unostentatious manner. He went to dine with his old friends, but avoided
introductions, and remained at Florence nearly two months after other
Americans had departed for Rome. The reason he alleged for this was that
Rome was a mouldy place and the ruins made him feel melancholy; also,
because he preferred oil paintings to frescos. He had just come from
Venice, and spoke with enthusiasm of the mighty works of Tintoretto,--
especially his small painting of the Visitation, above the landing of the
staircase in the Scuola of San Rocco. He did not like the easel-paintings
of Raphael on account of their hard outlines; those in the Vatican did
him better justice. This idea he may have derived from William Morris
Hunt, the Boston portrait-painter. He considered the action of the Niobe
group too strenuous to be represented in marble.
Miss Mary Felton liked the Niobe statues; so Lowell said, "Now come back
with me, and I will sit on you." Accordingly we all returned to the Niobe
hall, where Lowell lectured us on the statues without, however, entirely
convincing Miss Felton. Then we went to the hall in the Uffizi Palace,
which is called the _Tribune_. Mrs. Lowell had never been in the
_Tribune_, where the Venus de' Medici is enshrined; so her husband
opened the door wide and said, "Now go in"--as if he were opening the
gates of Paradise.
At Bologna he wished to make an excursion into the mountains, but the
100 veturino charged about twice the usual price, and though the man
afterwards reduced his demand to a reasonable figure Lowell would not go
with him at all, and told him that such practices made Americans dislike
the Italian people. It is to be feared that a strange Italian might fare
just as badly in America.
Readers of Lowell's "Fireside Travels" will have noticed that the first
of them is addressed to the "Edelmann Storg" in Rome. The true translation
of this expression is "Nobleman Story;" that is, William W. Story,
the sculptor, who modelled the statue of Edward Everett in the Boston
public garden. Lowell's biographer, however, does not appear to have
been aware of the full significance of this paraphrase of Story's name.
When King Bomba II. was expelled from Naples by Garibaldi he retired to
Rome with his private possessions, including a large number of oil
paintings. Wishing to dispose of some of these, and being aware that
Americans paid good prices, he applied to William Story to transact the
business for him. This the sculptor did in a satisfactory manner;
whereupon King Bomba, instead of rewarding Story with a cheque, conferred
on him a patent of nobility. It seems equally strange that Story should
have accepted such a dubious honor, and that Lowell should recognize it.
On his return to Cambridge the following year, Lowell found himself a
grandfather, his daughter having married a gentleman farmer in Worcester
county. He was greatly delighted, and wrote to E. L. Godkin, editor of
_The Nation_:
"If you wish to taste the real bouquet of life, I advise you to procure
yourself a grandson, whether by adoption or theft.... Get one, and the
_Nation_ will no longer offend anybody." [Footnote: Scudder's
biography, ii., 186.]
This was a pretty broad hint, but E. L. Godkin was not the man to pay
much attention to the advice of Lowell or anybody. In fact, he seems to
have won Lowell over after this to his own way of thinking.
Lowell certainly became more conservative with age. He did not support
the movement for negro citizenship, and had separated himself in a manner
from the other New England poets. After 1872 Longfellow saw little of
him, except on state occasions. In 1876 he made a political address that
showed that if he had not already gone over to the Democratic party he
was very close upon the line. Charles Francis Adams had already gone over
to Tilden, and had carried the _North American Review_ with him. It
would not do to lose Lowell also, so the Republican leaders hit upon the
shrewd device of nominating him as a presidential elector, an honor which
he could not very well decline. When the disputed election of Hayes and
Tilden came, Godkin proposed that, in order to prevent "Mexicanizing the
government," one of the Hayes electors should cast his vote for General
Bristow, which would throw the election of President into the House of
Representatives; and he endeavored to persuade Lowell to do this. Lowell
went so far as to take legal advice on the subject, but his counsellor
informed him that since the election of John Quincy Adams it had been
virtually decided that an elector must cast his vote according to the
ticket on which he was chosen. When the electors met at the Parker House
in January, 1877, Lowell deposited his ballot for Hayes and Wheeler, and
the slight applause that followed showed that his colleagues were
conscious of the position he had assumed.
