A review from New Review, Volume 2: THE most interesting things in American literature are its myths. By the treatment of these myths shall ye judge a critic of our literature. The Hawthorne myth is one of the most interesting. Hawthorne is hailed as "the poetic embodiment of the Puritan spirit." "In sooth," says John Macy (and his incisive treatment of this myth serves as an example of his method), "Hawthorne was the least Puritan of New England writers....Puritanism never produces art; it kills art. As well speak of a deaf violinist as of a Puritan poet. When Milton is writing poetry he is a pagan; as a Puritan he either does not write or writes badly." Hawthorne "was interested in fanciful manifestations of the soul, not in genuine ethical problems; his home was fairyland.... The theme of The Scarlet Letter appealed less to his moral sense than to his pictorial imagination.... The Scarlet Letter is a development of the theme: 'On a Field Sable, the Letter A, Gules.' " Hawthorne "stands alone in the literature of New England, a verbal melodist without any ethical intention whatsoever, a delicate detached artist, as solitary in Concord as Poe was in New York; symbolizing, if he symbolizes anything, not the Puritan spirit, but the spirit of beauty everlastingly hostile or indifferent to the crabbed austerities and the soul-killing morbidity of Puritan ethics." Macy is not an intentional iconoclast. Yet such is the critical rubbish cluttered around American literature that even his none-too-deep analysis makes a veritable debacle of accepted opinions and literary values. "American literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet, delicate, nicely finished. There is little of it which might not have appeared in the Youth's Companion." "The poets are thin, moonshiny, meticulous in technique. Novelists are few and feeble, and dramatists are non-existent." And Macy not only specifically proves his point in connection wi