious that I am most deficient in—that is, boldness—an habitual independence and disregard for the opinion of men … My eyes are turned so habitually on myself, that almost every action of my life is divested of freedom … I am not free enough; I am not bold enough for a Minister of the Word of Life. Over and over again I do chide my timidity, my reserve, my sensitiveness. I want what might be called spontaneousness. And I think the West is the school where this want is to be supplied … I must think more of my fellow man and less of myself. I must not feel myself detached from society, but as forming a stone in the arch, helping to support the building. In the West it is especially necessary that no member of society should forget his relations and isolate himself. He must step out from the charmed circle of his own peculiar tastes, habits, feelings, and sympathize with, and help, all around him. This is the minister's office by preeminence. The minister should not be a standing, placid, lake, embosomed by mountains and gazing on the stars; but a quick, deep, active, strong-moving stream, winding about men, purifying and gladdening and fertilizing the world.³⁰

The above statement seems more indicative of Cranch's insecurities with the ministry than Clarke's position in Louisville.³¹ Just one month after this yearning for “spontaneity,” he labeled himself “much the child of impulse, though not wholly so, I hope.”³² Cranch continually found himself without “boldness” in terms of the Unitarian mission, while the “impulse” toward art did not waver during his years in the West. According to his daughter, Cranch felt “unfitted” for his position as he constantly struggled to “prepare himself for his duties.” She writes: “it was endeavoring to fit a square peg into a round hole; his poetic effusions, his love of painting and of music all calling him away from sermonizing, which he was strongly urged to follow and to crush the rest.”³³

The indirect association which he began with the Transcendentalists through the Western Messenger quickened his aesthetic impulses in the midst of his struggle. Miller labels Cranch as a “seedling transcendentalist” before he moved west.³⁴ This unconscious Transcendentalism gradually solidified in the years that he spent in the Ohio Valley. He began to seriously write poetry between the publication of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus in the spring of 1836 and Emerson's Nature in the autumn. Men like Clarke and books like Nature and Remarks on the Four Gospels by his cousin William Henry Furness exposed him to iconoclastic ideas and a budding movement more eclectic and more suited to aestheticism than to Unitarianism. By the time Cranch left the West, he was a full-fledged advocate of this movement.³⁵

Cranch's prose contributions in 1837 to the Western Messenger reflect his struggles to “consecrate” himself. Most of the prose from that year consisted of arguments for Unitarianism as members of the religion worked to defend their doctrine against the accusations of orthodox Calvinists. Cranch used parables to figuratively express these doctrines,³⁶ but he usually concentrated on the necessity for self-denial in order for men to realize higher purposes. In one of his first prose pieces appearing in the Messenger in July 1837, a nature parable called “The Ant Hills,” Cranch uses the natural world, in this case—the “little world of a sand heap”—to share a moral with the human world. He moves the emphasis from individual needs and places it on God's “higher law of Nature.”³⁷ Mirroring Pilgrim's Progress, Cranch creates an Interpreter who provides the answers to the confused Christian. In another parable in the November issue, “The Balloon,” Cranch emphasizes the need for self-denial by comparing man with a hot air balloon. While he realizes the necessity of the body as a balance to the spiritual element in man which “urges the soul to rise to God and duty,” true faith requires a rejection of those impulses. “But let him throw away the weights he bears, and he instantly rises, and will continue to rise, till the spirit within him finds its place high in its native element.”³⁸ The tension between the heavenly and the earthly aspects of Cranch's personality and its effect on individual salvation and happiness prompted his discussion of the conflict in his prose.

In the expository prose of 1837, Cranch stressed that religion's role in societal change as well as individual salvation further necessitated duty to God and self-denial. In November 1837, Cranch extended his concept of duty to include good actions in “Duties and Responsibilities of Unitarian Christians.” Unitarians adopted the notion of their religion as a “city set upon a hill which cannot be hid.”³⁹ This metaphor places great importance upon the ability of correct actions to influence others. Outward forms assume an essential role as standards used to judge Unitarians for inner truth. In conjunction with this, Cranch emphasizes traditional forms like the Lord's Supper and the Sanctuary. He explains the special responsibility of Eastern Unitarians in the West: “How great therefore is the responsibility of those of us who have come from a part of the country where religious institutions flourish! What a duty is imposed upon them to see that those institutions be not neglected and downtrodden in this Western Valley.”⁴⁰ Cranch's awareness of the possibility and necessity of missionary work in the West prompted him to make such statements. But underneath these bold assertions of the importance of duty were insecurities about his faith. The emphasis on responsibility reminds us that Cranch, the role model for the missionary, also struggled with his responsibility as a role model.

