THE SERIOUS WORK OF PROFESSOR LEACOCK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 251, 14 April 1944, Page 6

THE SERIOUS WORK OF PROFESSOR LEACOCK

N this article for "The Listener,’ A.M.R. estimates the place in literature of Professor Stephen Leacock, famous humorist, economist and political scientist, whose death in Canada at the age of 75, was announced the other day.

Y first encounter with Leacock was in the Children’s Newspaper. Under the picture of a melancholy man sipping tea in a restaurant, it was somewhat redundantly explained that Mr. Stephen Leacock, the celebrated Canadian humorist now visiting England, did not look in the least like what one expects a humorist to appear. That scotched my youthful belief that "a humorist" meant a "funny man" like Uncle John, someone bubbling with jokes, a stage comedian in real life. Probably, however, plenty of adults make an error nearly as childish in thinking of a humorist as a sort of juggler, a prestidigitator with words and "funny situations." T6é them I protest the seriousness of Professor Leacock, No. not solemnity. Leacock was a gifted man of extreme versatility. But he did not possess solemnity-except inside his conjuror’s hat. Stage entertainer he was, of course. We have all held our breaths, then roared, at his acrobatics with words-‘"taking a rise out of words" he called it. Remember Sir Guido (the Gimlet of Ghent) mounting his steed and riding off wildly in all directions. Remember the solitary horseman appearing on a bluff, followed by another, and yet another, until the sky line was crowded with solitary horsemen. Remember Oyster McOyster McShamrock clad in. half-hose with tartan sporran half down his, thighs, a half-coat half hiding his brawny chest, while from his bonnet a rhinosceros feather rose halfway into the air. Remember Mistress McShamrock "knitting breeks for their son Jamie as a surprise against his ordination. Already it was shaping that way. .... " But remember also Leacock’s comment on some learned reviewer’s taking of: Mark Twain to pieces to see how he ticked. "Mark Twain’s humour is simply an ingenious mixture of meiosis and hyperbole" explained the reviewer in conclusion. "Now we know how. Take one ed ne i ee ad 2° peel geet Tae

quart ‘meiosis, three pints hyperbole. Mix thoroughly. Stand’ in» a cool place. . ." commented Leacock, or words to this. effect. "A Highly Sensitive Person" The point is, of course, that to be a real humorist, one must be something more than a daring young man on a verbal trapeze. One must be a critic. One must be, that is, a highly sensitive person, able to see things as they really are, not as we have got used to pretending they are. Then, if such a person has in addition, the ability to describe what he sees as brightly and as swiftly as he sees it, we hail him humorist and pay tribute in book royalties-or else we hound him down for subversion and indecency. Which of these two we do depends mainly, I think, on whether the critic himself sees with an indignant or an indulgent eye. Shaw, for example, has alternated each. We have caught him winking-and not known what to make of him. Look at Leacock this way. "Scholars tell us,’ he writes, "that Aristophanes was probably the wittiest man that ever lived: so witty that it takes half a page to explain one of his jokes." Now why is that funny? Is it not because the writer has suddenly flung open a window in the well-wall of standardised literary judgment that entombs us, and we gasp as a sunbeam of true perspective flashes in. Possibly half of Leacock’s "funny pieces" have their groundwork effect on us in this way. There is "The Barber’s Outline of History," for example, which proves in three pages what many philosophical and theological tomes have laboured in vain to persuade-namely that all interpretations of all events, no matter how scientific they set out to be, simply reflect the writer’s own historical situation. Leacock did it, of course, by following through in political and economic detail "man’s progréss from Unbarbarism to Barbarism" on the solemn assumption that the motive force of (Continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) History has been changes in men’s shaving habits. Or hear this summary of centuries: "To the Ancients the Businessman was a crook. To the Middle Ages he. was a sinner. Later, he became a Merchant and very rich-but still not good’ enough to eat with gentlemen. Then the English discovered that though one cannot be made a gentleman, one can be made a Lord. This discovery has practically turned society bottom up. A final effort will do it." In short, Professor Leacock’s funny work was his serious work. And his statement that he would rather have written Alice in Wonderland than the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, showed that he himself was aware of it. His Frenzied Fiction is Literary Criticism of the most difficult and most illuminating sort. No one who has roared through "Serge the Superman" ("translated. out of the original Russian with a stomach pump"), or "Soaked in Seaweed," is ever going to be taken in again by the pretentious psychological or sea stories that they guy. He has been shown the tricks of the trade, and to get his old enjoyment from books will hereafter have to read better ones, or at least ones in which the machinery is better oiled. ‘ With the Idle Rich However, criticism of literary form is only the start of a critical attitude ‘generally. Leacock was a Conservative in Canadian politics and definitely ‘anti-socialist in economic teaching. But if you really want to know the full damnableness that inequalities of pos--session and income impart into every phase of society from road-marking to religion, go on Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. The book is not

social satire. It is just plain photographic description-touched up, of course-of what capitalism does to its favourites. Here is Mr. Newcome telling us how he built his "little (20,000 dollar) summer chalet" of Yodel Dudel: "T went 40 feet down for foundations and landed in eight feet of water. . . Then I threw my steel girders across in 60-foot pieces, and held them easily until I let the whole thing sink gradually to its place ... I always use Italians for blasting. Blew two of them up once. Most unfortunately! It cost me two thousand dollars each. Still, it was fair enough. After all, the risk, you see, was mine, not theirs. .... Probably best known to New Zea-landers-because in the School Journal -is the article where Leacock built up characters and histories for A, B, and C by piecing together the brief accounts of their activities in the arithmetic books. Probably least read will remain the attack upon Keynes’s Economics ot Investment and Consumption, in which Leacock was so keen on his "message" that he slipped into titling it "The Invasion of Human Thought by Mathematical Symbols" instead of simply "How .Mathematics Supersedes Thinking." In his 40 volumes in between, he was in varying degrees intent on what he was saying or on how to say it. But always he was clothing abstractions in flesh-and, most particularly, turning the figures of his own professional science into human figures, Because the attitude towards the ‘world that lay behind this was natural to him, but in much danger of becoming unnatural to us, probably many besides myself who originally came to Leacock to laugh are now regretting not a driedup stream of humour but the kindly personality and ever-fresh outlook of the man behind the \books,