Leacock Lapses
AT his best, Stephen Leacock was a most inviVri ating and amusing writer, apparently intent mere whimsical caricature and farcicalising reality, but in fact never quite affronting-1i sometimes modestly extending—our concept` of it. Thus the fate of Melpomenus Jones, 01',.( came to tea and was too diffident ever to saY must be going, is a reckless hyperbole, but AI , album of photographs he spends his last days 1° ing at (particularly the one of papa's tutc.'„1 friend in his Bengal uniform) is perfectly gentiTi Much of Leacock's work is on the edge of parou.. moving towards it by a then unfrequented rant a favourite manoeuvre is the importation of tech 0, cal language or cliché into a violently • inapPt priate context, as when boarding-house life is into Euclidean terms—`All the other rooms bej31 taken, a single room is said to be a double rosy —or Captain Bilge of 'Soaked in Seaweed' ,11 in his 'rough sailor fashion' to the crew : carefully in the rigging there, Jones; I fear t`, a little high for you.' And on occasion this /'11 of procedure is used to deflate a stupid or atiec16 mode of behaviour; something is being crititl rather than travestied in, for example, 11 memoirs of Marie Mushenough, who talks 101, flower in the meadow: 'I asked it if my heart vvcrt/,,, ever know love. It said it thought so. On mY home I passed an onion. . . . Someone r}",,, stepped upon its stem and crushed it. How it Olt- have suffered.'
When Leacock's high spirits began to qui as they plainly did after his first two books, fell back on tired satire of academic hurt) cultural humbug, education humbug (the utt are meagre) that is facetious where it ought ttl factual, probable where it ought to be wild whirling, and above all long where it ought t short. It is a pity that Mr. Priestley's selectio0 aiming to be representative, includes so mu this diluted vein, and includes anything at au Leacock having a shot at seriousness or a bility. These were qualities he possessed abundance on the personal level, as his ni ,11 prefatory memoir makes agreeably clear. `, could not handle in his writing. It would ti'j. been fairer to his memory if the text of t „, volume had been confined to straight reprints Literary Lapses and Nonsense Novels.
KINGSLEY At°
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