In 1837 Cranch's early affinity with the Transcendentalist movement exposed him to another cause. In the November issue of the Western Messenger, Cranch reprinted large sections of Emerson's “American Scholar” address. He praises the speech as “full of beauties, full of original thought and illustration.”⁴¹ His admiration for Emerson's thought and his pervasive self-abnegation combine as he wistfully concludes “would that we had been in the church of old Harvard, when the thinker, the orator and poet charmed the multitude to silence in such a strain as that we have here so imperfectly reviewed.”⁴² Why did Cranch support statements that foreshadowed the Oversoul and Emerson's radical self-reliance? It is obvious that he did not view Emerson's doctrines as irreconcilable with the true spirit of Unitarianism; he welcomed the free thought as consistent with the spread of liberal religion and devotion to Truth. In addition, he instinctively felt the rightness of Emerson's statements. In 1840 Emerson wrote Cranch in response to Cranch's immoderate praise of Nature: “If my thoughts have interested you, it only shows how much they were already yours.”⁴³ This man, who did not value his own inclinations in 1837, attempted to apply these Emersonian truths to his own duties in the Unitarian mission. When Cranch quotes Emerson's “Only so much do I know, as I have lived,”⁴⁴ he views this statement as a damning appraisal of his inactivity in the missionary life.

Cranch continually focused on the importance of action, as prompted by men like Emerson and Carlyle, in 1838. From Louisville in November, he writes to Catherine Myers:

As I have often said when egotizing, I am a bad mixture of the oyster and the spirit, the unexcitable and the excitable, … or of whatever other strange contrarities and extremes you please. … At times so alive, so excited, so full of one or another faith and aim; and at other, so dead, immovable, ennui-ish. … I hope it may not always be so. It is a great hindrance to me in my walks and undertakings in life to be such a Janus with a double head, looking two ways and going neither. It is truly a “mortal coil,” this body. … Yet we are encompassed around by Spirit. The solemn morning light, the presence of Duty, the voices of friends, the existence of vice in the world—every feeling—every thought … all our proving it to us … in every word embodying our inmost Me.⁴⁵

In the same letter, he discusses his attitude toward travelling: “If I ever get crazy, I suppose it will be on this subject, possessed with the demon of perpetual motion … by the dull prosaic methods of conveyance usually esteemed in fashion upon this nether planet.”⁴⁶ In this comment, Cranch indicates his progressive dissatisfaction with the itinerant life. He yearns for another form of travelling, a transcendence into the world of the Spirit. This transcendence results from his reading of Keats' Endymion: “This will transport you to every spot in air, earth, ocean, but this dull surface we plain mortals grovel upon.”⁴⁷ This correspondence also mentions his meeting with one of Keats' nieces from Louisville. His description of her offers some insight into his slowly-shifting self-definition. She possessed the “poet's dark, soul-like eyes and diffident manner.”⁴⁸ He uses the same term, “somewhat diffident,”⁴⁹ to describe Elizabeth Barrett Browning ten years later in Florence. Cranch lends the term some importance by associating it with artists, and yet he criticizes his own “diffidence” as a detriment to his work in the West. Through the application of this term to himself, he aligns himself with the artists. His inclination is to see himself in such a light, but the “Duty” that he mentions in the letter reminds him not only of his spirituality but also of his earthly mission.

The tension between individual fulfillment and vocation appears in Cranch's prose from 1838. In “Letter on Travelling, & c,” we see the different aspects of Cranch's personality. He begins:

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 itinerant 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. But so it is—it is a discipline—perhaps a salutary one. But I don't sit down to egotize.⁵⁰

Despite Cranch's wish to avoid the self, he soon launches into a romantic description focused on his reaction to a ride on the Mississippi. He concludes: “I could have sat for hours and gazed—but there were none to share my feelings.”⁵¹ After a long-winded description of modes of traveling, he echoes the same sentiment in his letter to Catherine Myers:

For myself, I have tried all these modes, (including sleigh and sled riding) so long and so far, that even my night dreams are consumed in repeating them over and over again in my imagination, and strange places, mountains and rivers, and long roads whirl through my brain—with strange ways of passing through them, till like the flying fiend in Milton, I fancy the demon of perpetual motion and migration hath wholly possessed me.⁵²

