Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense
one hundred and twenty or thereabouts, and its equipment consisted of
a modern brick building on a hill-top and facing to the east, and a
little lower on the hill the ‘old academy’ of wood, well preserved and
painted white.
“There were several fine old teachers, excellent representatives of
the school that believed that thoroughness and hard work were the
beginning and the conclusion of the educational process. Great store
was set by Latin which was taught by George W. Bingham, the stern and
aged principal, and by Greek in which Mary Parsons, maiden member of
a distinguished Derry Village (and New Hampshire, too) family, gave
instruction.
“The faculty was true to the good old Pinkerton tradition. The Academy
had been founded in the first years of the nineteenth century and
dedicated to the development of cultured Christian character. Old
rules governing the student body were still in effect. Card playing,
for example, was forbidden, and for a boy to escort a girl to and from
an entertainment was still a technical violation of ‘requirements.’
There were compulsory study hours and compulsory attendance at church.
Students must be in their homes at seven p.m. and not leave thereafter
except on Friday evening when grace was extended to ten p.m. and Sunday
evening when the students were expected to attend church services.
Once a week the principal called the roll of the assembled student
body and each student reported his record of the week, thus: ‘All the
requirements,’ ‘One exception, excused,’ ‘Two exceptions.’
“Most of the students came from homes within a radius of fifteen miles.
A great many were from farm families, while Derry ‘Depot’ sent the
children of factory workers. An Academy-owned dormitory housed the
majority of the few boarding students.
“I am sure that when I entered the Academy there was much faculty
hostility to Frost, and even among the older students there was some
also. I recall that the submission to Frost as the English teacher of
all prepared papers in an inter-class debate between Junior Middlers
and Seniors was objected to by the Senior team, a grossly offensive act
meriting disciplinary rebuke, but such did not follow. And I believe
that there were certain members of the faculty who had toward the new
English teacher almost a personal animosity.
“Frost came as the representative of new things, and there was
collision. He did not arrive at the Academy in time to participate
in the morning chapel exercises; he had no classroom; he defied
the Pinkerton tradition in the informality of his presence and the
free-and-easy way he handled his classes. The fact that he had no
college degree would, for a portion of the faculty, keep him forever
outside the circle. He was younger than nearly all the others. A dozen
things made him an ‘outsider.’ He looked it and acted it.
“The old order of things at Pinkerton went quickly. A new principal,
Ernest L. Silver (later principal of the New Hampshire State
Normal School), came in 1909. There were new teachers and new
subjects--agriculture, domestic science, and this and that. Pinkerton
in brief time was doing a lot of catching up. I believe that Frost’s
success with his English classes had a great deal to do with the
rapidity and completeness of this change.
“No greater departure from traditional Pinkerton teaching methods could
be conceived than those of Robert Frost. A boy of sixteen or seventeen
isn’t aware in respect to much of a teacher’s pedagogy beyond knowing
whether it pleases him or not. But, looking back, I believe I know the
first great difference between Frost and the other teachers. He had far
greater interest in the individual student. He had a way of manifesting
this, of asking questions and of making observations in a few words,
all the while getting closer to the boy in question. It was not a
professional self-conscious thing, but a desire from Frost’s heart to
get closer and learn more.
“A new member of one of his classes, I had handed in a single short
theme. Late one afternoon as a group of boys were passing a football
about on the athletic field, Frost came up. He was a frequent figure
on the athletic field and sometimes he would take off his coat and
‘make a bluff,’ as the boys put it, at playing. This afternoon he
happened to come near me. He asked several questions concerning
the Pawtuckaway Mountains where the ‘Devil’s Den’ about which I had
written was located. I answered them awkwardly: I was a shy boy. In a
matter-of-fact way he observed that I was a fellow who had ideas.
“That was all there was to the conversation, for a spinning ball came
my way, but I can still see Frost and the fall mud and the football
bucking machine and the boys on that afternoon. He seemed to show in
this conversation several hundred times the interest in me that other
teachers had.
“He really had this interest, I am sure, and it was not directed
toward me alone, but toward all his students. He asked them personal
questions, drew them out.
“In those days Frost was always asking questions of people. Not the
mechanical questions of politeness, but questions that would get at
things Frost was interested in ... and he was interested in a great
deal. If we took a winter walk toward Londonderry and met a logging
team, which stopped as we came abreast, there would be a conversation
right there. Frost would have the teamster talking about logging things
and horses and wood roads and such matters. He talked with his students
in somewhat the same way. There was always something to be learned
from these New Englanders, and Frost learned it.
“And he was interested in the boy’s problems of individuality.
Seemingly, he could like any sort of boy. He might not win a boy in the
first few months of his contact with him, but nearly always he won him
in the end.
