Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 834
It appears further that the professors themselves are not keen on their lectures. If the lectures are called for they give them; if not, the professor’s feelings are not hurt. He merely waits and rests his brain until in some later year the students call for his lectures. There are men at Oxford who have rested their brains this way for over thirty years. The accumulated brain power thus dammed up is said to be colossal.
I understand that the key to this mystery is found in the operations of the person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him, that the students learn all that they know: one and all are agreed on that. Yet it is a little odd to know just how he does it. “We go over to his rooms,” said one student, “and he just lights a pipe and talks to us.” “We sit round with him,” said another, “and he simply smokes and goes over our exercises with us.” From this and other evidence I gather that what an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of students together and smoke at them. Men who have been systematically smoked at for four years turn into ripe scholars. If anybody doubts this, let him go to Oxford and he can see the thing actually in operation. A well-smoked man speaks and writes English with a grace that can be acquired in no other way.
Now, the principal reason why I am led to admire Oxford is that the place is little touched as yet by the measuring of “results,” and by this passion for visible and provable “efficiency.” The whole system at Oxford is such as to put a premium on genius and to let mediocrity and dulness go their way. On the dull student, Oxford, after a proper lapse of time, confers a degree which means nothing more than that he lived and breathed at Oxford and kept out of jail. This for many students is as much as society can expect. But for the gifted student Oxford offers great opportunities. There is no question of his hanging back till the last sheep has jumped over the fence. He need wait for no one. He may move forward as fast as he likes, following the bent of his genius. If he has in him any ability beyond that of the common herd, his tutor, interested in his studies, will smoke at him until he kindles him into a flame. For the tutor’s soul is not harassed by herding dull students, with dismissal hanging by a thread over his head in the class room. The American professor has no time to be interested in a clever student. He has time to be interested in his “deportment,” his letter-writing, his executive work, and his organizing ability and his hope of promotion to a soap factory. But with that his mind is exhausted. The student of genius merely means to him a student who gives no trouble, who passes all his “tests,” and is present at all his “recitations.” Such a student also, if he can be trained to be a hustler and an advertiser, will undoubtedly “make good.” But beyond that the professor does not think of him. The everlasting principle of equality has inserted itself in a place where it has no right to be, and where inequality is the breath of life.
Viewing the situation as a whole, I am led then to the conclusion that there must be something in the life of Oxford itself that makes for higher learning. Smoked at by his tutor, fed in Henry VIII’s kitchen, and sleeping in a tangle of ivy, the student evidently gets something not easily obtained in America. And the more I reflect on the matter the more I am convinced that it is the sleeping in the ivy that does it. How different it is from student life as I remember it!
— My Discovery of England.
AN APPRECIATION
DO YOU REMEMBER Col. Hogshead in the “Literary Lapses?” He claimed that there was a character called Saloonio in the “Merchant of Venice,” though no one else had ever heard of him. He was “the man who came on the stage all the time and sort of put things through.”
Well, I am in much the same case as Col. Hogshead. In preparing to write this paper I have read everything I could find about Stephen Leacock. But no one else seems to have seen the Stephen Leacock who has had a place of honor in my gallery of favorites for over thirty years. Of course I find him in the books and, like Saloonio, he is on the stage all the time — or at least very often — and sort of puts things through. Worst of all, he doesn’t look a bit like the published portraits of Leacock, and I couldn’t imagine him making one of those brilliant after-dinner speeches that I see reported in the papers from time to time. But to me he is the real Stephen Leacock, and no learned doctor, nor professor of political economy, nor brilliant author, nor lecturer who can make even old England laugh, can make me give him up. You may not be able to find him in the books, even after I describe him to you, but for me he is there all the time, “concealed behind the arras or feasting with the doge.”
The reviewer who said that Mr. Leacock’s work received instant recognition and appreciation fell short of the truth. His humour was current among the students of Toronto University even before he began to write. The first example of it that was repeated to me by one of his youthful admirers has never been published, but it is still as fresh to me as his latest production. It was a burlesque account of Noah building the Ark, that he used to give for the amusement of his immediate circle of friends. Noah, with his mouth full of nails, was issuing orders to Shem, Ham, and Japhet about bringing in the animals. They had a lot of trouble getting the hippopotamus out of the river and, meanwhile, the neighbors stood around and guyed Noah. They didn’t think it was going to be more than a shower anyway. And Noah hit his thumb with the hammer while trying to drive a nail. And so on, and so on. You can imagine what Leacock could do with such a theme.
Then came the first published article, “A, B, and C.” From that moment Stephen Leacock was what he has continued to be ever since. He was the humorist of youth, and in spite of later lapses into humor for sophisticated grown-ups he will always continue to be the humorist of youth. “A, B, and C” captivates every school-boy and school-girl at once. Charles Lamb and Mark Twain may be beyond their grasp, but to find the mathematical symbols that they use every day given life and personality brings a sudden hilarity into the routine of school life.