He abruptly shifts tone in the next sentence as he reminds himself of the purpose of the essay: “But I was about to say that there seem to me to be some advantages which may be derived from this much traveling.” Cranch restricts his sentence to suit his attitude toward the subject as he claims the chief advantage lies in the realization that man is a “passive thing, leaning against the arm of God—entirely in His hands who is father of all.”⁵³ The more controlled structure and tone of the second sentence indicates Cranch's divorce from uninhibited self-expression and the adoption of the dutiful sentiments of the Unitarian ministry.

Similarly, in the August issue of the Messenger, Cranch's varying sentence structure betrays his attachment to subjects focused on the self as opposed to subjects focused on religion. He identifies himself with the “wandering pilgrim” in “A Ride over the Mountains,” and begins the essay with a description of a pastor's sermon: “He preached well. The manner, the spirit, and delivery of the discourse all pleased me … I think we have good reason to hope that the light of a sound theology and of liberality still dwells and is diffused in this place.”⁵⁴ A shift from the impersonal “we” to “I” parallels the increasing intensity of his language and tone in his description of the Hawks nest and the Kanawha river. The statement above contrasts markedly with his description of Hawksnest:

It was a deep wall of fathomless atmosphere which was before me. I shuddered as I thought where one single step would take me. I felt my insecurity and I felt my insignificance … But the distant view—the spirit of beauty and stillness which pervaded everything—the mountain forests—the foaming river wandering far from its far mountain home, the sunset clouds around and above, calmed down the momentary thrill of fear. I gathered some springs of pine, and some moss which grew at the verge, with some pieces of the rock itself, as memorials, and was hurried away … It was a place to kneel and worship in alone.⁵⁵

The driver's box replaces the throne of the pulpit and becomes the elevating instrument as he tours his majestic surroundings. He concludes his essay with these two sentences:

Long shall I remember these scenes—yet with a sweet confused dreamy feeling—a lingering sense of undefined beauty—more cherished perhaps than any sharp outline.

I will conclude with saying that I arrived in Cincinnati, without any accident. I shall be here a month or two.⁵⁶

In the previous prose pieces, Cranch chooses an inspired and unrestricted manner to discuss his aesthetic impulses and a terser and nonemotional method to express his feelings about preaching. The manner in which Cranch describes the work involved in his occupation, and the more expansive style which he employs to speak of natural beauty, betrays his prejudices toward the aesthetic realm. Appreciation of natural beauty as opposed to religion served as an emotional stimulant, but his obligations to the ministry pulled him from complete acceptance of his inclination.

Cranch tries to convince others and himself of the importance of self-restraint in the parables of 1838. In “The Lightning and the Lantern,” “The River of Death,” “The Fountain in the Desert,” and “The Three Mountains,” he adopts the traditional motif of the pilgrimage in order to describe the necessary toil of the faithful Christian. In “The Lightning and the Lantern,” a wanderer, like Cranch, commits himself to an offered lantern rather than the flashes of lightning that intermittently shed bright light on the darkness. The Interpreter concludes: “It is only the steady light of habitual religion, seen and felt and followed at all times, which can be ‘a lamp to our feet and a light to our paths.’ Good feelings—religious excitements—revivals—can do us no good unless they can be arrested, and made to minister to constant and habitual good works.”⁵⁷ Even an emotional experience of religion must be contained and controlled. Feelings or inclinations cannot be unbridled; for Cranch all must be subjected to an overarching sense of duty.

In “The Three Mountains,” Cranch discusses the Mount of Instruction, Mount of Transfiguration, and the Mount of Crucifixion. Experiencing all three mountains leads to salvation. After the Christian has witnessed Religion as “Truth and Beauty,” in the Mount of Transfiguration, the narrator counsels him “to be strong, self-denying, active, resigned. Religion must be to him something more than merely a sermon and a dream of Beauty. The Soul's Calvary must be the Soul's gate to Heaven.” Cranch stressed the importance of enduring “the hard duties and trials of life” in order to achieve salvation.⁵⁸ As indicated by his correspondence, the virtues of self-denial and action are the same virtues that Cranch hoped to cultivate in the West. His attempts to reject aesthetics and consecrate himself for the ministry became his Calvary. He constantly recognized the difficulties of the Christian experience, especially as related to his own experience in the West, and his prose became the attempt to work through these difficulties by justifying them as a service to a greater good.

