Delphi complete works of.., p.322
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 322
The ceiling recall the Parthenon;
So lofty the Hall, so dim the Light
The Ceiling is almost out of Sight,
So still, so calm it is, they say
That at Times the Folk from across the Way,
By accident wander in to pray.
The Bank permits it, — in Fact is glad, —
A thing like that is a splendid Ad.
I am standing here in the Atrium, — how wide it is and high,
Counter and cage around its Edge in one vast Horseshoe lie,
And Footsteps o’er the Flagstone Floor fall echoless to die.
Noiseless the People seem to glide
From Desk to Counter to stand beside
The courtly Tellers who bend their Necks
To Plutocrat Dowagers signing Cheques,
Courtly Tellers all spick and span,
And everyone a Gentleman;
While farther back under Lights of green,
The Ledger Keepers are dimly seen
You know what they’re doing, — ask anybody
Who’s read the Works of Professor Soddy.
They’re busy with that contemptible trick
Which is known as Banker’s Arithmetic.
With Credit and Debit in Ink expressed
And Nothing from Nothing leaves Interest.
A watchful Attendant is prowling around, grizzled and hard and grim,
No Bandit would stand it, I’ll be bound, to get in a Fight with him; For the Ribbon adorning his Uniform’s Edge,
I rather suspect is a Privilege
That he got at the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
Nay, honest Vimy, eye me not,
I’m restless, yes, but I’ll tell you what,
My Business here in the Bank, I own,
Is to ask for a Thousand Dollar Loan.
D’you think they’ll lend it? They must have got it.
They’re waiting, I understand, to “allot it.”
But Soddy says all they have to do
Is coin it, — Vimy, d’you think it’s true?
And with this an Assistant with courteous Bow,
“Mr. Midas Wegg, sir, will see you now.”
Behind Mahogany and Teak sits Mr. Midas Wegg
Courteous and Debonair and sleek, he needs no Wooden Leg,
The whole Environment makes good with heavy Leather, polished Wood,
And panelled Walls with just a Hint
Of Acquarelle or Mezzotint.
No vulgar Signs of Common Toil
The polished Table’s Surface spoil.
A pointed Pencil laid out straight
Beside a marble Paper-weight,
A sage green Blotter, which, I think
Has never seen a Spot of Ink,
And Daffodil and Violet
In front of Midas Wegg are set.
No titled sovereign, I confess,
Exceeds the Banker’s courtliness.
I really cannot fancy how
A King could make a statelier Bow,
Or say with a more gracious Tone
“The Bank will entertain your Loan.”
Just think, — how easily it’s done!
I’m back within the Atrium,
Thrilled with Emotion, I must own,
The Bank has entertained my Loan!
No Entertainment that I know,
No Comedy or Minstrel show,
My Sense of Fun so well sustains,
As when a Banker entertains!
I stand there dreaming all alone, —
The Bank has entertained my loan!
Then breaks upon my inner Sight
The Thought, Is Frederick Soddy right?
It sounds too simple, — I am sure
There must be, must be something more.
For Midas, writing my account
Can “coin” me any God’s amount.
Can write with Ink and call it “Loan.”
But can he write it for his own?
Of course he can’t! Could Silas Wegg,
The real one with the wooden leg, —
By writing with his Pencil Stub
Enrich himself, — ah! there’s the Rub.
The banker lends, but at the best
All that he gets is Interest.
He coins the public Credit, serves it,
Gets Interest and well deserves it.
And at that thought a sudden Flash of future Visions rise,
And what may happen later on, appears before my Eyes.
Suppose from angry Argument, from bitter Social Hate,
Wild social Revolution starts, — too late, alas, too late, —
The Demons you are raising now you cannot then abate,
Suppose, suppose the Bank went down in Fire and Flame and Smoke
The day that on that peaceful Town, fierce Revolution broke.
With shouts of Fury an angry scum
Of People have stormed the Atrium;
The vision rises before the Eye
Tellers in Cages, who fight and die
Not debonair but fierce with Rage, —
Then Tangled and Dead across the Cage,
And Virny Ridge dies where he stood
Grim and grizzled and smeared with Blood.
The Bank has been rifled high and low
It’s the PEOPLE’S TREASURY now, you know;
The Ledgers are scattered and thrown away
What need for ledgers? the PEOPLE say,
Where each owns all and may take what he may.
In the noisy Atrium now there floats
The acid smell of the Sheepskin Coats,
The Flagstones are coated still with Mud
That no one cleans, and with Stains of blood.
In the Sanctum Room the Rulers are,
There’s Ilyitch the Commissar,
Smoking a heavy black cigar,
And Eleiny the Halfwit, worse by far.
Ilyitch the Commissar, — heavy boots all mud,
Ilyitch the Commissar, — features cut from wood,
Ilyitch the Commissar with a mind misled,
Born for a devoted Serf, made a Boss instead,
Ilyitch the Commissar, hand as is an iron Bar
With a Hand of Lead But in war fearless,
And to pain tearless,
And underneath a smothered Fire
Of what was once a righteous ire.
