Delphi complete works of.., p.828
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 828
In the good old summertime of those days our chief diversions were boating, sailing, swimming, and above all lawn tennis, newly introduced and all the go. Swimming never took the form of mixed bathing except for a few “sissies” who might care for it. Girls in those days, when they went into the water, were equipped from top to toe with bathing caps, full bathing suits more voluminous than their ordinary dresses, and bathing stockings and bathing shoes. “Swimming” for them just meant getting wet with their clothes on. Ordinary young men of wholesome minds looked on girls in the water as a damn nuisance. But for tennis they came into their own, since we all played so indifferently and had so little idea of the smashing game that tennis could turn into that any girl who could stand up beside the net and prevent the ball from hitting her in the face did well enough for a partner. Here again was a cheap game. The grass court cost little trouble to make, no expert work, and people made it for themselves. The net cost three dollars and lasted forever, and the balls never got lost, since we hunted them till after dark rather than lose them. As yet no one had ever heard of golf, at least not in that part of Canada, except as a sort of crazy game played in Scotland by knocking a ball round among sand hills which forbid any other exercise.
But compare again the cost of our lawn tennis of the nineties and the cost of the golf of forty years later which drove it out. Golf meant a high cost to make the premises and build a clubhouse and fence, high annual dues; with that, suburban fares, green fees, caddy fees, tips, at least one meal at the clubhouse on account of the distance from home. In the prewar days I knew of many people in Montreal who found that they had all that they could do to keep up their annual golf subscription without attempting to go out to the club and play. Yet in Scotland and in England, where golf links were clipped by grazing sheep, where the “clubhouse” was just such a small building as might serve to drink Scotch whiskey in or smoke a pipe in a rainstorm, golf was carried on for years and years at an annual subscription, in ordinary country places, of five dollars (one guinea) a year. Many people have told me of cases of minor revolution when the subscription was moved up to two guineas. But very likely, for all I know, the game may have been overswamped by wealth and by the pretense of being rich that has swamped out for us in America so much of the inexpensive amusement of the past.
The good old summertime of 1889 being ended, I went back with deep regret to my teaching job, with no particular prospect in front of me. And then unexpectedly things began to open up indeed and in less than a month altered my whole outlook. It is possible that the market for teachers had taken a favourable turn, or it is possible that I had made a hit as a teacher and that this one or that one may have spoken of me to someone else, but at any rate, quite unexpectedly and unsolicited, I got an offer to come to Napanee High School at a salary of nine hundred dollars — an increase of two hundred dollars in pay. By all the ethics of the teaching profession the Uxbridge trustees should have let me go or raised my salary. It is among the few redeeming points of the teaching profession that a school is not supposed to stand in a teacher’s way: what is a temporary inconvenience to the school may mean a life advancement for the teachers.
The Uxbridge trustees didn’t see it that way: they proposed to hold me to my contract. Looking back on it as I see it now, they felt that they had got a good article cheap and meant to hang onto it. They were, or most of them were, a poor lot. So they refused to let me go, and I had to accept it with the best grace I could and stick at my work.
Then right on the heels of this came a real offer, one that meant for me light out of darkness, salvation out of disaster. Upper Canada College needed a junior master at seven hundred dollars a year and offered me the job if I was free to take it at once. This would mean, of course, that I would go on with my college course towards a B.A. degree. For the residence requirements in those days were not strict, involved no actual roll call of attendance, and in any case, since the Upper Canada School day finished at three o’clock, I would take odd lectures that came at four or five. What it all meant to me I can find no words to describe.
But the Uxbridge trustees hardened their hearts, and again they refused to let me go. No doubt they were more than ever impressed with what a fine cheap bargain they had picked up. But this time the refusal was too bitter for me to sit down under it. I asked leave to come and talk to the trustees in person. They consented, and I went down to an evening’s meeting of the board of trustees and laid my case before them with something, I imagine, like impassioned eloquence. I tried to show them how much it meant to my future. I took up no other aspect of it. I had no precedents to quote, no usage, no real argument, just how much it meant to me. It didn’t seem to touch them. The chairman explained the difficulty of getting a new teacher when the term was already three weeks old, and that seemed likely to be the end of it, when to my surprise an elderly trustee who hadn’t spoken — his name was Britton, and I am glad to honour it — hit the board table with his fist and said, “Damn it, gentlemen” — or words to that effect— “let that boy go. Do you think you can keep a boy of his ability in a place like Uxbridge?” With that the situation was saved: on a sudden inspiration I asked them to give me a week to find them a teacher and they consented.
