Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 601
“A square meal?”
“Yes, a square meal. Think; when?”
“Thirty years ago,” said the patient quietly. He spoke quite firmly now.
“And since then?”
“Never.”
“Never a beefsteak?”
“Never once.”
“Never had a Christmas dinner?”
“Yes, once,” said the patient, sitting half up. “At least that was what I had thirty years ago. It was a real English Christmas dinner.” He seemed to gather animation as he spoke. “We had turkey.”
“And cranberry sauce!” laughed Sir Magnus.
“Yes, and mashed potatoes.”
“And plum pudding?”
“Oh — yes, yes, plum pudding, all on fire with brandy and raisins and—”
“You see,” said the great specialist, turning to the little group; “it was simply a case of malnutrition, of underfeeding. If you young students,” he added, almost severely, “would only read a little old-fashioned Christmas literature, instead of sticking your heads into books of diagnosis, you would know that underfeeding is the cause not only of all the street accidents but of half the troubles of the world. This poor fellow — Gandhi is your name, isn’t it? — is merely underfed. All the trouble comes from that.”
Half an hour after, Mahatma Gandhi, propped up in bed, a napkin at his neck, a tray in front of him, devoured wing after wing of the turkey on his plate. Half a month after that, he weighed two hundred and fifty pounds.
Half a year after that, India became free (to take effect A. D. 3000). Its liberator always used to say, “It is better for my people to give up swaraj, suttee and thuggee, and stick to things like Bombay duck, chutney and chili con carne, where you know what you are getting.”
· · · · · · · ·
IV — THE UNCLE FROM AMERICA
(Here is another familiar type of Christmas story that needs political application. It is called “The Uncle from America” and is known in France as “L’Oncle d’Amérique.” In the story the uncle of a certain family is supposed to have gone away to America, years and years ago, so long ago that his relations have lost all track of him. In reality he has made a great fortune, but they do not know it. The family themselves have had exactly the opposite fate and they have sunk from affluence to poverty; their home has been mortgaged and the mortgage has fallen due, as mortgages always do in fiction, on Christmas Eve. And then — well, everyone knows what happens. But here is the political and international application of it.)
The fatal evening had come. There was no help, no hope. The mortgage had fallen due; tonight it would be foreclosed, and Europa House, the fine old property that had come down for centuries in the family, must go under the hammer.
Good old Squire John Bull, the senior member of the family, restlessly paced the library floor, pausing at intervals to speak with a fair-haired gentleman who sat in an armchair, his good-humored countenance disfigured by an expression of utter dejection.
“It’s too damn bad, Fritz,” said John Bull. “I wish the rotten business was over and done and the papers signed. Let the damn fellow take the old place. A here’s no help for it. You’ve no money, have you, Fritz?”
“Not a mark,” he said. “Neither has Jacques nor Benito. Only paper, and he won’t take it.”
“Damn his impudence,” said John Bull. “But never mind, Fritz. We’ll stick it out together somehow. But here come the others. Come in, Jacques. Come in, Benito.”
John Bull advanced to the door with outstretched hands, with something of his old glad hospitality in his face, shaking hands with his guests as they arrived.
“Come in, Jacques. Ah! and this is little Slovakia with you, is it? How are you, dear? And this I suppose is Cousin Polonia Corridor. My! But you have grown into a great girl! So Cousin Ivan wouldn’t come, eh? Let him go to the devil in his own way. Angus, pour them out a glass of Scotch. It’s there on the sideboard. Damn it, cousins, the old place is ours for half an hour yet, anyway. Stir up the fire, Patrick. Let’s have a good blaze for the last one. Now then, you all know what the trouble is and why you’re here, so we won’t mince matters. This damn American fellow has closed out the mortgage. Well, you’ve none of you any money, have you? What about you, Benito?”
“Money!” said Benito, a dark Italian-looking man, scarcely recognizable as cousin to John and Fritz, but resembling Jacques. “Money! Millions and millions! I have kept telling you.”
