MR. LEACOCK'S ESSAYS.*
THOSE of us who are grateful to Mr. Stephen Leacock as an intrepid purveyor of wholesome food for laughter have not failed to recognize that ho mingles shrewdness with levity—that he is, in short, wise as well as merry. This engaging dualism is maintained in his new volume of Essays and Literary Studies. They are not academic in form or phraseology. They stand in much the same relation to the professorial utterance as the leading articles of Mr. Martin in New York Life to those of the Nation. Indeed, the beat description of them that we can find is in a phrase of Mr. Martin's when he speaks of Uncle Sam " thinking hard in his shirt-sleeves." This is not to say that they are lax or slipshod in expression. Mr. Leacock is never obscure, and can be serious and eloquent. His most homely or grotesque illustrations are never irrele- vant. To adapt the title of Mr. Walt Mason's poems in prose, one might call this little book " Horse Sense in Diction Tense." The only piece of sustained freakishness in the book is"' The Rehabilitation of Charles IL" The Merry Monarch naturally appeals to humorists, and has already found a devoted admirer in Mr. Bain, the accomplished author of The Digit of the Moon. But even here Mr. Leacock is careful to discount the effect of his special pleading, and concludes with the following anecdote of the most illustrious of Amer:can humorists :—
" Returning from a journey to Colorado, Mark Twain informed hi] friends with enthusiasm that he had sojourned beside a mountain lake whose waters were of such transparent limpidity that a ten-cent piece might be clearly seen lying on the bottom at a depth of 100 fathoms. Finding himself confronted with a distressing incredulity, ho offered to make a discount on the story at a fair compromise, and to say that at any rate a ten-dollar bill might have been aeon floating on the surface. Similarly, let me say to my readers that though they may be conscien- tiously unable to digest all that I have told them of Charles IL, I shall be nevertheless amply satisfied if they will believe the half of it."
Elsewhere Mr. Leacock does not give us the impression of being content with a half-measure of acceptance. His " Apology of a Pro- fessor," while fully alive to the futility and inferiority of individuals, is in its essence a fine and spirited defence of a calling which, with all its limitations, does perform a useful service in the world " in acting as a leaven in the lump of commercialism that sits so heavily on the world to-day." As he says :- " I had set out to make the apology of the professor speak for itself from the very circumstances of his work. But in these days, when money is everything, when pecuniary success is the only goal to be
• Essays and Literary Stadia, By Stephen Leacock. London: John Lane. [35. Gd. uet.l achieved, when the voice of the plutocrat is as the voice of God, the aspect of the professor, side-tracked in the real race of life, riding his mule of Padua in competition with an automobile, may at least help to soothe the others who have failed in the struggle. Dare one, as the wildest of fancies, suggest how different things might be if learning counted; or if we could set it on its feet again, if students wanted to learn, and if professors had anything to teach, if a university lived for itself and not as a place of qualification for the junior employees of the rich ; if there were only in this perplexing age some way of living humbly and retaining the respect of one's fellows ; if a man with a few hundred dollars a year could east out the money question and the house question, and the whole business of competitive appear- ances and live for the things of the mind ! But then, after all, if the mind as a speculative instrument has gone bankrupt, if learning, instead of meaning a mind full of thought, means only a, bellyful of fact, one is brought to a full stop, standing among the littered debris of an ideal that has passed away."
Mr. Leacock is a Professor at a Canadian University and-a loyal Imperial- ist, but he lays it down that a Canadian writer may with no great impropriety use the term " American," for want of another word, in reference to the literature and education of all the English-speaking people between the Rio Grande and the North Pole. There is, he adds, a certain warrant of fact for such a usage. Canadian literature, jour- nalism, and education approximate more nearly to the type and standard Of the United States than to those of Great Britain, and whatever charges may be brought against the literature and education of the American Republic " apply equally well—indeed, may probably apply with even greater force—to the Dominion of Canada." This being so, the close correspondence of Mr. Leacock's criticisms to those of- the American essayist,. Mr. Paul Elmer. More, in that remarkable volume, Aristocracy and Justice, recently reviewed in these columns, is most interesting and significant. - In temperament the two writers are widely 4ifferent : their conclusions are almost invariably the same. On the need of conserving- the old ideals of education, " rapidly passing. away in America but still dominant in the great Universities of England," Which aim at a wide and humane culture of the intellect; on the dangers and abuses of an arid specialization ; on the vulgar apotheosis of the business man as national hero and nat'on-builder ; on the flabbiness of the New Morality, and the worship of uplift for the sake of feeling uplifted—on all these points the two writers are in substantial accord. But the convergence is even more remarkable in regard to the miscon- ception and abuse of the evolution theory when translated from pure science to sociology and moral philosophy :— " Anybody who will look at the thing candidly, will see that the evolutionary explanation of morals is meaningless, and presupposes the existence of the very thing it ought to prove. It starts from a mis- conception of the biological doctrine. Biology has nothing to say as to what ought to survive and what ought not to survive ; it merely speaks of what does survive. The burdock easily kills