Cranch also betrays his insecurities about his aesthetic impulses and his profession by using metaphors from music. Here he describes the importance of expression in strengthening thought and feeling: “Expression calls back thought on the feelings, and fixes it, and takes its impress in the mind and heart—makes it echo and reverberate like sound in the deep chambers of the soul, till we have caught the key note of the new harmony that comes chiming in upon us.”⁵⁹ According to Cranch, this process explains the need for prayer, which strengthens religious feelings. It is also the reason that poets, musicians, and painters need their respective means of expression. Cranch links prayer with his three aesthetic interests and uses them to make his case. Through expression, “we then begin to feel a certain faith in the reality of what we have uttered, which before we had not.”⁶⁰ Could this statement reflect Cranch's own insecurities about the ministry? As in his earlier letter to Dwight, the response of others to his faith, rather than the faith itself, served as its validation. Near the end of his tenure in the Ohio Valley, Cranch wavered between service to the Unitarian God and service to the Muses. In 1838 he did not have the inner strength or outward support to accept his “tastes” as a career. Instead, he continued to chastise himself for wavering in his devotion.

In 1839 circumstances forced Cranch, along with many other of the young missionaries, to assess the success of his ministry in the West. Of course, he immediately detected his so-called faults, and therefore began the year with a resolve to correct his supposed flaws. In the first entry from his 1839 journal, he asks God for a firmer faith and chides himself for his inactivity and indifference:

All things must become more real to me. I must ‘see into the life of things.’ I must realize. The great end of life is to realize. At present I only dream. Half of my existence seems to be dreaming. A deadly Indifference hangs over me—like a lethargy. It is partly temperament & partly habit of mind—I think. I must break this egg shell—out of this prison I must forth. I must realize, & the way to realize, is to give up dreaming and go to acting & working. As to needed knowledge, will it not “come round,” as Emerson says, to him who works and truly lives?⁶¹

Cranch applies Emerson's doctrines to his failure in the Unitarian mission. He also uses Carlyle to criticize his passivity:

I want faith in my former impressions & convictions, and aspirings. I want Faith that I am a Spirit. … I must not be afraid of my thought, if it is an earnest and true one, to myself … I must be an independent feeler. I am not now natural enough. I am afraid of those around me. They'll think me affected, strange, undignified or lax in principle. Must not mind them. Do what is right and natural. Obey my higher instincts. In a word—I must begin to Live. Then I shall begin to Realize—then to think, feel, act, grow.

The ministry to the Poor, may be a great thing for me. A stern discipline, but a salutary.

God grant me faith and patience, and the spirit of self-sacrifice!⁶²

Cranch's attempts to break free from the judgment of others were paralyzed by a superimposed belief in the importance of “discipline” for authentic vocation. Howe labels Unitarian character development as a “peculiar mixture of moral conditioning, emotional stimulation, and learning to keep busy.”⁶³ Cranch's constant attempts to “think, feel, act, grow” illustrate his awareness of that standard. However, his western experiences led him to the inevitable conclusion that he did not possess the abilities to promote the Unitarian mission in the West.⁶⁴ When James Handasyde Perkins offered to replace Cranch in his position ministering to the poor in Cincinnati, he accepted. Rather than merely criticizing his failure to live up to a standard, he maturely assessed his talents and admitted his unsuitability for the position. He bowed to men like Perkins:

He will make the most efficient minister to the poor, that could be found in the country. He is already fitted for it. I am not. The time that I should spend in learning, he would spend in acting—and acting on the broadest foundation, & with the most earnest & devoted spirit. It will release me from my position—a position I have been standing in less than from my own will, than from the urgency of my friends. I feel that though this ministry would be a glorious discipline to myself, yet I am unfitted for it by taste and habits; while with Perkins, it seems to be the very sphere for which everything predestines him.

