New England Questions

A MASQUE OF REASON--Robert Frost -Holt ($2).

Shortly after completing this 23-page verse-play, yo-year-old Robert Frost came down with pneumonia, lay wondering if God were punishing him for having written it. Happily--and justly--he recovered. A poet whose work has often been implicit drama, Frost is outright dramatist in A Masque of Reason--and still the New England philosopher asking questions about the nature of things.

They are embarrassing questions, and one of the dramatic values is the embarrassment of God, of whom the questions are asked. Job, the afflicted, who asks the questions, is embarrassed, too. Only his wife is not: she is too impatient with the two male colloquists. (And too bored: once, she falls asleep.)

The play's setting is "a fair oasis in the purest desert" of the afterworld. Job, his wife, God and the Devil are the actors, and the theme is the place of reason (or lack of it) in man's lot under God's hand. Says God (who, like his servant, is pure New Englander in sense and idiom): I've had you on my mind a thousand

years To thank you some day for the way you

helped me

Establish once for all the principle There's no connection man can reason

out Between his just deserts and what he

gets.

He tells Job's querulous wife that Job and I together Found out the discipline man needed

most

Was to learn his submission to unreason; And that for man's own sake as well as

mine,

So he won't find it hard to take his orders From his inferiors in intelligence

In peace and war--especially in war. But all this strikes Job as mere "justifying ex-post-facto excuses"--and he presses God for a better answer. God seems to have nothing better, and Job soliloquizes on the inanity of metaphysical questioning.

Get down into things.

It will be found there's no more given there

Than on the surface. If there ever was,

The crypt was long since rifled by the Greeks.

Oh, we know well enough to go ahead with.

I mean we seem to know enough to act on.

God finally confesses to Job that, in making him suffer, He was really just "showing off to the Devil"--for which He is somewhat apologetic, now.

When God agrees to call in the Devil (in response to Job's suggestion of "a good old get-together"), Job's wife perks up, runs for her camera.

"Now if you three have settled anything You'd as well smile as frown on the

occasion."

Which is about what the reader does--seeing that nothing is settled, but a good deal of wit and sly wisdom have been released. The 23 pages are good latter-day Frost: the ruminative philosophic wit whose pentameters are salted with gentle satire and unobtrusive learning.

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