Delphi complete works of.., p.341
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 341
It spoke through such epoch books as Louis Blanc’s Organisation of Labour and Karl Marx’s Capital and Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. It has spoken through a thousand tongues since, but the voice, though in a thousand tones, is still the same. Academic people with long ears and loose ties now pooh-pooh all connection with the older socialism. They said it is replaced by guild socialism, or gradualism, or syndicalist-socialism, or by the peculiar Tom Tiddler’s ground beginning to be called totalitarianism. Not so: as they say in French, ‘the more it changes the more it’s the same thing.’ The central idea is wonderful, simple — and utterly hopeless.
A British Prime Minister once said that he could write out ‘free trade’ on half a sheet of notepaper. I am sure I could write out socialism on the space left at the bottom of the page.
Socialism merely means everybody working along with everybody else for everybody’s good, in cheerful co-operation and equality, instead of each selfishly working for himself in a world of inequality and injustice. The idea is grand. I’m all for it. But I’m not fit for it. At least I might be, but I doubt you other people. I’d hate to give up my house and my shares in my latest get-rich-quick gold mine (over the counter, tenpence a share) — till I am a little more sure of the rest of you.
Consider how socialism is supposed to work, by a real socialist or communist. Never mind the difference between the two: it’s only that a socialist shares the workroom and a communist shares the bathroom. For the present purpose they are all the same. There isn’t, of course, any such thing as real socialism in existence, and never has been and never will be. But you will find it existing as a vision in the mind of any enthusiastic second-year student, bright with light and iridescent as a soap-bubble. It is part of his native endowment of generous imagination which the college will presently remove in fitting him for life.
This is what he sees.
In his happy world a group of awfully decent old men (many of them as old as forty) sit together as a sort of board of directors and arrange how much of everything ought to be produced so that everybody will have conveniently enough of it. How do the old fellows know it? Oh, they think it out — or no, perhaps they calculate it from graphs and curves that indicate what is called ‘saturation.’ The old men are supposed to know when they are saturated. Not all old men do, but that doesn’t matter. These are supposed to, and anyway these old men are so decent and so public-minded that they don’t mind how long they sit there and saturate. Real old men (I am one) might want to have a whiskey and soda brought in, and a box of cigars — or perhaps want to know what there was in it for themselves; and crooked old men (I’m not one, but a lot of my friends are) would start to fix up the plan of production all crooked.
But anyway pass on from the old men. The idea then is that all the ‘comrades’ are allotted to various tasks. One says, ‘Please may I be a policeman?’ and the board says, ‘Certainly!’ And another says, ‘Can’t I have a hat like his?’ and the board says, ‘Why, of course.’ Because, you see, they’re all so kind and so considerate. They’re just dream people, not real at all. And so the dream-people drift off into all their jobs — and some are butchers, or bakers, or tinkers, or tailors — my, it’s fun! — they all love it! — and some are engineers on trains and go ‘Toot! toot!’ Don’t you remember when you were a child and had no economic ideas and thought that a policeman was a policeman because he liked being a policeman, and an engineer was on a train because he liked to make the whistle toot? Well, that dream world that you lived in was the socialist’s world: and if you grow old enough and silly enough you can get back into it, and think of it over a bowl of gruel.
It just can’t be. The motive is wrong. We are not like that. We don’t, we can’t care enough for one another’s welfare. I’ll look after my grandmother, but I won’t look after yours. She’s not worth it. I’ll pay for the education of my own children because they are bright little fellows and it’s well worth while, but you’ve only to look at yours to see the difference.
As to dividing up work, by cheerful goodwill and free discussion, you can’t do it. I’ll take an example from the simplest thing that I understand — farming.
On a socialist farm, run by free discussion comrades, you’d get scenes like this — held in fence corners under an elm tree on a June morning. The hour is early, but not too early as some of the comrades like to take an extra snooze, when it’s fine, and the other comrades hate to start without them.
