FICTION.

ARCADIAN ADVENTURES WITH THE IDLE RICH.• Ma. STEPHEN LEACOCK, who indemnifies himself for his professorial allegiance to the dismal science by periodio

excursions into the land of nonsense, frivolity, and extrava- gance, has come to occupy in letters a position closely allied

to that occupied by the late Mr. Pelissier and his troupe on the stage. With the death of the leader of the Follies, and the disbanding or dispersion of his company, a source of unfailing and innocent mirth, a veritable Ions leporum, was

suddenly dried up. But if we can no longer renew, except in memory, the joys of those evenings at the Apollo Theatre, a

new volume from the pen of Mr. Leacock is about the best substitute that we know of. His Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich are a blend of delicious fooling and excellent satire. Once more the author of Literary Lapses has proved himself a benefactor of his kind.

In one respect the new venture differs from its prede- cessors in that these stories are a series of studies in the eccentricities of American plutocrats on their native heath, or, to be more correct, as they reveal themselves in their

clubs, hotels, salons, and universities. The first of the series gives us a wonderful picture of the Mausoleum Club at Plutoria, where multi-millionaires combine sultanic luxury with the emission of the most splendidly anti-feudal, demo- cratic, and Socialistic sentiments. On this particular occa- sion the Club is the scene of a tragedy. Mr. Lucullus Fyshe had arranged a little dinner in honour of the Duke of Dulham, on the assumption that this eminent aristocrat had come to America to lend money. As a matter of fact, he had come to borrow ; and, to make matters worse, the dinner broke down at the end of the first course owing to a strike of the waiters, just after Mr. Fyshe had started on his favourite topic :—

"‘ Luxury !' he exclaimed, I should think so! It is the curse of the age. The appalling growth of luxury, the piling up of money, the ease with which huge fortunes are made' (Good ! thought the Duke, hero we are coming to it), these are the things that are going to ruin us. Mark my words, the whole thing is bound to end in a tremendous crash. I don't mind telling you, Duke—my friends here, I am sure, know it already—that I ant more or less a revolutionary socialist. I am absolutely convinced, sir, that our modern civilisation will end in a great social catas- trophe. Mark what I say'—and here Mr. Fyshe became exceedingly impressive—' a great social catastrophe. Some of us may not live to see it, perhaps ; but you, for instance, Furlong, are a younger man; you certainly will.' But here Mr. Fyshe was understating the case. They were all going to live to see it, right on the spot. For it was just at this moment, when Mr. Fyshe was talking of the • Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Etch. By Stephen Leacock. London John Lane. [Ss. 6d. net,]

social catastrophe and explaining with dashing eyes that it was bound to come, that it came ; and when it came it lit, of all places in the world, right there in the private. dining-room of the Mausoleum Club. For the gloomy head waiter re-entered and leaned over the back of Mr. Fyshe 's chair and whispered to him. 'Eh!' what?' said Mr. Fyshe. The head waiter, his features stricken with inward agony, whispered again. 'The infernal, damn scoundrels!' said Mr. Fyshe, starting back in his chair. • On strike ; in this club! It's an outrage! =I'm very sorry, sir. I didn't like to tell you, sir. I'd hoped I might have got help from the outside, but it seems, sir, the hotels are all the same way.'- ' Do you mean to say,' said Kr. Fyshe, speaking very slowly, that there is no dinner I'm sorry, sir,' moaned the waiter. ' It appears the chef hadn't even cooked it. Beyond what's on the table, sir, there's nothing.' The social catastrophe had come."

In "The Wizard of Finance" and its sequel we find touches of that humanity of which Mr. Leacock never loses hold in his wildest moments. It is the picture of a simple Western farmer, a multi-millionaire malgre lui, whose reticence—born of ignorance—is mistaken for abysmal shrewdness by financiers and journalists, and whose persistent efforts to lose his money only result in constant accessions to his wealth. Incidentally we get a delightful sketch of a simple-minded geological pro- fessor, whose expert knowledge is exploited at a beggarly wage by company promoters, while he is all the time only interested in the evidences which his analysis furnishes for or against the theory of the distribution of igneous or aqueous rocks. Incidentally, too, we have a mordant satire on certain aspects of the modern American University as revealed in Dr. Boomer

