Hawthorne’s (Devilish?) Humour and the Ending of The House of the Seven Gables

HAWfHORNE'S (DEVILISH?) HUMOUR AND THE ENDING OF THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES R.D. MacDonald In "The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" (1916), the Canadian social critic and humorist, Stephen Leacock, ironically laments the passing of the devil in order to show the paltriness of our modern preoccupation with "selfdevelopment " and "brute force" (46-51). For earlier generations, writes Leacock, belief in the devil "illustrate[d] at once the pleasures and penalties of life.... Merriment in the scheme of things was his, and for those drawn too far in pleasure and merriment, retribution and the oyster fork" (52). In "American Humour" (1916), Leacock resorts to this same devil in order to mark off the lowest forms of humour against the highest, includingthe high humour of Nathaniel Hawthorne: the lowest humour, the primitivehumour of demolition, relates to things broken, to "the unfittingness, the want of harmony among things,"and to our "demoniacal merriment," our triumphant pleasure in the misfortune of others (86-87); humour in Leacock's middle range shows up the "incongruous," the impropriety of "that which misses its mark, which betrays a maladjustment of means to end, a departure from the proper type of things" (90); Leacock's highest humour is humane (and perhaps religious), for it rests upon a fatalistic acceptance of our imperfect lot, upon a prolonged and sustained conception of the incongruities of human life itself. The shortcomings of our existence, the sad contrast of our aims and our achievements, the little fretting aspiration of the day that fades into the nothingness of tomorrow, kindle in the mellowed mind a sense of gentle amusement from which all selfish exultation has been chastened by the realisation of our common lot in sorrow. On this higher plane humour and pathos mingle and become one. To the Creator perhaps in retrospect the little story of man's creation and his fall becomes sadly droll. (92-93) This, then, is the quietistic sentiment that Leacock finds in the "greater masterpieces of humorous literature"--like those of Cervantes "smilingsadly at the passing of the older chivalry" (93) or those of Hawthorne looking backward to the "mingledhumour and pathos of Puritanism" (85): 368 R.D. MacDonald [to] the sombre melancholies of Puritanism against the background of the silent woods of New England. This is the really great humour--unquotable in single phrases and paragraphs, but producing its effect in a long-drawn picture of human life, in which the universal element of human imperfection--alike in all ages and places-excites at once our laughter and our tears. (93) Thus Leacock consigns Hawthorne (with his fellow Americans, O'Henry and Twain) to that "highest plane of humour in which the mere incongruous 'funniness' of the ludicrous has been replaced by a larger view of life" (110). Like many of Hawthorne's readers--including Henry James--Leacock has paid too little attention to the primitive demolition, the devilish merriment and ruthlessness, at work in Hawthorne's writing. 1 Perhaps the reason is to be found in the poised civility of Hawthorne's narrative voice, which can all too easily lull us into a quietistic submission to our "common lot in sorrow." Hawthorne, however, like his subtle and diabolical Chillingworth, darkly mines and quietly subverts the hidden foundations of the mind; like Hester Prynne, he ranges beyond and actively brings into question the "iron frame-work" of established belief; like Arthur Dimmesdale, Young Goodman Brown and Clifford Pyncheon momentarily breaking loose and threatening in demonic ecstasy to trample all in their paths, Hawthorne himse1f (for all his civil repose and his shy, contemplative sympathies for mankind's imperfection) often displays an unsettling anarchic merriment. This can be seen in his peculiar narrative closures. In The Scarlet Letter at the end of "The Custom House," Hawthorne is already shaking himse1f loose from the matrix of his imminent story, setting himself aside from his ancestral dust of Salem; at the end of the novel, though Hester returns freely to the scene of her guilt and though she retains (and thereby remains bound by) her symbolic letter, Hawthorne does not allow her dust to be mingled or settled fmallywith Dimmesdale' s in death. "The...