Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 400
There is also the most obvious qualification to be made in regard to women’s sense of humour in general and women’s wit in particular, that of course individual exceptions, however conspicuous, do not set aside the general rule. There is no doubt that at least one of the most brilliant humourists of the hour in America is a woman. Many would say, the most brilliant. Such a faculty for reproducing by simple transcription the humour of social dialogue has, it seems to me, never been surpassed. But one swallow doesn’t make a summer, though one drop of ink may make all humour kin.
The truth is that the ideal of ordinary men is not a witty woman, but a sweet woman. I know how dangerous the term is, how easily derided. Sweetness may easily cloy into sugariness, or evaporate into saintliness. A saint with hair parted in the middle, with eyes uplifted, may be all right for looking out from the golden bars of heaven, but not so good for the cocktail bars below.
And yet, I don’t know. A saint can kick in sideways anywhere.
It might easily be objected that all such opinions about sweetness in women are just left-over Victorianism, half a century out of date. Witty women, it will be said, may have seemed out of date in the stodgy days of women’s servitude, but not now. The men and women of today — or call them the boys and girls — mix on an entirely different plane. All the old hoodoos and taboos are gone. All the girls smoke. They use language just as bad as any the men care to use. They drink cocktails and give the weaker men the cherry. In other words, they can curse and swear and drink — they’re real comrades. In point of physique, they may not be equal to the men but after all they can drive a car and fly a plane and telemark all over hell on skis — what more do you want?
So why shouldn’t a girl of that type, the new girl who has conquered the world, be witty if she wants to? What more charming than a witty girl, half-stewed, as compared with a girl half-stewed and silent as a toad full of gravel?
To all of which I answer, “No, no, it’s just an illusion!” There are no new girls, no new women. Your grandmother was a devil of a clip half a century before you were born. You telemark on skis; she cut ice in a cutter. You only knew her when she was wrinkled and hobbling, reading the Epistle to the Thessalonians in a lace cap and saying she didn’t know what the world was coming to. The young have always been young, and the old always old ... men and women don’t change. It took thousands, uncounted thousands, of years to make them what they are. The changes that you think you see lie just on the surface. You could wash them away with soap and hot water.
But now I’ll tell you another thing. All this new era of ours of emancipated women, and women in offices and women the same as men, is just a passing phase, and the end of it is already in sight. A great social disaster fell on the world. The industrial age built up great cities where people lived, crowded into little boxes, where there was no room for children, where women’s work vanished because they were dispossessed, where national population was kept going by additions from God knows where, and national safety was jeopardized by the increasing scarcity of our own people.... We had a close shave of it.
Then came the war in the air.... It has bombed the industrial city out of future existence. They know that already in England. The bomb is decentralizing industry, spreading the population out. They will never go back. This will mean different kinds of homes, homes half-town, half-country, with every man his acre.... Every one’s dream for a little place in the country, a place to call one’s own, will come true. Socialized up to the neck, the individual will have its own again under his feet.
And the children? There must be four or five for every marriage. It is the only path of national safety, safety by the strength and power of our kin and kind, bred in our common thought and speech and ideal. Without our own children, the wave of outside brutes from an unredeemed world will kill us all. Later, we can redeem the world but we must save ourselves first.... Everybody will know that. In re-organized society the nation’s children will be the first need, the main expense of government. Women who see to that need see to nothing else.... That will be done in the home, for there will be no paid domestic service except contract labour by the hour from the outside, labour as good as ladyship, wearing a gold wrist watch and a domestic college degree.... But the main thing will be the home and behind it the long garden and trim grass and flower and vegetable beds, and father trying to plant a cherry tree from a book.
When England has been bombed into the country, America will follow. Our cities will go, too.... No one will live in New York any more than miners live in a coal mine.
So the world will be all different. One little century will do it. Even half a century will show the full outline of it. Surviving on ... surviving on into this altered world will be the queerest old set of left-over creatures, as queer as our left-over Victorians, only queerer. These old women will be happy and alert and self-assertive, but they will still not know how to fry an egg or repeat a nursery rhyme, for they only had three-quarters of a child each.... The boys and girls of twenty will think them very funny.... But my! Won’t they be witty when they get together and cackle.
So that, you see, is why I don’t think witty women are attractive to men. You don’t see the connection? Well, perhaps you remember Molière’s play called The Doctor by Accident (Le Médecin Malgré Lui) where the supposed doctor, called in to diagnose a case, gets off a vast rigmarole about nothing in particular and adds at the end, “...and that is why your daughter has lost her speech.” You see, he didn’t know anything about it.
Possibly it was like that.
Living with Murder
I AM A great reader of detective fiction. That is, I have been up to now, but I see I shall have to give it up. It begins to affect one’s daily life too much. I am always expecting something sudden, something sensational, to happen, such as that a criminal will “burst around the corner” on the run and I shall immediately have to “time” his burst.
They always time everything in the stories, so as to have it ready for the evidence.
That is why I now find myself perpetually “timing” myself all day, so that I can swear to everything.
