Delphi complete works of.., p.338
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 338
‘Waiter, when I asked for the toast well browned, I didn’t want it all burnt up like that, into a black crisp!’
Poor fellow, how he must have suffered! Got black toast instead of brown, too bad! But as a matter of fact, that type lives on suffering like that. He can’t eat without it.
If the waiter could talk back he’d say, ‘Got burnt toast, did you, you poor fish — well, even at that, it’s too good for you!’
But the waiter can’t talk back, he just says, ‘I’m sorry, sir.’ He isn’t really. He hopes the fellow chokes.
But look at this other man, pink and complacent, and smiling at the bill of fare. ‘Waiter,’ he is saying, ‘I want a nice lamb chop — and some nice fried potatoes, with a nice piece of toast and a nice pot of hot tea.’
The proper answer from the waiter to say to him would be, ‘I’m sorry, sir, we have no nice lamb chop. It’s no good!’ But he doesn’t give it. He says, ‘Yes, sir,’ and writes it all down. He knows this man has such a good digestion that his breakfast seems nice to him before he eats it.
The most usual type of man in the room, representing, at least, three-quarters of them all, is the man who sits with the menu card in his hand and holds a dialogue with the waiter like this:
‘Waiter, is there fresh fish this morning?’
‘Oh, yes, sir.’
‘How is it?’
‘Excellent, sir.’
Here there falls silence and a little more study and then:
‘How’s the steak this morning?’
‘Very good indeed, sir.’
More study:
‘Are there cod fish-cakes on the bill of fare to-day’?
‘I’ll just go and see, sir.’
‘No, wait a minute. What about liver and bacon?’
‘Yes, sir, always; very good indeed, sir.’
The man puts down the bill of fare.
‘Bring me bacon and eggs,’ he says, and picks up his newspaper.
As a matter of fact this man has eaten bacon and eggs every day for ten years, never eats anything else, and he knows it and the waiter knows it.
But he can’t help having a sort of longing look at the things he would eat if he didn’t eat bacon and eggs. It’s like thinking of having married someone else instead; not exactly regret, just wonder.
‘Waiter! Is my order coming?’
HAND ME DOWN THAT BOOK
IT IS AN old dispute whether fancy is greater than fact, fiction superior to reality, and the creation of the imagination more significant than the literal truth of the intellect. To put it more simply — which do you find more real, Mr. Pickwick whom you know from the garters up and from the heart out, or Mr. Jones, next door? Night after night you’ve talked with Mr. Jones while he sprinkled his lawn with a hose. He has expressed his opinion on the extent which grass can be kept green all summer and he has agreed with you that after all the City in the summer is the best summer resort that there is. But apart from that, do you know him? No, practically not. Would he lend you money? Oh, no! Would Mr. Pickwick? My dear sir, you’d only have to ask. He’d send it over by Sam Weller within ten minutes with a warning that there must be no thought of repayment.
That’s what ‘people in books’ are like — real people to whom your heart responds and who mean more to you than the people of your everyday life. Many of them have come down with you from your childhood. With some of them you have faced danger on the sea, when one more crack in the top-gallant-mast might mean instant disaster — or in the pathless woods of North America where the careless cracking of a dry twig under the foot of either of you could have brought an arrow whizzing past your head. It wouldn’t have hit you, of course. In the glorious world of books, arrows never hit you, they just ‘whizz past’; and bullets ‘sing’; or even ‘rattle’ when thick enough — but you come out of it all right, always. Another contrast this with real life, whose poor disasters are so mean, so desolating, so shabby and so unrelieved.
What a cavalcade they form, these ‘people out of books’ as they come from away back down the centuries. Some are in the very dawn of history, the mist still all about them. Here is Hector with his tall helmet, and Achilles who dragged him around the walls of Troy — or, wait a bit, was it Achilles who dragged Hector, or was it Hector who dragged Achilles? And, let me think, were they dragged or drugged? — I’m afraid I’m mixing it up with the latest film; did you see it? I can’t quite remember the name — anyway, the one where the Chinaman, Hong something, drugs the detective — at least he thinks he’s a detective.
