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REUBEN A. BROWER
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.
But Frost, like the men who most influenced his thinking, Emerson and
James, is not to be tied down. He loves contradictions, and he is deeply
subversive and experimental.
If
his most wicked gestures cannot be en–
tirely trusted, neither can his more pious ones.
Thompson's demonstration of Frost's familiarity with the thought of
Wi11iam James is most valuable, confirming as it does what we suspect
from the poetry. But in using statements from James in an effort to show
that Frost reached a more positive religious belief, Thompson does not
always seem to remember how chancy James was, how fond he was of
taking the risk of believing, of "sustaining a thought," as he said,
"because
I choose to
when I might have other thoughts." In James as in Frost the
impressive thing is the assertion of will, the courage to believe, not any
commitment to what James calls "Reality with a capital R." In an ad–
mirable review of Frost's prose writings, Armour Craig has pointed out
that in a favorite parable based on the great Seal of the United States,
Frost "proposed a slight though radical change," by dispensing with the
eye that completes the pyramid: "Our eyes, not an all-seeing eye above
but our eyes, fill out the incomplete structure by imagining an invisible
apex." Frost's image of the invisible lines that represent "our faith that
the structure has a point" is characteristic, an example of "mental thrust,"
but hardly a declaration of faith as the term is used of any traditional
creed.
Some of the time, Thompson accepts the risky and hypothetical
character of Frost's belief; but at other times he infuses a tone of simple
piety that goes badly with the evidence. "Throughout his life he would
want to associate himself with heroic wanderers among ideas; but
his
mother's teachings would continue to provide him with a kind of sea
anchor, even when his thoughts remained harborless." Another reassuring
comment appears in a passage on a poem expressing "the poet's regret
that the ideals for which the Union soldiers had fought so heroically dur–
ing the Civil War had become so nearly forgotten." There is a sudden
transition from Frost's faith in the heroic ideal of self-sacrifice to
this:
"In addition Frost was continuing to write with an increase of religious
fervor, now fortified by the Congregational ministers with and for whom
he was teaching." "Fervor" is an unlikely term for the attitudes of the
tentative thinker Thompson describes elsewhere in
The Early Years.
From
the immediate context it is clear that "the Congregational ministers"
fortified his faith that he was a poet, rather than his "religious fervor."
It is not difficult to produce more examples of this attempt to impart a