Still some such discipline I must have. But where shall I now go? The West is all open before me. Shall I remain this side of the Mountains, or not? I must decide quickly.⁶⁵

Cranch's admission of failure and acknowledgment of his dissatisfaction with his imposed vocation freed him to return to the East. Upon acceptance of the weakness of his faith, he moved back to the established center of Unitarianism to find a “home, steady work, and a wife.”⁶⁶ Nevertheless, he did not completely give up the ministry, only his missionary wanderings. Still, he continued to search for a “discipline” and to criticize his lack of action and his failure in devotion to duty. In February he lamented “this dreadful indifference which hangs upon me—! … I am dissatisfied with myself, and almost everything about me.” He looked to action to remedy this deplorable condition. “Action—a habitual daily fixed routine of duty can alone deliver me from the body of this death. I feel now as if I were letting my powers run to waste. It must not be.”⁶⁷

Cranch could not formally reject the ministry and accept his aestheticism until he found a way to reconcile a career in art with his sense of duty. In Washington City in April 1839, he records his pastimes:

Occasionally draw, & india-ink and flute, … or amuse myself with the piano forte. My passion for music is such that I sometimes wonder tis not all-absorbing. No enjoyment of my existence is greater. When I sit down at twilight to the piano forte, and roam over the soul like chords of that glorious instrument, I can feel what perfect beauty is. What God is. I can feel what the language of angels must be. That language must be music. What else can it be?⁶⁸

He adopted art as a method of perceiving a higher truth. Yet he refused to devote himself to the cultivation of the arts, continuing to believe in an imposed view of a “profession” as weightier than “talents” and “tastes.” He adds in the same entry: “I must learn to renounce, more than I do, many of my talents & tastes in music & drawing, for instance, & give myself more to my profession. I am behind bad in this. I am too desultory—too indolent, too unclerical.”⁶⁹

The necessity for action and self-denial haunted Cranch's prose in early 1839 as he confronted personal and professional crises in terms of faith and vocation. In the January 1839 issue of the Western Messenger, he prompts men “more by the actions than by the feelings that we must discern the Regeneration of the human soul. We consider man's deeds a test of his religion.”⁷⁰ He continued to renounce self-fulfillment and self-reliance. In the April Messenger, he cautiously advises Unitarians that “the only safe rule in searching for religious truth, is to leave fruitless speculations, and not attempt to be wise beyond what is revealed and written.”⁷¹ In July, he contends that men should “‘be still’ and wait, trusting in God and faithful to duty, and in due time, all will be revealed.”⁷² In his prose Cranch cannot yet divorce faith from suppression of self.

However, the more imaginative prose marks a shift in Cranch's emphasis from God's role in the world to the interaction between Nature and the autonomous self. When he does discuss God's power in the universe, he uses metaphors. In the parable, “Prayer Without Ceasing,” Nature speaks to the narrator: “And is not this beautiful mist that is stealing up, and this breath of the opening flowers that steals up with it, the silent orisons of Nature to her God?” The narrator responds poetically: “I look abroad on the awakening landscape, as the golden light comes from afar, kissing the earth as a mother kisses her waking child.”⁷³ In his last parable for the Western Messenger, he uses a metaphor to compare man to a “spiritual Harp.” Although the Interpreter adds that “its place in this life is a state of trial and discipline,” the man who keeps his harp in “tune by labouring with God,” will participate in Heaven “in the thousand varied strains of the celestial Hymn.”⁷⁴ Linking music with religion provides a way for Cranch to express his aestheticism without participation in “unclerical” activities.

Cranch finally began to come to some sort of reconciliation, at least unconsciously, with his aestheticism. This is evidenced in his June contribution to the Messenger. He submitted “Dreams” in January 1839, the same month in which he struggled against his propensity to dream rather than act. However, in this piece, he describes dreams as “Poetry” manufactured by the creator in order to demonstrate man's connection to the spiritual world. He asks: “may it not be, that dreams are one way in which the spiritual gains access to the spirit's ear … the invisible element which enwraps our being, streams inward to the imprisoned spirit, to remind it of its glorious birth, nature, and heritage?”⁷⁵ Instead of a faculty which restricts necessary action, he aligns dreaming with the Imagination, which reveals spiritual realities. In July, Cranch supports the “romantic in the soul” in “Leaves from My Omnibus Book.” The soul that pauses before Nature “looks on life and the world with an angel's eye, not with a dreamer's. It is allied to faith, to lofty enthusiasm, to all things beautiful and holy.” He carefully qualifies his praise, dividing these natures into false and true romance. “It is only a false, morbid romance which steals away from life and duty and action, and creates its own world, which it peoples with its own idle dreams.”⁷⁶ Duty is still present, and still qualifies his aestheticism. Cranch must eventually accept such a qualification or reject his past.