One speaks, ‘I move, gentlemen, that it would be a good thing to-day if we were to pick Colorado ‘Beetles.’
‘You’ve heard the motion, gentlemen, that we spend to-day in picking Colorado Beetles. Any seconder?’
‘I second it.’
‘Any discussion?’
‘I’d like to offer an amendment to the effect that we don’t pick them off by hand but use a spray of Paris green dissolved in water’ —
‘I object — it’s no good — it don’t kill ’em. I propose arsenate of lead’ —
‘It’s no use — Paris green!’ (shouts of ‘arsenate of lead!’ ‘Paris green!’).
Chairman: ‘Order, order, gentlemen!’
Senior member, rising — that is, half sitting up in the grass: ‘Mr. Chairman, in view of the heat I suggest that we adjourn the discussion and have a drink of lemonade under this elm tree.’
‘I suggest an amendment to make the motion read, “beer and pretzels.”’
Amendment carried.
But suppose you say that in a co-operative commonwealth of course everybody would have to work; wouldn’t be allowed extra sleep just because he felt drowsy; wouldn’t pick his own trade — if it was full — or set his own hours, or wages, or conditions. All this would be done by authority, by those over him. The officials of the state would decide how and when and where the work was done. And if a man wouldn’t work? What then? ‘Those who will not work shall not eat,’ wrote up Captain John Smith in Virginia. But the Virginian had at least the wilderness. The modern communist worker has the loom on the left and the jail on the right. Work or get punished. And those who direct it are the bosses — elected, selected, or forcing their way to the top. The strongest rules.
What a picture, this world of iron rule with the worker called, and if need be driven, to his task. This is no pleasant hay field in the morning sun. But if you know of any state where this cap fits, put it on. There is no escape from the dilemma. Freedom in a socialist state means idleness and confusion: order and authority means economic slavery.
Nor is there any solution to be found in the half-way house called a totalitarian state: in this the workers are ordered and grouped in huge economic divisions with wages and profits unified in the groups. But the totalitarian state faces exactly the same dilemma as described: the moment it passes a certain line it turns to economic slavery. In it, or in any other state, political and national enthusiasm can render tolerable for a time an economic system impossible in the long run. But this is just the hair shirt of the mediaeval socialist. A similar devotion for a time can carry a nation, or at least many of its people, into the sacrifice of individuality, the consciousness of mass welfare, that goes with war. But this is the agony of mankind, its martyrdom, not its life.
What is left? We must go on as we are, with our every-man-for-himself individualist state, patching it, fixing it, somehow making it go. Call it capitalism if you like and kick it, but it is all we’ve got.
But observe that after all we are at least getting on a little. We won’t let one another starve: doles, and pensions, and relief, and all that goes with it take the place, for the poor, of the Kingdom of Heaven. We try to regulate our industrial system by wage laws, welfare laws, school laws, and all that goes with parks, playgrounds and libraries and community life. We give more and more collectively from the rich towards the collective enjoyment of the poor. We seem slowly to be devising not a new society but a better regulation of the old, not a new game, but a new set of rules.
Such a conclusion seems perhaps dispirited and discouraging. As I see it, it’s the only one. What we have is all we are fit for. Change us and you change it. The two go together, spirit first, body after.
COLLEGE AS COMIC STUFF
EVERY AGE AND every generation has its own particular line of humour, its own ideas of what things are supposed to be funny and form the subject of its jokes. A generation ago all Irishmen were funny; in fact, the whole of Ireland was supposed to be a sort of fun shop — with horse-fairs and wakes, and fist fights — something doing all the time. On the comic stage the Irishman in green twirled a shillelagh tied up with ribbons and joined in alternate laughter and tears with a ‘colleen’ whose short skirt came up so high that it met her pigtails coming down. The Irishman — older people please recall it — would hold up a sod of earth, so green you could see it from the gallery, announce it as from his mother’s grave, break down and cry, and then forget it all in a dance with the colleen. In short, the place was full of fun. Nothing is left of it now except the thin conventional jokes beginning ‘Did you hear what Pat said?’ Ireland as the home of merriment has gone to the bad; there’s no fun left in it — just a people who talk Gaelic, sit in the League of Nations, discuss their tariff policy, and buy their laughter over the radio.