The trouble is, of course, that in these later days — nobody’s fault — the old outlines are getting dim — all sorts of other and newer and quicker impressions are being written over them. The flash of the cinematograph fuses our history like a burnt-out wire, till the pictures melt and run and mix and somehow reform to make a kaleidoscope of moving mice, flying rabbits, of dancing scenery, of rushing trains, fleeing criminals, detectives ... and throughout all, to-day’s news, crashing with bombs, louder than the ten years’ siege of Troy, and forgotten in a week.
Those of us old enough can still look through this foreground of the moment to the cavalcade of giants, heroes, warriors, knights, and ladies, that gradually made the literature of the world. We can still hear the laughter of Chaucer’s Pilgrims of Canterbury, easy and sauntering, with always time for a joke, the worse the better — how different from the hurrying tourist of to-day with his radio in his ear as he sleeps. We can still wander with Don Quixote, driving full speed at windmills, with the haunting feeling that there’s a double meaning in it all if we could only catch it. Or here, closer at hand is Falstaff — it’s a pity the young people of to-day don’t know him; they’d find him ‘some boy.’ Or here is Sir Roger de Coverley — never read it? Oh, you must — and The Vicar of Wakefield — and then round the corner into the full noonday sun of the nineteenth century, with its whole procession of Waverleys and Ivanhoes, its Pickwicks and its Wellers, Pendennises, and Newcomes. Lord bless us! How the sun once shone on them. And with that what a marvellous side procession to join from America, brought over in stately ships by Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper, on rafts by Huck Finn, and as (first-class) Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain. On these, as on their British peers and predecessors, it seemed as if the illumination would never fail, and that there never could be a boy who hadn’t heard of Mr. Squeers or a girl who hadn’t wept over Evangeline.
And now, how great a change! It seems — so I am credibly informed and so I constantly notice — it seems that a great many of the young people of to-day (young people anywhere from six to sixty) have never heard of the Knights of the Round Table or at least mix them up with Ten Nights in a Bar Room. They think that Robin Hood was ‘Doug’ Fairbanks when he was younger, and that Lady Godiva is the name of a flesh paint.
There is no need to get angry over it. No need even for a professor to lecture about it. The fact is that the world to-day is so closely interconnected on the surface, that it loses its connection downwards with the past. Let me try to say that more simply, and then I’ll get it better myself. In the world in which we live you may ‘sit in’ at any aerial bombing going on in Barcelona or Shanghai, you can watch and hear the French people going crazy over King George VI, get all the wars in fifteen minutes, three wars going on and four practically guaranteed, get prize-fights, horse races, beauty shows — all hot over the wire or the wireless and fused again into nothing in a moment, as printers melt up type to use the lead again, and so convert a sermon into a love story. Thus does the type of life melt and run over the radio and the cinema. Now I think we all get it.
And yet — even granting that this hurrying world exceeds and surpasses the older one — its technique, immeasurably superior, in its possibilities of vivid depiction, its power of annihilating time and distance in the interest of narrative, and, perhaps, in many ways surpasses it in imaginative power — if only in its command of the grotesque, the lurid, the pathological forms of literary creation — grant all that, and yet something is irretrievably gone if we let go the thread of connection with the literature of the past.
We cannot live in a world of two dimensions, and literature, like life, must have its third. Our literature, common more or less, in its greatest sense, to all Western Europe, and laid as a present in the cradle of America — goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. It has to. It is a continuous growth. Mr. Pickwick, don’t you see, is directly descended from Sir Roger de Coverley, and Charles O’Malley, and Masterman Ready (never mind who they were: ask someone eighty years old), all such, and a host of heroes like them, are the Knights of the Round Table, still seeking for adventure. As the professorate would say, the continuity of a national literature is an essential condition of the continuation of national life.