the violet, and the Canadian skunk lingers where the hurriming-bird has died. In biology the test of fitness to survive is the fact of the survival itself— nothing else. To apply this doctrine to the moral field brings out grotesque results. The successful burglar ought to be presented by society with a nickel-plated jemmy, and the starving cripple left to die in the ditch. Everything—any phase of movement or religion— which succeeds is right. Anything which does not is wrong. Everything which is, is right ; everything which was, is right ; everything which will be, is right. All we have to do is to sit still and watch it come. This is moral evolution. On such a basis, we might expect to find, as the general outcome of the new moral Code now in the making, the Simple -worship of success. This is exactly what is happening. The morality which the Devil with his oyster fork was commissioned to Inculcate was essentially altruistic. Things were to be done for other people. The new ideas, if you combine them in a sort of moral amal- gam—to develop oneself, to evolve, to measure things by their success —weigh on the other side of the scale. So it comes about that the scale begins to turn and the new morality shows signs of exalting the old- fashioned Badness in place of the discredited Goodness. Hence we find, saturating our contemporary literature, the new worship of the Strong Man, the easy pardon of the Unscrupulous, the Apotheosis of the Jungle, and the Deification of the Detective. Force, brute force, is what we now turn to as the moral ideal, and Mastery and Success are the sole tests of excellence. The nation cuddles its multi-millionaires, eine- matographs itself silly with the pictures of its prize fighters, and even casts an eye of slantwise admiration through the bars of its penitentiaries. Beside these things the simple' Good Man of the older dispensation, with his worn alpaca coat and his obvious inefficiency, is nowhere."
We have dethroned the Devil, and the facts of our moral conduct are better, but the principles on which they are based are no better for the abrogation of an authoritative moral code. " There is no absolute sureness anywhere. Everything is to be a development, an evolution; morals and ethics are turned from fixed facts to shifting standards that change from ago to age like the fashion of our clothes ; art and literature are only a product, not good or bad, but a part of its age and environ- ment. . . . We have long since discovered that we cannot know any- thing. . . . Philosophy is the science which proves that we can know nothing of the soul., Medicine is the science which tells that we know nothing of the body. Political Economy is that which teaches that we know nothing of the laws of wealth ; and Theology the critical history of those errors from which we deduce our ignorance of God." And the age which has repudiated the Devil as too difficult of belief has not only failed to eliminate the supernatural and the super-rational from the current thought of our time : it is "more riddled with superstition, more credulous, more drunkenly addicted to thaumaturgy than in the palmiest days of the Devil.
In dealing with American literature Mr. Leacock contrasts the scanty
product with the immense progress made on material lines. It cannot be the lack of stimulus or inspiration in history or natural surroundings. It is simply that " the Milton and Bunyans are not among us ":—
" The aspect of primeval nature does not call to our minds the vision. of Unseen Powers riding upon the midnight blast. To us the midnight blast represents an enormous quantity of horae-power going to waste; the primeval forest is a first-class site for a sawmill, and the leaping cataract tempts us to erect a red-brick hydro-electric establishment on its banks and make it leap to some purpose."
But Mr. Leacock makes a special and honourable exception in favour of American humour, to which he devotes a most genial and illuminating paper, alike in his discussion of the psychology of the ludicrous and the peculiar differentia of tho American variety. Nothing better or fairer has been written on this theme. The illustrations are most happily chosen, and our only ground of complaint is that he does not render, as we think, full justice to the genius of Artemus Ward. The gradual upward progress of humour from its delight in anti-social events, in destructiveness and discomfiture, to the higher plane in which humour and pathos mingle and become one, is traced with true insight and elo- quence, as when he speaks of the humour of Cervantes " smiling sadly at the passing of the older chivalry . . . the really great humour— unquotable in single phrases and paragraphs, but producing its effect in a long-drawn picture of human life, in which the universal element of human imperfection—alike in all ages and places—excites at once our laughter and our tears."
On the woman question Mr. Leacock shows no sympathy with feminism. He believes that woman will get the vote, but when the vote is reached the woman question will not be solved but only begun. " In and of itself, a vote is nothing. . . . Very often the privilege of a vote confers nothing but the right to express one's opinion as to which of two crooks is the crookeder." Woman will remain woman ; if she fails or refuses to fulfil the functions assigned her by Nature, the world will come to an end. " The vacuum cleaner can take the place of the housewife. It cannot replace the mother." " Fiction and Reality " is a charming fantasy vindicating the realism of Dickens ; and in "The Amazing Genius of 0. Henry " Mr. Leacock proclaims himself a whole- hearted admirer of the short stories of the late William Sydney Porter, who is only now coming into his own, and though primarily a literary artist, has achieved widespread popularity in America. This fact Mr. Leacock would doubtless regard as of hopeful augury, for elsewhere he lays considerable stress on the fact that the ordinary citizen in America is not a literary person, and has a very restricted estimation of literature as an art.
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