“Then where is it?” said John Bull.
“I have told you,” said Benito, “first lend me ten — a hundred million lire — and in ten years—”
The assembled family broke into laughter.
“In ten years, mon cher Benito,” said Jacques, “we are all like that. Oh, it is sad to think of it. Behold us, a united family, loving one another, and now ruined by a stranger. Ah! if only Fritz had not made that sacred war!”
“Me make a war!” cried Fritz, jumping up. “It is to laugh! You made it, Jacques — you and Ivan!”
“I make the war!” shouted Jacques, “You insult my honor. You shall answer—”
“Gently, gently,” said John Bull. “Remember we are all cousins.”
“I never made the war,” said Fritz, his face distorted with anger. “I love peace. You and Cousin John Bull here—”
“Damn your eyes, Fritz,” said John Bull, clenching his fist. “I’m a peace-loving man, but—”
The room was filled with a very tumult. But at that moment a butler announced at the door:
“The American gentlemen are here, Mr. Bull.” There was an instant silence as a tall man in a characteristic stovepipe hat and swallowtail coat, with a mustache and a long beard, walked into the room. He was followed by two others, evidently attorneys, who produced and spread out on the library table a bundle of documents which they carried.
“Well, gents and young ladies,” said the Yankee, lighting a cigar without so much as asking permission, or even removing his hat. “All here, eh? Quite a family party! Sounded from your voices just now like a real affectionate powwow.”
“Look here, sir,” said John Bull, striding toward the American. “Do the business you are here for, but your damned insults you can keep to yourself. I won’t have them.”
“And I too not,” said Fritz.
“Nor me neither,” said Jacques.
“All right,” said the American quite unruffled. “I reckon money talks anyway. There’s the conveyance laid out on the table. You get a discharge of all you owe and I take over Europa House and the grounds, including the famous Concert Room and the Conservatory and the Moratorium. Now, gents, you can either put up or shut up. My pal there, Idaho Bill, will either take the money or give you a pen to sign with. Which is it?”
The Yankee’s manner as he looked at the assembled cousins seemed purposely and dramatically offensive. There was a moment of tense silence. Jacques’ hands were clenched in anger; Benito’s face was dark with rage; and Fritz’s keen eyes glittered like steel.
But John Bull stepped toward the table.
“Cousins,” he said; “there is no help for it. I am the oldest here. If there’s been any fault it’s mine as much as anyone’s. I’ll sign first.”
And then a strange thing happened.
“Wait a bit,” said the American. “I’ll just see these papers are in the shape they ought to be.”
He walked to the table, picked up the papers, carried them over to the fireplace, tore and crushed them into an indistinguishable mass, and threw them into the flames. Then, as he turned around again, he took off his stovepipe hat and false beard and stood smiling at the astonished family.
“Well, John,” he said. “Don’t you know me now?”
“God bless my soul!” exclaimed Squire Bull. “Sam! Sam! Why it’s Sam! Cousins! It’s your Uncle Sam from America!”
“Uncle Sam!” exclaimed everybody.
“Yes, sir,” said Uncle Sam. “Back from America, and back with a pile big enough to make the value of them papers look like two cents. Boys and girls, I’ve lived for years just for this. All the time I was working and making my pile I thought of this homecoming to the old place, to clear up the mortgages that I’d bought up one by one, and pay back some part of what I owe. You and I, John, were kids together. Fritz, it was your mother taught me music. Jacques, I knew your pa. He gave me a statue once. Come, cousins, fill ’em up to the health of the old house! We’ll mend and repair it till it’s grander than it ever was, and your Uncle Sam will pay the bill for the Reparations.”
And as he spoke, the Christmas bells rang out their message of Peace, including its Economic Consequences, and good will toward Americans.
· · · · · · · ·
But a still higher range is found when burlesque is used to portray and to satirize not merely the written books of a period but the life and manners of the period itself. This is what Mr. Archibald Marshall has done in his account of the Birdikin Family that adorned the pages of Punch and has since appeared as a book.
