Delphi complete works of.., p.402
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 402
It is only now that we realize to what extent the motor car had come to shape and fashion all our leisure. Older and slower things were pushed aside, compressed into small compass or speeded up into newer and bigger forms. Golf changed from a quiet pursuit in a local pasture beside the town to a vast, mechanized organization carried on twenty miles from everywhere and transforming farms and fields to a clipped landscape of little flags, and a palace club house that grew and grew till it’s become too expensive for its own members. People used to play golf in the ex-cow-pasture at five dollars a year. Lately they were just able to keep up their annual fee by never going out to play. It was the motor car that did this.
During the same period the motor car killed fishing. Sitting in a punt at one end of a rod was too slow; fishing around home at the old rate of two bites an hour, two bass a day, and two drinks a man, was just hopeless as beside a motor trip one hundred miles to Lake Katchehoochee, where you can get a motor boat for only ten dollars, and a man to run it for five dollars, and where there’s the fine big Katchehoochee Inn, all built of spruce logs set on end, with piazzas and chromium cocktail bars and everything à la carte so as to cost more.
It was the motor car that did all that.
With fishing went boat sailing — the real old boat sailing in the real old sailboats. As far as I know, it has vanished from our inland waters. It survives only beside the open sea where people must use real sailboats and do real sailing in them or get drowned.
But on the inland waters there is no time for that. Sailing has given place to a sort of aquatic circus in a thing called a sailing dinghy, all bottom and no sides, all gunwale and no seats, all sail and no place to pour a drink. It has to be that way, because sailing has to be done in a form to fit in with driving a motor car ten to twenty miles to a sort of sailing meet, where a whole flight of dinghies skim over the water, as beautiful to look at as all such wicked things are.
Boys and girls in bathing suits line the gunwales of the boats — in bathing suits because, of course, they expect to be upset. They feel disgraced if they don’t get upset; in the old days we felt disgraced if we did. There they sit, like birds on a swaying bough, wonderfully dexterous, tanned and bronzed and coloured and trimmed till they look as good as an advertisement. What they do is wonderful, but it isn’t worth doing, or only for people who live so fast that they have no time for better.
But, above all, please do not let them think that that sort of thing is boat sailing, and that the contraption they are sailing in is a boat. A boat, a sailboat, used to mean, and still does mean beside the sea, a boat that is not meant to capsize, that is not meant to roll over sixty degrees in every squall. You don’t “hang on” to a real sailboat because you are inside it — smoking. You don’t have a row of girls sitting out on the gunwale because in a real sailboat you don’t use girls. You may “take them out” on a fine afternoon with a wind that is guaranteed neither to rise nor to fall, but real sailing, as it used to be, was too long and too slow to be enjoyed by a mixed community of souls....
Nowadays, you see, the whole of the dinghy sailing is planned on the idea that, of course, you will all be back in time to dance at the Club House, or the Chop House, or the Old Windmill, or wherever the crowd will fly to after the sailboats are all capsized....
But the old boat sailing was planned as a thing in itself, to take all afternoon if one only had an afternoon, all day if one had a whole day, all the end of the week from Friday till Monday (oddly enough we never called it the “week end” — that was a fashionable English term that sounded affected) ... but, as I say, from Friday to Monday if you had all that, and then, for a vacation, sailing joined hands with camping, and there you were.
The scenes where the sailing and camping were done were the inland lakes like Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching which lie beside me, one to the right and one to the left, as I write this article ... beautiful lakes, two among hundreds. Before the motor car came, their waters were flecked with the sails of real sailboats — large sloops half-decked, heavily ballasted, with a main boom that would kill an ox if you let it jibe; Mackinaw two-masted boats patterned from the Upper Lakes’ fishing trade, bow and stern both sharp, the sternpost six to seven feet high, a cuddy forward and the rest open; and, with these, the boats we then called “yachts” — deep-draft boats with leaded keels, decked over, with a cabin with a folding table and four bunks ... and with these again a great number of smaller sailboats, every one seaworthy.
A dinghy of today in a fair breeze would pass all this old fleet as if it weren’t there. But then the old fleet would just sail on anyway, still smoking and with the sheets tied, against the rule that everybody made and everybody broke.