For instance, I went down to dine three or four days ago with my old friend Jimmy Douglas at his house. He lives alone. This, by itself, would make any reader of crime fiction time him. I paused a moment at the lighted doorway before ringing the bell and noted that my watch said 7:00 P.M. A street clock just visible down the street, however, marked 7:02½ P.M. Allowing for the fact that my watch was one minute slow, I was thus able to place the time fairly accurately as at 7:01¼.
What did I do that for? Well, don’t you see — what if I rang the bell, received no answer, and at length pushed the door open (it would yield quite easily) to find Jimmy Douglas lying prone in the doorway? That would settle the time, wouldn’t it? And what if he were still warm (he would be, good fellow)? That would settle just how warm he was.
So I rang the bell. The Chinese servant who answered the door showed me noiselessly into the lighted sitting room and motioned me to sit down. The room was apparently empty. I say apparently, because in the stories you never know. If Douglas’s body was lying hunched up in a corner (you know the way they hunch them up), my business was to take care to look up in the air, around the room, everywhere except in the right place to see him.
I did this and I noticed that there was an Ormolu clock on the mantel (there always is) and that it stood at 7:04 P.M., practically corroborating my previous estimate.
I was just checking it over when Douglas came in.
I noticed his manner at once and could only describe it as extremely normal, even quiet, certainly, I would say, free from any exhilaration. Whether this was a first effect of arsenic poisoning, or just from seeing me, I am not prepared to state.
We had a cocktail. Douglas left two distinct fingerprints on the glass. I held mine by the rim.
We sat down to dinner at 7:30 P.M. Of this, I am practically certain because I remember that Douglas said, “Well, it’s half-past,” and as he said it the Ormolu clock chimed the half-hour. A further corroboration is that the Chinese servant entered at that moment and said, “Half-past seven!” I gather, therefore, that the hour was either seven-thirty or possibly a little before or a little after.
At any rate — not to make too much of details — we sat down to dinner. I noticed that at dinner Douglas took no soup. I attached no importance to this at the time, so as to keep it for afterwards. But I also took care on my part to take no fish. This, of course, in the event of arsenic poison would at least, by elimination, give a certain indication of how the poison had been administered. Up to this point the Chinese servant’s manner was quite normal, in fact, Chinese.
I am not able to say whether Douglas took coffee after dinner; I slipped up there. I had got talking, I remember, of my views on Allied Strategy and for the moment forgot not only to time him but to notice what he ate. This makes an unfortunate gap in the record.
However, Douglas, I noticed, seemed but little inclined to talk after dinner. I was still unfolding to him my views on Allied Strategy in the war, but he seemed unable to listen without signs of drowsiness. This obviously might be due to arsenic poisoning.
I left at nine, having noticed that Douglas roused up with a slight start as the Ormolu clock struck, and said, “Nine! I thought ... I thought it was ten.”
I drove home in a taxi; and can easily identify the taxi, even if abandoned in a stone quarry, by a mark I made in the leather. I can identify the taxi man by a peculiar scar.
That, as I say, was three days ago. I open the newspaper every morning with a nervous hand, looking for the finding of Douglas’s body. They don’t seem to have found it yet. Of course I don’t know that he lost it. But then it is never known that a body is lost until some one finds it.
One thing is certain, however. I am all ready if they do.... If any news comes out I can act at once. I have the taxi man, and the fingerprints and the Ormolu clock — that’s all you need usually.
What Can Izaak Walton Teach Us?
EVERYBODY — OR at least everybody who goes fishing, and the rest don’t count — knows the name of Izaak Walton. Many of them would also remember that he was called the Father of Angling and that he wrote a book called The Compleat Angler. This is acknowledged to be one of the world’s books. Only the trouble is that the world doesn’t read its books, it borrows a detective story instead.
So it may not be without interest to outdoor people — anglers, men of the bush and streams and such — to turn over again the pages of the old volume and see what Izaak Walton can teach us. This, especially, if we can catch something of the leisurely procedure, the old-time courtesy and, so to speak, the charming tediousness of people with lots of time, now lost in our distracted world.
Izaak Walton, let us pretend to remember, was born in the reign of Queen Elizabeth (1593) but lived so long and so peacefully — old fishermen never die; they merely fade away — that he only passed away at the age of ninety at the end of the Stuart period. People reading The Compleat Angler would take him for a country gentleman. But he wasn’t. Indeed, in the phrase of the times he wasn’t a gentleman at all. He came to London from the little town of Stafford and in London he kept an ironmonger’s shop in the very heart of the city. It was so small a place that there was hardly room to turn around in, certainly not with a fishing rod, for it was only six feet by seven feet six inches.
But it must have been a grand little place from which to dream of the woods and meadows around Stafford and to let the noise of the city die on his ear till he could catch the murmur of the babbling streams.... Thus you may see to-day, if you have the eye for it, many an imprisoned, incomplete angler working at a desk with the sound of a waterfall in his ears, or selling across a sporting goods counter the tackle that he never has the good fortune to use.
Walton says that fishermen are the Lord’s own people, and no doubt he’s right. “The primitive Christians,” he remarks, “were, as most anglers are, quiet men and followers of peace.” He undertakes to prove it from the fact that four of the Apostles actually were fishermen, and these four taught all the others to fish. Thus worked Izaak Walton till he was over fifty years old.
