Читать книгу Stephen Leacock - Стивен Ликок - Страница 5

Table of Contents

hile an author is still living he has rights that a biographer is bound to respect. If he states that he was born on a certain day, in a certain year, at a certain place, it is the biographer's duty to accept these statements without question. He may suspect that the author has taken the facts on hearsay evidence, but he must leave it to some conscientious biographer of the future to consult the parish register and verify the details.

Moreover, if the author occasionally indulges in autobiography and sets forth explicitly what he regards as the effects of the various events of his life on his career, the biographer will be wise to accept these confidences in a thankful spirit.

Being convinced of the soundness of these views, the work of the present biographer of Stephen Leacock is greatly simplified. By letting Mr. Leacock, as far as possible, tell the story of his own life, his labors will be reduced to a minimum and the enjoyment of the reader greatly increased. Mr. Leacock can tell the story of his life better than anyone else—and this is how he does it.

"I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, on December 30, 1869. I am not aware that there was any conjunction of the planets at the time, but should think it extremely likely. My parents migrated to Canada in 1876, and my father took up a farm near Lake Simcoe, in Ontario. This was during the hard times of Canadian farming, and my father was just able by great diligence to pay the hired man, and, in years of great plenty, to raise enough grain to have seed for the next year's crop without buying any. By this process my brothers and I were inevitably driven off the land, and have become professors, business men, and engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farm laborers. Yet I saw enough of farming to speak exuberantly in political addresses of the joy of early rising and the deep sleep, both of body and intellect, that is induced by honest manual toil.

"I was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, of which I was head boy in 1887. From there I went to the University of Toronto, where I graduated in 1891. At the University I spent my entire time in the acquisition of languages, living, dead, and half-dead, and knew nothing of the outside world. In this diligent pursuit of words I spent about sixteen hours of each day. Very soon after graduation I had forgotten the languages and found myself intellectually bankrupt. In other words I was what is called a distinguished graduate, and, as such, I took to school teaching as the only trade I could find that needed neither experience nor intellect. I spent my time from 1891 to 1899 on the staff of Upper Canada College, an experience which has left me with a profound sympathy for the many gifted and brilliant men who are compelled to spend their lives in the most dreary, the most thankless, and the worst-paid profession in the world. I have noted that of my pupils those who seemed the laziest and least enamored of books are now rising at the bar, in business, and in public life; the really promising boys, who took all the prizes, are now able with difficulty to earn the wages of a clerk in a summer hotel or a deck-hand on a canal boat.

"In 1899 I gave up school teaching in disgust, borrowed enough money to live upon for a few months, and went to the University of Chicago to study economics and political science. I was soon appointed to a fellowship in political economy, and by means of this, and some temporary employment by McGill University, I survived until I took the degree of doctor of philosophy in 1903. The meaning of this degree is that the recipient of instruction is examined for the last time in his life and is pronounced completely full. After this no new ideas can be imparted to him.

"From this time I have belonged to the staff of McGill University, first as a lecturer in political science, and later as the head of the Department of Economics and Political Science. As this position is one of the prizes of my profession, I am able to regard myself as singularly fortunate. The emolument is so high as to place me distinctly above the policemen, postmen, street-car conductors, and other salaried officials of the neighborhood, while I am able to mix with the poorer of the business men of the city on terms of something like equality. In point of leisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than a business man knows in his whole life. I thus have what the business man can never enjoy, an ability to think, and, what is still better, to stop thinking altogether for months at a time.

"I have written a number of things in connection with my college life—a book on Political Science, and many essays, magazine articles, and so on. I belong to the Political Science Association of America, to the Royal Colonial Institute, and to the Church of England. These things surely are proofs of respectability. I have had some small connection with politics and public life. A few years ago I went all around the British Empire delivering addresses on Imperial Organization. When I state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Union of South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turko-Italian war, I think you can form some idea of their importance. In Canada I belong to the Conservative party, but as yet I have failed entirely in Canadian politics, never having received a contract to build a bridge, or make a wharf, nor to construct even the smallest section of the Transcontinental Railway. This, however, is a form of national ingratitude to which one becomes accustomed in this Dominion.

"Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called 'Literary Lapses' and the other 'Nonsense Novels.' Each of these is published by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can be obtained, absurd as it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillings and sixpence. Any reader of this paper, for example, ridiculous though it appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books for seven shillings. Yet these works are of so humorous a character that for many years it was found impossible to print them. The compositors fell back from their task suffocated with laughter and gasping for air. Nothing but the invention of the linotype machine—or rather of the kind of men who operate it—made it possible to print these books. Even now people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the books should never be put into the hands of people not in robust health.

"Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labors of the economist. My 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 enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward 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 rather have written 'Alice in Wonderland' than the whole 'Encyclopædia Britannica.'"

Of the two books mentioned above he gives elsewhere an account that may be added appropriately to this autobiographical sketch. The attention of the reader is called to the fact that the sketches included in "Literary Lapses" were written between 1891 and 1897, when the author was in his early twenties. They were not published in book form until fifteen years later, when they made an immediate success. Although they did not attract the attention of book publishers when they first appeared in Saturday Night, Life, Truth, Puck, The Detroit Free Press, and similar publications, they established Mr. Leacock's reputation as a humorous writer with all who read these papers at that time. They won for him many enthusiastic admirers who were not surprised at the favor with which his writings were received when gathered in book form. For years this literary gold-mine lay hidden in the files of old papers, while the author occupied himself with the uncongenial task of school teaching and with serious forms of writing and study. Of his first book he writes:

"The sketches in 'Literary Lapses' were very largely written in my younger days, just after I left college. The one called 'A, B, and C' was the first of them. The editor of a Toronto paper gave me two dollars for it. This opened up for me a new world: it proved to me that an industrious man of my genius, if he worked hard and kept clear of stimulants and bad company, could earn as much as eight dollars a month with his pen. In fact, this has since proved true.

"But for many years I stopped this sort of thing and was busy with books on history and politics, and with college work. Later on I gathered these sketches together and sent them to the publishers of my 'Elements of Political Economy.' They thought I had gone mad.

"I therefore printed the sketches on my own account and sold them through a news company. We sold 3,000 copies in two months. In this modest form the book fell into the hands of my good friend—as he has since become—Mr. John Lane. He read the sketches on a steamer while returning from Montreal to London, and on his arrival in England he cabled me an offer to publish the book in regular form. I cabled back, 'Accept your offer with many thanks.' Some years after Mr. Lane, at a dinner in London, told this incident and said that it proved to him that I must be the kind of man who would spend seventy-five cents in saying 'many thanks.'"

Of "Nonsense Novels" he writes:

"The stories in this book I wrote for a newspaper syndicate in 1910. They were not meant as parodies of the work of any particular author. They are types done in burlesque.

"Of the many forms of humorous writings pure burlesque is, to my thinking, one of the hardest—I could almost feel like saying, the hardest—to do properly. It has to face the cruel test of whether the reader does or does not laugh. Other forms of humor avoid this. Grave friends of mine tell me that they get an exquisite humor, for instance, from the works of John Milton. But I never see them laugh at them. They say that 'Paradise Lost' is saturated with humor. To me, I regret to say, it seems scarcely damp.

"Burlesque, of course, beside the beautiful broad canvas of a Dickens or a Scott, shrinks to a poor mean rag. It is, in fact, so limited in scope that it is scarcely worth while. I do not wish for a moment to exalt it. But it appears to me, I repeat, a singularly difficult thing to do properly. It is to be remembered, of course, that the work of the really great humorists, let us say Dickens and Mark Twain, contains pages and pages that are in their essence burlesque."

It would be possible to make quite a bulky volume of autobiography if one pursued the search through all of Mr. Leacock's writings. There are passages in the literary essays that are frankly autobiographical, and doubtless many of his sketches are burlesque renderings of personal experiences. But we shall content ourselves with just one more glimpse of his life that he has given.