After Cranch left Cincinnati, he led a life very similar to the one he had led in the West, with one major exception. His proximity to the cultural centers of the East allowed him to devote more time to the arts as leisure activities, and directly exposed him to the heated debate over Transcendentalism. In Boston in February 1840 he describes his life as “a sort of dissipation,”⁷⁷ where he takes advantage of the cultural atmosphere. However, Cranch produced very little prose in the few years before he seriously began to consider leaving the ministry. In the same letter, he relates: “I have had no invitations from the Muse in a long time.”⁷⁸

The few pieces of prose he wrote for the Western Messenger and the Dial indicate that he had fully accepted Transcendentalism, perhaps explaining the new freedom in his prose from the restrictions of religion. In “Grandfather's Spectacles,” he contrasts the worn-out theology suiting “old eyes” with “some newer and more living form of faith.” He concludes: “let us then leave the old for the old, and take what is good and true out of the new forms, and we shall be suited, and get along comfortably and peaceably.”⁷⁹ The last statement—“get along comfortably and peacefully”—reflects Cranch's new ideals for his life at that date. His involvement in the Transcendentalist controversy came about because he could not understand how a liberal religion could reject any “free seekers after truth.”⁸⁰ As he defended freedom of expression, he began to accept it as a possibility for himself. In a “Sign from the West,” he states his satisfaction with the discourse of Andrew Wylie, “one who, if he lived here, would go about branded with the nickname ‘Transcendentalist,’ a terror to women and children—the more as having crept out of an unlooked-for quarter.”⁸¹ He aligns himself with men like Emerson and Wylie who supported “Intuition” and rejects the expression of Christianity only as a creed. Cranch's prose hints at his eventual decision to trust completely in his own Intuition.

The movement from duty to inclination and practical action to spiritual knowledge appears in the prose of these years. In “Musings of a Recluse,” he stresses the needlessness of “watching, guarding, and arranging our actions … Is not the difference between spiritual and material things just this; that in one case we must watch the details, in the other keep alive the high resolve, and the details will take care of themselves?”⁸² Cranch had shifted his devotion from duty to religion to duty to self. In “Glimmerings,” published in the Dial in January 1841, Cranch's acceptance of human knowledge as “but approximation” freed him from certain obligations that weighed heavily on him while he lived in the West. In this piece, he stresses nature's importance to the soul's rejuvenation. “Least of all does she imitate our obtrusive moral codes. She reads her mysterious fables, but we are not pestered by the word ‘application’ at the bottom of the picture.”⁸³

This shift helps to explain Cranch's movement toward the arts as a career. But what else accounted for Cranch's decision to leave the ministry in 1843, and why did he wait so long? In 1840 Cranch first began to experience the symptoms of an illness that plagued him for three years. According to Scott, “to occupy himself while he had some distemper which prevented him from writing or thinking for the time being, he turned to painting.”⁸⁴ Cranch called this painting a “great solace and delight”⁸⁵ but he did not consider abandoning the ministry with that discovery. In 1841 Cranch was located in Washington and was completely self-absorbed with painting. Therefore, he barely realized that Parker and Dwight had accepted views which made it impossible for them to remain in the ministry. With the realization that these views mirrored his own, and would force him to follow the direction of his friends, he began to consider painting no less a precarious profession than the ministry and also one more suited to his talents. He shares this discovery with Emerson:

I have been spending the summer at the South, and have lately taken very vigorously to landscape painting, which I am strongly tempted to follow in future instead of sermon writing. It is an art I have fondly looked at from boyhood. Whether I turn artist or not, I become more and more inclined to sink the minister in the man, and abandon my present calling in toto as a profession. Verily our churches will force us to do it whether we will or not.⁸⁶

However, Cranch was content to wait until forced to leave. He explains his position in a letter to Dwight from Burlington, Vermont, in 1842:

I am determined not to give up preaching unless compelled to by health, and by want of sympathy and encouragement from without. I like my profession in many respects, and have grown accustomed to it. I should never get bread in any other way; and I know not if, upon the whole, any other sphere of life would bring me any more inward peace and satisfaction than this. I am resolved, therefore, to submit as far as I can do so without compromising my views and feelings, to such usages and forms as the profession ordinarily carries with it, and to wait for things to grow better and more rational.⁸⁷

