Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 657
But Mark Twain’s vision was born in him. The plan of his book had arisen partly from a previous volume called Tom Sawyer, an exuberant book, merry with laughter and with high spots of tragedy, that leaped into universal popularity but left the deeper notes unsounded. Unconsciously Mark Twain wanted something of greater meaning, in which, through the eyes of the outcast Huckleberry Finn and the runaway Nigger Jim, the world could be seen and known.
But the whole subject had a touch of disreputability — a ragged boy on a raft, a nigger and no other background than just the ‘river’ anyway that everybody knows! Let’s write about Princes and Paupers or get started on Joan of Arc! So the manuscript was thrown around and laid aside and was years in the completion. But luckily when parts of it were read aloud in the family circle the children laughed over it in joy, and so Huck, dirty and ragged, got past the censorship. Here and there the text was mauled and disfigured, but mainly it ‘got by.’
It is not possible to convey a full idea of the greatness of the book by random quotations. Like much of Mark Twain’s work Huckleberry Finn contains rigid transitions from the sublime and the romantic to what runs close to being sheer burlesque. Huck and Jim float down the river in their raft, fugitives from law and civilization, anchored in hiding all day under vines and bushes, moving on at night. All this has a background as spacious, as primitive as when shepherds watched their flocks by night: this is a vision of romance, and with it is the interest of the unsullied mind of little Huck, his rags and his chewing tobacco in contrast to the purity of his soul: and Jim a slave — and in his every word and thought an unconscious condemnation of slavery. But when intruders come upon the raft, the two ‘bums’ called the King and the Duke of Bilgewater, we pass to roaring burlesque, and presently, in the shore episodes, to swift and sudden tragedies. But the basis of the book is the picture of Huck and Jim on the river, and the atmosphere that seems to breathe from its pages the mingled tears and laughter, the smile that is a sigh, which mark the highest form of humor. Seen in this light humor is not the lower level of the field of literature, but lies around the summits of its highest range.
Here Are My Lectures
CONTENTS
PREFACE
I. HOW SOON CAN WE START THE NEXT WAR?
II. RECOVERY AFTER GRADUATION. or. LOOKING BACK ON COLLEGE
III. WHAT I DON’T KNOW ABOUT THE DRAMA
IV. FRENZIED FICTION. FIRST LECTURE. MURDER AT $2.50 A CRIME
V. FRENZIED FICTION. (CONTINUED). SECOND LECTURE. LOVE AT $1.25 A THROB
VI. FRENZIED FICTION. (CONTINUED). THIRD LECTURE. PASSION AT 25 CENTS A GASP
VII. MY FISHING POND
VIII. THE TWO MILORDS
IX. MY NEWSPAPER AND HOW I READ IT
X. WHY I AM LEAVING MY FARM. I CAN’T LIVE UP TO IT
XI. WHILE YOU’RE AT IT. EXPERT ADVICE ON KNOCKING YOUR HOUSE INTO SHAPE
XII. THE SIT-DOWN STRIKE IN MY PARLOUR. THEY CAME AND THEY WOULDN’T GO
XIII. THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. A TALK TO GRADUATE STUDENTS
XIV. LOOKING BACK FROM RETIREMENT
PREFACE
ALL MEN WRITE memoirs. Great commanders, in their old age, refight their battles with pen and ink. Magicians explain their magic. Confidence men, from their repentant cells, expound their bygone wickedness. Bar-tenders in the sunset of their lives write manuals on mixing drinks.
So let it be with me.
A year ago I retired from college lecturing, at the urgent request of the college trustees, who were very firm about it. Now, at the request of innumerable friends all over the country, I am retiring from lecturing on the public platform as a humorist.
This is a rôle I never dared to assume till many years after I had begun work as an academic lecturer. Indeed I first attempted it in order to raise money for the Belgian refugees during the Great War — either the audience must come or the Belgians must die. In this capacity I covered a great deal of ground in 1915 and 1916. Indeed the King of the Belgians had very generously said that he didn’t care how much ground I covered as long as I paid my own expenses.
It was very difficult at first. I remember that at my first ‘humorous’ lecture at St. John, New Brunswick, the Chairman announced it as ‘international law,’ and the audience believed him. I recall also a gloomy evening in Vermont when the Chairman, in rising to thank me, said in a solemn tone: ‘I forgot to mention, ladies and gentlemen, that this lecture was given for nothing. We didn’t give Mr. Leacock any fee, and we didn’t bring him here.’ That set everything right.
But in any case I was able to send quite a lot of money to the French town of Nantes where many refugees were. As I have elsewhere narrated, in my book on my Discovery of Western Canada, the Mayor of the town wrote and thanked me, and expressed admiration at the long journeys I had made. I imagine he used a French atlas of the days of Louis XIV and picked off it the only names he recognized. He wrote, ‘We observed, with admiration, that you have made the dangerous voyage of the Lake Superior and penetrated as far as Fort William and Duluth, in the country of the savages.’
