Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense
It is this: Pound and Eliot are in the main loyal to the principle of
authority, whereas Frost depends entirely upon personal discovery.
Pound and Eliot give allegiance to literary tradition as a governing
body, seeking only to produce work that, while molded by tradition,
still has sufficient novelty of conception and style to alter somewhat
the existing body of letters. Frost is unconcerned with such a theory
of dictatorship, adjustment and modification: he does not set up a
literary authority to serve. Like the intelligent Greek, he is simply
by nature rather positive, critical and experimental. If he manifests
the classical virtues, if he achieves a nature, an imitation of it, a
probability and a decorum which can suggest those cultivated by the
classical world, it is because he has discovered them in, through and
by his own direct experience. In comparison with him, Eliot and Pound
appear formalistic, and the distinction between them and Frost is the
distinction between neo-classicism and classicism.
It is important to see that the classicism of Robert Frost has been
evolved in a simplified world, the world of the New England farmer.
Such a farmer has a settled routine of living dependent upon the
seasons. He leads a village life in which most of the human factors
at work have the appearance of being tangible and measurable. The
intricacies of commerce and industry, the distress wrought by machines,
the flow of vast crowds, the diversity of appeals of a great city, do
not reach him. Churches are what they were, intellectual currents do
not disturb, and science, arch-upsetter of former values, finds no
opening to intrude. Frost tells of a hugger-mugger farmer who burnt his
house in order to buy a telescope with the insurance money. He gazed
with an unspoiled wonder at the heavens. But for science at large the
attitude is indifference.
“You hear those hound-dogs sing on Moosilauke?
Well, they remind me of the hue and cry
We’ve heard against the Mid-Victorians
And never rightly understood till Bryan
Retired from politics and joined the chorus.
The matter with the Mid-Victorians
Seems to have been a man named John L. Darwin.”
“Go ’long,” I said to him, he to his horse.
In Frost’s New England then many of the complex tormenting questions
that have arisen since the small city and agrarian communities of old
Greece have been lopped away from the problem of living.
“Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose.”
With this simplified world given, Frost has built his art, as
was pointed out in the preceding chapter, upon the foundation of
observation, and it is by positive and critical observation of things
conceived as discrete that Frost has discovered his Nature.
The end reached by observation as a method, whether it is a poet or a
scientist who employs it, is dualism,--that is, a set of axioms and
laws founded on distinctions. The distinctions are based on appearances
and both they and appearances are treated as reasonably final data.
Of course, something inscrutable remains beyond, “something must be
left to God,” as Frost says, but the fundamental truth or error of
dualism is not plumbed. At any rate, whether or not the real world is
dualistic, certainly the apparent world is.
So in Frost’s poetry we are consistently struck by his acceptance of
the dualistic world and his actual contentment with his lot of joy
and love “dashed with pain and weariness and fault.” Nature we feel
as a sort of friendly antagonist, dangerously strong sometimes, but
on the whole a fair opponent. In combat with her one cannot laze or
cheat: but honest struggle brings fair returns. Especially is the
line between Nature and Man always present in Frost’s mind, though
never insisted upon. For example, he spends no time dilating on the
aloofness or indifference of nature to man. Such a poem as _The Need
for Being Versed in Country Things_ illustrates very well the sense
of demarcation between man and nature which Frost preserves, his
acceptance of nature as lovely and fair, and his awareness of her
unconcern for man’s disasters. In this poem we hear of the burning of a
farmhouse and the decay of its barn. The birds nest in the latter.
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
Frost’s poetry contains no taint of the “pathetic fallacy” of the
romanticist which in these days is almost sufficient ground for
suspecting Frost’s classical tendencies.
The man that Frost treats is situated in a tamed wilderness and is
disciplined by it. In New Hampshire the mountains are not high enough,
there is nothing extravagant or unduly wild about nature, nor are the
people of Frost’s poems grandiose or expansive. Their bodies have been
contracted and hardened by sweating toil, their emotions are rock-like,
and their minds achieve a good dogged horse sense.
For art’s sake one could wish them worse
Rather than better. How are we to write
The Russian novel in America
As long as life goes so unterribly?
There is the pinch from which our only outcry
In literature to date is heard to come.
We get what little misery we can
Out of not having cause for misery.
It makes the guild of novel writers sick
To be expected to be Dostoievskis
On nothing worse than too much luck and comfort.
* * * * *
It’s Pollyanna now or death.
This, then, is the new freedom we hear tell of;
And very sensible. No state can build
A literature that shall at once be sound
And sad on a foundation of well-being.