When President Hayes appointed Lowell to be Minister to Spain, Lowell
remarked that he did not see why it should have come to him. It really
came to him through his friend E. E. Hoar, of Concord, who was brother-
in-law to Secretary Evarts. His friends wondered that he should accept
the position, but the truth was that Lowell at this time was
comparatively poor. His taxes had increased, and his income had
diminished. He complained to C. P. Cranch that the whole profit from the
sale of his books during the preceding year was less than a hundred
dollars, and he thought there ought to be a law for the protection of
authors. The real trouble was hard times.
He did not like Madrid, and at the end of a year wrote that it seemed
impossible for him to endure the life there any longer. Evarts gave him a
vacation, and at the end of the second year Hayes promoted him to the
Court of St. James.
Such an appointment would have been dangerous enough in 1861, but at the
time it was made the relations between the United States and Great
Britain were sufficiently peaceable to warrant it. Lowell represented his
country in a highly creditable manner. The only difficulty he experienced
was with the Fenian agitation, and he managed that with such diplomatic
tact that no one has yet been able to discover whether he was in favor of
home rule for Ireland or not.
He made a number of excellent addresses in England, besides a multitude
of after-dinner speeches. Perhaps the best of them was his address at the
Coleridge celebration, in which he levelled an attack on the English
canonization of what they call "common sense," but which is really a new
name for dogmatism. Lowell, if not a transcendentalist, was always an
idealist, and he knew that ideality was as necessary to Cromwell and
Canning as it was to Shakespeare and Scott.
He was certainly more popular in England than he had ever been in
America, and he openly admitted that he disliked to resign his position.
Professor Child said, in 1882: "Lowell's conversation is witty, with a
basis of literary cramming; and that seems to be what the English like.
He went to twenty-nine dinner parties in the month of June, and made a
speech at each one of them."
In the last years of his life he was greatly infested with imitators who,
as he said of Emerson in the "Fable for Critics," stole his fruit and
then brought it back to him on their own dishes. Some of them were too
influential to be easily disposed of, and others did not know when they
were rebuffed. An old man, failing in strength and vigor, he had to
endure them as best he could.
The story of Lowell's visions rests on a single authority, and if there
was any truth in it, it seems probable that he would have confided the
fact to more intimate friends. There are well-authenticated instances of
visions seen by persons in a waking condition--this always happens, for
instance, in _delirium tremens_--but they are sure to indicate
nervous derangement, and are commonly followed by death. If there was
ever a poet with a sound mind and a sound body, it was James Russell
Lowell.
Edwin Arnold considered him the best of American poets, while Matthew
Arnold did not like him at all. Emerson, in his last years, preferred him
to Longfellow, but it is doubtful if he always did so. The strong point
of his poetry is its intelligent manliness,--the absence of affectation
and all sentimentality; but it lacks the musical element. He composed
neither songs nor ballads,--nothing to match Hiawatha, or Gray's famous
Elegy. America still awaits a poet who shall combine the _savoir
faire_ of Lowell with the force of Emerson and the grace and purity of
Longfellow.
Emerson had an advantage over his literary contemporaries in the vigorous
life he lived. You feel in his writing the energy of necessity. The
academic shade is not favorable to the cultivation of genius, and Lowell
reclined under it too much. His best work was already performed before he
became a professor. What he lacks as a poet, however, he compensates for
as a wit. He is the best of American humorists--there are few who will be
inclined to dispute that--even though we regret occasional cynicisms,
like his jest on Milton's blindness in "Fireside Travels."
[Illustration: C. P. CRANCH]
CRANCH.
Christopher Pearce Cranch was born March 9, 1813, at Alexandria,
Virginia, and was the son of Judge William Cranch, of the United States
Circuit Court. His father came originally from Weymouth, Massachusetts,
and had been appointed to his position through the influence of John
Quincy Adams. His mother, Anna Greenleaf, belonged to a well known Boston
family. Pearce, as he was always called by his relatives, indicated a
talent for the fine arts, as commonly happens, at an early age, and
united with this a lively interest in music, singing and playing on the
flute. These side issues may have prevented him from entering college so
early as he might otherwise have done. He graduated at Columbia College,
in 1832, after a three-year course. He wished to make a profession of
painting, but Judge Cranch was aware how precarious this would be as a
means of livelihood, and advised him to study for the ministry,--for
which his quiet ways and grave demeanor seemed to have adapted him. He
accordingly entered the Harvard Divinity-School, and was ordained as a
Unitarian clergyman.