"When I was a student at the University of Toronto, thirty years ago, I lived, from start to finish, in seventeen different boarding houses. As far as I am aware these houses have not, or not yet, been marked with tablets. But they are still to be found in the vicinity of McCaul, D'Arcy, and St. Patrick streets. Anyone who doubts the truth of what I have to say may go and look at them.

"I was not alone in the nomadic life that I led. There were hundreds of us drifting about in this fashion from one melancholy habitation to another. We lived as a rule two or three in a house, sometimes alone. We dined in the basement. We always had beef, done up in some way after it was dead, and there were always soda biscuits on the table. They used to have a brand of soda biscuits in those days in the Toronto boarding houses that I have not seen since. They were better than dog biscuit, but with not so much snap. My contemporaries will remember them. A great many of the leading barristers and professional men of Toronto were fed on them."

While these quotations are satisfying enough, they fail in several important particulars. They fail to tell that he was married in New York, in the "Little Church Around the Corner," in August of 1900, to Beatrix, daughter or Lieut.-Col. Hamilton, of Toronto, and that he has one son, who was born on August 19, 1915, and named Stephen Lushinghton Leacock.

Above all they fail to tell us what he looks like, so that we may recognize him when we see him on the street. But this omission can be remedied by extracts from the writings of his contemporaries. An open letter to him in the Montreal Standard has this gem:

"I saw you in your native habitat, with your protective coloring all about you, and I have been able to pick you out ever since.

"It was a bright August afternoon, as I remember, and you were honoring Lake Couchiching with your presence on holiday. You were fully clad in a suit of dungarees, waders, a cow-bite hat, and whiskers of at least three days wilfulness. Waist-high in the water you pushed ahead of you a sort of young scow, pausing ever and anon to curse a short, black pipe with a hiccup in its stem. The scow was loaded with stones, with which you calculated to build an oven in a remote part of the island and pretend you were an Indian. Even at that early date your playful fancy was at work."

An interviewer pictures him as follows:

"At the minute of four I was at the University club. An imposing official in an imposing uniform ushered me into a still more imposing room. It was a big room filled with a chilly, academic sort of atmosphere—the sort of room that made you feel very small; that made you wonder why you ever presumed to seek an interview There I sat for ten long minutes, wondering what Leacock would be like, what he would deign to tell me, what I should dare to ask him; whether he would be witty or just talk in academic phrases miles above my head.

"Just then the door was sort of blown open and the room was flooded with a bubbling exuberance, 'lots of fun' and all the things that go to dissipate an academic chilliness. The entrance of Stephen Leacock was responsible. The room immediately took on his very human personality. It became intensely friendly. In a minute or so I found myself talking to Professor Leacock as if he had been a childhood friend regained after long years. From the first minute he impressed me as being 'understanding.' He seemed to laugh more than talk, and his eyes absolutely danced with merriment. His conversation was every jot as witty as his books, and not for one instant did he even suggest the professor. Much more was he the big, happy school-boy, brimful of fun, very interested in all the things that go to make or mar the world of to-day."

For this picture of him we are indebted to an employee of the Library of McGill University:

"When three o'clock came round it was no unusual thing to see him, a host of books and papers under his arm, make giant and hasty strides into the library to the delivery counter.

"With the coming of 'Literary Lapses,' Dr. Leacock appeared before me in an altogether different light. His familiar figure assumed a new meaning. His fine, grave face, that boy's mop of hair which always looks as if it had just been washed the night before, and simply refused to be brushed, the deep, vibrating tones of his voice and his peculiar stride, had always appealed strongly to me."

