FICTION.
SUNSHINE SKETCHES OF A LITTLE TOWN.t
STEPHEN LEACOCK, in a delightful autobiographical preface to his new volume, tells us that many of his friends are under the erroneous impression that he writes his humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist. (Mr. Leacock is head of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill University, Montreal.) His own experience is exactly the other way. " The writing of solid, instructive stuff, fortified by facts and figures, is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical inquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward's Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between. Personally I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica." Such sentiments are entirely reassuring, and afford a convincing earnest of the joys of perusing these jocund pages. At the same time we demur to Mr. Leacock's estimate of the frequency of his " fortunate moments." This is not the first but the third volume in which be has contributed to the gaiety of the Old as well as the New World, and for a professor of two dismal sciences the contribution strikes us as decidedly liberal.
• The Standard of Value. By Sur David Barbour, K.C.S.I., K.C.M.G. London : Macmillan and Co. [6s. net.] t Sunshine Sketches of a little Town. By Stephen Leacoelc. London Joh* Lane. [3s. 6d. net.], Hitherto Mr. Leacock has devoted his fortunate moments to irresponsible fantasies and burlesques. Here he breaks new ground as a chronicler of the annals of a small Canadian provincial town. But he is careful to tell ns that Mariposa, on the shores of Lake Wissanotti, is not a real town : " on the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of them." Simi- larly the characters engaged are not portraits but composite photographs : they represent types, not individuals. We are quite content to accept Mr. Leacock's caveat: the important thing, from the point of view of the reader, is that they com- bine certain local characteristics with a great deal of essential humanity—freshness with familiarity. The peculiar attribute of the Mariposans is their youth and hopefulness. He does well to call his chapters " Sunshine Sketches," for they have a most welcome freedom from the fashionable pessimism of old-world fiction. The Mariposans have their ups and downs, but they have an invincible resilience ; an unquenchable belief in their town and its future; an inexhaustible fund of public spirit. They combine ferocious political partisanship with a complete social solidarity. When the Knights of Pythias— a society nominally devoted to the Temperance cause—give their annual picnic everybody joins in :- " In Mariposa practically everybody belongs to the Knights of Pythias just as they do to everything else. That's the great thing about the town and that's what makes it so different from the city. Everybody is in everything. You should see them on the seventeenth of March, for example, when every- body wears a green ribbon and they're all laughing and glad,— you know what the Celtic nature is,—and talking about Home Rule. On St. Andrew's Day every man in town wears a thistle and shakes hand with everybody else and you see the fine old Scotch honesty beaming out of their eyes. And on St. George's Day !—well, there's no heartiness like the good old English spirit after all ; why shouldn't a man feel glad that he's an Englishman? Then on the Fourth of July there are stars and stripes flying over half the stores in town, and suddenly all the men are seen to smoke cigars, and to know all about Roosevelt and Bryan and the Philippine Islands. Then you learn for the first time that Jeff Thorpo's people came from Massachusetts and that his uncle fought at Bunker Hill (it must have been Bunker Hill—any way Jefferson will swear it was in Dakota all right enough) ; and you find that George Duff has a married sister in Rochester and that her husband is all right ; in fact, George was down there as recently as eight years ago. Oh, it's the most American town imaginable is Mariposa—on the Fourth of July. But wait, just wait, if you feel anxious about the solidity of the British connexion, till the twelfth of the month, when everybody is wearing an orange streamer in his coat and the Orangemen (every man in town) walk in the big procession. Allegiance! Well, perhaps you remember the address they gave to the Prince of Wales on the platform of the Mariposa station as he went through on his tour to the west. I think that pretty well settled that question."