But later on I acquired a certain facility in lecturing and received many compliments. My friend Irvin Cobb, who was lecturing on the public platform at the same time, once said that he had no hesitation in classing me as the second humorist in America. And the other day, when I spoke at Edmonton, the Chancellor of the University of Alberta said that he had never in his life listened to anything more brilliant, and that he hadn’t listened to more than a few opening sentences anyway. The Chief Justice of the Province, who was also present, concurred, except as to the opening sentences.
But perhaps the estimate of anybody’s talent made in his own home town is apt to be the most nearly correct. Such an estimate I got lately in my home town of Orillia, Ontario. It was at a dinner held in Carter’s Upstairs Dining Room — it’s just opposite Macnab’s Hardware; you can hardly miss it. The dinner was given in my honour by the Anti-Mosquito Society of East Simcoe, of which I am life President. In presenting me with a mosquito net the committee of reception spoke of me as ‘one of our foremost humorists of East Simcoe.’
So I can take my stand on that.
In spite of any success or encouragement in lecturing, the time came when I had to give it up. I had lectured in the East so often that I had said everything I knew to everybody who would listen. So I took a trip to the West and lectured all the way to the Pacific Ocean. After I had spoken in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, I realized that I must either stop lecturing or learn Japanese and go on.
So I have decided to take my place with the memoir-men. Here are my lectures. Here with them are a lot of odd stories that I used to drag into them as best I could; or, failing that, tell them to little gatherings of hospitable friends after the lectures, in that warm hour when the lecture is over and everyone delighted; or tell them to the Pullman car porter, man’s last friend.
STEPHEN LEACOCK
Montreal, Nov. 1, 1937.
I. HOW SOON CAN WE START THE NEXT WAR?
(WITH APOLOGIES TO the many audiences who have heard me promise to start it, without my having yet made good.)
I purpose to discuss the question: How Soon Can We Start the Next War? And I want to say at once that on this question I am an optimist. I think that things are coming our way. Now, I don’t say that we can have the war for this autumn. It’s getting a little too late and the football season has been interfering with it; and of course Xmas is approaching and that’s apt to bring along with it a rather nasty outbreak of good will which is troublesome while it lasts. But even allowing for these temporary delays I think we can all look forward pretty confidently to what we may call a general conflagration in the near future. Some of our friends already talk hopefully of an Armageddon which may end in world chaos. So I think that we shall certainly get something; if not this winter at any rate early in the spring.
But I want to say at once that if this world war does come, we on this North American continent — Canadians and Americans — can take very little credit for it. I say it straight out; we have not been doing our share. We have been hanging back at a time when over in Europe they have been making such splendid efforts towards a general war.
We have to realize that in the older civilization they have developed a mechanism that we haven’t got — a system of ‘conversations’ and ‘incidents’ and ‘protocols’ and ‘ultimatums,’ by which No. 10 Downing Street talks to the Quai D’Orsay, and by which they both address an identical ‘communique’ to the Ball Platz which, being a Ball Platz, plays it right across fast to the Yildiz Kiosk, and from there to the Escurial, and then home. All that we seem able to do is to send a Minister in a plug hat from Ottawa to Washington to play golf, and bring back two others like himself to Ottawa to fish in the Gatineau. You can’t make a war out of that stuff.
We have to remember, too, that they have long since got the map of Europe all fixed up for war. They have a set of ‘corridors,’ by which one nation’s territory runs right through another’s and out on the other side; and they have little places called ‘enclaves,’ meaning a piece of one nation’s territory entirely surrounded by the territory of another. Then there are bits with special names like the Sandjak of Novi-Bazaar, and the Casino of Monte Carlo, and the Folies Bergère republic — one reads of them. There is territory that is ‘internationalized’ and ‘neutralized’ and ‘sterilized’ and ‘stupefied.’
Now if we want to take our proper place in the world we have got to get these things. A little while ago — I hope I am not violating official secrets in telling you about it — I was instrumental in starting a correspondence between our Canadian External Affairs Department at Ottawa and the American Secretary of State at Washington in regard to the possibility of opening a ‘corridor.’ Our Department telegraphed:
Would like to offer you a corridor to the Hudson Bay, air-conditioned.
The American Secretary answered:
We are ignorant of where the Hudson Bay stops (stop) But that sort of thing never stops us (stop) Gladly accept corridor and offer you in return enclave west side of Chicago.
Our Government sent a telegram back in reply:
Not very keen on west side of Chicago; how about Hollywood, California?
Here the matter stands at present. It is what they call in European diplomacy an impasse. If you keep it up long enough, you get a war.
But there is more in the situation even than that. In Europe, for centuries and centuries, they have cultivated the idea of nationality, till they now have themselves divided up in their minds into nations, in which they understand that every person in one nation is altogether different from every person in any other nation. In this way of thinking one Englishman is just the same as every other Englishman, and all of them quite different from all Frenchmen; and every Frenchman is just like every other Frenchman and all different from every kind of German — and so on right down to Chinese and Canadians. There was a lot of truth in this a thousand years ago; there is hardly any now. But European politics are still working on this system. It was grand in the days of Charlemagne; now, worse than meaningless, it is the chief impediment to progress.
But there the imaginary nations are, still persisting in their existence.
