Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 671
I beat them with that. Within ten minutes I had them round the dining-room table with the turkey; they had found half a cold ham and a few other things and claimed the lot. We were acting on a fair and square ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that they’d eat all they could and then go. There was a little murmuring; indeed, someone suggested a round of cold hands at poker or something, and one woman said that when she got going she could go on all night. But there was a general feeling that my offer was a fair compromise, and they took it.
They made one stipulation however. They are all coming back next Tuesday, and they are going to bring two others with them, visitors who are coming up from Cincinnati. They say that these are ‘lovely people.’ I don’t doubt it. And they say that they are just dying to meet me. All right. Let them die.
Next Tuesday I’ll be ready. The chain will be across the drive. John Kelly, my lodge-keeper, a determined man who has seen something of Sinn Fein Ireland, is a handy man with bird-shot. And I ordered ten gallons of tear-gas.
And yet — oh, I don’t know — somehow you just can’t! That’s the bother with the sit-down strikes in social life. They’ll come and I’ll let them in, and they’ll say, ‘Well! here we are again!’ and one of the women will get off that old thing about the bad penny, and then say, ‘I want you to meet Mr. and Mrs. Potzenjammer of Cincinnati,’ and I’ll say, ‘What about a little Scotch?’
All right. Life is just repetition.
XIII. THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING. A TALK TO GRADUATE STUDENTS
(NOTE. THIS MOURNFUL and prophetic address was delivered to an audience of McGill Graduate Students to reconcile them to leaving college. But as it was afterwards widely printed in newspapers, there may have been something in it.)
The British Universities, of which the American are the offspring, grew up on a religious basis. Great flocks of students gathered round the Friars to learn from tattered manuscripts the sacred art of reading. Incidental to this was much argument, brawling, and drinking — what we now call ‘student activities.’
There were no athletics. In those rough days each man carried his athletics at the hilt of his sword or the butt of his quarterstaff. After a game one side didn’t play any more.
Centuries passed. Printing came. The colleges grew. Pious benefactors sought to balance their sins against their munificence. Thus in the name of Christ arose tall towers in Oxford to cleanse the soul of Henry VIII. This was the first college deficit.
Beside these holy studies grew up others in the dark. Wicked men revived from pagan books the lost art of medicine. This involved the desecration of the body, God’s image. It never flourished till it got to Scotland, a hard place, where they thought nothing of the body and sold it from its grave. Scott called the place ‘Caledonia stern and wild.’ He might have added Burke and Hare.
Still darker was the evil inquiry into God’s universe. Roger Bacon tempted God by making gunpowder, for which the Friars gave him ten years in prison. It turned out to be not enough.
Thus grew up that distinction between light and darkness, between God and the Devil, still seen in the separation of the Faculty of Arts from those of Medicine and Science.
For centuries before and after the Reformation, the colleges were pre-eminently the hostels of the church devoted to God. His glory rose in sculptured stone, His majesty in shadowing elms, His peace in the hush of the quadrangle. Here kneeled in prayer beneath a stained-glass window a little Milton, storing his mind with that dim religious light that was to illumine his written page. Here a sturdy little Isaac Newton left his slate of calculated figures to join, pious and devout, in the bidding prayer — that there may be a succession of men to serve God in church and state. Such was the aim and invocation of the colleges. And such they kept it.
And all this time there was no thought of business; of money, no inkling. In the Middle Ages the business man was held to be a crook. To fit a student for business would have meant to fit him for hell. In other words, there was no commerce course.
Time rolled its years, its lustrums, and its centuries over the unchanging college. The elms nodded within the quadrangle, the doves coo’d in the oriel window, and inside the halls students and masters droned and dreamed of Greece and Rome. All studies sprang from that. For every age the past is better than the present. The evening light of retrospect is better than the glare of day. In letters, at least, each generation learns more from the revered thoughts of the remembered dead than from the idle chatter of the living. But with the classical culture went the new inquisitiveness of calculation and the spacious measurement of the sky for the greater glory of Him who put it there. Thus grew college science, without afterthought, untainted as yet with the mean aim of business, not yet enslaved to utility.
