Observe,
now, the vital office of humor in Hawthorne's thought. It gleams out
upon us from behind many of the gravest of his conceptions, like the
silver side of a dark leaf turning in the wind. Wherever the concretion
of guilt is most adamantine, there he lets his fine slender jet of humor
play like a lambent fire, until the dark mass crumbles, and the choragos
of the tragedy begins his mournful yet hopeful chant among the ruins.
This may be verified in the "Seven Gables," "Blithedale," and "The
Marble Faun"; not in "The Scarlet Letter," for that does not present
Hawthorne's genius in its widest action. In one place he speaks of "the
tragic power of laughter,"--a discrimination which involves the whole
deep originality of his mind. It is not irrelevant here to remark that
at the most affecting portions of the play "Rip Van Winkle," the
majority of the audience always laugh; this, though irritating to a
thoughtful listener, is really an involuntary tribute to the marvellous
wisdom and perfection with which Jefferson mingles pathos and humor.
Again Hawthorne: "Human destinies look _ominous_ without some
perceptible intermixture of the sable or the gray." And, elsewhere:
"There is _something more awful in happiness than in sorrow_, the
latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance
and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble
at it." These thoughts could never have occurred to Irving with the same
intensity.
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