and Professor Boyster, and in the equipment of the Plutoria University :—

"The university, as everyone knows, stands with its great gates on Plutoria Avenue, and with its largest buildings, those of the faculty of industrial and mechanical science, fronting full upon the street These buildings are exceptionally fine, standing fifteen stories high and comparing favourably with the best departmental stores or factories in the city. Indeed. after night- fall, when they are all lighted up for the evening technical olasses and when their testing machinery is in full swing and there are students going in and out in overall suits, people have often mistaken the university, or this newer part of it, for a factory. A foreign visitor once said that the students looked like plumbers, and President Boomer was so proud of it that he put the phrase into his next Commencement address ; and from there the newspapers got it and the Associated Press took it up and sent it all over the United States with the heading, ' Have Appearance of Plumbers ; Plutoria University Congratulated on Character of Students,' and it was a proud day indeed for the heads of the Industrial Science faculty. Bnt the older part of the University stands so quietly and modestly at the top end of the elm avenue, so hidden by the leaves of it, that no one could mistake it for a factory. This, indeed, was once the whole university, and had stood there since colonial days under the name Concordia College. It had been filled with generations of presidents and professors of the older type, with long white beards and rusty black clothes, and salaries of fifteen hundred dollars. But the change both of name and of character from Concordia. College to Plutoria University was the work of President Boomer. He had changed it from an old-fashioned college of the bygone type to a university in the true modern sense. At Plutoria they now taught everything. Concordia College, for example, had no teaching of religion except lectures on the Bible. Now they had lectures also on Confucianism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism, with an optional course on atheism for students in the final year. And, of course, they had long since admitted women, and there were now beautiful creatures with Cleo de Merode hair studying astronomy at oaken desks and looking up at the teacher with eyes like comets. The university taught everything and did every- thing. It had whirling machines on the top of it that measured the speed of the wind, and deep in its basements it measured earthquakes with a seismograph ; it held classes on forestry and dentistry and palmistry ; it sent life classes into the slums, and death classes to the city morgue. It offered such a vast variety of themes, topics, and subjects to the students, that there was nothing that a student was compelled to learn, while from its own presses in its own press building it sent out a shower of bulletins and monographs like driven snow from a rotary plough."

But the most exhilarating of all these adventures is that entitled " The Yabi-Balii Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown," and tells how a couple of sham Orientals, after trading on the credulity of that lady and her friends, were ultimately un- masked and haled off to prison. Here is the description of the opening seance. Mr. Sikleigh Snoop, it should be explained, was the eminent sex-poet, a leading spirit in the organization,

who had a special fitness for the task. He had actually " spent six weeks in India on a stop-over ticket of a round-the- world 635-dollar steamship pilgrimage " :-

" Mr. Yahi-Bahi was tall. His drooping oriental costume made him taller still. Ho had a long brown face and liquid brown eyes of such depth that when he turned them full upon the ladies before him a shiver of interest and apprehension followed in the track of his glance. • My dear,' said Miss Snagg afterwards, 'he seemed simply to see right through us.' This was correct. He did. Mr. Ram Spudd presented a contrast to his superior. Her was short and round, with a dimpled mahogany face, and eyes that twinkled in it like little puddles of molasses. His head was bound in a turban and his body was swathed in so many bands and sashes that he looked almost circular. The clothes of both Mr. Yahi- Bahi and Ram Bpudd were covered with the mystic signs of Buddha and the seven serpents of Vishnu. It was impossible, of course, for Mr. Yahi-Bahr or Mr. Ram Spudd to address the audience. Their knowledge of English was known to be too slight for that. Their communications were expressed entirely through the medium of Mr. Snoop, and oven he explained afterwards that it was very difficult. The only languages of India whioh he was able to speak, he said, with any fluency were Gargamia and Gumaic, both of these being old Dravidian dialeote with only two, hundred and three words in each, and hence in themselves very difficult to converse in. Mr. Yahi-Bahi answered in what Mr. Snoop understood to be the Iramio of the Vedas, a very rich, language, but one which unfortunately he did not understand.. The dilemma is one familiar to all oriental scholars. All of this Mr. Snoop explained in the opening speech which he proceeded to- make. And after this he went on to disclose, amid deep interest,. the general nature of the cult of Boohooism. He said that they could best understand it if ho told them that its central doctrine was- that of Bahee. Indeed, the first aim of all followers of the oult was- to attain to Bahee. Anybody who could spend a certain number of hours each day, say sixteen, in silent meditation on Boohooism would find his mind gradually reaching a condition of Bahee. The chief aim of Bahee itself was sacrifice: a true follower of the cult must be willing to sacrifice his friends, or his relatives, and even strangers, in order to reach Bahee. In this way one was able fully to realise oneself and enter into the Higher Indifference. Beyond this, further meditation and fasting—by which was meant living solely on fish, fruit, wine, and meat—one presently attained to complete Swaraj or Control of Self, and might in time pass into the absolute Nirvana, or the Negation of Emptiness, the supreme goal of Boohooism. As a first step to all this, Mr. Snoop explained, each neophyte or candidate for holiness must, after searching his heart, send ten dollars to Mr. Yahi-Bahi. Gold, it appeared, was recognized in the cult of Boohooism as typifying the three- chief virtues, whereas silver or paper money did not ; even national bank-notes were only regarded as del, or half-way palliation ; and outside currencies such as Canadian or Mexican bills were looked upon as entirely too, or contemptible. The oriental view of money, said Mr. Snoop, was far superior to our own, but it also might be attained by deep thought, and, as a beginning, by sending ten dollars to Mr. Yell-Bahl."

The financial side of church organization in the United States, and the extent to which theology is controlled by plutocratic

influences, are familiar to readers of Mr. Winston Churchill's last novel, The Inside of the Cup. Mr. Leacock deals with this

subject in his account of the rival churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph in a vein of exuberant satire which may shock

fastidious readers, though there can be no doubt of his sincere championship of tolerance and independence. The range of Mr. Leacock's satire is further extended by a sketch of the ill- assorted ménage of a young man of the "gentle Juggins"

type, with great possessions and no brains, and a middle-aged adventuress ; and finally by " The Fight for Clean Govern- ment," in which a resounding triumph is scored by the magnates of the Mausoleum Club over the cohorts of Aldermanic corruption, with the net result of leaving things exactly as they were before.