Mr. Frost's Recessional
THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The...
...It is the instinct that argument...
...It is a strangely compounded retirement, or to hear a charge so often and so ably affair, made up partly of a curiosity, not altogether un- refuted as that the Church "strangled science at birth" generous, to hear what may be said upon the other repeated with no apparent suspicion of the discredit side: partly of a resentment, rooted in the ego, when that has descended upon them...
...able theses to make its argument palatable to a pubThe reasons for this were to be looked for not so lic which, on the whole, has lost its taste for religious much in American human nature as in human nature invective...
...The protestant spirit (using the word in its For the most part, Mr...
...It is the both safety and dignity...
...Perhaps," he conjectures rather wistfully, "the grown apart from the mediaeval ideal that gave to difficulty lay in the perfection of the services...
...America, it has been how, at a single moment, when eternity touches time, said, is individualistic...
...One is the And yet, on occasion, as has happened over and over heterogeneous nature of the crowd...
...It is not so comforting a man whose opinion has not been asked...
...feel the fitness of black-robed Jesuits chanting their It is a Church forever "passing on...
...Frost envisages brooding over the littered arrogance or desire to impress...
...God and his worship "until it hurt"-because we have The second is its lack of simplicity-its departure grown up so in the compromise which satisfies its sense from the democratic ideal as understood by the aver- of obligation to spiritual things by no more than deage American...
...thought that there may also be a budding midnight Naturally, reasons so intimate and on the whole so at noon...
...but only in the same sense that it is not an American boast...
...While, on the other hand, un-French, un-German, un-European, and un-Asiatic...
...The incongruity of such royal state cency and decorum demand...
...there was to be seen a distinct likeness in the faces It has seen too much pass-it has passed too much of all the prelates...
...itself...
...Louise Townsend Nicholl 424 Frederick H. Martens, Martha Bayard, Conversation and Mrs...
...Frost's thought is fol- up its home in any one country-to accept the repose lowed carefully and his feeling that the questions and repute that come from absolute alignment with raised by the congress are not primarily religious, but any one country's racial ambitions and preoccupations...
...The religious forms that reached him first were the Chicago celebration is clear...
...And again: "The mind could the function of the Church in relation to the world...
...the ranks marched past...
...But it has also shown of a great paternalistic system...
...Measured it with hectoring governors and litigious crown lawagainst this actual standard, the alien character of yers...
...No one who went about among his fellows little flattering, are not the ones that we shall find during the marvelous week when it might be said the given when the season of dissent and mistrust arrives...
...it established a can," there is a distaste for the pomps and ceremonies fairly definite group-mind which, in spite of recent un- of an older world...
...very effectiveness of the congress tells against it in Corporate display and splendor, indeed, are the the mind of the typical (but hypothetical) American shallowest of reasons on which to base a charge of whom Mr...
...Stanley Frost, is a fair type of the and there a sentiment existed which could be trusted, form criticism is likely to take when a resentment at the fitting time and place, to write its own reces- intimately felt is forced to seek plausible and reasonsional upon the Eucharistic Congress...
...Frost's article is temperate, strictest etymological sense) exists in every com- as it is certainly well-written...
...THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Review of Literature, The Arts, and Public Affairs...
...But one those who, with Mr...
...It is a proud boast-but It is un-American...
...thousands who are "Irish mostly, French Canadians, To examine Mr...
...Here and there one munity...
...Such things, as Mr...
...a communal feeling has for the moment reduced the Frost should be aware, are no longer used in reputable significance of the individual...
...And this fact should move sume an entire issue of The Commonweal...
...But to carry esty compels him to admit it is not "generally ac- what is a mere association of ideas into serious argucepted," it is interesting to proceed, and to see wherein ment at a day when the world has learned only too the congress either failed to measure up to it, or, in well under what prim outward conformity with the some vague fashion, exceeded it...
...His early experience, at the dawn settlement, is still dominant over the greater part of of his own history, and when the national imagination the country, and forms the unwritten premises and as- received its ineffaceable stamp, taught him to associate sumptions of most of our national thought...
