SOURCE: Levenson, J. C. “Christopher Pearse Cranch: The Case History of a Minor Artist in America.” American Literature 21, no. 4 (January 1950): 415-26.

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...