Ireland has gone, and along with it a lot of other old landmarks: — the comic Jew now turned into one of the world’s tragedies, the comic Yankee of the days of Sam Slick and Major Downing, now turned into a New England trust company, fast asleep.
But in place of these, since the world never stops spinning, arises new scenery for our humour, and above all, as the latest, the best and the most delightful, the Comic College. You can see it, if you don’t know it already, in a hundred moving pictures, in a hundred magazines. Look! There it is! See the ‘Co-eds’ skipping around in shorts! You didn’t think college girls were like that, did you? And ‘Prexy,’ the president, isn’t he just done to the life, eh? That is to say, you’ve perhaps never really seen a college president, but isn’t he just like what they all are — I mean all the other ‘Prexies’ in all the other college movies? And the ‘Profs’ — aren’t they simply killing? And the rah! rah! students playing on ukeleles.
The Comic College! I’m all for it as the most delightful, most enchanting Garden of Fun that ever opened upon our vision.
I have spent my life, except my school days, in college — was myself a ‘Prof’ for thirty-five and a half years. And when I see the Comic College, I half recognize it and half not. It seems half true and half nonsense — or at least truth reflected through apparent falsehood as it always is in art.
Where did they come from — the ‘Co-eds,’ the ‘Prexies,’ and the ‘Profs’? How did the Comic College appear, and why wasn’t it here before? Well, you see, a generation or two ago, a college, whatever else it was, wasn’t comic. There was no fun in it. Then all sorts of changes came over the old college and turned it into the new college. This opened the eye of the artist to things that no one ever saw before.
For the wonderful thing about the Comic College is that it contains just that exact relation of fact and fancy, reality and romance, truth and exaggeration which makes for artistic creation. Take some of its chief items, for example, ‘Prexy,’ the comic president of the Comic College, with his mortar-board, and mock dignity, ridiculous in his overdone decorum, his offended majesty, his fuss and anger. Is a college president really like that? Not in the slightest. A college president of to-day is approximately more and more, as is everyone else, in the type of a ‘business man.’ If the twelve apostles came alive to-day they’d look like ‘business men.’ It’s what the biologists call the ‘survival type.’ Anything else like the old-fashioned college president that used to be, the biologists call a ‘sport.’ You see the world at large only caught on to the fun that was in the old-fashioned college president after he was gone. It is always like that. We can only see literary colour in retrospect; for colour in the life around us we are as blind as a horse in blinkers. We only discover when its light is fading. Chivalry only began in literature when it was dead in fact; a war only gathers its romance when the soldiers who fought in it are dead. And so the world never discovered the college ‘Prexy’ till in reality he was gone. The president of to-day, dictating in his office, filling appointments, granting interviews, is quite different.
Witness this little experience.
A classmate of mine of long ago came back after many years to see our college. He said he’d like to go in and see the president, see him just a minute. ‘I don’t want to let the old geyser pin me down there and shoot Latin at me for half an hour; do you remember the way old “Prexy” used to get people in his office and they couldn’t get out?’ ‘So he did,’ I admitted. ‘Well, look,’ said my friend, ‘if this old buster starts saying anything about showing me round the college and inviting me to lunch, then I’ll say that I have to catch the 11.30 for New York, see? We just go in and shake hands and then beat it.’
We waited our turn, were announced, and went in. The president rose from his chair, with my friend’s card in his hand. There was no ‘Prexy’ stuff about him — neat and smooth, a man of the world, his manner polished, his voice composed, nothing comic in him. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, as he shook hands, still with his eye on the card, ‘Mr. — er — Mr. Maclennan of — er — Arizona — class of — er — ninety-four... I’m extremely glad!’
My friend gurgled. He didn’t find words because he was knocked sideways to realize that the president was twenty years younger than he was.