Between 1841 and 1843 Cranch found that the Unitarian Association's awareness of his affiliation with the “heretical” Transcendentalists made a permanent place for him more unlikely. In May 1843 he writes again to Dwight of his ambition to enter “life as a whole man—an individual man; and if possible, of working and earning money in some way suited to my tastes.”⁸⁸

Therefore, with the support of his new wife, Cranch decided to devote himself to a career as illustrator, landscape painter, and author. He describes his new cause in aestheticism that stands apart from “everyday” duty:

Here in this quiet, subdued, mellow light, the harsh world is shut out, and approached only when duty and common everyday interests summon us to action, which only prepares us for the next day's absorbing labor, at the end of which we only find ourselves weary without knowing why. And is not the artist, too, working for truth and goodness as well as beauty? I have an inward feeling that my time is not misspent, though I may never attain to eminence. If I can, in the remotest degree, by my labors, bring the thoughts of nature and the dreams of paradise into a single soul, I have done some good, I have spoken some truth.⁸⁹

Cranch realized that “common” duty and “higher” inclinations usually did not lead in the same direction. Therefore, he found a way to infuse painting with a greater duty by linking the exposure of others to “truth and goodness” with inclination. A combination of factors, including his increasingly unpopular position in the Unitarian Church, his illness, and encouragement from his friends, Emerson, and his wife, prompted his formal separation from the ministry. He came to his own private reconciliation between art and religion.

Like Emerson, Cranch faced a conflict between vocation and inclination. Emerson's “inability to satisfy simultaneously the conventions of his youth, the demands of humanitarians, his own temperamental inclination, and the ethical ideals of English Romanticism” caused a tension that he could not resolve in his early career.⁹⁰ Cranch's distance from the center of Unitarianism, his stoic temperament, and a lack of confidence in his usefulness without the ministry allowed him to publicly avoid these problems while in the West. However, the prose demonstrates Cranch's insecurities and his struggle to find a niche in an unsuitable profession and an alien society. After he left the West, the tension between self-consecration and self-fulfillment continued to plague him.

In 1850 Cranch expresses this dichotomy between professionalism and aestheticism in a letter to his brother:

I don't like to think that your theory, or your life, should be all sacrificed, made up of nothing but duty. Or at least I want to hear some time that your duty and your inclinations both point in the same direction. O, why were you not an artist; or a literary man, or an editor, or a farmer; or anything for which God and nature fitted you, rather than a lawyer?⁹¹

Henry A. Pochman also associates Cranch with Fuller and a few other Transcendentalists in his cultivation of the arts.⁹² And according to David Robinson, “art was both a psychological and an economic salvation for Cranch, offering him deep personal satisfaction and the means of a livelihood that could not have been obtained through letters alone.”⁹³ Are Cranch's sentiments similar to other artists' in the period? Did other artists feel that “economic and psychological salvation” was discouraged through an imposed sense of duty to society or others? Where does devotion to self end and responsibility to society begin? Contrasting attitudes toward inclination and duty in different artists with the “conventional” views of nineteenth-century society might help us to better understand the literary branch of the Transcendentalist movement.

Notes

1. Leonora Cranch Scott, The Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), p. 281.

2. Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865, rev. ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1941), p. 258.

3. The Transcendentalists, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 179.

4. F. DeWolfe Miller, “Christopher Pearse Cranch: New England Transcendentalist” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1942), p. vi.

5. Miller, The Transcendentalists, p. 385.

6. Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), p. 42. Buell links Cranch with a group of Transcendentalists who moved beyond Emerson in pursuing aesthetic interests.

7. Miller, “Cranch,” p. 10.

8. Scott, Cranch, p. 11.

9. Elizabeth B. McKinsey, The Western Experiment: New England Transcendentalists in the Ohio Valley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), p. 34.

10. Scott, Cranch, p. 6.

11. Scott, Cranch, p. 14.

12. Scott, Cranch, p. 67.

13. Scott, Cranch, p. 19.

14. Scott, Cranch, p. 20.

15. Daniel Walker Howe, The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy, 1805-1861 (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), p. 107. Howe describes the Unitarian religion as a “means of self-culture.” This self-culture is the attention to sentiments and duty resulting from the realization of man's obligations to God. Proper action discharges this obligation.

16. Miller, “Cranch,” p. 31.

17. See Scott, Cranch, p. 23.

18. See Daniel Day Williams, The Andover Liberals: A Study in American Theology (Morningside Heights, N. Y.: King's Crown Press, 1941). Williams discusses Andover's shift from conservatism to liberal Christianity in the nineteenth century.

