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PARTISAN REVIEW
leaning across a fence discussing, according to Robert Frost, a dubious
territory, our human life, what it is all about. One old farmer wears the
thin masque of a baroque but perhaps cancerous God, the other of Job.
Frost, whom the homespun have loved for his homespun philosophy, is
not the man he seems, is the joker in the philosophic pack, strangely
enough.
A Masque of Reason
shows Job as continuing the first debate
with God, and after a thousand years of inexperience, alas, God is as
inept as when he spoke out of the whirlwind. In fact, more helpless.
He has lost his arrogance. He still gives no teleological explanation of
his own being or Job's. The chances are simply that life is life, and that
it will continue just that, in spite of self-superseding sciences, institutions,
committees, men, women, the masque of our reason, the two-party sys–
tem, and what not. The data of this world never were and never will
be understandable, according to God and Frost. What Frost distrusts
as if it were poison is theoretical reason itself and the vacuum in which
it operates. There can be no progress. Our progress is more and more
toward less and less. Individuals, from Frost's point of view, a biased
one, are the only reality. Enough said. Individuals are indefinable be–
cause they are made up of matter and its excrudescences, even boils,
Frost shows, indeed, the cosmic imposture of God, and the spectre of
cause as banished, along with the mists which it inhabited--also, alas,
the imposture of man, a sad joke. Any originality the earth shows must
be attributed, in fact, to the nonexistent Devil-the Devil is man-and to
false premises. At that point or thereabouts, Frost ceases thinking about
the whole damned subject. There is nothing more to think of, evidently,
but how to make both ends meet.
Herbert Read's
A World Within a War
is the work of a man who
has accepted, with large generosity of intellect and emotion, both the
challenge of Hamlet's derangement and our responsibility, like Prospero's,
to create a better dream within the translucent dream. Read is in the
deepest sense a dignified humanist of the first water. Writing the most
loving poetry, he criticizes our belief without action, our action without
thought, the blind intervention of years without design, our lethargy.
The fault is both in ourselves and in our stars-all things being mortal.
The universe and landscape of small flowers and birds, both are haunted
by our presence-and our death, he realizes, may be the death of all.
How we have been torn and fretted by vain energies! How, moreover,
the darting images of eye and ear are veiled in the webs of memory,
drifts of words that deaden the subtle manuals of sense. On man, the
pitiful incident, the cosmos depends for its meaning. Man is the Atlas,
more or less. God, too, may walk in an English garden. Of consciousness
and its hazards, Read writes implicitly and explicitly, even of the most
delicate nuances before the slow material kiss of death which he sees
aggrandized in a time of war.
Last but not least, Conrad Aiken, his poem,
The Soldier.
This
is a
