The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Emerson is the first important spokesman for those ele- ments in the national character we vaguely term optimistic, idealistic, democratic, expansive, individualistic. He preached the self-reliance on which we pride ourselves. In The American Scholar he issued what the elder Holmes called "our intellec- tual Declaration of Independence," a note we have since con- tinually and sometimes raucously sounded. Emerson stresses the newness, the freshness of the American viewpoint; he invites his countrymen to "enjoy an original relation to the uni- verse"; he emphasizes what up to fairly recently was one of our proudest boasts, "the infinitude of the private man," the integrity of the individual mind.

Emerson believed the universe was good. Most Americans think so, too, though not always for Emerson^ reasons. At any rate his emphasis on the power of the will, on inspiration, on an open-ended future, has always appealed to us. Sometimes we have vulgarized his affirmative doctrine. It is but a short series of missteps from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Billy Graham.

I suggest you read the short book called Nature, published in 1836, which contains most of Emerson^ informal philoso- phy; The American Scholar, the essays "History" and "Self- Reliance"; the essays on Plato [12] and Montaigne [37] from Representative Men; the essay on Thoreau; and, best of ali, English Traits, which, though written for its time, seems to me the most durable of ali Emerson's work.

70

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

1804-1864

The Scarlet Letter, Selected Tales

In any well-considered list of the dozen greatest American novйis The Scarlet Letter would almost certainly appear. Yet one may wonder at first why this should be so. Its background is seventeenth-century Puritan New England. When Hawthorne wrote about it, the scene was already beginning to appear remote; today it might seem very far away indeed. Furthermore we are not quite sure that Hawthorne's picture of a sin-obsessed, guilt-ridden society offers even the interest attaching to historical accuracy. Most recent researches tend to show that the Puritans were a far more relaxed people than their brooding descendant conceived them to be. Finally, Hesters and Dimmesdale^ adultery and expiation appear to have a forceful meaning only within the framework of a dog- matic Christian morality. Many of us, living in a post-Freud world, may read this book for the first time only to exclaim "Whafs he making ali the fuss about?"

And yet, while we may smile away the Puritan ethic that suffuses it, we somehow cannot smile away the book itself. Its power to move us persists, even though we may admire it for qualities different from those that originally won Hawthorne his reputation. For us this is only incidentally a story of the bit- ter fruits of adultery. It is even more incidentally a historical picture of a bygone society. What we now seem to be reading is a profound parable of the human heart. It happens to be expressed in symbols that were particularly meaningful to Hawthorne and his time. But they are only symbols, and flexi- ble ones at that, applicable to the human condition as it exists everywhere and at ali times.

Take that moral which Hawthorne, toward the end of his

dark and beautiful romance, puts in a sentence: "Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!" Though couched in didactic phrases, is this not an indictment of repression, a plea for that purification of our souls that comes only from facing, not deceiving, ourselves? In the same way we feel that Chillingworth^ dissolution is inevitable in any man in any society who tries to live by life-denying emotions. We feel also, as Hawthorne explicitly says, that love and hate begin to resemble each other when both depend too exclu- sively, too passionately on the possession of the loved or hated object.

In other words, we no longer read this as a book about how two young people were punished for committing adultery. We read it as the work of a moral psychologist who knows as much about our own hidden guilts and fears as he did about those of his tortured Puritans. I suggest that if we approach The Scarlet Letter in this light it ceases to be the faded classic sug- gested by its old-fashioned style and its, to us, excessive mor- alizing. We begin to see what the critic Mark Van Doren means when he tells us that Hawthorne^ "one deathless virtue is that rare thing in any literature, an utterly serious imagination.^,>