Robert Frost, James Madison, and The American Experiment

 ...For James Madison the central challenge of free government was to make power and right synonymous in republican government. The difficult challenge of placing the power of the majority on the side of natural right was the great object to which he dedicated his lifelong labors as a scholar and a statesman. It was the same challenge that would face and occupy the mind and energies of another great American thinker and statesman about a half century later, Abraham Lincoln. It is, in fact, the same challenge we always face in America, or abroad, or anywhere there is a people whose aspiration is to govern themselves. Standing on the floor on the Pennsylvania State House in the First Congress of the United States, as he introduced the Bill of Rights, Madison recalled the central truth that mandates the experiment in self-government. In so doing, he reminded his listeners that the truth that “All men are created equal” in our Declaration of Independence is an “absolute truth.” 

On the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Calvin Coolidge repeated Madison’s sentiments. “About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful,” Coolidge said.

“It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”

  Like Coolidge, Robert Frost was concerned about changing the words and ideas of the Declaration of Independence in the name of progress. For Frost there was both a finality and a mystery in the words of the Declaration of Independence. But Frost liked mysteries and riddles; he liked to say, “You’ve got to have something to say to the Sphinx.” “You’ve got to handle these things…handle whatever turns up.” “You’ve got to have something to say….” In one of his talks Frost recounted the story of a Swede the government hired to come to the U.S. to give expert opinion on our form of government. After he passed judgment on the country, we invited him back and gave him an honorary degree. Do you know what his expert judgment was, Frost asked. “That our form of government is a conspiracy against the common man.” Now, “You’ve been enlarged and broadened to where you can listen to anything without getting mad,” Frost told his audience. “But I have to have something to say to that, sooner or later….” 

  One of the things he said to it, I think, can be found in his poem, “The Black Cottage.” This poetic vignette is about a minister and a fellow chatting while on a woodland walk. As they come upon a little, neglected cottage, the two men reminisce about the old widow lady who used to live there, who had lost her husband in the Civil War, maybe at Fredericksburg, or maybe Gettysburg. The conversation is about two creeds, one religious, the other political, and how, for some Americans these creeds are no longer sacred, no longer true. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to retell some of this story:

Whatever else the Civil War was for

It wasn’t just to keep the States together,

Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.

She wouldn’t have believed those ends enough

To have given outright for them all she gave.

Her giving somehow touched the principle

That all men are created free and equal.

And to hear her quaint phrases—so removed

From the world’s view to-day of all those things.

That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.

What did he mean? Of course the easy way

Is to decide it simply isn’t true.

It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.

But never mind, the Welshman got it planted

Where it will trouble us a thousand years.

Each age will have to reconsider it.

The poem continues, with the minister recounting the perspective of the liberal youth, who said some of the words of the creed weren’t true and should be changed, and so the minister thought maybe he would exchange an old phrase for a new one; that he would change the Creed a little. But then “the bare thought”—

Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew,

And of her half asleep was too much for me.

And so the minister wrestled with his conscience. If the words weren’t true, then

                         Why keep right on

Saying them like the heathen? We could drop them.

Only—there was the bonnet in the pew.

Such a phrase couldn’t have meant much to her.

But suppose she had missed it from the Creed

As a child misses the unsaid Good-night,

And falls asleep with heartache—how should I feel?

I’m just as glad she made me keep hands off,

For, dear me, why abandon a belief

Merely because it ceases to be true.

Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt

It will turn true again, for so it goes.

Most of the change we think we see in life

Is due to truths being in and out of favour.

  Today the truths of the old American Declaration are out of favor again. There are many who want to change the creed, drop the old phrases and ideas and adopt new ones. Even if some of us will miss these from the creed, “as a child misses the unsaid Good-night, and falls asleep with heartache.” Those quaint old phrases of the Declaration of Independence, like the idea that all men are created equal. That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s, as Frost acknowledged. What did he mean by it? Is it true? Of course the easy way is just to decide it isn’t true. Like Robert Frost, Harry Jaffa liked to talk about that mystery. He spent his whole life teaching about that mystery. At the heart of Crisis of the House Divided (1959) we see Lincoln wrestling with that riddle and answering it in a way worthy of Jefferson’s truth, and of Aristotle’s too. Like Frost, Jaffa taught us that we have to have something to say to the Sphinx. And I suppose we have to have something to say to the Swede as well, and to all who claim that the American way is a conspiracy against the common man. For Frost, “[T]he answer” to this was “that that’s what it was intended to be.” The American creed “was intended to be a conspiracy against the common man. Let him make himself uncommon.” 

Thank you. And Good Night. 

Colleen Sheehan

https://americanmind.org/essays/something-to-say-to-the-sphinx/

"When Diogenes went about with a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little time to be honest himself. And when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great. Now the error of Diogenes is evident. The error of Diogenes lay in the fact that he omitted to notice that every man is both an honest man and a dishonest man. Diogenes looked for his honest man inside every crypt and cavern, but he never thought of looking inside the thief. And that is where the Founder of Christianity found the honest man; He found him on a gibbet and promised him Paradise. Just as Christianity looked for the honest man inside the thief, democracy looked for the wise man inside the fool. It encouraged the fool to be wise. We can call this thing sometimes optimism, sometimes equality; the nearest name for it is encouragement. It had its exaggerations ─ failure to understand original sin, notions that education would make all men good, the childlike yet pedantic philosophies of human perfectibility. But the whole was full of faith in the infinity of human souls, which is in itself not only Christian but orthodox; and this we have lost amid the limitations of pessimistic science. Christianity said that any man could be a saint if he chose; democracy, that every man could be a citizen if he chose. The note of the last few decades in art and ethics has been that a man is stamped with an irrevocable psychology and is cramped for perpetuity in the prison of his skull. It was a world that expects everything of everybody. It was a world that encouraged anybody to be anything. And in England and literature its living expression was Dickens."

~G.K. Chesterton: "Charles Dickens," (1906) Part I, Chap. 1

https://americanmind.org/essays/something-to-say-to-the-sphinx/