The Victorian age was a great age. Its achievements in arts and arms, in science and in letters were unsurpassed. Greatest of all was its advance in human kindliness, in human sympathy with the poor, the lowly, the outcast. Its righteous anger and its copious tears helped to smite to pieces and to wash away the older cruelty of the law, the inhumanity of the prison, the bitter isolation of the workhouse. It heard the cry of the children and took them to its heart. The moral advance of the Victorian age has helped to open a new social world.
But just because it was great, it had the defects of its noble qualities. It ran easily to prudery and overdone morality, and the hypocrisy that apes the moral attitude. It dissolved feeling into sentiment and sat in a flood of tears. It became namby-pamby and self-righteous; and, while it kept for the most part its class system and its régime of status and privilege and the snobbery and subservience that disfigured it, it sought to hide it all under a make-believe of noble-mindedness and false equality. In other words it hatched out from its nest such a typical progeny as the Birdikin Family.
Here is the beginning of the book. Anyone who can read it without wanting to go on had better go back to his financial column in the Economist. He has no place here.
THE BIRDIKIN FAMILY
Chapter I
A Walk with Papa
“Come, children,” said Mrs. Birdikin, entering the breakfast-parlor where the four young Birdikins were plying their tasks under the supervision of Miss Smith, “your good Papa is now able to resume walking exercise and wishes that you should all accompany him on this fine morning, if Miss Smith will kindly consent to release you half an hour earlier than customary.”
Miss Smith, who occupied the position of governess at Byron Grove, the country seat of Mr. Birdikin, was a woman of decent but not lofty parentage, whom her employers treated almost as they would have done if her birth had been equal to her integrity. This toleration, which so well became persons of a superior station, was exhibited on this occasion by Mrs. Birdikin’s asking permission of Miss Smith to cut short the hours devoted to study instead of issuing a command. Miss Smith was deeply conscious of the condescension thus displayed and replied in a respectful tone, “Indeed, ma’am, the advantages that my little charges will gain from the converse of my esteemed employer, while engaging in the healthful exercise of perambulation, would be beyond my powers to impart.”
Mrs. Birdikin inclined her head in token of her appreciation of the propriety of Miss Smith’s utter-ance and said, “Then go at once to your rooms, children, and prepare yourselves for the treat in store for you.”
The four children trooped obediently out of the room, the two boys, Charles and Henry, politely making way for their sisters, Fanny and Clara; for, although their superiors in age, they had been taught to give place to the weaker sex, and invariably did so when either of their parents were by.
The Birdikin Family stands upon a lofty plane. It is, in character, far above all the ordinary efforts of parody and burlesque. Yet quite comparable with it in point of novelty and range, and indeed unique in all the field of parasitic literature is the new Sherlock Holmes Saga, the new Research Criticism of the lives of Holmes and Watson. In old French poetry, such as the Chanson de Roland, they had a way of saying “Who hasn’t seen that hasn’t seen anything.” It applies to this. Yet unfortunately on this side of the Atlantic this new development is scarcely known and not at all to the general public.
Of all the range of parody and parasitic literature, good and bad, that ever was covered, the mass of literature connected with the name of Sherlock Holmes outranks everything else in sheer quantity. The great mass of it is commonplace, a lot of it is beneath attention, but at least it has enlisted some of the famous pens of the world. In its latest phase — the new Sherlock Holmes Higher Criticism — it stands at the very top plane of the humor of amusement.
The whole phenomenon of Sherlock Holmes is extraordinary. His rise, emergence, and dominance is one of the most notable things in the history of ideas. No Arabian genie that ever came from a magic bottle, and rolled in smoke, vast and portentous, across the world, is more marvelous. Only a few characters in the world’s literature have anything of the same reaction upon the world’s thought — perhaps, Don Quixote, Hamlet and Mr. Pickwick — certainly very few.