You see, they wouldn’t care about the empty dinghy swishing by them because they are “going camping,” and are down to the hatches with cargo. This, you see, is not a sail at all, but a voyage.
You notice the mattresses all rolled up tight and stowed under the foredeck, so that they will only get half-wet instead of completely soaked ... there are the dunnage bags in which each man has his other duck trousers; there’s the box full of canned food and the other one with the jar of whiskey and the keg of lager ... lying on top of this stuff — for after all you need something to read — is a copy of a paper called Tit-bits. It will last three men four days because it is all made up of little bits about the height of the Pyramids, and you can begin anywhere and stop any time. That is how Lord Northcliffe made a fortune.
So away blows the old sailboat farther and farther out on the lake till all you see over the waves is just the bobbing patch of white that is the mainsail.
Perhaps, some day, it may turn around and come back again.
But meantime the motor car killed out the sailboat and with it the camping that was its associate. Camping was too slow. Why go and cut down spruce saplings for tent poles, and make a fire with smoke in your eyes, and sleep beside snakes when you can take your car and hire a cabin for a dollar a night for one, and only three dollars a night for two, and have supper at the Spruce Bough Inn with dancing....
The motor car did that. It did it all. The only amusement for a youth came to be going out in a car with a girl, or going out in a car to look for a girl, or going out with a girl to look for a car. Since you can’t drive all the time, they had to invent the pop and hot dog stand, and since you can’t stand and eat all evening, they had to build a dance hall beside the pop stand.
You can’t dance forever, so that had to expand into a sort of Inn, called the Old Saw Mill, or the Old Forge, or the old anything at all that a new thing isn’t.
With that, money, money, money every minute ... money for gasoline, money for pop, money for ice cream, more money for more gas, money for the right to dance, money for the right not to dance...
Thus staggered the world along, bankrupt with its own pleasure ... the rich bankrupted by the richness of their golf club ... the young bankrupted on soft drinks; the old bankrupted on hard ones. There was a time — it’s not so long ago but what some of us can remember it still — when a young man could have a wonderful summer holiday on twenty-five dollars a month ... along with one or two other young men with the same ideas and the same funds. You needed a sailboat and a canoe in tow, an extra shirt each and that extra pair of duck pants I spoke of....
Things like bread and milk and butter and eggs cost nothing ... you just went to the nearest farmhouse with an empty basket and ten cents — the farmer wouldn’t take the ten cents; one ten-cent piece lasted all summer. As to drink, it cost hardly anything ... no young people drank much before prohibition ... out camping, if we came to a town, there was a bar with drinks at five cents. Two of those lasted three days.... There were no girls in it, but when you came home, all tanned up from a trip like that, you could get engaged to just about any girl you wanted.
So that’s that. The pleasure car is gone. We won’t pretend that we don’t want it back. But there is no such thing as an unalloyed blessing or an unmitigated cure ... let us look around for that old canoe; is it still somewhere in the back of the shed? Or is it lying somewhere on a bend of the river under the trees? And the heavy old sailboat with the bluff bow ... is that it I see thumping, thumping toward us? ... “Ahoy-y-y!” Let’s get our things ready; hurry up; it’s beating toward us. It will be right in at the dock in two hours.
So, good-bye, motor car....
II
STEPHEN LEACOCK COULD TAKE A HEAVY, PONDEROUS SUBJECT, SHAKE ALL THE WEIGHT OUT OF IT, AND PRESENT IT IN A LIGHT, INTERESTING VEIN. HE HAS DONE THIS IN “COMMON SENSE AND THE UNIVERSE,” “AN APOLOGY FOR THE BRITISH EMPIRE,” AND “BRITAIN AND CANADA: OLD PHASES AND NEW.” OF THE LAST TWO IT MIGHT FURTHER BE SAID THAT FOR OVER THIRTY YEARS STEPHEN LEACOCK TAUGHT HIS HONOUR STUDENTS IN ECONOMICS, OF CANADA AND THE EMPIRE. IN A SKETCH WRITTEN AT HIS DEATH BY PROFESSOR JOHN T. CULLITON, ONE OF HIS YOUNGER COLLEAGUES, MR. CULLITON REMARKS: “HIS LECTURES WERE CROWDED. ADAM SMITH, JOHN STUART MILL, AND MALTHUS WOULD COME TO LIFE. HE, BEFORE WINSTON CHURCHILL, SAVED THE BRITISH EMPIRE EVERY MONDAY, WEDNESDAY, AND FRIDAY, AT THREE O’CLOCK, IN ROOM 20.”