And with him Heiny the Halfwit sits,
As cruel as only can be half wits,
A Thing with a watery weak blue Eye
And slithering Features all awry,
Contemptible and treacherous,
And underneath all lecherous, —
Such Things may revolution spue
To govern some day me and you.
Heaped on the Table all the while
Is greasy Money in a Pile,
Uncounted cash from Vault and Store, —
“Come take it, Brother, here, take more!”
For the Brothers yes, — but for others what? —
The scourge, the dungeon, — picture their Lot.
And with that the Vision breaks and is fled
I am back in the Atrium, — no one’s dead,
A teller, still living and debonair,
Hands me a cheque book all unaware,
But old Vimy Ridge has a questioning Stare.
And the Customers slide and move and glide
Ah, good old World! let me back inside.
Soddy, you’re wrong, It isn’t so!
The Banker gives us a Quid pro Quo
Mr. Midas, shake! you’re the Real Stuff —
Well, another Thousand, would be enough.
FINALE
A RESURRECTION OF Adam Smith
Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, is generally understood to have started the modern science of political economy. It is time that he was called up to answer for it.
ADAM, Adam, Adam Smith,
Listen what I charged you with!
Didn’t you say
In the class one day
That selfishness was bound to pay?
Of all your Doctrine, that was the Pith,
Wasn’t it, wasn’t it, wasn’t it, Smith?
Don’t you remember your book begins
With a Panegyric on making Pins?
Didn’t you say that the more we made
The bigger would be External Trade?
We sold the pins and the Foreigners had ’em,
That was the Big Thought, wasn’t it, Adam?
And didn’t you say, — don’t think it funny,
That the greatest thing in the world was money,
And didn’t you say, — now please don’t shirk,
That the basis of value was human work,
And the Worker must be content with his lot
Being worth precisely just what he got.
Come don’t evade it,
Long-winded Scot,
Just, whether you said it Or whether not?
And if you said it, you must confess
You have brought the World to a terrible Mess,
For a hundred Years since your Grave was made
We’ve been making Pins and Machines and Trade,
All selfish as Hogs, whether rich as Sin
Or as poor as Rats, — Ah! why begin
To teach us about that fatal Pin!
How can you venture to look in the Face
Of an honest fellow like Stuart Chase?
How can you dare to be blocking the way
Of an Enterprise such as the NRA!
Smith, come up from under the sod
Tell me what did you do with God?
You never named him, I understand,
You called him (Book IV) an invisible hand;
You gave him the system all geared and speeded
With none of his Interference needed.
It wasn’t worthy a man of your size,
Smith, — come up and apologize.
AN EDUCATIONAL APPENDIX
(FOR THOSE WHO can Read it and Care to)
I present these Hickonomic Verses, not merely as a study in political economy, but, in all modesty, as a study in educational method. They are meant to illustrate that mode of learning by means of the imagination which is beginning to play such a large part in the college curriculum of today. I am thinking here of the brilliant work that is being done in teaching students of English the beauty of our literature and drama, by having them undertake a creative effort of their own. The real key to interpretation and appreciation lies in that. We are moved and stimulated to understanding far more by our imagination than by our intellect: more even than by our self-interest.
I have lived long enough in colleges, — half a century, — to have seen each of these principles in operation. The old disciplinary curriculum was hard and stern, training the mind. The practical, and optional, curriculum that replaced it invited the student to learn how to do the very things that he was going to have to do to earn his living; and now, dawning and expanding, is the light of a newer idea, — the allurement of the artistic impulse, the awakening of the creative instinct, which, once aroused, moves of itself, asking no reward.
No educational program could be based solely on any one, or any two, of these underlying principles. It must use them all in their degree. But the higher ideal lies with the last one.
When I entered college half a century ago, the curriculum was almost entirely disciplinary. It aimed at training the mind — not to do any particular thing but to learn afterwards with ease any particular thing it had to do.
Any of my classmates who had been trained in Greek syntax, could easily learn how to keep books in a laundry. Many of them did. The old curriculum was hard and uncompromising. It did not so much train men to live as fit them to die. In fact it killed some of them right in college.
That was the trouble with it. It was too hard, too disciplinary. It often defeated its own end. It did not have in it a sufficient element of fancy, of diversion, of creative effort. In point of sheer fun, it never got further than the occasional framing of Latin Hexameter verses, or a six line acrostic on Milton’s genius. We did, about once every twenty years, put on a Greek play in the original Greek, as laborious as the gestation of a female elephant bringing forth its offspring once in half a century. The Greek play was printed in Greek and in English and followed by the audience in a book. They got the book free or they wouldn’t have come. It took three years to rehearse the play, seven years to recover from it and ten years to revive it. Night after night and week after week, the students of the old disciplinary curriculum stayed in their little boarding-house bed-rooms, working at their books with midnight oil long past midnight. The pace was too hard. Once in about every two months, they broke loose, paraded the streets shouting, Rah! Rah! Rah! College! drank about one cubic foot of beer per student, upset a horse car and then went home, — sated.
