STEPHEN LEACOCK

There are two things in ordinary conversation which ordinary people dislike - information and wit.

Stephen Butler Leacock was born in Swanmore, England. His father, after failing at farming in South Africa and Kansas, took his family in 1876 to Canada, where they settled on a farm in the Lake Simcoe district of Ontario. It was never a success, and Leacock's father eventually abandoned his wife, leaving her to raise the family of eleven children (of whom Stephen was the third). Leacock was educated locally and then at Upper Canada College, Toronto. After a year at the University of Toronto he became an unenthusiastic school-teacher in 1888; from 1889 to 1899 he taught at Upper Canada College, finding time to complete a degree in modern languages at the University of Toronto in 1891. In 1899, inspired by Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the leisure class, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he did graduate work in political economy under Veblen. He married Beatrix Hamilton in 1900, and upon receiving his Ph.D. in 1903 was appointed lecturer in the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University. In 1906 he published his first and most profitable book: Elements of political science (rev. 1921), a college textbook. In 1907–8 he went on a lecture tour of the British Empire to promote Imperial Federation, and when he returned to McGill he became head of his department, helped found the University Club, and built a summer home on Lake Couchiching near Orillia, Ontario. McGill, the University Club, and the home in Orillia became the focal points of his existence. In 1910 the first of Leacock's many books of humour was published, Literary lapses (New Canadian Library, with an Afterword byRobertson Davies). Elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 1919, Leacock became a charter member of the Canadian Authors' Association in 1921, and that year went on a lecture tour of England. He remained head of his department until his enforced retirement in 1936, after which he made a triumphant lecture tour of western Canada that resulted in My discovery of the West: a discussion of East and West in Canada (1937)—winner of a Governor General's Award. In 1937 he received the Lorne Pierce Medal of the Royal Society of Canada. He continued to write prolifically until his final illness.

Leacock's humorous books usually gathered together, in time for the Christmas trade, miscellaneous pieces that had appeared previously in various magazines. As a result, most of them have little or no overall unifying structure. The mix in Literary lapses is typical: funny stories, some little more than anecdotes, others more extended; monologues and dialogues; parodies ranging from fashionable romantic novels to Euclid; humorous reflections and essays on a wide variety of topics. Much of Leacock's humour, in this book and in others, is exuberant nonsense that, like Lewis Carroll's, sometimes breaks out into a violence that would be disturbing if it were not so obviously in fun. More modern parallels might be the Marx Brothers or Monty Python's Flying Circus. Leacock's parodies (see especially Nonsense novels, 1911; Frenzied fiction, 1918; and Winsome Winnie, and other new nonsense novels, 1920), which are undervalued today, offered him an excellent opportunity to give vent to this strain of irresponsible anarchy. Lord Ronald in ‘Gertrude the governess; or simple seventeen’, who ‘flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’, is the most famous example of this strain of Leacock's humour. Other parodies—such as ‘Guido the gimlet of Ghent: a romance of chivalry’ and ‘Sorrows of a super soul; or, The memoirs of Marie Mushenough’—provide examples of almost equally inspired absurdity. Often, however, a more serious note mingles with the humour, and some of Leacock's funniest pieces—such as ‘My financial career’, ‘Hoodoo McFiggin's Christmas’, or any of the sketches from Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914; ncl)—show genuine sympathy for decent but ineffectual victims of a coldly indifferent or actively hostile world. It is clear from pieces such as these why Leacock considered Mr Pickwick and Huckleberry Finn to be the two greatest creations of comic literature, and why he was approached to write a screenplay for Charlie Chaplin.

The most striking aspect of Leacock's style is the illusion of a speaking voice, which is so strong in all his works. Like his masters, Dickens and Mark Twain, Leacock was a great lecturer and raconteur, and many of his pieces must be read aloud or recited for their full effect. North American humour has always been rooted in the oral tradition, from Thomas Chandler Haliburton (whom Leacock did not admire but with whom he had much in common) through Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, and many others, including Robert Benchley and James Thurber, who were both influenced by Leacock. But Leacock's idiom has none of the frontier raciness we associate withSam Slick and his numerous progeny. Much of the humour of his best pieces comes from their modesty of tone. They seem to be recounted, as simply and straightforwardly as possible, by someone who is not intending to amuse us and would probably find our amusement puzzling. Leacock's finest achievement in this respect is the naively self-revealing narrator of sunshine sketches of a little town (1912; ncl, with an Afterword by Jack Hodgins). Another aspect of Leacock's humour that may also owe something to the oral tradition is the way in which he elaborates a single idea, capping one ingenuity with another until he reaches an inevitable but absurd climax (the final irrational act of the narrator that follows a crescendo of humiliations in ‘My financial career’) or collapses into an equally inevitable but absurd anticlimax (as in the apparent tragedy turned farce of ‘The marine excursion of the Knights of Pythias’ or ‘The Mariposa bank mystery’ in Sunshine sketches).

