i6 
Land & Wate. 
June 27, 1918 
Life and Letters ^ J. C Squire 
High Spirits 
TiHERE is now no need to explain who Mr. Stephen 
Leacock is : his Frenzied Fiction (John Lane, 6s. 
net), is his ninth book, and the other eight are in 
every house where (unhke one of Mr. Leacock's 
recent reviewers) 'they enjoy "uncontrollable 
laughter." Mr. Leacock has been boomed in several continents, 
and it is only natural that a reaction should set in. If it 
does, it will be unfair to him, for his work, uneven as it is, 
has not f;dlen off at all. He is as amusing now as he ever 
was : and, as a topical humourist should, he keeps well up 
with the latest events, phvsical and moral. He may not 
"stay by" one; but there" is always sufficient sense under 
his nonsense to enable one to read him at least twice. 
• ♦**** 
The world has never lacked people who have made it their 
business to attack shams, hypocrisies, pretence, and Cant. 
Some of them have been solemn missionaries, themselves 
a proper subject for humour, and others have been morose 
and bitter satirists who have taken a savage pleasure in 
exposure. Mr. Leacock is also principally concerned with 
what we comprehensively term Humbug, and he also takes 
a pleasure in exposing it. But his pleasure is a healthy, not 
a perverse, pleasure. His method of attack is not to flay 
humanity with knives, or pierce it with poi^soned arrows, but 
to pull its leg. There is nothing in him of the satirist who 
likes giving pain, or of the austere moralist who thinks a 
little hypocrisy a sin which earns the lowest hell. Oil the 
whole he finds humbug a rather harmless thing that adds 
to the variety of existence, and he is aware (as any man 
who is honest with himself must be) that he is a bit of a hum- 
bug himself. Though he is always on the right side, nobody 
could suspect him of writing in order to improve his-fellows ; 
but he is at once so shrewd and so charitable that he is far 
more likely to do so than many of those crusaders who 
approach us showing their teeth and inviting counter-attack. 
His unconscious tendency is to exhort us to be natural ; 
and the man who does not find in his pages unnatural actions 
and words of which he himself has been guilty has never 
watched Ms own conduct. 
****** 
But to hunt further for what the authors of The King's 
English would not allow me to call the True Inwardness of 
Mr. Leacock would be to join that solemn company of theorists 
at whom he is always laughing. He is about as easy to define 
as the end of the war. It is enough to say that he pulls 
legs ; and that, being an educated and cultivated man, he 
pulls legs with which humourists of his boisterous type are 
usually unfamiliar. Amongst the humbugs treated in the 
new book are not merely the humbugs of prohibition, of the 
fisherman, the Return to Nature, and the strong primitive 
man, but the humbugs of modern education, of modem 
fiction, and of foreign politics. To identify and burlesque 
the nonsense in these last you have to know something about 
them ; and that is where Mr. Leacock, who is a man of letters 
and a professor of economics, as well as a funny man, gets 
his pull. On the whole, as a citizen, he is, no doubt, in 
favour of every sensible reform in educational curricula that 
is proposed; but his skit, "The New Education," absurdly 
as it exaggerates, does point out real dangers. We may 
substitute " Civics" for "Classics" as a subject of study, but 
superficial and pedantic teachers and stupid students will 
not be abolished by any such charge, and his conversation 
with a girl imdergraduate on vacation is not mere folly. 
" I've elected Social Endeavour." 
"Ah," I said, "that's since my day, what is it,? " 
"Oh, it's awfully interesting. It's the study of condi- 
tions." 
" What kind of conditions ? " I asked. ' 
"All conditions. Perhaps I can't explain it properly. 
But I have the prospectus of it indoors if you'd like to see 
it. We take up Society." 
" And what do you do with it ? " 
"Analyse it," she said. 
"But it must mean reading a tremendous lot of books." 
■' No," she answered. "We don't use books in this course. 
It's all laboratory work." 
"Now I am mystified," I said. "What do you mean 
by laboratory work ? " 
"Well," answered the girl student with a thoughtful look 
upon her face," you see, we are supposed to break Society 
up into its elements." 