Out of a settled social framework, an honest necessary struggle
for existence, and a fair amount of well-being, something like a
representative man can emerge. There are balances and checks to trim
down his uniqueness while at the same time there is permitted a
moderate scope for his emotional and reflective life. In such a state
the acquisitive impulse gets no favoring head start and instead of
haste we find reticence and deliberation characteristic.
Thus Frost discovers what Professor Irving Babbitt would call a sound
model for imitation. Professor Babbitt has labored to show that
imitation as the ancients understood it was a fresh and imaginative
process. It is just so with Robert Frost. His choice of words, his
rhymes, always escape the commonplace: we are awakened by the exact
perceptions of a new discoverer. But the more important point is that
this stirring-up is followed by a conviction of the naturalness or the
obviousness of Frost’s statements. Why, we murmur, has this not been
said before? Again we are repeating Poe’s useful test question for the
workings of the imagination.
One cannot be certain just what content the term, the imagination,
contains today. Modern psychology has cleared away some of the rank
underbrush which has cluttered our view of the imagination, though
it has planted other bushes to confuse us at the same time: but at
least we habitually distinguish imagination from fancy. Perhaps by
pure imagination we mean something not far from a total sweeping
flash-like view taken by a human being at unusual moments. At any
rate Frost’s imagination is based on the view of a man who is using
_more_ of his equipment than most of the moderns do. The meaning is
simply that Frost does not seem to write almost exclusively from
one of three centers,--from the intellect or the emotions or the
instinctive center,--but from a sort of rude partnership of all three.
The conditions of his erstwhile livelihood (farming) brought into
at least partially coördinated play his body and his emotions, and
in addition he is capable of thought. In this growth he is again a
parallel, though distant, to the ancient writers, and gives a start to
the speculation as to how far the conditions of modern mechanized life
throw into disuse portions of the necessary equipment of a fully aware
human being. Certainly, Frost’s lines give one more of an impression
that a whole man is writing them than do the sharply intellectualized
or bubbling emotional lines of most of his contemporaries.
The moot interpretation in the doctrine of imitation has always
been the meaning to be attached to universals. One may rightly be
skeptical as to the coincidence of the views of the idealists with the
original meaning of Aristotle. But whether Aristotle is interpreted
idealistically or not, Frost’s use of universals arising from a welter
of particulars is covered in the minimum definition that could be
offered. His poems, _Mending Wall_ and _The Grindstone_, are prime
examples: in these poems the particulars are vividly and concretely
seen and they can stand the most rigid literal interpretation. Yet no
less present and vivid in them is a wider significance or rather there
are wider significances. Thus, among other things conveyed in _The
Grindstone_, we are deeply aware that a sense of the inertia of nature
has been induced. We are aware of the aching strain of making nature
malleable and the tear and wear made on the straining human being
by time. For readers of Frost it is not necessary to add that this
creation of universal significance is accomplished directly without an
atom of didacticism.
Although the doctrines of nature and imitation as exemplified in the
works of Robert Frost have been so briefly dwelt upon, does it seem
requisite to develop the contiguous statement that Frost is an observer
of the law of probability and the law of measure or proportion or
decorum? It is simply stating an easily recognizable fact which any
reader may verify by going through Frost’s writings that it is the
probable sequence and not the improbable but possible sequence that
he develops. He is a poet of the customary in man and nature, not the
exploiter of the remarkably arresting and wonderful. Nor does his
feeling for decorous proportion require argument beyond saying that
he does not commit the mistake of the neo-classicists who have been
properly accused by Professor Babbitt of confusing the language of the
nobility with the nobility of language. Frost’s people are humble, but
they speak a language and utter feelings appropriate to them: they are
restrained by conventions which are inherently worthy of respect, and
the result is decorum in the true sense.
The study of these considerations should explain why Frost declares
that he has written several books against the world in general. For
since Rousseau romanticism has been in the ascendency. A new conception
of nature as impulse and temperament has supplanted the old nature as
a strict model, a “return to nature” has come to mean “letting one’s
self go.” For imitation has been substituted the self-expression of
the spontaneous original genius, for the law of probabilities has
been exchanged the law of wonderful possibilities, and for decorum we
have the doctrine of expansiveness. Science has abetted the growth
of naturalistic emotionalism, and neither humanism nor religion has
been able to stop the tide of writing designed for the expression of
uniqueness rather than of generality.
Against this efflorescence of the interior world, the neo-classicists
have striven in vain, for their position does not rest solidly enough
upon experience and personal discovery. They have been debilitated by
the blight of Scaliger’s rhetorical question, why imitate nature when
Virgil is a second nature?
Frost however quietly takes his place beside the antique Greeks and