It was shortly after the publication of this sketch that I had my one and only glimpse of Stephen Leacock in the flesh. I had reached the last hour of a visit to Toronto when a friend told me that Leacock was having a game of billiards in a near-by billiard parlor, and offered to introduce me. When we reached the billiard room the game was over and I carried away a mental picture of a slender young man putting away a billiard cue and looking at me over his shoulder. The interview did not last for more than five minutes, and I do not remember a word that was said. I have never been able to decide whether the impression he made was of being shy or of being stand-offish. Anyway, we didn’t get very far in our interview. And he didn’t look a bit like the pictures of him that appear so often in the papers. But that quiet, youthful Stephen Leacock has come down the years with me and persists in walking before me on every page he publishes.
His next published article was “My Financial Career,” and I am willing to contend — if necessary, with “grinded lances” — that no grown-up person ever fully appreciated the abundant humor of that little masterpiece. It is an outburst of reckless, effervescent youth that only the young can enter into fully. Of course, if you read it first when you were young, its full humor may have remained with you, but no person of mature age, reading it for the first time, can appreciate its joyous insolence. Just think of it! He has dared to be merry with a bank. What awful blasphemy! To the grown up man a bank is a combination of a temple and a tomb. It is the holy of holies of that which he worships and serves every hour of his life. And his chief tragedies are connected with it. Overdrafts, “equitably rationed credit,” and “selective curtailment” have made the bank a charnel of dead hopes. How many of his dreams of avarice have been shattered by the refusal of an unfeeling banker to extend the necessary credit. No! No! You cannot expect a grown-up man to indulge in care-free laughter at “My Financial Career.”
I am in a position to back up my opinion on this point. For some years past I have been using “My Financial Career” as a reading on the public platform and have watched its effect on many audiences. The young are always the first to laugh and the last to stop laughing. The mature join in of course, but to even the most successful men a bank recalls unpleasant moments. And if there happens to be a banker in the audience the older people look towards him and sober up at once. I have known even a branch bank manager — a man no more impressive than Peter Pumpkin — to check the enjoyment of all the mature people in an audience. But the young just let themselves go. Most of them have run a message to a bank or have been inside of one, and they have experienced the same feelings that Leacock expresses so poignantly. They do not realize that their future in life may depend on the smiles of a banker, and they let themselves go, no matter who may be offended.
It has always seemed to me that “My Financial Career” could have been written only by a young man who was exquisitely sensitive. Contact with the inexplicable grown-up world made him feel shy and awkward, and perhaps it hurt a little. In self-defence he turned it all to ridicule — just to bluff the young people of his own age. He was like a boy taking a dare to throw a snowball at the schoolmaster or the minister. He would let his contemporaries see that even a bank couldn’t overawe him. And in all his later dealings with club-men and the idle rich there is a touch of the same bravado. I doubt if either the student or the professor has been wholly at ease with the solid citizens and solid institutions of the world. And he gets back at them by having a joke at their expense. The same solemn boy (wearing a grey suit by the way) who walked through the awful adventures in the bank, now walks through the Mausoleum Club and glares defiantly at Mr. Doomer and the other worthies of High Finance. (Oh, I know all about that “infectious smile,” but the boy is there just the same, “behind the arras.”) The same sensitiveness sharpens his powers of observation, and he turns them all to ridicule — not for the boys of his own generation, but of this generation, and for all generations of boys to come. He is youth making laughter for youth, and the laughter will continue while the young are shy and awkward and sensitive.
Although scholarship and experience of life have given him a wider range of themes than when he wrote “My Financial Career” his art is the same. He has never dealt much in epigrams and “lapidary phrases.” With individual and inimitable skill he takes ordinary incidents and by the use of ordinary language — though of unusual clarity — he builds up situation after situation that is electrical with laughter. For sheer audacity of irresponsible fun-making some of his little sketches are unique. They have a spontaneity that is not surpassed even in the poems of Calverly.
A careful reading of Mr. Leacock’s works with a view to discovering the man back of them, is an exhilarating, but somewhat bewildering task. He has expressed opinions on every conceivable subject, and has expressed them with impetuous vigor. Usually his dominant note is one of rebellion.
“The rewards and punishments in the unequal and ill-adjusted world in which we live are most unfair.” His comments are at all times penetrating. But he seldom offers a solution of any of the problems he scornfully analyzes. Why should he? Others have been offering solutions down through the centuries and piling foolishness on foolishness. The great fact to be gathered from all this is that the contacts of life have not made him callous. His sympathy with all human hurts and needs is never failing. He rages at the impossibility of setting things right and then finds refuge in his marvellous gift of laughter. If he cannot help us, he can make us laugh and forget. Possibly he finds forgetfulness himself in his outbursts of fun-making. In any case, it is something to be thankful for that his fun is without malice. It is an anodyne for the miseries that he cannot correct. To laugh with him in his gay moods is to be refreshed for the battle of life — to share in his high spirits. And if, after laughing with him, the world goes back to its cares and thinks of him only as a frivolous entertainer, who deserves attention only in idle hours, it is only making the same mistake it has always made in dealing with those who bring good gifts and enrich life. He has equipped himself as a scholar and thinker to deal gravely with the gravest problems — but all that his ever-increasing following sees is the sparkle of his wit and the antic nimbleness with which he turns life’s hypocrisies and stupidities to laughter. Surely it is excusable if he has moments of cynicism and bitterness. The more he is acclaimed for his humor the more he must feel the futility of things. It was after his fame had been established that he wrote:
“An acquired indifference to the ills of others is the price at which we live. A certain dole of sympathy, a casual mite of personal relief, is the mere drop that anyone of us alone can cast into the vast ocean of human misery. Beyond that we must harden ourselves lest we, too, perish. We feed well while others starve. We make fast the doors of our lighted houses against the indigent and hungry. What else can we do? If we shelter one, what is that? If we try to shelter all, we are ourselves shelterless.”
