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

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 "self- development" 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, including the high humour of Nathaniel Hawthorne: the lowest humour, the primitive humour 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)

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