For the next six years Cranch lived the life of an itinerant preacher. He
preached all over New England, making friends everywhere, and receiving
numerous calls without, however, settling down to a fixed habitation.
This would seem to have been a peculiarity of his temperament; for
in 1875 George William Curtis wrote to Mr. and Mrs. Cranch a letter which
began with "O ye Bedouins"; and it is true that until that time he can
hardly be said to have had a habitation of his own. He extended his
migration as minister-at-large from Bangor, Maine, to Louisville,
Kentucky. His varied accomplishments made him attractive to the younger
members of the parishes for which he preached, but he never remained long
enough in one place for their interest to take root.
The wave of German thought and literary interest was now sweeping over
England and America. Repelled by doctors of divinity and the older class
of scholars, it was seized upon with avidity by the more susceptible
natures of the younger generation. Its influence was destined to be felt
all through the coming period of American literature. C. P. Cranch was
affected by it, as Emerson, Longfellow and even Hawthorne, were affected
by it. This, however, did not take place at once, and when Emerson's
"Nature" was published, Cranch was at first repelled by the peculiarity
of its style. At the house of Rev. James Freeman Clark, in Cincinnati, he
drew some innocently satirical illustrations of it. One was of a man with
an enormous eye under which he wrote: "I became one great transparent
eye-ball"; and another was a pumpkin with a human face, beneath which was
written: "We expand and grow in the sunshine." In another sketch Emerson
and Margaret Fuller were represented driving "over hill and dale" in a
rockaway.
[Footnote: Sanborn's Life of Alcott.]
He would make these humorous sketches to entertain his friends at any
time, seizing on a half-sheet of paper, or whatever might be at hand; but
he did not long continue to caricature Emerson. His first volume of
poetry, published in 1844, was dedicated to Emerson, and in Dwight's
"Translations from Goethe and Schiller," there are a number of short
pieces by Cranch, almost perfect in their rendering from German to
English. Among these the celebrated ballad of "The Fisher" is translated
so beautifully as to be slightly, if at all, inferior to the original.
The stanza,
"The water in dreamy motion kept,
As he sat in a dreamy mood,
A wave hove up, and a damsel stept
All dripping from the flood,"
may have appealed strongly to Cranch at this time; for we find that in
October, 1841, he was married at Fishkill-on-the-Hudson to a young lady
of an old Knickerbocker family, Miss Elizabeth De Windt. If she did not
come to him out of the Hudson, there can be no doubt that he courted her
by the banks of the most beautiful river in North America.
Cranch had given up the clerical profession six months before this, and
had adopted that of a landscape painter, for which he would seem to have
studied with some artist in New York City,--unknown to fame, and long
since forgotten. He continued to sketch and paint, and write prose and
verse on the Hudson until 1846, when he embarked with his wife on a
sailing packet for Marseilles. He had the good fortune to find a fellow-
passenger in George William Curtis, and during the voyage of seven weeks,
a lifelong friendship grew up between these two highly gifted men.
The volume of poems which he published in 1844 is now exceedingly rare;
yet many of the pieces belong to a high order of excellence. In ease and
grace of versification they resemble Longfellow, but in thought they are
more like Emerson or Goethe. Consider this opening from "The Riddle":
"Ye bards, ye prophets, ye sages,
Read to me, if ye can,
That which hath been the riddle of ages,
Read me the riddle of _Man_.
Then came the bard with his lyre,
And the sage with his pen and scroll,
And the prophet with his eye of fire,
To unriddle a human soul.
But the soul stood up in its might;
Its stature they could not scan;
And it rayed out a dazzling mystic light,
And shamed their wisest plan.
Yet sweetly the bard did sing,
And learnedly talked the sage,
And the seer flashed by with his lightning wing,
Soaring beyond his age."
This is sonorous. It has a majesty of expression and a greatness of
thought which makes Longfellow's "Psalm of Life" seem weak and even
common-place. The whole poem is pitched in the same key, and Cranch never
equalled it again, excepting once, and then in a very different manner.
