Delphi complete works of.., p.835
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 835
As a single book “Nonsense Novels” does not deserve a word of censure, but as a turning point in the development of Mr. Leacock’s art it raises a doubt. Since its appearance the public has demanded more nonsense novels, and the publishers have tried to make it appear that all his later work has been of the same class. This is not true. He has allowed himself a wide range, which embraces pathos as well as nonsense, but publishers, critics and readers have seemingly conspired to make believe that all his productions are nonsense sketches. Of course the same care-free nonsense appears in the later books and perhaps dominates them, but not to the exclusion of other forms of humor with which he made us familiar in his earlier books. The aggrieved boy still appears, full of fierce but funny indignation — as when Melpomenus Jones exclaimed with hollow, despairing laughter:
“Another cup of tea and more photographs! More photographs! Har! Har!”
When he appears in the last book he is just as aggrieved and indignant and funny as ever. The chairman at one of the lectures had announced:
“This year we are starting a new line, and trying the experiment of cheaper talent.”
“Let anybody who knows the discomfiture of coming out before an audience on any terms, judge how it feels to crawl out in front of them labelled as cheaper talent.”
The satirical master of ceremonies is there also and gives us such comments as this:
“The Rasselyer-Brown residence was the kind of cultivated home where people of education and taste are at liberty to talk about things they don’t know and utter freely ideas they haven’t got.”
If Mr. Leacock’s later books were as advertised and popularly acclaimed they would be mere imitations of “Nonsense Novels,” but fortunately he has not allowed himself to be submerged by his first success. There are elements of even greater success in other phases of his humor. Many of his sincerest admirers wish that his work had developed along the line of “Sunshine Sketches” rather than on the line of “Nonsense Novels.”
Like everyone else, I have read Mr. Leacock’s writings as they have appeared in periodicals and from time to time in books, but never with the purpose of appraising his powers and achievements. Now that I have re-read his books I am forced to a number of conclusions. To begin with, I cannot confine my mental picture of him to the shy and sensitive boy. I must admit that he has somehow developed into a man with a competent chuckle, who laughs at things, not because they hurt, but because he knows them and sees through their solemn pretentiousness. Then this man is sometimes aroused to indignant scorn and plies a satiric lash, that is none the less lacerating because it is light. Sometimes, for he is human, he blunders into something like peevishness and might almost be accused of scolding. But in every book, and in almost every article, I still find flashes of the boy, and am glad. I do not want to give him up, for that would mean giving up one of the last outposts of my own youth. To laugh with Leacock in his boyish moods is still to be in one’s twenties, and is very precious.
So much has been said about Leacock as a satirist that a word of consideration is indicated. Somehow I cannot class him with the great satirists. Although he has decided satirical power, it is slight compared with his genius as a fun-maker. I should never think of applying to him the quotation from Milton that Hugh Miller applied to Voltaire:
“I forewarn thee, shun His deadly arrow; neither vainly hope To be invulnerable in those bright arms, Though tempered heavenly; for that mortal dint, Save He who reigns above, none can resist.”
It is true that his ridicule can provoke laughter at many things that deserve the lash of satire, but it is not the laughter that one associates with the great masters of the lash. The subtle malignity of Swift, the delicate, brilliant savagery of Pope, and the indignant scorn of Dryden, are nowhere in evidence. Mr. Leacock’s lively mockery does not voice the rancours of his time. While his treatment of enemy statesmen, generals and rulers, for instance, moves us to laughter, the average man will prefer to leave the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs and their retinues to the fierce invective of Henry Watterson and of others who are skilled in expressing the unprintable opinions of their fellow men. The ordinary reader is not satisfied to see these great offenders tapped with a bauble. He wants someone to go after them with an axe. Mr. Leacock lacks the cold ferocity of the master satirist. And it is a good thing that he does. In spite of Pope’s boast that those who are: —
“Safe from the pulpit, bar and throne Are touched and shamed by ridicule alone,”
it is doubtful if the satirists ever accomplished much for the good of mankind. When the world is ready to dismiss any man or institution with contemptuous laughter, it is as likely to seize on some accidental phrase or some unmeaning “Lillubulero,” as on a prepared satirical masterpiece. It is quite true that on many occasions Mr. Leacock has essayed the role of a satirist with undeniable skill, but he finds it hard to hold the part. He often lapses into joyous and irrelevant nonsense, or pours out his indignation in every-day wrath, as when he ended his satire on “Night Life in Paris” with the comment: —
“Nothing is too damn silly for people to pay money to go to see.”
Mr. Leacock need not mind if one admirer — for I make no pretense of speaking for any one but myself — does not join in the chorus of praise that has greeted his satire. All satire is much overrated, and its value to humanity is doubtful. It gives expression to emotions that should not be cultivated. But wholesome laughter, such as he has evoked so freely, has a tonic effect, and we cannot be too grateful to him for his contributions to the bewildered sanity of the trying period through which we have passed.
Though the war affected the writings of Mr. Leacock, as it did the writings of all who came through that terrible experience, it is not in his humorous and satirical books published during the war and after that his real thought is revealed. Moved to the depth of his soul by the problems developed by the conflict, he dropped his role of jester for democracy, threw aside the cumbrous instruments of the political economist, and revealed himself as a man keenly alive to human needs. “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice” is the truest expression of himself that he has given. And, moreover, it is one of the most serious and purposeful books published since the war.
“But it is serious!” protests the average admirer of Leacock.
Quite true. But unless you can appreciate this book to the full you have never caught a glimpse of the man who has been amusing you. Unless you can enter into the spirit of this book you have missed the pathos that underlies so much of his humorous work.
“Pathos! Stephen Leacock writing pathos!” I can hear a chorus of laughers exclaiming.
Certainly!
What is the story of the “Little Girl in Green” that is tucked away in the burlesque narrative of Peter Spillikins but a little masterpiece of pathos? And Peter Spillikins himself — enthusiastic, clean-minded, futile, innocent — who is vamped because of his wealth, is almost a tragic figure. And he is presented in an atmosphere of burlesque. Because of the wide range of his observation and sympathy, Mr. Leacock is one of the best interpreters of conditions in the United States and Canada. In his writings the sordidness of things is not made repulsive. It is pathetic. Even his wildest burlesqueing and most boisterous laughter has an undertone of pathos. The impossible aspirations of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown are absurd and laughable — and pitiful. The mocker sees through them so clearly that one could weep for them. These things all hurt — and he covers the hurt with laughter.
Take the case of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown. Her name is burlesque and her friends are all burlesque characters. The people of an old and aristocratic civilization no doubt find her very amusing. The strivings of such people are favorite jests with the comic papers. But if you read the chapters in which she appears with any appreciation, you will feel that the crude yearnings for culture, and the follies and swindlings to which they lead, are fully as pitiful as they are laughable. In the same story, the suddenly wealthy farmer, Tomlinson, and his vague wife and their immature son, are portrayed with a pathos that has not a false note. The real laughter in “The Wizard of Finance,” and its sequel, “The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson,” is all directed against the greed and hypocrisy of the financiers and bunkum educationists and parasites who always fasten themselves on financial success. Their greed makes them just as blind as the simplest “come-on” who ever listened to the glozings of the gold-brick artist. Mr. Leacock gives us plenty of fun and satire directed at the shams of the world, but his mockery does not glance at the innocent. If they blunder into laughable foolishness, the pathos of their simplicity is not overlooked. When you have once glimpsed the man back of the fun and fooling, you will realize that only the man capable of writing “Social Justice” could possibly have written any of scores of his most-applauded and laughed-at sketches. We needed this passionately earnest book to reveal the true man to us.
Although Mr. Leacock has written extensively on political economy and occupies a position of authority as an instructor in that science, it is not proposed in this essay to follow him — to quote his own phrase— “into the jungle of pure economic reasoning.” He confesses that he is “well and wearily familiar” with this science, and reveals his opinion of its present status in a sentence: —
“When I sit and warm my hands, as best I may, at the little heap of embers that is now political economy, I cannot but contrast its dying glow with the generous blaze of the vainglorious and triumphant science that it once was.”
But though I find it convenient to quote him in my own defence when I wish to put by his serious work and confine the present essay to his popular successes, it would not do to follow this method too far. In his various essays and books he has dealt with almost every phase of his own work that a critic might be disposed to consider. It might be shown that even this essay is an impertinence, for he concludes his essay on American humor with this paragraph:
“One is tempted in such an essay as the present to conclude with a discussion of the writers of the immediate moment. But discretion forbids. Criticism is only of value where the lapse of a certain time lends perspective to the view. Of the brilliance and promise of a number of the younger humorists of to-day there can be no doubt. But it is difficult to appraise their work and to distinguish among the mass of transitory effects the elements of abiding value.”
Mr. Leacock’s stand on such controversial subjects as prohibition and public ownership have attracted so much attention that one cannot help at least mentioning them. The roar of anger that has risen against him all bears the burden that he is a professor and a humorist, and consequently is not qualified to discuss matters so profound and practical. The best reply to this attitude that occurs to me is a quotation from his own essay on Charles II.
“The man of real enlightenment is inevitably reckoned a trifler and is accused of shallowness and insincerity, while a dull man, heavily digesting his few ideas, is credited with a profundity which he does not possess.”
But if time should prove Mr. Leacock to be right — if prohibition and public ownership of the railways should prove to be failures — it is highly probable that he would find himself the victim of one of the keenest ironies of fate. An attempt to remedy conditions would probably force him to elaborate from his personal experience two more of the economic paradoxes with which he deals from time to time in his serious writing. For instance, in an American State where prohibition has been in force for many years it was found impossible to repeal it, not because of the strength of the prohibitionists, but because all the bootleggers and blind-piggers who profited by the illicit traffic in liquor supported the law. Under a licensing system their profits would disappear, so they supported the law they were breaking. Similarly, if the public ownership of railways should prove a failure it is logical to suppose that the chief opposition to a change would come from the powerful private railway interests that found competition with the government easy, and consequently would not want to face the keener competition they would find if the railroads were denationalized.
In addition to his literary success, Mr. Leacock has made an unusual success as a humorous lecturer. England, Scotland and Wales, as well as the United States and Canada, have listened to him and laughed — and the only complaint is that audiences cannot listen enough because they laugh so much. It has not been my good fortune to hear and see him as a lecturer. From those who have heard him I understand that seeing is just as necessary to a full enjoyment as hearing, for he is an actor as well as a speaker. When he tells a story, it is his habit to assume a part in it and act it during the telling. The following report from the London Spectator gives a suggestion of both the matter and the method of his lectures.
“Once he was playing in that wonderful piece, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ The audience would remember that the climax of the play was when Eliza crosses the river on lumps of ice. At the beginning of the run he was one of these lumps of ice, and he described how he put his very heart into it, and swayed and shifted as Eliza stepped on him, and when the manager saw that lump of ice he knew that his heart was in his work. Then his chance came. Just as Eliza had to cross the ice one of the characters had to say to her: ‘Hark, they have put the bloodhounds on your track already!’ and then a dog had to howl off. They had had a real dog to do it, but one day the dog was sick. You know how we actors climb on one another’s shoulders. I was sorry for the dog but—’ Anyhow the manager had said to him, ‘Mr. Leacock, can you howl?’ Blushingly Mr. Leacock had admitted that he thought he could howl, and from that day the part had been his.”
The critic of the Spectator makes a comment on Mr. Leacock’s humor that may be passed on without comment: —
“His jokes are oftenest produced by the magnifying-glass method, which is the same as the method of exaggeration, which, again, is the same as the reductio ad absurdum.”
An American critic of Mr. Leacock’s method as a lecturer is less learned, but more illuminating:
“Leacock hurt me at the Brunswick yesterday. He strained my stomach. I was wearing a suit that was made in 1902, and I split the back of the vest. I laughed until I had a sort of reflex, double-acting come-back of the diaphragm that was really painful. And he was merciless. I would straighten out my face and determine not to be an absolute fool; but Leacock kept coming back at us with Harry Lauder stuff, and Mark Twain stuff, so far as acting goes; and Jim Riley stuff, and all of it Stephen Leacock’s home-brew, absolutely fresh and full of kick. And bang! would go a ligament of my vest and a sinew of my will. I then cast all discretion to the winds and joined the merry throng. I have heard no such cachinnation in a sedate audience before in years.
“He should be fined for cruelty to sedate people. He should pay me for the back of my vest. I will bet that the janitor picked up a bushel of buttons from the floor after Leacock got through.
“It is a wonderful gift, this histrionic power over audiences. It is a form of auto-intoxication, too, when it attacks a professor of political economy and sets him to going around and making the world laugh, even against its set and fixed habits of declining to laugh at anything.
“This Canadian professor, with his hair in a bang, his twinkling eyes, his sturdy figure, his outdoor bronze, his deep voice, his sort of ‘Behind the Beyond’ imagination that turns laughs against himself, can doubtless move to tears, if he please, as easily as to laughter.”
The fundamental characteristic of Mr. Leacock’s writing, both serious and humorous, is intellectual fairness. He takes the trouble to know what he is writing about, whether his purpose at the moment is to instruct or to amuse. Many of his lighter sketches are scarcely humorous. They are singularly clear studies of things as they are, and these things seem funny because we never before saw them so clearly. Of course every serious observation or statement is inevitably followed by an absurd, nonsensical, or humorous afterthought, but that does not detract from the soundness of the serious part. When he burlesques the modern problem play in “Back of the Beyond,” it is at bottom a searching analysis of that particular form of the drama.
But though in his serious writing historical dignity is never violated, the humorist was nevertheless awake and storing up material that emerges as burlesque later on. For instance, it seems very good burlesque when the rector of St. Asaph’s “bowed to Episcopalians, nodded amiably to Presbyterians, and even acknowledged with his lifted hand the passing of persons of graver forms of error.”
But Leacock, the historian, records gravely that in the days of “John, by Divine permission, first Bishop of Toronto,” this description was seriously embodied in a public document. We find that in a petition addressed to Parliament Bishop Strachan had protested against an educational programme which “placed all forms of error on an equality with truth” — truth in that case being Anglicanism.
Although his volume in “The Makers of Canada” series gives evidence of much research and sets forth impartially the establishment of responsible government, there is no reason to suspect that it was a piece of drudgery and hackwork. The grave historian quotes with evident relish from the fierce polemics and fiery speeches of that embittered time. And in spite of the fact that Mr. Leacock mentions with evident pride that he is a Conservative he sets forth justly the great work performed by the Reformers who fought the battle of popular rights against an intrenched Toryism.
While he voices freely his disrespect for classical political economy and, as one critic has said, “has applied to it the cruel test of common-sense,” His “Elements of Political Economy” is a work of academic thoroughness, based on a wide survey of that overcrowded field. Only “a tough capacity for reading” could have enabled him to familiarize himself with the cloud of witnesses when bringing this subject into court. He must have “swallowed libraries whole” and digested them before producing this lucid and orderly presentation of political science, which is now used as an authoritative text-book in our schools and colleges. And if you read one of his satirical sketches, such as “A Little Dinner with Mr. Lucullus Fyshe,” you will find that his knowledge of business methods and conditions is searching and accurate. The amazing thing about Mr. Leacock is that, with his thorough grasp of the serious aspects of life, he has not lost his sense of boyish playfulness. He can lay aside his books at any time and “play at push pin with the boys.” But no one who makes a survey of his work as a whole can doubt that if he chose to stick to his books and to cultivate a pose of unshakable seriousness, he could have been as dull and dependable as any college professor or eminent editor of them all.