But change gradually came, in infinite degrees. As theology sank, culture rose. Religious toleration rose and spread in a world grown intolerant of religion, and tired of texts. As the great age of Victoria expanded to its full growth, the universities became, as they never had been before, never will be again, the centres of intellectual life, of learning, for its own sake, of culture and letters. There was as yet no tyranny of the lower class to dictate — with the sheer colossal power of its accumulated coppers — our journals, our drama, and our written words. There were no raucous voices in the air, no antics on the screen. The pyramid of society still rested with its top side up, its apex in the clouds. The age carried heavy drawbacks and paid heavy penalties for its eminence. At the base of the pyramid was the vast stratum of the poor, crushed almost flat. Nor was learning unalloyed. It ran easily to enthroned pedantry. It hated novelty. It had lost its inquiring mind. The Newtons and the Halleys had grown up in and by the colleges. But the Darwins and the Huxleys must grow in spite of them. And what the students and the masters sang in the colleges of the middle century was, if they had known it, only a song of swans. Other times were coming, needing other people to serve not God but machines.
Then there came and settled among the doves of learning in the oriel window a new and ungainly bird, huge and squattering, and its name was Business. With the middle and closing nineteenth century the Business Man came at last into his own as the Supreme Word in civilization. Now that day is past — gone these four years — we may stand beside him like Brutus beside the body of Caesar. But yesterday the word of the Business Man might have stood (with proper collateral) against the world; now lies he there and none so poor as do him reverence.
But at least he had his day. The Business Man, to the ancient Greeks and Romans, was a crook. To the Middle Ages he was a sinner. In the polite world of Queen Anne and the Georges he had turned into a Merchant, but even then gentlemen did not eat with him — except at his expense. But as commerce expanded, business wealth grew. There were first the great fortunes of the returned East Indian merchants, nabobs, dripping with jewels. After that came the great industrial fortunes of the Peels and the Gladstones and the cotton-spinners and the ironmasters. The discovery was made that, even if a man is not a gentleman, you can make him a Lord. Thus slowly and gently England began to turn upside down, till it is now bottom up — or nearly. A final effort will do it.
But meantime America had shown to England what a real fortune could be, how money could be made to flow in oil pipes and pour out of blast furnaces. Thus arose the Carnegies and the Rockefellers and the Strathconas. And these became, as someone soon called them, inspired millionaires. They poured their magnificent munificence out in gifts to the world, hospitals and libraries and colleges. Which of us is there here who has not in one form or another tasted of their bounty?
So it came about that success and the generosity of the Business Man led to a glorification that amounted to Apotheosis. For every social purpose it seemed that what was needed was a committee of Business Men. Was there a city to be saved? Get a committee of Business Men! A maternity hospital to be developed? Leave it to the Business Men. A couple of religions to be amalgamated? Let a committee of Business Men do it; they’re used to it.
In return the Business Man asked nothing from the colleges, and the colleges gave him nothing — apart from the letters of a degree, by accepting which he kindly uplifted all those beneath him. There was nothing they could give him. Masses for his soul? What an idea! As if a man as smart as that would be caught with a soul.
So it came about that the business man, without meaning it, without malice, and with nothing but decency in his mind, transformed the colleges. For those of us who can look back over fifty years, the change is visible, obvious and in some aspects appalling. A new wealth flowed into the colleges; brick and stone rose to the sky; apparatus moved in car-load lots; the colleges expanded in all directions.
This area of expansion seemed at first wonderful. Vast institutions such as Cornell and Chicago arose, as it were, out of nothing. Older colleges increased to five times their size. Colleges that had numbered their students in hundreds now counted them in thousands. Even the little colleges sleeping among the elm trees woke up and distended themselves like Æsop’s toad in the attempt to be an ox.