19. Scott, Cranch, p. 30.

20. Francis B. Dedmond, “Christopher Pearse Cranch's ‘Journal 1839,’” Studies in the American Renaissance 1978, p. 130.

21. Scott, Cranch, p. 21.

22. Scott, Cranch, p. 25.

23. Scott, Cranch, p. 27.

24. Scott, Cranch, p. 31. Leonora Cranch Scott uses these words to describe Eliot.

25. Miller, “Cranch,” p. 65.

26. Robert D. Habich, Transcendentalism and the Western Messenger (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), pp. 25-48.

27. Scott, Cranch, p. 26.

28. Scott, Cranch, p. 35.

29. See Miller, “Cranch,” p. 131.

30. Scott, Cranch, pp. 39-40.

31. See McKinsey, The Western Experiment, pp. 23-24.

32. Scott, Cranch, p. 41.

33. Scott, Cranch, p. 32.

34. Miller, “Cranch,” p. 31.

35. F. DeWolfe Miller, Christopher Pearse Cranch and his Caricatures of New England Transcendentalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 12-13.

36. Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, p. 116n.

37. Western Messenger, 3 (July 1837): 841-42.

38. Western Messenger, 4 (November 1837): 156.

39. Western Messenger, 4 (November 1837): 158.

40. Western Messenger, 4 (November 1837): 163.

41. Western Messenger, 4 (November 1837): 184.

42. Western Messenger, 4 (November 1837): 188.

43. Scott, Cranch, p. 59.

44. Western Messenger, 4 (November 1837): 186

45. Scott, Cranch, p. 42.

46. Scott, Cranch, p. 42.

47. Scott, Cranch, p. 43.

48. Scott, Cranch, p. 44.

49. Scott, Cranch, p. 156.

50. Western Messenger, 5 (June 1838): 183.

51. Western Messenger, 5 (June 1838): 184.

52. Western Messenger, 5 (June 1838): 185.

53. Western Messenger, 5 (June 1838): 185.

54. Western Messenger, 5 (August 1838): 339.

55. Western Messenger, 5 (August 1838): 340-41.

56. Western Messenger, 5 (August 1838): 342.

57. Western Messenger, 5 (September 1838): 374.

58. Western Messenger, 6 (December 1838): 97.

59. Western Messenger, 5 (September 1838): 375.

60. Western Messenger, 5 (September 1838): 375.

61. Dedmond, “Journal,” p. 138.

62. Dedmond, “Journal,” p. 139.

63. Howe, The Unitarian Conscience, p. 113.

64. Miller, “Cranch,” p. 97.

65. Dedmond, “Journal,” p. 143.

66. See Scott, Cranch, p. 45.

67. Dedmond, “Journal 1839,” p. 144.

68. Dedmond, “Journal 1839,” p. 144.

69. Dedmond, “Journal 1839,” p. 144.

70. Western Messenger, 6 (January 1839): 151.

71. Western Messenger, 6 (April 1839): 401.

72. Western Messenger, 7 (July 1839): 192.

73. Western Messenger, 6 (January 1839): 152-53.

74. Western Messenger, 6 (February 1839): 269-70.

75. Western Messenger, 7 (June 1839): 99.

76. Western Messenger, 7 (July 1839): 197.

77. Scott, Cranch, p. 48.

78. Scott, Cranch, p. 48.

79. Western Messenger, 8 (July 1840): 120.

80. Scott, Cranch, p. 51.

81. Dial, 1 (October 1840): 163.

82. Dial, 1 (October 1840): 188.

83. Dial, 1 (January 1841): 397.

84. Scott, Cranch, p. 66.

85. Scott, Cranch, p. 66.

86. Scott, Cranch, p. 60.

87. Scott, Cranch, p. 79.

88. Scott, Cranch, p. 80.

89. Scott, Cranch, p. 83.

90. Henry Nash Smith, “Emerson's Problem of Vocation: A Note on the American Scholar,” New England Quarterly, 12 (March 1939): 60.

91. Scott, Cranch, p. 179.

92. Henry A, Pochman, German Culture in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 449.

93. David Robinson, “The Career and Reputation of Christopher Pearse Cranch: An Essay in Biography and Bibliography,” Studies in the American Renaissance 1978, p. 470.