You see them best perhaps, as you do so many things, in comic literature. Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, if I were allowed to talk upon humour as a serious matter I would try to show you that perhaps sometimes we can get a clearer view of the world by reading what is called its humour, looking at its comic characters, than by looking at its serious phases.
First, the imaginary Frenchman, still seen in the comic stage and still used as the basis of the world’s politics; always called Alphonse or Gaston; wears a bell-shaped coat; eats frogs; prefers other men’s wives to his own; good taste but no morals.
Put beside him the Englishman; hay-coloured hair and straw-coloured whiskers; has only one eye — the other is glass. Why Englishmen prefer to have a glass eye, I don’t know. But it is so. To be a real Englishman you must have only one eye; and you must use words like ‘rippin’ ’ and ‘toppin’,’ and say ‘my deah fellah, I haven’t seen you since the Baw Wah, eh, what.’ The Englishman has a title, or his cousin has, and is very stand-offish but needs watching or he’ll borrow money.
Contrasted with him is the imaginary Irishman; always saying ‘Arrah’ and ‘Macushla’ and ‘Mavourneen’; always ready for a fight; no respect for law; makes a fine policeman.
Next to him is one type that I admit has something in it, the Scotchman. I lean towards him, but not from any point of descent. I have no Scotch in me except what I put in. But you know that imaginary Scotchman who, I will say, has perhaps kept his national characteristics more stubbornly than the others; very hard, very dour; believes in hell — hopes to go there; looks on any other place as not economical enough.
Contrast with this what one might call the true international spirit and the international type, just coming, perhaps, into existence. I can illustrate it by quoting a little anecdote that I read in the paper the other day.
A young man at a dance approached a girl and said, ‘I’d love to ask you for a dance, but I have to admit I’m just a little stiff from polo.’ ‘Oh,’ said the girl, ‘I don’t care where you come from; let’s dance.’
That was a truly international girl. We ought to have more like her.
But having all these imaginary beings going strong, we keep up the conviction that the world is divided into nations. Mind, if I were speaking to you this morning as a political scientist — a forbidden rôle — I would be willing to say that, yes, of course in the past the nation was a wonderful thing; the nation as a conception in history was at one time the salvation of Europe. At the time when all Europe was strewn with the wreckage of the Roman Empire, prostrate under barbarian invasion, at the time when the peace and civilization of the Antonine Emperors had been scattered into fragments, the upbuilding of the European nations, around a castle here or a cliff there or a harbour somewhere else, the upbuilding of the European nations is a wonderful story. ‘Nationalism’ and ‘Progress’ were one and the same thing. And with that story still goes the marvellous allegiance, the pride of race, which has been so wonderful for all of us — the tattered flags, the long history of victories and struggles that have made our countries what they are. All of that we must never forget, never throw aside. For the trouble with the new cosmopolitanism is that it tries in vain to turn its back on history. You can’t do that. There is no need to. But when the world gets a little wiser, all our history will become a common product in which each and all of us can take pride in the achievements of the other people.
Look at our North American history and realize that, now the fires of anger have died out, there is no sorrow in the record; there is only the twin glory of an equal contest, a Wolfe and a Montcalm pitted against one another, and an American Revolution in which, as usual, both sides are right. They always are. In any epic contest, like the civil war of long ago in England, and the civil war of yesterday in America, both sides are right, or the war would never go on. We must never think that internationalism, which I am preaching indirectly, should force us to turn our backs on the splendour of national history. That has been the inspiration of every great people.
But the world has got to realize that time moves on, that the salvation of one era is the ruin of another, and that the thing carried over from one generation to another, once noble, can lose its meaning, and perhaps spell disaster. The world must unify or die. And it cannot be done with books or pen and ink or with corridors or enclaves. The Quai D’Orsay can’t do it; 10 Downing Street or the Ball Platz can’t do it. Nothing can do it except a new spirit in the human heart.
Let us pass on then to measure some of the forces working in each direction, for nationalism and against it. And first we have that powerful instrument, the League of Nations. Those are the boys who make trouble! The League of Nations, without whose kind offices we would never know half the quarrels that are going on in the world. But they keep us well informed. We have had more accurate history of other people’s wars since the League began to function than we ever dreamed of.
I have been privileged to see a little of their correspondence for next year. They hope next year to be able to do something as between Wales and Scotland. And I have here an advance copy of a letter from the Secretary of the League of Nations to the business manager of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland:
Reverend Sir:
I write on behalf of the League to inquire whether you would feel interested in getting up a war this season between the Scotch and the Welsh. As you are doubtless aware, the Welsh have been saying a lot of dirty things about Scotland. There was one here in our office yesterday said he could lick any three of you north of the Tweed. And we think we ought to bring it to your notice and ask if you are prepared to stand for it. If not, the League offers its publicity at any rate that you think suitable. We will also supply propaganda. We have a good deal of dirty stuff against them ready to give to you and we will help you to float an international loan in the United States — and sink it there.
Ah, but observe the answer, and in this answer, which the Scotch are to send, you see the first slight warning note that perhaps there may be difficulties in getting up a war. This is from the business manager of the Presbyterian Church:
