REQUIRED READING: Why Our American Classics Matter Now.<i> By Andrew Delbanco</i> .<i> Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 226 pp., $24</i>

Although he is a professor of English in full standing, Andrew Delbanco happily reads and teaches our American literary classics with intense excitement. When it comes to matters of literary taste and purpose, the trendy academy of our day is still a drag on independent and eager minds. These days many an English department is just a hothouse of sexual ideologies and empty unpolitical radicalism. As Delbanco ruefully notes at the end of “Required Reading,” “We do not seem to like literature anymore.” Nowhere more than in the academy. The other day I was not surprised to come upon a doctoral candidate whose only reason for writing a whole book about Mark Twain was that he “opposed American imperialism.”

I heartily approve of a critic who is not afraid of “Lyrical Dreiser” and who knows that Richard Wright (not just for “Native Son”) has given us the strongest, most courageous story of the perils of being black in America.

Delbanco seems unsure when he comes up against historic American issues in his geniuses. His strong point is his delight in language and his ability to read the originality of a writer’s mind from the idiosyncrasy and complexity of his style. His opening piece, the book’s longest and best, “Melville’s Sacramental Style,” delightfully says:

“This is a writer whose relation to words is not so much mastery as it is the kind of hot intimacy in which the language will do anything he asks of it. He accosts you; he bends close to you to share a confidence; he wanders away from the point distracted by a new half-formed idea; he falls away into silence as if stunned by the cost of his own discoveries.”

Such writing demonstrates the charged-up personal relation to his material that makes a critic worthwhile. The literary historian Perry Miller was sure that the heavy hand of Thomas Carlyle could be seen on Melville’s style. That does not tell us as much as Delbanco does when he quotes Melville’s laughing description of Nantucket in “Moby Dick” as “all beach, without a background.” He comments that “Melville speaks in this passage as if he were returning with a report of an alien world to an uncomprehending reception party. He is looking for a way to represent a whole field of experience that is outside the capacity of the known language. The genius of the writing is its excess--what Walt Whitman had in mind when he claimed that his ‘elbows rest in sea-gaps,’ that he can ‘skirt sierras.’ ”

I know nothing better on Melville’s “Billy Budd” than Delbanco’s saying of the cabin scene in which Capt. Vere tells his beloved Billy that he must die: “The scene cannot be written but it is nevertheless heard.”

No figure in what we now strangely call the “American Renaissance” (What was there before it to renew? This was an eruption founded on a newly won independent sense of divinity) was so obsessed with words as Thoreau. As Delbanco notes, Thoreau’s greatest achievement was the many-volumed “Journal” in which he practiced his art by describing to satiation the slightest object he encountered on his daily walks. But Delbanco does not help us to recognize the aspiration to sainthood that Thoreau is reaching for in his dependence entirely on words.

What is the point, regarding the intractable and self-consuming solitude in which Thoreau lived, of noting Thoreau’s “peculiar position in the American literary tradition?” What first-rate imagination does not occupy that “peculiar position”? We don’t have a consistent and continuous “literary tradition,” like the British or French. We just have a few marvels, wonderful eruptions of genius from time to time. All the rest is commentary, which is why we have had such an excess of it since the English department made a profession of “criticism.”

Delbanco’s chapter on him is called “Thoreau Faces Death.” Thoreau faced death cheerfully when he came to die of lung disease. Unlike Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Dickinson (and so many others in our literary pantheon), he hoped for immortality, as the truly devout do. He had nothing else to live for. I don’t think Delbanco is sympathetic to Thoreau, or else he would recognize some of this. Instead, he conventionally says, “Thoreau’s was an unreconciled temperament,” complains that he wrote “about people with a shriveling disdain” and finds in Thoreau “a dreadful emptiness.” Mystery of mysteries, he thinks Thoreau resembles Poe, another “alien writer.”