Fetch me the old books and the old favourites — a whole real collection of them. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, if you will. I’ll start all over again, beginning with the Trojan war, with Flaxman’s illustrations, and then live over again the Last Days of Pompeii (look out for the lava, it’s dangerous): we’ll sit and watch the hundred coloured bannerets that flaunt in the breeze on the tourney ground of Ashby de la Zouche: drink sack with Falstaff; smoke long pipes with my Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim: and, in our heroic moods, wrap our colours round our breast (over our vest) on the fields of Spain, or climb the mast right up to the royal flush (I forget its exact name) and listen to the guns thunder on the deck below!
And, do you know, I think that such perusal, lost and absorbed in the fancied creature of which our own imagination must supply one half — and gives more than, if we sit, full of peanuts and popcorn, allowing flickering shadows, created by someone else, and sound and melody, contrived by someone else, to fill us up with a story — as you feed porridge to a duck.
Fetch me the books. I’m going to read.
WHO KNOWS IT?
OUR PASSION FOR INFORMATION
THE OTHER NIGHT I heard a voice on the radio in my living-room asking who was King George’s great-grandmother. I felt terribly pleased — because I knew the answer — Queen Victoria! In fact I remember her quite well. Then it asked how high is Mount Popocatapetl, and I was clean out of it. In all these years I had never stopped to enquire. When the voice went on to ask how many gallons there are in a cubic foot, and who fought the battle of Actium, I had to switch it off.
Odd, isn’t it, this sudden new passion for information that seems to have swept over us like a wave. Questionnaires, intelligence tests, quiz classes held by Professor Knowit, puzzles, problems — anything that can stand for information given and received, knowledge checked up and proved. And even when we are listening to other people being questioned, it’s really ourselves that we are checking up on. ‘Who was the bosom friend of Damon?’ asks the radio — and we know it: Pythias, eh, what? Where was Napoleon born? Corsica! — we got it the first time — ask us another.
The wave of questions sweeps the whole coast of human knowledge. Sometimes it’s history: ‘Where was General Burgoyne defeated?’ That’s just a sort of come-along, made easy, to coax us into the water. ‘In what year was America discovered?’ That gets us right in up to the neck; and then, ‘Who was John Wilkes?’ ‘Who was Vasco da Gama?’ ‘Who defeated Hannibal?’ ‘Who were the Sumerians?’ We’re swamped and drowned.
Often the questions branch into poetry, ‘The curfew tolls the knell’ — of what? ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’ — what boy? ‘Father, dear father, come home with me now’ — home from where? ‘The shades of night were’ — doing what?
A person who stands up to questions like that feels that he’s getting a grip on literature.
Sometimes we drop into straight mathematics, which has the same attraction as playing with fire; for example: — If a frog falls into a sand-pit twenty feet deep and gets up the side in jumps two feet at a time, but slips back one foot on the sand while taking his breath after each jump, how many jumps would it take him to get out of the pit?’
There, be careful with it. Don’t say you can do it by algebra — that’s cheap stuff — and anyway you can’t.
A side-line of this new question-and-answer craze is the ‘information-questionnaire’ as used in business.
The idea of it is to find out all about a person by reducing him to a set of questions and answers. As a recommendation of a candidate for a job we no longer want a few words of glowing praise, but something by which we can ‘measure him up’ on a scale. Perhaps as the light of the spirit grows dim, we turn on the artificial lamp of science.
Fifty years ago, if a business house wrote to a college for a recommendation of a young man seeking a job, they merely asked in general terms what sort of young man he was. They received in reply from a dean, or other academic authority, a letter which said that Mr. Jones was ‘a young man of high Christian character who had earned the esteem of his teachers, both for his assiduity and his intelligence.’ But nowadays, that kind of recommendation wouldn’t get the young man very far. The business house want him ‘measured.’ So they send out a printed form of questions. It says:
‘We understand that Mr. Jones was at your college. Kindly fill up the data as requested in the questions below.