"In six weeks ? " 
"Some of the girls do it in six weeks. Some put in a 
whole semester and take twelve weeks at it." 
"So as to break it up pretty thorouglily ? " I said. 
''Yes," she a.ssented, "But most of the girls think six 
weeks is enough." 
"They ought to pulverise it pretty completely. But how 
do you go at it ? " 
"Well," the girl said, "it's all done with laboratory 
work. We take, for instance, department stores. I think 
that is the first thing we do, we take up the store." 
" And what do you do with it ?" 
"We study it as a Social Germ. " 
"Ah, ' I said, "as a Social Germ." 
This sketch is good all through ; so is tlie one which shows a 
circle in a club listening to a cryptic authority on Foreign 
Affairs and pretending to . understand : a very hard poke 
at the journalists who make up for a deficiency of real know- 
ledge by jaunty use of a few foreign words and the ordinary 
man who would rather do anything than admit that he does 
not understand what is being said to him : 
"I doubt very much," he said, "whether Downing Street 
realises the enormous power which the Quai d'Orsay has 
over the Yildiz Kiosk." 
"So do I," I said, "what is it ? " But he hardly noticed 
the interruption. 
"You've got to remember," he went on, "that, from the 
point of view of the Yildiz, the Wilhelmstrasse is just a 
thing of yesterday." 
"Quite so," I said. 
"Of course," he added, "the Ballplatz is quite different." 
"Altogether different," I admitted. 
"And mind you," he said; "the Ballplatz itself can l^e 
largely moved from the Quirinal and the Vatican." 
"Why, of course it can," I agreed, with as much relief 
in my tone as I could put into it. After all, what simpler 
wa^' of moving the Ballplatz than that ? 
The lunacy of the last sentence is the American touch ; an 
Englishman of the Leacock kind would have shnmk from it ; 
he would have preferred to keep his raillery more uniform 
and more delicate ; he would have feared to spoil the illusion 
by extravagance. But Mr. Leacock's spirits are uproarious 
and he will allow sheer nonsense to break into quite a close 
parody. He does not hesitate to call a Russian spy 
M. Poulispantzoff. 
****** 
The description of life in a "dry" Canadian city is very 
good; so is the interview with a primitive cave man, for- 
tunately procured after a surfeit of magazine stories in which 
the heroes feel the cave man surging within them and use 
violence towards the heroines. Needless to say, the cave 
man, when found, is a nervous creature, very much under 
the thumb of his wife, afraid to smoke when she is about, 
and unreasonably proud of his unprepossessing child. 
Another good one is the seance. "All the spirits who are 
tapped say that they are happy, quite happy ; that every- 
thing is bright and beautiful where they are, and that they 
want everybody to know how happy they are. Even 
Napoleon. The conversation with him opens charmingly : 
"Hello ! " I called. " Est-ce que c'esl lEmpereur Napoleon 
a qui j'ai I'honneur de parler ? " 
"How's that ? " said Napo'eon, 
" Je demande si je suis en communication avec I'Empereur 
Napo'eon — ." 
"Oh," sad Napo'eon, "that's all right; speak English." 
"What!" I said in surprise. "You know English.' 
I always thought you couldn't speak a word of it." He was 
silent for a minute. Then he said : 
' ' I picked it up over here. It's all right. Go right ahead. ' ' 
But the best thing in the book is the interview with a pair 
of novelists, husband and wife. The wife is a sociological 
novelist ; she specialises in the laundry and pickle industries, 
and will talk. The husband, however, refuses to talk about 
anything but his pigs, bees, bulls, horses, dogs, and crops. 
All he can say when pressed about his methods of work is 
contained in this passage : 
"My methods of work ? " he answered, as we turned up 
the path again. "Well, I hardly know that I have any." 
"What is your plan or method," we asked, getting out 
our notebook, "of laying the beginning of a new novel ? " 
"My usual plan," said the novelist, "is to come out 
here and sit in the sty till I get my characters." 
■^Does it take long ? " we questioned. 
"Not veiy. I generally find that a quiet half-hour spent 
among the hogs wil give me, at least, my leading character." 
But how seldom are they so candid. 