When Dr. Leacock was discovering England, English observers discovered him. One of them wrote his impressions as follows:

"Nobody, we must think, could be churlish with such a man. A ripple of laughter spreads round him wherever he moves; vexation vanishes, ill-tempered people begin to chuckle in spite of themselves, everybody crowds about him to be entertained. So it must happen; and it is not surprising if such a visitor as this has found many nice things to say of us. He has a way with him to soften the ruggedest, to rouse the most inert, and there is not the least credit in being jolly in his company. Let his impression of the English, therefore, be accounted to his own irresistibility, not to ours. Professor Leacock as an explorer, is at a certain disadvantage; he can never see people as they are without the charm and enlivenment of his society.

"What is peculiarly delightful about him, moreover, is that he never seems to be friendly and kindly out of mere politeness. Indeed he is a man of whom at first sight we might expect to feel shy; his quizzical glances have a dangerous look; and sometimes we suspect him of meaning more than he says. His compliments have now and then a tweak of sarcasm."

Another English observer conveyed his impressions in this fashion:

"Leacock was smiling all the while. He was smiling just before 8.30, when he stood in the gangway of Eltham Parish Hall, looking out at and up at the great audience who had come to greet him. Whilst the chairman was introducing him to the audience, Mr. Leacock sat and smiled, and for nearly an hour Leacock smiled like a great human sunbeam.

"Well, if some one smiles at you and says nothing, you are constrained to smile back at him. It is a smile that invites a smile. Leacock must have found that out, and just as one tacks down an oil cloth to hold it to the floor, so has Stephen Leacock nailed down his world with that infectious, merry smile of his which takes one right to a merry heart and a merry brain. Punch once wrote of him:

"Anyhow, I'd be as proud as a peacock

To have inscribed on my tomb:

He followed the footsteps of Leacock

In banishing gloom.'

"His laughter quietly rocks a not entirely giant frame, for Leacock is not a really big man. He just escapes being this. Perhaps to him the body just merely matters. About the shoulders he is built largely and strongly, these shoulders heaping up slightly behind into the student's back. There is a not easily forgettable face of fairly large proportions. It is a live face, a kindly face. One writer has spoken of his shaggy locks; they are hardly this. A mat of closely growing hair lies all over the head, and it has made its way, almost creeper-like, far down on his broad forehead. There is no curl, no wave—just what one may call useful hair over a large, well-shaped head. It is a head that reminds one of that of John Masefield, the poet, but the faces of these two men are very different.

"Does Leacock's body really matter? Not that we wish to convey the idea that he is mystic and ethereal. Body means appearance. Mr. Leacock wears clothes, in spite of the fact that he once wrote 'To Nature and Back again.' For dinner and lecture purposes he wears a form of dress which is quite careless and easy. It has no 'fit' in the tailor's sense of the word, but just that looseness which it should have for the fireside talk he likes so well. Is there the supreme insouciance of some professors about him? There is and there is not. When one looks at the highly glossed, turned down (perhaps a touch of Bohemianism) collar, and neat black bow above the white shirt front, there is not; but allowing the eyes to travel downwards to his trousers, one has to admit they have a peculiar vagueness about the knees that can only be obtained by intensive scholarship."

Since his first success as an author, Mr. Leacock's life has passed quietly as a professor at McGill, and in his summer home at Orillia. According to popular belief, he built the house in which he lives in Orillia with his own hands. This popular belief will be verified or disproven before going to press, if the information can be dragged from him by correspondence.

Since the publication of "Literary Lapses" in book form, he has added a book a year to his rapidly growing library of humor. In 1921 he visited England on a lecturing tour, and officially discovered the country—recording his impressions in a book that may be regarded as part of his autobiography. As a matter of fact, the final biographer of Mr. Leacock will only find it necessary to select from his published works the material for an adequate record of his life. Many of his sketches record faithfully his dealings with educationists, club-men and the world in general. In "Fetching the Doctor" he gives us a glimpse of his boyhood.

Mr. Leacock's writings have placed him so clearly before the public that there is little for a biographer to do beyond recording the usual facts of a quiet academic life. His history is written in his own books for the perusal of his host of admirers, who may be found wherever the English language is read.