Leacock's two most important books are Sunshine sketches and Arcadian adventures. The first is a regional idyll portraying the essentially good-natured follies of Mariposa, a small Ontario town based on Orillia. The second, set in an American city, is much harsher in its criticism of a hypocritical and destructive plutocracy. These two books stand apart from the rest of Leacock's humorous writings in their artistic unity and seriousness of purpose. Apart from the works already mentioned, Leacock's thirty-odd books of humour include Behind the beyond, and other contributions to human knowledge (1913), Moonbeams from the larger lunacy (1915), Further foolishness: sketches and satires on the follies of the day (1916), The Hohenzollerns in America: with the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities (1919), Over the footlights (1923), Winnowed wisdom: a new book of humour (1926), Short circuits (1928), The iron man & the tin woman, with other such futurities: a book of little sketches of today and to-morrow (1929), The dry Pickwick and other incongruities (1932), Funny pieces: a book of random sketches (1936), Model memoirs and other sketches from simple to serious (1938), My remarkable uncle, and other sketches (1942, ncl), and Last leaves (1945). An original ncl collection is My financial career and other follies (1993), selected and with an Afterword by David Staines.

After the appearance of Literary lapses, (1910; ncl, with an Afterword by Robertson Davies) Leacock published, on the average, one book of humour a year; but he found time to produce many non-humorous works as well—numerous articles, and some twenty-seven books, most of which are of little lasting interest. Two exceptions are My discovery of England (1922) and The boy I left behind me (1946). The first is based on Leacock's 1921 lecture tour of England and contains two of his best pieces: ‘We have with us to-night’, a hilarious account of the tribulations of a public lecturer, and ‘Oxford as I see it’, a powerful defence of the ideal of education as a humane experience. The boy I left behind me consists of the opening chapters of an autobiography that was interrupted by Leacock's death. It is shrewd and unsentimental but evocative, and even in its truncated form is one of Leacock's finest sustained pieces of writing. Leacock's other non-humorous books, while skilful and sometimes genuinely eloquent, are lacking in originality, seldom rising much above the level of competent popularizations. However, many of these works provide important insights into the issues that concerned Leacock all his life and that underlie much of his best humour.

Leacock's most dearly held belief, which links him to the Victorian age in which he spent his formative years, was in progress, which he saw as culminating in the achievements of Anglo-Saxon civilization. This belief underlies his many works of history, political science, and economics, such as Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: responsible government (1907), Economic prosperity in the British Empire (1930), Canada: the foundations of its future (1941), and Montreal: seaport and city (1942), among many others. For Leacock the essence of progress was an ever-increasing capacity for human kindness, which found its highest artistic expression in Anglo-Saxon humour, especially as it is reflected in the works of Mark Twain and Dickens. He argued this thesis most notably in Mark Twain (1932), Charles Dickens, his life and work (1933), Humour: its theory and technique (1935), and Humour and humanity (1937). Leacock's belief in progress may appear complacent, but it was not lightly held. Throughout his life there was a tension between his proclaimed optimism about the continuing progress of humanity and his feeling of unease (expressed most forcefully in The unsolved riddle of social justice, 1920) about the triumph of materialism, with its exaltation of laissez-faire individualism and its undermining of traditional social ties. Leacock's particular stance in this matter has been characterized by Gerald Lynch as Tory humanism, a particularly Canadian stance that Leacock shares to some extent with other Canadian social satirists such as Thomas Chandler Haliburton, Sara Jeannette Duncan, and Robertson Davies, and with philosophers such as Charles Taylor and George Grant.

Leacock's hostility to the chaotic forces that he saw threatening human progress was reflected in his views on imperialism. Like many of the Canadian imperialists of his day (again Haliburton and Duncan come particularly to mind), Leacock saw the British Empire, for all its failings, as a humane alternative, rooted in tradition and community, to the unfettered materialism of the American capitalist juggernaut—a kind of Mariposa writ large. To be sure, Leacock's imperialism often came out in unpleasant ways, as in his unyielding opposition to non-Anglo-Saxon immigration to Canada; but whatever the forms his world view sometimes took, it was deeply rooted in a genuine desire that the gradual progress of humanity not be brought to a halt.

Most readers of Leacock agree that his writing career shows little sign of development, either intellectual or artistic. He did, however, continue to produce excellent pieces intermittently throughout his career, such as ‘Eddie the bartender’ (1929), ‘My Victorian girlhood by Lady Nearleigh Slopover’ (1939), and ‘My remarkable uncle’ (1942); and in his last years he wrote some very fine essays, essentially serious but leavened with humour, among the best of which are the final chapter of Humour: its theory and technique, with its vision of the universe as a great cosmic joke, and two meditations on old age: ‘When men retire’ (1939), and ‘Three score and ten—the business of growing old’ (1942). Nonetheless there remains a sense of disappointment, of unfulfilled potential, in his career. It has been argued, notably by Robertson Davies, that, perhaps because of his impoverished and unstable childhood, Leacock craved the reassurance that fame and money brought, and that this led him to fall back uncritically on successful formulas. This is undoubtedly true; but another reason may be that the kindly view of an ever-progressing world that Leacock wished to maintain was at odds with his gift. Leacock's insistence that humour should be kindly is clearly wrong-headed when tested against the world's great humour, including his own, especially Sunshine sketches and Arcadian adventures, with their critique—implicit in the former and bitterly explicit in the latter—of ‘money-getting in the city.’ It is hard to see how Leacock could have continued in the far-from kindly direction that seemed to lie ahead of him after Arcadian adventures if he were to maintain his faith in progress. His emphasis on the need for kindliness in humour seems, then, a rationalization for his pulling back from the fullest implications of his essentially pessimistic vision of man in the modern industrial age. Ironically, it may have been Leacock's need to maintain his faith in the progress of humanity that thwarted his own progress as an artist and the fullest development of the gifts with which he was so generously endowed.