‘Having a look round the old college?’ continued ‘Prexy,’ and my friend made another noise in his throat to mean retrospect. ‘I’m sure you will be most interested. You must see our new dormitories — I’m so sorry’ — he took out a gold watch and snapped it— ‘that I can’t offer to go around with you — but the fact is that I have to get the 11.30 for New York.’
Two minutes later we were out of the room again, my friend pledged to go and look at the dormitories and not to miss the hydraulic apparatus.
That seemed very different from the comic ‘Prexy’ who does the dance with the ‘Co-eds’ in shorts. In reality it was the change from one to the other that enables us to hatch out the old college president, and to turn him into art.
It was the same law of evolution that also hatched out the ‘college man’ from the ‘student’ of fifty years ago. The old-fashioned student lived on midnight oil, worked sixteen hours a day, and only took a ‘night off’ once in ten months; even when he did, all he thought of doing was to go and drink enough beer to excite him to upset a horse car. The ‘college man’ of the comic college plays the ukelele, burns gasoline, roots at football, ‘flunks’ his exam., ‘bones’ his father, ‘cuts’ his classes, and above all gives the girls a good time. Study! Bless my soul, how can the man get time to study? What for, anyway? You don’t have to. All you do is to ‘elect’ a ‘snap,’ ‘flunk’ an oral, ‘fake’ an ‘aegrotat’ and ‘get by.’ You observe that it takes a whole new dialect to express the college man. But anyone in college knows what this jargon means. People outside may interpret it as meaning that students don’t study. If they work, it’s in the summer in a logging camp in Wisconsin, or preaching to an Eskimo mission. But at college they don’t work; they live.
With the students are the ‘Profs’ of the comic college, as seen by the new imagination. And these, too, are not the actual professors of to-day but just the ghosts of the professors that were, in their own day, not appreciated as fun, but now ‘cashed in’ as literature, like an investment made in the past. Look at them! See them at their professors’ committee meeting in the movies, all in mortar boards! Real professors haven’t worn them for thirty years. So absent-minded that they chase a fountain pen through fourteen pockets and find it behind their ear. But try and rob a real professor of a nickel and see him react. The real professor of the newer type, sits like the president in an office and dictates, plays golf in plus fours and makes money out of the stock exchange and his knowledge of geology. A few of the older type, one admits, still survive; too preoccupied to have their hair cut, calling the same student by six different names in one morning — college ‘characters’ that justify to that extent the creation of the comic college.
But first, last, and always, the very soul of the comic college is found in the ‘Co-eds.’ They are the force that made it — the Delilahs that cut Samson’s hair so short that he couldn’t upset a street car — that hurried students into ‘college men’ and first made professors conscious of odd socks.
College girls in the comic college have a greater aversion to study than even the college men. In fact, they don’t study. They ‘elect’ a course in ‘religion,’ or a half course in ‘maternity,’ or an ‘option’ on ‘marriage.’ They live in motor cars, drive in shorts, eat only after midnight, and dance on any and every occasion.
Are they truth or falsehood? I haven’t an idea. Are college girls really like that or getting to be like that? I guess they are partly. The early college girls wore spectacles, learned Greek, and married the professors. The newer college girls are descended from them, but how much they retain of their heritage, or how much they correspond to the reflection in the new mirror, goodness only knows!
The fact is that we are seeing it so close at hand that it is almost impossible to judge it.
This new imaginative creation of a ‘comic’ college is the reflection of a profound transformation in our social life, in the part of it we call education. I don’t want to get prosy about it, but the meaning of this would be lost if we didn’t look for the social interpretation of it. Education, past and present, has pursued various goals. It has never quite known what it was after. In early times it fitted people to die; but this made them want to live. Later it fitted them to learn Latin and Greek; this had the effect of making them love English. Later still, education taught people to be citizens. This made them crooks. Later still, it taught them to be practical, to learn how to make money; this landed them in gaol.