Expansion brought with it a flood of money, a rush of expenditure, an annual deficit, wiped out annually by renewed benefactions. ‘Praise John from whom oil blessings flow,’ sang the glad students of Chicago. For the first time the colleges no longer lived on their own. For the first time benefactors were no longer dead but living. At first the significance of this was lost; only in time did the college world come to see that — as with an Indian — the only good benefactor is a dead benefactor. To my mind the most beautifully solemn thing about James McGill is that he is dead.
For the living benefactor, though he didn’t mean it and didn’t know it, asked a price and expected a return. He expected the colleges to ‘show results,’ a thing no college had ever shown since the days of William of Wykeham and Johannis Caius. He expected the college to fit the young men for active life, whereas the older idea was to fit them to die. Hence came blowing in through the opening door a riot of new subjects, practical subjects so called. The colleges began teaching the unteachable. They forgot that in the long run — the only run worth thinking about — the unpractical subjects are the best. The ‘practical’ subject lowers the human intellect from the broad comprehensive compass of the Victorian mind to the narrow mechanical competence of ‘Educator’ of the day. The benefactor wanted system, and he got it. It is choking the wells of learning. He wanted organization, and he got it — a rigid frame in place of a living growth. Can you organize a soul?
More than that the benefactor wanted advertising, boosting, booming. He took his model from his industrial method — such triumphs of the human mind as Uneeda Biscuit, Uwanta Ham.
Here the benefactor — still infinitely well-meaning — enlisted the students. Undergraduates, musing in cap and gown upon the departed dead, changed into ‘rooters,’ ‘hooters,’ ‘boosters,’ broke out into white pantaloons and uniforms fit for the Zouaves of Pius the Ninth. Fostered by the benefactor, student ‘activities’ multiplied on the campus. The simple games played in the October dusk, with the few spectators running along the touch-lines, were exchanged for the vast spectacular performances, the huge stadiums, the paid organizers, like nothing seen since Rome went down under the weight of it. The student became a new person, quick, intelligent, capable, a young man of excellent address, a born salesman, a trained advertiser, competent to the last degree and ready to step smiling into his place behind a hotel desk. But somewhere in him was the deep seared mark of the scar where the college cut out his soul.
Compare, any who can, the typical undergraduate (if he will stand still long enough to let you compare him) with the little schoolboy that once he was. Whither now has gone the wistful dawning intelligence? The clouds of glory that he trailed are blown by all the winds of the stadium. The child that wrote the verses for verses’ sake, that saw visions in the pages of his books and heard in his ears the trampling feet and the armoured horses of the past — whither has he vanished? That open magic door that seemed to lead into a wood nodding with green hazels and bright with carpeted flowers — has it turned off to this, this vast, wooden building, loud with shouts and glared with light — this idiot’s dream?
On the more rigid and mechanical studies of medicine and science, the new influence brought chiefly good. But on the faculties of liberal arts it broke with its full devastating effect. These are intangible things; they are not physical; they depend on an idea. Learning for learning’s sake cannot survive amid a tumult of students’ clubs and students’ activities, a fierce and continued excitement of contested games, enthusiastic politics, student elections and mimic journalism. Student activities are destroying the student.
(The sobs of the audience prevented the continuance of this talk.)
TUBES OUT OF ORDER
In a book I wrote the other day about a lecture tour in Western Canada, called My Discovery of the West, I recorded a queer incident in connection with a loud-speaker apparatus. The thing was so funny and so literally true that I cannot resist the temptation to repeat it here.
I always told it as if it had happened a night or two before in a rival town. People like that best. Local jokes beat all others. In Orillia, where I live, we like a joke on Barrie; and in ancient Rome they enjoyed a crack at Carthage.
But as a matter of fact this incident happened in the Ladies’ Club of a great American city, a beautiful new building, with all the equipment brand new, and a lovely auditorium with a brand new loud-speaker.