Rev. Gideon Arch, a Hungarian scholar, philologist, and exile of 1849,
said of his "Endymion" that there were Endymions in all languages, but
that Cranch's was the best. To resuscitate it from the oblivion into
which it has fallen, it is given entire:
"Yes, it is the queenly moon
Walking through her starred saloon,
Silvering all she looks upon:
I am her Endymion;
For by night she comes to me,--
O, I love her wondrously.
She into my window looks,
As I sit with lamp and books,
And the night-breeze stirs the leaves,
And the dew drips down the eaves;
O'er my shoulder peepeth she,
O, she loves me royally!
Then she tells me many a tale,
With her smile, so sheeny pale,
Till my soul is overcast
With such dream-light of the past,
That I saddened needs must be,
And I love her mournfully.
Oft I gaze up in her eyes,
Raying light through winter skies;
Far away she saileth on;
I am no Endymion;
O, she is too bright for me,
And I love her hopelessly!
Now she comes to me again,
And we mingle joy and pain,
Now she walks no more afar,
Regal with train-bearing star,
But she bends and kisses me--
O, we love now mutually!"
This has the very sheen of moonlight upon it, and certainly is to be
preferred to Dr. Johnson's scholastic "Endymion":
"Diana, huntress chaste and fair,
Now thy hounds have gone to sleep,"--
If Cranch had continued in this line, and perhaps have improved upon it,
he would surely have become one of the foremost American poets, but a
poet cannot live by verse alone, and after he began to be thoroughly in
earnest with his painting, his rhythmic genius fell into the background.
From Marseilles George W. Curtis proceeded to Egypt, where he wrote his
well known book of Nile travels, while Cranch set out for Rome to perfect
his art.
He studied there at a night-school, painting in water colors from nude
models and arrangements of drapery, but not taking lessons from any
regular instructor. He never applied himself much to figure-painting,
however. He sold his paintings chiefly to American travellers, and when
the Revolution broke out in 1848, he returned to Sorrento, where his
second child, Mrs. Leonora Scott, was born. His first child was born the
year previous, in Rome, but afterwards died. In 1851, he returned to New
York and Fishkill, but not meeting with such good appreciation there as
he had in Italy, he went to Europe again in the autumn of 1853, and
resided in Paris. One cause of this may have been the unfriendliness of
his brother-in-law, who was a leading art critic in New York City, and
who disliked Cranch on account of his wife, and never neglected an
opportunity of disparaging his work.
One of his early landscapes is now before me. I think it must have been
painted anterior to his sojourn in Rome, owing to the coldness of the
coloring. It represents a scene on the Hudson near Fishkill, with some
cattle in the foreground, and a rather bold-looking mountain on the
opposite side of the river. The clouds above the mountain are light and
fleecy; the foliage soft and graceful; the cattle also are fine, but the
effect is like a chilly spring day when one requires a winter overcoat.
An allegorical piece, illustrating Heine's fir-tree dreaming of the palm,
has a much pleasanter effect, although it represents a wintry scene.
His art improved greatly in Paris, and he also wrote a number of short
poems which his friend, James Russell Lowell, published in the
_Atlantic Monthly_. In 1856 George L. Stearns sent him an order for
a painting, which Cranch executed the following year, and wrote Mr.
Stearns this explanation concerning it, in a very interesting letter
dated Paris, March 18, 1857:
"Your picture is done and is quite a favorite with those who have seen
it. In fact, I think so well of it that I shall probably send it to the
Exposition, which opens soon. After that it shall be sent to you. It is
an oak and a sunset--a warm and low-toned picture--and I am sure you
will like it."
This landscape represents two vigorous oak trees by the bank of a river,
with a sunset seen through the branches, and reflected in the water. The
scene is remarkably like a similar one on Concord River, about two
hundred yards below the spot where Hawthorne and Channing discovered the
body of the schoolmistress who drowned herself, as Hawthorne supposed,
from lack of sympathy. It seems as if the original sketch must have been
made at that point. It is of a deep rich coloring, smoothly and
delicately finished,--a painting that no one has yet been able to find
fault with. Rev. Samuel Longfellow, who knew almost every picture in the
galleries of Europe, considered it equal to a Ruysdael, and he liked it
better than a Ruysdael.
In the letter above referred to Cranch also writes:
"Since your letter (a long time ago) I have written you a good many
epistles (in a kind of invisible ink of my invention) which probably you
have never received.
"The truth is, I am a distinguished case of total depravity in the matter
of correspondence. Letters ought to flow from one as easily and
spontaneously as spoken words. But then one must write all the time and
report life continuously, as one does in speech. A letter does nothing
but give some little detached morsel of one's life--and we say to
ourselves what is the use of holding up to a friend three thousand miles
off such unsatisfactory statements, such dribblings and droppings? 'Write
what is uppermost,' says one at your elbow. Ah, if we could only say what
is uppermost; as I sit down for instance to write (say this letter) I am
caught into a sort of whirl of thoughts, in which it is impossible to say
exactly what is foremost and what is hindmost. Then if I only attempt to
narrate events, where am I to begin--so you see (I am theorizing about
letters) a letter must be a sort of epitome of a friend's being and life
or else nothing. Applying the theory to myself, finding myself unable to
shut my genie in a box and carry him on my shoulders, I simply go and
state that there is such a box with a genie supposed to be in it, lying
at the custom-house, and here is the roughest sort of sketch of it," etc.
This is characteristic of the man. He lived largely in an atmosphere of
poetic pleasantry, which served as an alleviation to his cares and as an
attraction to his friends.
Cranch did not always succeed so well. He never became a mannerist, but
there was too much similarity in his subjects, and the treatment too
often bordered on the commonplace. Tintoretto said: "Colors can be bought
at the paint-shop, but good designs are only obtained by sleepless nights
and much reflection." It is doubtful if Cranch ever laid awake over his
work, either in poetry or painting. He had a dreamy, phlegmatic
disposition, which seemed to carry him through life without much effort
of the will. He once confessed that when he was a boy he would never fire
a gun for fear it might kick him over, and when he was at Hampton beach
in 1875 he was in the habit of going out to sketch at a certain hour with
prosaic regularity. He did not seem to be on the watch, as an artist
should, for rare effects of light and scenery, and he talked of art with
very little enthusiasm. Yet he lived the true life of his profession,
enjoying his work, contented with little praise, and without envy of
those who were more fortunate. What is called _odium artisticum_ was
unknown to him.
He was an unpretending, courteous American gentleman. His disposition was
perfect, and no one could remember having seen him out of temper. His
pleasant flow of wit and humor, together with his varied accomplishments,
made him a very brilliant man in society, and he counted among his
friends the finest _literati_ in Rome, London, and the United
States. He knew Thackeray as he knew Curtis and Lowell, and was once
dining with him in a London chop-house, when Thackeray said: "Have you
read the last number of The Newcombs?--if not, I will read it to you."
Accordingly he gave the waiter a shilling to obtain the document, and
read it aloud to Cranch and a friend who was with him.
[Footnote: Both mentioned in Hawthorne's Notebook.]
Cranch could never understand this, for it was the last thing he would
have done himself without an invitation; but he enjoyed the reading, and
often referred to it.
When he returned to America in 1863 he went to live on Staten Island in
order to be near George William Curtis, who cared for him as Damon did
for Pythias, and who served to counteract the ill-omened influence of
Cranch's brother-in-law. The Century Club purchased one of his pictures,
an allegorical subject, which I believe still hangs in their halls. From
1873 to 1877 Lowell would seem to have frequented Cranch's house in
preference to any other in Cambridge.
When Cranch first went to live there he occupied a small but sunny and
otherwise desirable house on the westerly side of Appian Way,--a name
that amused him mightily,--but in 1876 he purchased the house on the
southwestern corner of Ellery and Harvard Streets. Having arranged his
household goods there he sent one of his own paintings as a present to
Emerson in order to renew their early acquaintance. Emerson responded to
it by a characteristic note, in which he said that his son and daughter,
who were both good artists, had expressed their approval of his present.
He then referred to the danger which arises from a multiplicity of
talents, and said: "I well recollect how you made the frogs vocal in the
ponds back of Sleepy Hollow."
Cranch did not feel that this was very complimentary, but a few days
later there came an invitation for Mr. and Mrs. Cranch to spend the day
at Concord. Emerson met them at the railway station with his carryall. He
had on an old cylinder hat which had evidently seen good service, and yet
became him remarkably. He was interested to hear what George William
Curtis thought about politics, and to find that it agreed closely with
the opinion of his friend, Judge Hoar. The Cranchs had a delightful
visit.