Reuben A. Brower
PARALLEL LIVES
Anyone who undertook a series of American
Parallel Lives
in
the manner of Plutarch could hardly find two more striking subjects for
comparison than Robert Frost and Bernard Berenson, both American "suc–
cesses," one belonging so intensely to the old world, the other to the new.
Together they illustrate perfectly the two ways open to an American
intellectual who reached maturity in the eighties and nineties: to return
to Europe with Henry James, or stay behind with Twain, an Innocent at
Home. The awkwardness of "intellectual" as a term for Frost or Twain
brings out the difference between choosing a life of cultivation and quota–
tions and a life of Thoreauvian wildness and hit-and-miss learning. As
Lawrance Thompson's biography reminds us, we must not suppose because
of Frost's Yankee manner (in part consciously acquired ) that he
was
an
innocent, or intellectually less sophisticated than contemporaries who went
to England or the Continent.
If
we could imagine some celestial testing
day in which Frost and Berenson were set to work on a problem demand–
ing native wit rather than familiarity with cultural objects, it would be
safer to bet on Frost, in part because he was such a winner. Nothing brings
out more sharply the contrast between the two men and their lives than
their reaction to Harvard: Frost barely able to take it for a year and a
half, Berenson finding in his university a home of the mind to which he
remained loyal throughout his life.
But there are also surprising points of similarity between Berenson
and Frost in mind and temperament, though the similarities serve in most
instances to mark fundamental differences. It is odd to think, for example,
that they both were considerably affected by the philosophy of William
James. Both men departed, as people used to say, from the faith of their
fathers; and both continued to be fascinated with religious belief in some
form or other. The course of the religious life of each reflects the basic