“The most excited boy over an English paper I ever saw was Dave
Griffith, the athlete of ’10, a magnificent halfback and sprinter. He
had written on a sport subject and had earned commendation from Frost.
Breaking the study hour rule of the dormitory, Dave stealthily went
from room to room to announce grandly his accomplishment. Dave had a
haughty disregard for scholastic honors in general (few of which he
ever received), but he knew when he had something to be proud of.
“We had a boarding student in the Junior class, Arthur Eastman, who was
neither among the scholars on one hand nor the athletes on the other.
Arthur suddenly was famous for a four-line stanza which Frost was
commending to his classes. I believe the boy never again wrote a verse
which was praised. On the other hand, one of the older students who
turned out verse with great abundance and prided himself on his ability
received no approval whatever. The school knew that Frost considered
this student’s verse of no merit.
“Frost’s English classes were always ‘easy’ classes. Frost had none of
the taskmaster’s attitude, yet his classes did a great deal of work
and covered fully as much ground as any ordinary class. Any feeling
for literature displayed by a student was cultivated: any talent for
writing was nursed along. A few in each class were gradually developed
who could always be counted on for lively discussion. Very frequently
departures from the regular routine were made. Often, for example,
Frost, slumped down in his chair, would read to the class. And every
time a new _Critic_ was out, Frost would discuss it with his classes.
“The _Critic_ was the student publication, and it was better than it
had been for many years before Frost’s engagement. He let the boys and
girls run it largely themselves: faculty supervision of it was much
less than formerly. There was a good deal of comradeship between Frost
and the _Critic_ staff. Unconventional things occurred ... the _Critic_
files may contain at least one poem the distinguished authorship
of which is not generally known. I believe the _Critic_ sometimes
contained, because of his ‘hands off’ policy, things that he would not
have passed for publication. But he knew that his policy was right and
held to it.
“He was philosophical, too, when one of the honor members of the Senior
class, given liberty in connection with his Commencement essay not in
keeping with Pinkerton practice, read a paper at Graduation which was
a wretched failure. This boy had not been required to submit his essay
for faculty approval. And he messed the job, actually writing the final
paragraphs two hours before he was due on the platform. Frost remarked
later, ‘It sounded as though you had read one book or article and then
written your essay.’ That was all that was ever said between us, and it
was enough! Frost had divined the fact.
“Out of the English classes came during those years several plays
coached by Frost. In one year I remember we had Marlowe’s _Dr.
Faustus_, Milton’s _Comus_ and Yeats’ _The Land of Heart’s Desire_.
The plays were a success on both sides of the footlights. Frost liked
to have his fun as much as any of the students, and the rehearsals
brought us all together in a fine way. These plays were a new thing at
Pinkerton. The Academy had presented several of Shakespeare’s plays
since the century came in but no cognizance of other drama had been
taken.
“In 1909 the state began to be interested in Frost’s classes. He talked
at conventions, booked by Henry Morrison, the New Hampshire State
Superintendent. And from time to time educators visited our classes.
These convention talks were ordeals, and Frost always came back from
them in a condition of exhaustion. Once he made an experiment before
a talk given at Exeter, I believe. He put sharp pebbles in his shoes
and walked about for hours, painfully, hoping that physical pain would
alleviate the mental torture he was in. But it didn’t!
“The student body was with him one hundred per cent as the fall term of
1909 opened. There was a new order of things in the school and Frost
was recognized as a big figure.
“I do not recall just when it was that Frost first wrote a formula,
famous with his classes, upon a Pinkerton blackboard. He put forward
the following kinds of matter used for literary purposes:
Uncommon in experience--uncommon in writing.
Common in experience--common in writing.
Uncommon in experience--common in writing.
Common in experience--uncommon in writing.
The last was the kind of material to search for, he told us.
“We celebrated a football victory over our rival school, Sanborn
Seminary, in November, 1909, with a supper provided by the new domestic
science department. Frost was the hit of the evening with a string of
verses he put on the blackboard. This was one:
In the days of Captain John,
Sanborn Sem had nothing on,
Pinkerton, Pinkerton.
“A few of the boys spent considerable time with Frost out of school
hours. I remember a walk over the turnpike to Manchester twelve miles
away in the late afternoon, an hour spent in a bookstore, an oyster
stew, and then a ride home on the electric railway. Our conversation on
walks touched books only now and then. They might include reminiscences
of Frost’s early life, discussion of school affairs, aspects of farm
life in New Hampshire, some current news happening of importance, and
nearly anything else. If in passing a farmhouse the aroma of fried
doughnuts came out to us, Frost might propose that we buy some. Down
around the corner we might encounter a fern he hadn’t seen since he was
last in the Lake Willoughby region. And if darkness overtook us and
it was a favorable night for observation, Frost would be sure to take
at least five minutes to study the heavens and attempt to start our
astronomical education.
“There was always an abundance of conversation, but almost never any