A saving grace of the old curriculum was the existence of the College Magazine, not the roaring Daily of today, but a magazine of the old sort, not giving the news but printing translations of Catullus and essays on Oliver Cromwell. Every now and then the magazine helped to create, or rather, to hatch a poet.
After that, at about the end of the old century, began and spread the new idea of a practical curriculum. It is supposed to teach people how to do the very things they are going to have to do. It has been in existence now for over a quarter of a century as a chief element in the college program. I regard it as very largely a failure. It undertakes to train college men exactly in the way in which men who don’t go to college get trained. It substitutes four years in college for one in a workshop. Here belongs in great part, as now taught, the subject of Political Economy, compelled by the outside pressure of mass demand to convert itself into a vade mecum of business. Here belongs a great part of what goes with Schools of Commerce — which are admirable things in so far as they keep away from Commerce.
But the life of the practical college student has at least been adorned with all sorts of amenities on the side. His “practical” life has led him into a wilderness of college “activities,” college “politics” and organizations. He is as busy as a committee man, as powerful as a labor delegate, as self-important as a city alderman. Moreover he has with him his “co-eds,” — who entered the university so modestly and so coyly under the old disciplinary curriculum and helped to smash it all to pieces. So the “practical” student with his co-eds lives in a garden of flowers, a very Ispahan of hanging gardens. No midnight oil for him. He prefers to burn gasoline. His busy life turns him out an active, efficient, wide-awake citizen. But in his soul the more delicate flowers of learning have withered at the root. The little poet dies on the first year benches.
Now, as I say, is coming a newer time, or rather a new influence, blown into the college atmosphere like invigorating oxygen. This consists in the re-invocation of the spirit of creative imagination as the mainspring of education, — such as it was in the twilight of civilization. There is no doubt that truth can reach us best if it comes with an emotional appeal. Mothers who teach little children instinctively give everything a personal and imaginative twist. They do not say that two and two make four, but suggest that John has two peaches and Tom has two peaches, — and with that a swelling emotionalism is set up that makes addition easy. The mothers do not know it but they are repeating the history of the human race. This is seen in the early Hindu Arithmetic — that led Europe in point of symbolic calculation, a thing the Greeks never understood. All the “problems” in the Hindu text book have a queer slant of imaginative fancy. Thus a sum in multiplication runs something like this: —
“Oh! sacred cow, musing beside the River in the pasture, tell me how think’st thou ten would multiply with five?” Even more striking is the attempt of the Hindu Mathematician to put into Arithmetic a sort of amorous element or what the French now call “le sex-appeal.” Thus. “I have given thee, O Fair One, eight kisses already: If I add seven more, how many is that?” It is probable that many girls would feel that they would get along faster on the Hindu system than they do now.
Compare this. Euclid says, “Parallel straight lines produced ever so far both ways will not meet.” This is good, — bold, striking and final. But Rudyard Kipling beat it when he said, “But East is East and West is West and never the Twain shall meet.” There is a yearning, unfulfilled desire there that Euclid did not grasp, which conveys by emotion a drearier infinity than Euclid’s lines could do. Similarly Einstein has said in opposition to Euclid. “Parallel lines if produced far enough must finally meet.” But if he were capable of saying it with a touch of imagination how much more convincingly would it reach our minds. Thus “Parallel lines if produced far enough, must sooner or later, like lovers long separated, come together in the end.” No sympathetic mind could miss the appeal of that.
But this new transfusion of creative vigour into learning, in which even mathematics may share, would seem at first almost impossible for Political Economy. Here is an obstinate and crabbed science, living on facts and figures, untouched by imagination. Worse than that, it is now crippled and discredited with controversy. It has become the snarling sister of the sciences, living on argument. It knows nothing of the reverend senility of Philosophy, the outcome of two thousand years of thought: nothing of the chattering femininity of Language: nothing of the austere dignity of mathematical truth, as calm and unmoving as the polar sky.
Yet political economy must alter or perish. It needs, if it is to be reformed and reconstructed, the vivifying touch of warm imagination. The ossifying frame of Economics needs a Pygmalion to wake to life the Galatea that was once a living form; or shall I put it more simply and say, It has got to be louder and funnier? This Hickonomics book is an attempt to open the locked door behind which economic scholasticism is drowsing into final oblivion, and to let in a new current of life.
FINIS
Model Memoirs
CONTENTS
MODEL MEMOIRS
MODEL MONOLOGUES
THE DISSOLUTION OF OUR DINNER CLUB
HOW TO LOSE MONEY
THE FAMILIAR MAGIC OF FISHING
OVERWORKING THE ALPHABET
ON THE NEED FOR A QUIET COLLEGE