It appears now from letters and memoirs that Conan Doyle grew to hate Sherlock Holmes intensely, was utterly jealous of him, and would have killed him if he could. Quite naturally, Sherlock Holmes, once out of the bottle, overtowered his liberator, overwhelmed his identity, absorbed him. Sherlock Holmes, multiplied by millions in common speech, in common thought, by book, by cinema, by joke, spread around the world. In vain Doyle had sought to check him, had spread stories that Holmes was a drug fiend, that his knowledge was limited and his power restricted. The world saw otherwise. It saw in Holmes the embodied spirit of human reason, the power of mind over circumstance, and it fell down in recognition that reached idolatry. In a primitive age that had no printing and had no certainty of record, Sherlock and Watson would have become twin gods, associated like Castor and Pollux. Holmes would appear in mythology as the God of Deduction and Watson as the God of Truth.
Even in our world Sherlock has long since become an Idea which corresponds to a god in the ancient world. Conan Doyle ceased to have anything to do with him. It is true that Conan Doyle had first “revealed” Sherlock Holmes to the world, just as Joe Smith, the founder of Mormonism, revealed his golden tablets from the caves, or as a “medium” reveals a spirit. But Sherlock soon broke loose from his interpreter’s control. He dragged the unwilling Doyle after him, pleading and protesting; and when Doyle could write no more, Sherlock set up for himself as an Idea. Masses of Sherlock Holmes jokes, references and stories exist quite apart from Conan Doyle.
It is contrary to the conventions of English literature today for other writers to write complete stories of Sherlock Holmes except as parodies or adaptations. It used to be done, as when the unspeakable G. W. M. Reynolds wrote further books about Mr. Pickwick. And other nations do it now. It is understood that the Spanish and Latin American press runs “Sherlock Holmes stories” with complete license and without public disapproval.
In other words Sherlock Holmes has become with us like Reynard the Fox in the middle ages — everybody’s thought and everybody’s property. He is undoubtedly today the most widely known character in fiction. Beside him, Hamlet and Pickwick, though they may stand next to him, are a long way down. Anyone who will think about this will see that it is true; all city people of all classes go to moving pictures, and all moving picture audiences understand, every one of them, a reference to Sherlock Holmes. Now ask the people outside of the cities, the people in the wilderness — let us say, Canadian lumbermen running logs up north; use the phrase “a regular Sherlock Holmes.” Of course they know it. Niggers in equatorial Africa, Eskimos in an Igloo, labor delegates in a saloon, professors in a college — they all know it.
Now the Sherlock Holmes story lends itself to parody better than any other conceivable type. It almost invites it. Here is a frame already, a setting — the theme of marvelous deduction from small details unnoted by the ordinary observer. More than that — the very fact that the idea is unique, is extreme, is carried to a great length, makes it invite a parody. It does not mean that anybody and everybody could write a parody, but anybody and everybody might want to.
Take an example. Holmes looks at Watson’s watch, examines it in deep thought, turns his lens upon it, then hands it back to him and tells him how it reveals the pathetic story of his brother, dead years and years before, a drunkard but with alternating periods of efforts at reform.
Watson “springs from his chair” indignant. “This is unworthy of you, Holmes,” he says. “You have made inquiries into the history of my unhappy brother and you now pretend to deduce this knowledge in some fanciful way! It is unkind.”
“My dear doctor,” answers Holmes, “I assure you that I never knew you had a brother until you handed me the watch.”
This, of course, is priceless, “impayable,” beyond words. Probably this passage (from the opening chapter of the Sign of the Four) enslaved more of us to Sherlock than anything else he ever did.
Yet see how it challenges parody. Show him a watch and he’ll tell you about your brother. All right let’s show a cuff link and hear about grandfather. And with that the current of the narrative flows on, as regular as perspective, as orderly as Euclid. How to begin? Thus:
“We were sitting in our Baker Street rooms.”
Exactly: where else would they be?, and then what happens?
They look across the street and see someone.
What do they do?
They deduce him.
Precisely. And what does he do?
Appears a moment later at the door with Mrs. Hudson.
And what does he want?
He wants to know if either of them is Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