...Frost, are lamenting "the lack of or two suggestions will not be wasted if they clear up assimilation of recent immigration," to a little timely a misconception that lies at the root of a good deal and fruitful thought...
...It is not a very comfortable church, as in American life...
...Frost's arguments in detail, to Poles, Slovaks, a few Germans" can become so many trace each one to a misunderstanding of the Church's bowed heads, so many shadowed faces upon which conception of its mission in a world of infinite varia- now only the seal of the "Church Paternal" and of tion in color, in temperament, in tradition, would con- its Eternal Father rests...
...The programs again-in Ireland, in Poland, in Alsace in our own were printed in thirteen languages...
...being kept by any man who is truly the representative The root of the misunderstanding (we believe it is of the One who had not whereon to lay his head, is a misunderstanding, and less and less, as years pass, so great that in the typically American mind the idea hostility or sourness) lies in a failure to understand is wholly rejected...
...feeling that brings a grudging assent, even to proposi- The case is rather different with Mr...
...an extreme revulsion even from what relics of ritual Allowing Mr...
...traditional Americanism which has endured till re- There can be no doubt that, latent in the mind of that cently," he tells us, "has certain characteristics which being whom Mr...
...The of the Church's antiquity and universality takes place...
...attention of America was centered upon a single altar An article in the current number of The Forum, from in a single city, could fail to be conscious that here the pen of Mr...
...It is, in a sense, a recalcitrant church...
...But they are easily intel- It has never been tempted from its gipsying to take ligible when the line of Mr...
...FROST'S RECESSIONAL T HE poet has told us that "there is a budding mor- tions in whose success he is most interested, from the row in midnight...
...Frost his standard, even though hon- the "reformed" church had preserved...
...Wharton Van Wyck Brooks 429 Claude C. Washburn 425 The Quiet Corner 433 MR...
...Every one had been stamped, it itself-to be troubled when, at any given phase in a seemed, with the seal of the Church Paternal...
...The Church days-it has been the one centre round which a marUniversal' was a comment heard more than once as tyred and denied nationality has been able to rally...
...Frost terms "the traditional American be debated only in minor detail...
...It is by no Masses to Indian savages . . . but it could not fit accident that the processional form bulks so largely these enormously magnified ceremonies into any place in its ritual...
...They national development, its ancient order is felt to be might be humble or high in power, but all were part alien or vaguely oppressive...
...Frost's main 416 THE COMMONWEAL September 8, 1926 thesis, which is, briefly, and as his title bids us ex- of criticism, open or covert, when an outward display pect, the "alien" character of the congress...
...Volume IV New York, Wednesday, September 8, 1926 Number 18 CONTENTS Mr...
...politico-nativistic" is taken into account...
...Frost's Recessional 415 A Fount of Culture Grenville Vernon 426 Week by Week 417 The Play R. Dana Skinner 427 New England's Wise Man 420 Communications 428 Spokesmen of Eternity Wilfred Mallon 421 A Pension in Italy Arnold Whitridge 423 Books .. Robert R. Hull, George N. Shuster, Pediment (verse...
...mutually contradictory...
...Along with many other prejudices of makes a man resist the pressure of a crowd, even which he washes his hands in an opening paragraph, when that pressure is carrying him in the direction they may be, to use his own words, "ignored with where he is most anxious to be carried...
...The sist, is misleading and even disingenuous...
...If they reach many and trampled ground at Soldiers' Field and Munde- of us today with an alien air, it is because we have lein...
...the storm on the final day of the congress came to The third and fourth reasons seem, at first sight, remind us all...
...mass overwhelming power and real control can subThe first, strangely enough, is its success...
...Indeed, it would not be too much to say that, regrets to see phrases such as "the supreme achieveupon occasions, something of the protestant exists in ment of priest-craft" dragged from a dishonorable every human heart...
Vol. 4 • September 1926 • No. 18