The situation, I say, was saved. For it so happened that “my remarkable uncle,” E. P. Leacock, was on one of those visits from the West to the East by which he eluded his creditors in the West, and I was able to enlist his services on my behalf. I have written elsewhere of “my remarkable uncle” and of the phenomenal career that made him one of the notable figures of the spacious days of the Winnipeg boom. He amassed a great fortune, on paper, went up like a rocket, and came down not like a stick, but with the more varied and graceful descent of a parachute. I wrote to him in Toronto, and he set to work at once with characteristic energy, interviewed the principal of Upper Canada and obtained a few days’ delay, and in those days, with the aid of the teachers’ lists and a flood of telegrams (there were as yet no general telephones), he unearthed a teacher, a modern-language teacher. It is true that his candidate, when produced, looked far from modern and short on language; indeed, I believe the good old man was hauled out of retirement, but he filled the bill and I was free.
[End of The Boy I Left Behind Me by Stephen Leacock]
The Biography
Leacock in later years
Stephen Leacock by Peter McArthur
CONTENTS
STEPHEN LEACOCK
MY FINANCIAL CAREER
BOARDING-HOUSE GEOMETRY
DEFINITIONS AND AXIOMS
POSTULATES AND PROPOSITIONS
L’ENVOI
THE TRAIN TO MARIPOSA
MARIPOSA! MARIPOSA!
THE LITTLE GIRL IN GREEN
A HERO IN HOMESPUN
OR THE LIFE STRUGGLE OF HEZEKIAH HAYLOFT
THE SPIRITUAL OUTLOOK OF MR. DOOMER
THE SORROWS OF A SUMMER GUEST
OXFORD SMOKING
AN APPRECIATION
Dedicated to the writers of Canada — past and present — the real Master-builders and Interpreters of our great Dominion — in the hope that our People, equal heirs in the rich inheritance, may learn to know them intimately; and knowing them love them; and loving-follow.
The original frontispiece
STEPHEN LEACOCK
WHILE AN AUTHOR is still living he has rights that a biographer is bound to respect. If he states that he was born on a certain day, in a certain year, at a certain place, it is the biographer’s duty to accept these statements without question. He may suspect that the author has taken the facts on hearsay evidence, but he must leave it to some conscientious biographer of the future to consult the parish register and verify the details.
Moreover, if the author occasionally indulges in autobiography and sets forth explicitly what he regards as the effects of the various events of his life on his career, the biographer will be wise to accept these confidences in a thankful spirit.
Being convinced of the soundness of these views, the work of the present biographer of Stephen Leacock is greatly simplified. By letting Mr. Leacock, as far as possible, tell the story of his own life, his labors will be reduced to a minimum and the enjoyment of the reader greatly increased. Mr. Leacock can tell the story of his life better than anyone else — and this is how he does it.
“I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, on December 30, 1869. I am not aware that there was any conjunction of the planets at the time, but should think it extremely likely. My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and my father took up a farm near Lake Simcoe, in Ontario. This was during the hard times of Canadian farming, and my father was just able by great diligence to pay the hired man, and, in years of great plenty, to raise enough grain to have seed for the next year’s crop without buying any. By this process my brothers and I were inevitably driven off the land, and have become professors, business men, and engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farm laborers. Yet I saw enough of farming to speak exuberantly in political addresses of the joy of early rising and the deep sleep, both of body and intellect, that is induced by honest manual toil.
“I was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, of which I was head boy in 1887. From there I went to the University of Toronto, where I graduated in 1891. At the University I spent my entire time in the acquisition of languages, living, dead, and half-dead, and knew nothing of the outside world. In this diligent pursuit of words I spent about sixteen hours of each day. Very soon after graduation I had forgotten the languages and found myself intellectually bankrupt. In other words I was what is called a distinguished graduate, and, as such, I took to school teaching as the only trade I could find that needed neither experience nor intellect. I spent my time from 1891 to 1899 on the staff of Upper Canada College, an experience which has left me with a profound sympathy for the many gifted and brilliant men who are compelled to spend their lives in the most dreary, the most thankless, and the worst-paid profession in the world. I have noted that of my pupils those who seemed the laziest and least enamored of books are now rising at the bar, in business, and in public life; the really promising boys, who took all the prizes, are now able with difficulty to earn the wages of a clerk in a summer hotel or a deck-hand on a canal boat.
“In 1899 I gave up school teaching in disgust, borrowed enough money to live upon for a few months, and went to the University of Chicago to study economics and political science. I was soon appointed to a fellowship in political economy, and by means of this, and some temporary employment by McGill University, I survived until I took the degree of doctor of philosophy in 1903. The meaning of this degree is that the recipient of instruction is examined for the last time in his life and is pronounced completely full. After this no new ideas can be imparted to him.