It bothers me to read hurried analogies like that; it shrugs off what is central to Thoreau, his longing for absolute values. Poe’s imaginative genius (far beyond Thoreau’s literary capacity) fabricated no character greater (in his own mind) than himself. He became a professional Southerner and self-appointed “aristocrat,” thought well of slavery, derided American democracy and, in many respects, was right to think of himself as a disestablished dark European romantic writer. Thoreau carried Puritan New England’s belief in its own righteousness to the furthest edge of Yankee independence. No one attacked slavery with such religious fervor as Thoreau did in his defense of John Brown, whom Thoreau likened to Christ. Emerson’s son, Edward, one of the few who heard Thoreau speak in Concord’s town hall, said Thoreau’s message was delivered “as if it burned him.”

“Required Reading” “is about the idea that individual human beings can break free of the structures of thought into which they are born and that, by re-imagining the world, they can change it.” Now this seems to me just innocent. Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emerson (not included in this book), Lincoln and Richard Wright did try and hope to change the world. But as Delbanco demonstrates in his chapters on Henry Adams, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Theodore Dreiser and Edith Wharton, nothing was further from their thought than wishing to “change the world.” There is a distrust of democracy in many of our best writers, much as they count on democracy for their own emergence, that cannot fit into Delbanco’s declared purpose in “Required Reading.” Melville “re-imagined” the world all right, more deeply than anyone else; for he was metaphysical beyond anyone else in the American picture, obsessed by a God he could no longer believe in, just paint as a whale. When it came to society, the masses, the Civil War, Melville was, in his own mind, as much a snooty New York patrician as Edith Wharton.

Wharton was fascinated by class and its degenerative effect. I can’t understand why Delbanco wastes so much space on some ill-fated effort to “supplement” Wharton’s last, unfinished novel, “The Buccaneers.” Or why he thinks Wharton’s best novel is her sentimental “The Age of Innocence.” Her best subject, as in the pitilessness with which Wharton describes Lily Bart’s downfall in “The House of Mirth,” the graspingness of the vicious heroine in “The Custom of the Country,” is the power of “society” in her time. What she could have done with its decline into the “beautiful people.” This makes her an ally of Nathanael West, though she would have scorned him as a Jew.

I am grateful to Delbanco for including Lincoln and Henry Adams (and the much-derided Dreiser) in his book. But he harps on Lincoln the politician more than on the literary genius who, in the Second Inaugural, crystallized new devotion to the Union. No one reading Delbanco’s emphasis on Adams’ ghastly sense of failure would learn that “The Education of Henry Adams” is a great work of history as literature.

The impact of history on our best minds is not well understood in “Required Reading.” Delbanco is just too moral, idealistic and contemporary to grasp the relevance and irrelevance of slavery to Jefferson:

“Jefferson had declared that ‘those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God’ without recognizing that his words did honor to the black field hands who planted and pruned his gardens at Monticello, while he wrote in his study about the rights of man.

“There is only one way to understand this kind of moral obtuseness in people of otherwise exquisite intelligence. For most whites, black people not only were mysterious or alien or, as we say nowadays, ‘other,’ but, the fact is, they did not exist at all.”

Jefferson was, of course, a “racist,” as most Americans (with the exception of a few true believers that God made us one and the same) were and are. Meaning that he was convinced that blacks were so alien a species to his own as to be inferior. He certainly could not have created and maintained Monticello without his slaves, most of whom were willed to him by his father-in-law. Nevertheless, Jefferson thought slavery an abomination, tried to legislate against the slave trade, anticipated its threat to the Union. “Morally obtuse”? This Virginia aristocrat, best friend of the Enlightenment and fanatical supporter of the French Revolution, was caught in a historical trap, acknowledged his “guilt” and did not dwell on it.

Jefferson thought, as did all the best Southern minds at the foundation of the republic, that slavery would “expire” in due time. It took a Civil War, with near a million deaths, to eradicate slavery. There would have been no civil war and no immediate end to it if the “slaveocracy” had not tried to extend it to the territories. Poe approved of slavery. Hawthorne defended it. They were not “morally obtuse,” just creatures of history like ourselves, who can be just as “guilty” as we are in the domination we practice in our personal and business relations. The fierceness of such relations makes literature possible, as Delbanco well shows in his chapter on Harriet Beecher Stowe and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

“We do not seem to like literature anymore”? If so, it is the ferocity of life, at all times, that so many readers of junk are afraid to acknowledge these days.