In one sense the Mariposans recall the attitude of the Irish- man who said, " I love action, but I hate work." Their social, convivial, and political activities are immense, but they seem to have no regular business hours. The centre of the town is Josh Smith's Hotel, and the central figure of these pages is Josh Smith himself, a man who started life as a cook in the lumber shanties, who could not read, and who looked like an overdressed pirate. His methods were Napoleonic in their un- scrupulousness, but underneath a rough exterior he concealed a kind heart. In any emergency Smith took command and inspired universal confidence. He was at once lavish and shrewd : " never drunk, and, as a point of chivalry to his customers, never quite sober "; finally, as a political candidate, he was irresistible, as the following passage sufficiently proves :—
" I wish that I were able to narrate all the phases and the turns of the great contest from the opening of the campaign till the final polling day. But it would take volumes. First of all, of course, the trade question was hotly discussed in the two news- papers of Mariposa, and the Newspacket and the Times-Herald literally bristled with statistics. Then came interviews with the candidates and the expression of their convictions in regard to tariff questions. `Mr. Smith,' said the reporter of the Mariposa Newspacket, ' we'd like to get your views of the effect of the pro- posed reduction of the differential duties.' By gosh, Pete,' said Mr. Smith, `you can search me. Have a cigar.' What do you think, Mr. Smith, would be the result of lowering the ad valorem British preference and admitting American goods at a reciprocal rate ? "It's a corker, ain't it ? ' answered Mr. Smith. What'll you take, lager or domestic ? ' And in that short dialogue, Mr. Smith showed that he had instantaneously grasped the whole method of dealing with the Press. The interview in the paper next day said that Mr. Smith, while unwilling to state positively that the principle of tariff discrimination was at variance with sound fiscal science, was firmly of opinion that any reciprocal interchange of tariff preferences with the 'United States must inevitably lead to a serious per capita reduction of the national
industry. 'Mr. Smith,' said the chairman of a delegation of the manufacturers of Mariposa, `what do you propose to do in regard to the tariff if you're elected?' ` Boys,' answered Mr. Smith, `I'll put her up so darned high they won't never get her down again.' `Mr. Smith,' said the chairman of another delegation, `I am an old free trader—' Put it there,' said Mr. Smith, ‘so'm I. There
ain't nothing like it.' What do you think about imperial defence ? ' asked another questioner. Which ?' said Mr. Smith. `Imperial defence.' 'Of what?' ` Of everything.' `Who says it ?' said Mr. Smith. 'Everybody is talking of it' `What do the Conservative boys at Ottaway think about it ? ' answered Mr. Smith. They're all for it."Well, I'm fer it too,' said Mr. Smith."
Most of the characters in these pages are engaged in trade or business, but there is one charming exception in the person of the Rev. Dean Drone, the incumbent of the Anglican Church, a gentle old scholar, whose only grievance was that his early instructors had never taught him enough mathematics to grapple with the intricacies of church finance. The failure of his various schemes to extricate himself from the burden of debt—the result of an over-lavish expenditure on bricks and mortar—culminating in a "Whirlwind Campaign," ex- hibits Mr. Leacock in the new light of a humorist who com- bines a keen sense of the ludicrous with a genuine gift of pathos. Another most engaging character is the local Judge, of whose judicial temper we get many diverting examples :— "When the Conservatives got in anywhere, Pepperleigh laughed and enjoyed it, simply because it does one good to see a straight, fine, honest fight where the best man wins. When a Liberal got in, it made him mad, and he said so—not, mind you, from any political bias, for his office forbid it—but simply because one can't bear to see the country go absolutely to the devil. I suppose, too, it was partly the effect of sitting in court all day listening to cases. One gets what you might call the judicial temper of mind. Pepperleigh had it so strongly developed that I've seen him kick a hydrangea pot to pieces with his foot because the accursed thing wouldn't flower. He once threw the canary cage clear into the lilac bushes because the blasted bird wouldn't stop singing.' It was a straight case of judicial temper. Lots of judges have it developed in just the same broad, all-round way as with Judge Pepperleigh.
• • • • • •
I think it must be passing sentences that does it. Anyway, Pepperleigh had the aptitude for passing sentences so highly per- fected that he spent his whole time at it inside of court and out. I've heard him hand out sentences for the Sultan of Turkey and Mrs. Pankhurst and the Emperor of Germany that made one's blood run cold. He would sit there on the piazza of a summer evening reading the paper, with dynamite sparks flying from his spectacles, and he sentenced the Czar of Russia to °ten years in the salt mines—and made it fifteen a few minutes afterwards. Pepperleigh always read the foreign news—the news of things that he couldn't alter—as a form of wild and stimulating torment."
The speculations of Jeff Thorpe, the little barber, who made a small fortune in the mining boom and fell a speedy prey to some Cuban flat-catchers ; and the romance of Mr. Pupkin, the little bank clerk, who was afraid to tell his sweetheart that his father was a millionaire, afford congenial scope for Mr.
Leacock's skill in handling sentiment in a spirit of kindly satire. There is no bitterness in his laughter, and the epilogue, in which he pictures the dream visit of an exiled Mariposan to the Little Town in the Sunshine, closes an exhilarating volume on a note of tender reminiscence rare in a modern humorist.
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