“From this time I have belonged to the staff of McGill University, first as a lecturer in political science, and later as the head of the Department of Economics and Political Science. As this position is one of the prizes of my profession, I am able to regard myself as singularly fortunate. The emolument is so high as to place me distinctly above the policemen, postmen, street-car conductors, and other salaried officials of the neighborhood, while I am able to mix with the poorer of the business men of the city on terms of something like equality. In point of leisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than a business man knows in his whole life. I thus have what the business man can never enjoy, an ability to think, and, what is still better, to stop thinking altogether for months at a time.
“I have written a number of things in connection with my college life — a book on Political Science, and many essays, magazine articles, and so on. I belong to the Political Science Association of America, to the Royal Colonial Institute, and to the Church of England. These things surely are proofs of respectability. I have had some small connection with politics and public life. A few years ago I went all around the British Empire delivering addresses on Imperial Organization. When I state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Union of South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turko-Italian war, I think you can form some idea of their importance. In Canada I belong to the Conservative party, but as yet I have failed entirely in Canadian politics, never having received a contract to build a bridge, or make a wharf, nor to construct even the smallest section of the Transcontinental Railway. This, however, is a form of national ingratitude to which one becomes accustomed in this Dominion.
“Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called ‘Literary Lapses’ and the other ‘Nonsense Novels.’ Each of these is published by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can be obtained, absurd as it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillings and sixpence. Any reader of this paper, for example, ridiculous though it appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books for seven shillings. Yet these works are of so humorous a character that for many years it was found impossible to print them. The compositors fell back from their task suffocated with laughter and gasping for air. Nothing but the invention of the linotype machine — or rather of the kind of men who operate it — made it possible to print these books. Even now people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the books should never be put into the hands of people not in robust health.
“Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labors of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff, fortified by facts and figures, is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one’s own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance, only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally I would rather have written ‘Alice in Wonderland’ than the whole ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’”
Of the two books mentioned above he gives elsewhere an account that may be added appropriately to this autobiographical sketch. The attention of the reader is called to the fact that the sketches included in “Literary Lapses” were written between 1891 and 1897, when the author was in his early twenties. They were not published in book form until fifteen years later, when they made an immediate success. Although they did not attract the attention of book publishers when they first appeared in Saturday Night, Life, Truth, Puck, The Detroit Free Press, and similar publications, they established Mr. Leacock’s reputation as a humorous writer with all who read these papers at that time. They won for him many enthusiastic admirers who were not surprised at the favor with which his writings were received when gathered in book form. For years this literary gold-mine lay hidden in the files of old papers, while the author occupied himself with the uncongenial task of school teaching and with serious forms of writing and study. Of his first book he writes:
“The sketches in ‘Literary Lapses’ were very largely written in my younger days, just after I left college. The one called ‘A, B, and C’ was the first of them. The editor of a Toronto paper gave me two dollars for it. This opened up for me a new world: it proved to me that an industrious man of my genius, if he worked hard and kept clear of stimulants and bad company, could earn as much as eight dollars a month with his pen. In fact, this has since proved true.
“But for many years I stopped this sort of thing and was busy with books on history and politics, and with college work. Later on I gathered these sketches together and sent them to the publishers of my ‘Elements of Political Economy.’ They thought I had gone mad.
“I therefore printed the sketches on my own account and sold them through a news company. We sold 3,000 copies in two months. In this modest form the book fell into the hands of my good friend — as he has since become — Mr. John Lane. He read the sketches on a steamer while returning from Montreal to London, and on his arrival in England he cabled me an offer to publish the book in regular form. I cabled back, ‘Accept your offer with many thanks.’ Some years after Mr. Lane, at a dinner in London, told this incident and said that it proved to him that I must be the kind of man who would spend seventy-five cents in saying ‘many thanks.’”
Of “Nonsense Novels” he writes:
“The stories in this book I wrote for a newspaper syndicate in 1910. They were not meant as parodies of the work of any particular author. They are types done in burlesque.
“Of the many forms of humorous writings pure burlesque is, to my thinking, one of the hardest — I could almost feel like saying, the hardest — to do properly. It has to face the cruel test of whether the reader does or does not laugh. Other forms of humor avoid this. Grave friends of mine tell me that they get an exquisite humor, for instance, from the works of John Milton. But I never see them laugh at them. They say that ‘Paradise Lost’ is saturated with humor. To me, I regret to say, it seems scarcely damp.
“Burlesque, of course, beside the beautiful broad canvas of a Dickens or a Scott, shrinks to a poor mean rag. It is, in fact, so limited in scope that it is scarcely worth while. I do not wish for a moment to exalt it. But it appears to me, I repeat, a singularly difficult thing to do properly. It is to be remembered, of course, that the work of the really great humorists, let us say Dickens and Mark Twain, contains pages and pages that are in their essence burlesque.”