Common Sense and the Universe
I
SPEAKING LAST DECEMBER at the annual convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and speaking, as it were, in the name of the great 100-inch telescope under his control, Professor Edwin Hubble, of the Mount Wilson Observatory, California, made the glad announcement that the universe is not expanding. This was good news indeed, if not to the general public who had no reason to suspect that it was expanding, at least to those of us who humbly attempt to “follow science.” For some twenty-five years past, indeed ever since the promulgation of this terrific idea in a paper published by Professor W. de Sitter in 1917, we had lived as best we could in an expanding universe, one in which everything, at terrific speed, kept getting farther away from everything else. It suggested to us the disappointed lover in the romance who leaped on his horse and rode madly off in all directions. The idea was majestic in its sheer size, but it somehow gave an uncomfortable sensation.
Yet we had to believe it. Thus, for example, we had it on the authority of Dr. Spencer Jones, the British Astronomer Royal, in his new and fascinating book of 1940, Life on Other Worlds, that “a distant universe in the constellation of Boötes has been found to be receding with a velocity of 24,300 miles a second. We can infer that this nebula is at a distance of 230,000,000 light-years.” I may perhaps remind my fellow followers of science that a light-year means the distance travelled in one year by light, moving at 186,000 miles a second. In other words, this “distant universe” is now 1,049,970,980,000,000,000,000 miles away!
“Some distance!” as Mr. Churchill would say.
But now it appears that that distant universe has not been receding at all; in fact, it isn’t way out there. Heaven knows where it is. Bring it back. Yet not only did the astronomers assert the expansion, but they proved it from the behaviour of the red band in the spectrum, which blushed a deeper red at the revelation of it, like the conscious water that “saw its God and blushed” at Cana in Galilee long ago. One of the most distinguished and intelligible of our astronomers, Sir Arthur Eddington, had written a book about it, The Expanding Universe, to bring it down to our level. Astronomers at large accepted this universal explosion in all directions as calmly as they once accepted the universal fall of gravitation, or the universal death in the cold under Carnot’s Second Law of Thermodynamics.
But the relief brought by Professor Hubble is tempered, on reflection, by certain doubts and afterthoughts. It is not that I venture any disbelief or disrespect toward science, for that is as atrocious in our day as disbelief in the Trinity was in the days of Isaac Newton. But we begin to doubt whether science can quite keep on believing in and respecting itself. If we expand today and contract tomorrow; if we undergo all the doubled-up agonies of the curvature of space, only to have the kink called off, as it has been; if we get reconciled to dying a martyr’s death at one general, distributed temperature of 459 degrees below zero, the same for all, only to find that the world is perhaps unexpectedly warming up again — then we ask, where are we? To which, of course, Einstein answers, “Nowhere,” since there is no place to be. So we must pick up our little book again, follow science, and wait for the next astronomical convention.
Let us take this case of the famous Second Law of Thermodynamics, that inexorable scroll of fate which condemned the universe — or at least all life in it — to die of cold. I look back now with regret to the needless tears I have wasted over that, the generous sympathy for the last little band of survivors, dying at 459 degrees below our zero (-273° centigrade), the absolute zero of cold when the molecules cease to move and heat ends. No stove will light at that, for the wood is as cold as the stove, and the match is as cold as both, and the dead fingers motionless.
I remember meeting this inexorable law for the first time in reading, as a little boy, a piece of “popular science” entitled Our Great Timepiece Running Down. It was by Richard Proctor, whose science-bogeys were as terrifying as Mrs. Crow’s Night Thoughts, only slower in action. The sun, it appeared, was cooling; soon it would be all over. Lord Kelvin presently ratified this. Being Scotch, he didn’t mind damnation and he gave the sun and the whole solar system only ninety million years more to live.