(1) What percentage of character has he got?
(2) What is his percentage of Christianity?
(3) How is his assiduity (state how many hours he can sit still).
(4) How would you class his intelligence — (a) normal? (b) super-normal? (c) subnormal? Compare him with a higher ape.’
The college, of course, meets the situation on its own terms. It keeps books like ledgers in which Mr. Jones is reduced to credits, merits, hours per week, and weeks per year. They can fill him out in five minutes as sixty per cent Christian, forty-five per cent normal, assiduity guaranteed up to fourteen hours a day — saturation point — and intelligence tested five times under high pressure and never burst.
Some of the question sheets (I’ve filled in dozens of them) go further. They want to know not only what Mr. Jones is and does, but what he would be and do under circumstances that haven’t happened yet. Such questions as:
(1) How would Mr. Jones measure up in an emergency?
(2) If we left a hundred dollars on our office table would he steal it?
(3) If not a hundred, at what sum would he reach the stealing point?
(4) If burglars entered our office and shot at him, how would he react?
(5) If they hit him, what then?
As a natural result of this ‘questionnaire’ system, once it got started, there arose the ‘intelligence test,’ as applied direct to an applicant, the last word in the attempt at quantitative measurement of human capacity. It has since run riot. It proved a godsend to college psychology just at the time when the lamp of the old metaphysics burnt dim. It overspread business. It invaded the army. There was no end to it.
It works like this — you want to know what a piece of steel is like. Test it. You want to know what a young man is like — test him. Here, for example, is a young man who wants to marry your daughter. All right — have him tested. Send him up to the college psychological laboratory and let the professor test him. Don’t send your daughter up, though — just the young man.
To test him they find out whether he can remember how many windows there are in the corridor he passed through — how many steps he came up to get in — and what kind of trees he passed by in the college grounds. In reality, anybody who remembers windows and trees and steps has a mind as empty as a dried nut. What he needs is furniture. A hen, which can see, but can’t think, would pass an intelligence test in Class One ... Isaac Newton couldn’t touch it. To my mind an ‘intelligence test,’ if it means anything more than talking to a person as a way of getting to know him, is just a piece of pretentious nonsense, as ineffective as it is ancient.
But what does all this mean, this everlasting searching of our brains, testing our knowledge of fact, this passion for information, this desire for accurate measurement? Does it mean that there’s something going wrong with us? ‘Is civilization a failure, and is the Caucasian played out?’ asked the Truthful James of Bret Harte seventy years ago. Indeed, every nation is always asking itself if it is getting played out. The Greeks complained of it. The Romans talked of it so much that at last they got it. Every nation likes to hark back to the ‘men of old’ and pity themselves as degenerate descendants. Just now we are running through a phase of pretending that western civilization — the name we give ourselves — is playing out; that presently it will ‘crash’ — a new metaphor brought down from the air — and when it ‘crashes’ we’ll pass into a form of nebula called ‘world-chaos.’
Seen in this light, the present craze for ‘questions,’ for ‘facts’ means that earlier faith having gone, the minds run to seed in meaningless intellectuality; that ‘purpose’ is being replaced by purposeless capacity, just as the ‘helmsman’ is replaced by the gyro-compass, and machines with steel fingers replace the human agent.
There’s no end to it. People can get as mournful as ever they like about it, but if you come to the reality of things you will find that the present puzzle-and-quiz-and-fact craze has no particular meaning and no particular novelty. It’s the kind of thing that comes and goes and always has come and gone. The trouble with humanity is not that it changes so much but that it changes so little. The ‘men of old’ never existed, or, when they did, were pretty much like ourselves. Later on, we’ll be the ‘men of old’ — rugged, honest, but all dead.
So what I am saying is that the new ‘question-and-answer’ mentality is just a passing phase, not so new as it seems, and, in one form or the other, often in the world before.