Before the meeting the lady-President said to me, ‘I must apologize for our loud-speaker. Don’t mind if it starts to make queer noises. There’s something wrong with it, but we don’t know just what it is.’
No, she didn’t know, and I didn’t know, and they didn’t know what was wrong with it, but a little later we all knew. The trouble was that there were two plumbers in the basement under the platform trying to connect up a furnace.
So the lady-President in beginning the meeting said:
‘Ladies, before I introduce the speaker of to-day I want to say a few words of warning. Our loud-speaker was just installed and I’m afraid’ — and here she assumed a manner of charming apology— ‘I’m afraid it isn’t behaving itself very well. . . .’
At that moment the loud-speaker broke in with a giant voice:
‘Get something under her and lift her up — she’s not working right.’
There was a frozen silence, with ripples of giggles breaking the ice.
The lady-President said:
‘Ladies, I’m afraid . . .’
And the loud-speaker shouted:
‘Stick a crowbar under her and get a purchase on her. . . .’
‘Ladies, I must ask someone . . .’
‘She’s full of ashes, heave her up and shake the ashes out of her. . . .’
‘Ladies, will someone please . . .’
It’s her tubes — they’re not connected. . . .’
Then there was a click! Someone with emergency brains had cut off something. And in the dead silence that followed, I was able to begin my lecture on ‘Recent Advances in Human Knowledge.’
XIV. LOOKING BACK FROM RETIREMENT
I WAS RETIRED — or rather I was fired on the grounds of senility — last year from the college where I had been a professor for thirty-five years. Before that I had been a schoolmaster for ten years, making in all forty-five years of teaching. On this mere pretext, I was invited to go.
In other words I am what is called a professor emeritus — from the Latin e, ‘out,’ and meritus, ‘so he ought to be.’ These old professors go drifting out of the colleges, so many every year, as when the harness is slipped off old horses, and they go wandering down into the pasture. The world is always very kindly about it. When they leave there is always a gentle pretence that now in retirement they will do greater things. ‘Professor Rameses, we understand, will now at last have time to complete his monumental work on the Assyrian epoch.’ Oh, no, he won’t; not all eternity would be enough for that. But he’ll sit there in front of a blotter in his study and his wife will put the inkpot beside him, and through the open door will come the scent of the laburnum, and the late summer flies will buzz around his head! No, no, he’ll never finish. Look, he’s asleep already!
Or of another professor, it is said, ‘We understand that Professor Dream intends, now that he is free, to devote himself to journalism!’ Will he? That only means that he’ll sit and read the newspaper all morning in a barber shop. But notice that kindly little touch ‘now that he is free!’ The idea is that the old fellow has been held back from all kinds of accomplishment, and, once set him loose, and he’s supposed to dash off at a tremendous pace! It reminds me of the old days when we used to hire a horse and buggy at a livery stable, and the livery man would drag the horse out, shouting, ‘Whoa! Whoa! there!’ and stand at his head while we got in, as if it were a close call for life to drive behind that horse. When he let go with the final ‘Whoa! Back! Get up there!’ the old horse hadn’t the strength to shake the fly-net. So with the professors. Complete their study of Horace! Bring their work on ichthyology up to date! Don’t believe it — autumn flowers and buzz flies for them— ‘Whoa! Back! Get up!’
I recall long ago the resignation of one of my own old professors, and how we got up a dinner for him. I sat next to him and said, ‘I suppose now you’ll be able to complete your translation of Faust?’ and he said, ‘Eh?’ I said, ‘You’ll be able to complete your translation of Faust?’ ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘Faust!’ I yelled. ‘No, thank you,’ he called back. ‘I’ve had plenty.’ An idea struck me, and so I took the dinner card in front of me and wrote ‘Faust’ on it and put it in front of him. ‘I can’t read it,’ he shouted.