But, oddly enough, he made money, and soon was able to move to larger quarters on Fleet Street. Ironmongery was evidently all the thing in the days of the English Civil War. So when the great battles were over and there was peace, iron peace, under Oliver Cromwell, Izaak Walton gave up his London life, and bought himself the thing of which all anglers dream — a little place in the country, his own country — and all his dreams came true.
From then on, for some forty years, Izaak Walton spent a life of leisure, or of leisure broken with leisurely activity. At times he was on his own little place; at times he wandered about the country a welcome and indefinite guest, an old man who never grew older, who had said good-bye to the world and its troubles, and to whom Roundhead and Royalist were all one. Especially he sought, and was welcome in, the homes of the clergy. He had been greatly assisted in his London days by the famous Dr. John Donne, Vicar of St. Dunstan’s. Both his wives, for he married twice, were of clerical families; he seems to have borne married life easily, a basis, as with some among us now, from which to go fishing. For his last twenty years he wandered and fished alone. When he died he left his little place to the poor of the parish.
He wrote his Compleat Angler, so to speak, while angling. The first edition of it was mainly thought out in his Fleet Street days, the fruit of odd holidays and chance journeys. But later, with copious leisure and larger experience, he kept finding new things to put into the book, new verses, new jests and even new people.
As even casual readers remember, The Compleat Angler is built up on talks between various characters. They meet and go fishing together and they talk; or they can’t go fishing, so they talk; or they come in from fishing and they talk. Some of us do it still. And in among the talk they have so many pleasant cups of ale and draughts of the “best barley wine,” that it’s a pleasure to be with them; plenty to smoke, also, from the long pipes of the period, for tobacco, in spite of King James I, had now come into its own. Indeed, the comfortable entertainment begins in Chapter 1, page 1, paragraph 1, of The Compleat Angler. An angler, Piscator, accosts two travellers on the road with the words:
“You are well overtaken, Gentlemen! A good morning to you both! I have stretched my legs up Tottenham Hill to overtake you, hoping your business may occasion you toward Ware, whither I am going this fine fresh May morning.”
“Sir,” replies one of them, “I, for my part, shall almost answer your hopes; for my purpose is to drink my morning’s draught at the Thatch’d House in Hoddesden.” ...
So away they wander together, talking of fishing, so that the three miles to Hoddesden seem nothing, and there they are at the Thatch’d House, and must needs all enter together “for a cup of drink and a little rest.”
What fisherman, then or now, could pass a Thatch’d House?
Thus it was with the freshness of the morning; but equally so with the pleasant weariness of the evening after a long day.
“Come, Hostess, where are you? Is supper ready? Come, first give us drink and be as quick as you can for we are all very hungry.... Come, Hostess, more ale ... and when we have supped, let’s have your song!”
The early people in these wayside talks were a fisherman, Piscator, and a traveller, Viator. But later on Izaak thought it a good idea to let the second man be a huntsman, Venator, and then he put in a third who was called Auceps, which we understand to mean a falconer, a man who hunts birds with birds. Time has dropped him clean out. Today we would have to make him an Airman. That is probably exactly what Izaak Walton would have done, for he kept on putting in new things and new people till death made a final edition.
You ask perhaps, I hope not with impatience, what we can learn from Izaak Walton. Why, don’t you see we’ve learned a lot already; that fishing is the Apostles’ own calling; that fishing must be carried on in an atmosphere of good will and forbearance; that the longest story must never seem prosy; that a cup of ale beneath a tree is better than a civic banquet, and an old familiar song from a familiar singer outclasses grand opera.
And you can also learn, or learn over again, the peculiar and manifold charm of our English language. For what Izaak Walton writes is sufficiently like our own speech to be familiar, and sufficiently unlike to have a quaintness of its own. He has a chapter, for example, which he entitles How to fish for, and to dress, the Chavender, or Chub. A witty English writer of today was so impressed by the conversion of the everyday chub into the romantic chavender that he followed it up with a gallop of analogous synonyms:
There is a fine stuffed Chavender
A Chavender, or Chub,
That decks the rural pavender,
The pavender, or pub,
Wherein I eat my gravender,
My gravender, or grub.
And so on, amazingly. But I must not further trespass on the good nature or the copyright of Mr. St. Leger whose complete poem may be found in the fascinating little anthology, The Comic Muse.
All these things you can learn from Izaak Walton. But if you ask what you can learn of the technique of fishing, the answer is that you can’t learn anything at all. The apparatus of the modern expert, the knowledge of trout and flies, the mechanisms of reels — all these have left good old Izaak two centuries and a half in the rear. All that he can teach is the spirit; yet the performance in the long run rests on that.
To take an example, nowadays we always connect trout fishing with the art of casting flies — an exquisite art, indeed, when at its highest. What more beautiful than a cast far across a wide stream to where the broken water ‘round the end of a sunken log marks where a trout must lie? What more beautiful indeed, except the ensuing leap of the foolish trout itself, a victim of its own delusion. It is an art that, personally, I can envy but not share; I can never catch anything that way except willow trees.