This famous law was first clearly enunciated in 1824 by the great French physicist, Nicolas Carnot. It showed that all bodies in the universe kept exchanging their temperature — hot things heated cold, and cold things chilled hot. Thus they pooled their temperature. Like the division of a rich estate among a flock of poor relations, it meant poverty for all. We must all share ultimately the cold of absolute space.
It is true that a gleam of hope came when Ernest Rutherford and others, working on radioactivity, discovered that there might be a contrary process of “stoking up.” Atoms exploding into radioactivity would keep the home fires burning in the sun for a long time. This glad news meant that the sun was both much older and much younger than Lord Kelvin had ever thought it was. But even at that it was only a respite. The best they could offer was 1,500,000,000 years. After that we freeze.
And now what do you think! Here comes the new physics of the Quantum Theory and shatters the Second Law of Thermodynamics into gas — a word that is Dutch for chaos. The world may go on forever. All of this because of the final promulgation of the Law of the Quantum — or, shall we say, the Law of Just So Much — of which we shall presently speak. These physical people do not handle their Latin with the neat touch of those of us who knew our declensions as they know their dimensions. Of course they mean Tantum — but let it go at that. Quantum is drugstore Latin, quantum sufficit. Tantum is the real thing — Virgilium vidi tantum (“I saw something of Virgil”).
At this point I may perhaps pause to explain that the purpose of this article is not to make fun of science, nor to express disbelief in it, but only to suggest its limits. What I want to say is that when the scientist steps out from recording phenomena and offers a general statement of the nature of what is called “reality,” the ultimate nature of space, of time, of the beginning of things, of life, of a universe, then he stands exactly where you and I do, and the three of us stand where Plato did — and long before him Rodin’s primitive thinker.
Consider this. Professor Hubble, like Joshua, has called upon the universe to be still. All is quiet. The universe rests, motionless, in the night sky. The mad rush is over. Every star in every galaxy, every island universe, is at least right where it is. But the old difficulty remains: Does it go forever, this world in the sky, or does it stop? Such an alternative has posed itself as a problem for every one of us, somewhere about the age of twelve. We cannot imagine that the stars go on forever. It’s unthinkable. But we equally cannot imagine that they come to a stop and that beyond them is nothing, and then more nothing. Unending nothing is as incomprehensible as unending something. This alternative I cannot fathom, nor can Professor Hubble, nor can any one ever hope to.
Let me turn back in order to make my point of view a little clearer. I propose to traverse again the path along which modern science has dragged those who have tried to follow it for about a century past. It was, at first, a path singularly easy to tread, provided that one could throw aside the inherited burden of superstition, false belief, and prejudice. For the direction seemed verified and assured all along by the corroboration of science by actual physical results. Who could doubt electricity after the telegraph? Or doubt the theory of light after photography? Or the theory of electricity after reading under electric light? At every turn, each new advance of science unveiled new power, new mechanism of life — and of death. To “doubt science” was to be like the farmer at the circus who doubted the giraffe. Science, of course, had somehow to tuck into the same bed as Theology, but it was the theologian who protested. Science just said, “Lie over.”
Let us follow then this path.
II
When the mediaeval superstition was replaced by the new learning, mathematics, astronomy, and physics were the first sciences to get organized and definite. By the opening of the nineteenth century they were well set; the solar system was humming away so drowsily that Laplace was able to assure Napoleon that he didn’t need God to watch over it. Gravitation worked like clockwork, and clockwork worked like gravitation. Chemistry, which, like electricity, was nothing but a set of experiments in Benjamin Franklin’s time, turned into a science after Lavoisier had discovered that fire was not a thing but a process, something happening to things — an idea so far above the common thought that they guillotined him for it in 1794. Dalton followed and showed that all things could be broken up into a set of very, very small atoms, grouped into molecules all acting according to plan. With Faraday and Maxwell, electricity, which turned out to be the same as magnetism, or interchangeable with it, fell into its place in the new order of science.