Mr. Leacock’s most ambitious book is the series of “Sunshine Sketches” that reveal the town of Mariposa and its typical inhabitants. In commenting on it himself he points out all the faults that could be pointed out by the most censorious critic.
“I wrote this book with considerable difficulty. I can invent characters quite easily, but I have no notion as to how to make things happen to them. Indeed I see no reason why anything should. I could write awfully good short stories if it were only permissible merely to introduce some extremely original character, and at the end of two pages announce that at this point a brick fell on his head and killed him. If there were room for a school of literature of this kind I should offer to lead it. I do not mean that the hero would always and necessarily be killed by a brick. One might sometimes use two. Such feeble plots as there are in this book were invented by brute force, after the characters had been introduced. Hence the atrocious clumsiness of the construction all through.”
As a story, “Sunshine Sketches” has no plot. Very well. After reading it, we prefer our novels that way. The reader is satisfied, even though nothing happens. It has no suspended interest. True, but it has a sustained chuckle that keeps us going from page to page without any thought of skipping or stopping. And often the fun of the book bubbles over in hilarious nonsense, as when Mr. Bagshaw, on his return from Ottawa, “Went into Callahan’s tobacco store and bought two ten cent cigars and took them across the street and gave them to Mallory Tompkins of the Times-Herald as a present from the Prime Minister.”
The characters are such as you would find in any small town, and the things they say and do and think in the book are the things they are saying and doing and thinking in a thousand small towns to-day. But in real life we have no chuckling master of ceremonies to bring them out and show their weaknesses and absurdities — and human decency. The people of Mariposa are revealed in another sunshine than that of the every-day sun — the sunshine of a spirit that is wise and tolerant and amused. He reveals the law-breaking and cunning of Josh Smith — now legally extinct — as ruthlessly as if he were an investigator of the muckraking period, yet makes the fat rascal so human and deep-read in human frailty that we know he must be descended from a younger scion of the Falstaff family who adventured to the New World in the days of Elizabeth or James. The prohibition wave may have swept the saloon from existence, but it breaks in vain against the colossal figure of “JOS. SMITH, PROP.” And it is doubtful if the waves of time will submerge him any more than the prohibition wave.
There is not a character in this book that is not in place in a New World small town, and nothing happens that would not happen in any other small town. Only a touch of literary gloom would be needed to make this picture of contemporary life as sordid and mean and futile as any to be found in the most depressing “best seller.” But the sunshine in which it is revealed has transfigured it. And the sunshine never fails. Judge Pepperleigh and Dean Drone and Henry Mullins, and all the rest of them, move through the years, aureoled in kindly light and laughter. The art of “Sunshine Sketches” successfully blends the keen observation of the realist with the glamour of the idealist. Whether the book ranks as a classic time alone can tell, but for the present it is very satisfying.
“Nonsense Novels,” whose success established Stephen Leacock’s fame, deserve attention for a number of reasons. He ridiculed the best sellers — and in doing so produced a best seller. But these little novels are sheer fun from start to finish. It is not as parodies on current fiction that they excel. Their chief merit lies in the opportunity they gave Mr. Leacock to give full scope to his genius for attractive nonsense. More than anything else they are just what he has named them— “Nonsense Novels.” They can be enjoyed even by those who know nothing of the types of novels they start out to parody. Every character and every incident gives the humorist a chance to bubble over with delightfully inconsequent nonsense. If Hazlitt could have seen this book he would have devoted a special essay to it. He claimed that nonsense is an essentially English form of fun that is unknown to other people.
“I flatter myself that we are almost the only people who understand and relish nonsense. We are not ‘merry and wise,’ but indulge our mirth to excess and folly. When we trifle we trifle in good earnest; and, having once relaxed our hold of the helm, drift idly down the stream, and, delighted with the change, are tossed about by every little breath of whim or caprice,
“‘That under Heaven is blown,’
All we want is to proclaim a truce with reason, and to be pleased with as little expense of thought or pretension to wisdom as possible.”
Of this nonsense which Hazlitt admired, Stephen Leacock is a master — and also he is almost its slave. Whether writing burlesque, or satire, or humor or even pathos, he must stop every little while to indulge in an outburst of nonsense. That Mr. Leacock agrees with Hazlitt is shown by his admiration for “Alice in Wonderland” — that world masterpiece of nonsense. But his own nonsense in its way is just as masterly as that of Lewis Carrol, and even more mirth-provoking. It may not have the poetic whimsicality of “Alice in Wonderland,” but it is just as unexpected and even more lavish.
