Introduction to Stephen Leacock

Stephen Leacock arrived in England in late September 1921 to make his first professional lecture tour.  The publication of his Literary Lapses in 1910 and of ten books in the following ten years had won a wide celebrity for him in England and the United States, and some recognition in his own country.  The Times welcomed him on arrival as “a master of satire.”  On the tour he spoke a few times “on serious subjects” at the universities, at business gatherings, and at London dinners; but for the main part of his tour he depended upon two lectures – “Frenzied Fiction” and “Dream As I See It” – made up from previously published material.  These he presented in fifty appearances between October 4 and December 23, going “as far north as Aberdeen and as far south as Brighton and Bournemouth ... eastward to Ipswich and western into Wales.”  Leacock’s agent did not fail to provide him with official encouragement: at his London lectures he was introduced in turn by the editors of Punch, the Westminster Gazette, The Times, and the Spectator.  The tour brought his annual income for the first time about $20,000; it also provided him with the material for his next annual volume.  He had noticed with what prompt and lucrative facility English literary men turned into writing their first impressions of America.  He himself had been born in England but had come to Canada as a child; he had visited England in 1907 as a young political science professor lecturing on “Imperial Organization” under the auspices of the Rhodes Trust.  He decided not to “restore the balance of trade” in “Impressions” by writing, under the assumed privilege of slight acquaintance, a comic survey of England, her people, beliefs, manners, and institutions.  Unlike some writers of “impressions” he could, he said, draw if necessary “upon observations extending over fourteen years.”

My Discovery of England consists of ten sketches in a mixed manner which is neither consistently satire nor parody.  The three first chapters unfold against the background of the ocean crossing, the landing in Liverpool, the rail journey to London, his first interviews with the English press, his solitary but irresolute exploration of London (the Tower, the British Museum, the Abbey).  Stephen Leacock seems to have brought home almost as little of England as those resolute tourists of our own day who endanger their respiration if not their health with an intricate cross-gartering of camera straps, light meters, and long-focus lenses.  But that is all part of the fun.  The best travel books (he might argue) are those which transform the image of the countries and people visited into the self-centred image of the traveller: for as long as things feel strange and a little ridiculous, and the “natives” can be referred to comprehensively as “they,” the reader has the sensation of travelling to foreign lands.

To begin with, Leacock speaks from the point of view of a wide-eyed bucolic whose heart has never seriously left home.  He thinks of London, naturally, in terms of South Bend, Indiana.  His finds mother-comfort in the thought that the Bank of England acts as agent of the Montana Farmers Trust Company.  He is reassured by “the existence of a tall stone monument” in Trafalgar Square because it helps to guide visitors to the two best American barber shops in town.  The Tower of London – “the principal penitentiary of the city,” where (he gravely adds) “Queen Victoria was imprisoned for many years” – lies due south of the American Garage where “excellent gasoline can be had.”  The air of optimism that he feels in the streets of London reminds him of the unalloyed confidence that charges the atmosphere of Peterborough, Ontario; and (he is sure) it can only have been impatience to hear the brass band waiting for him in Peterborough that induced the Duke of York, on his last visit to Canada, to decline a warm invitation to leave the train in Orillia and spend an evening with “the boys.”          

But the narrative thread soon disappears and is developed only slightly in the ninth chapter where he deals with the hazards that beset a public lecturer in Britain.  The rest of the sketches explore themes rather than episodes: government, education, the press, capital, prohibition, English humour.  Before long the charming and ingenuous rustic has departed and Leacock himself takes control of the action, shaping the landscape to his own vision.  We see him change, in the course of five hours of interviewing by the press, from a “dynamo” to an “extinct volcano” and we recognize the Leacockian system of accelerated aging.  This is a world in which some act of common brutality – an alleged poisoning, for example – can be redeemed by his compassionate sketch of the malefactor: “Miss Mary De Forrest, a handsome brunette thirty-six inches around the hips.”  In this world, smoking is a mark of swashbuckling manhood and profound thought.  Here millionaires, though in this book uncommon, comprise a distinct genus (with species and subspecies) which Leacock observes with fascinated and self-identifying revulsion and attraction.  Here a taxi driver can without detectable irony address his fare as “Sir.”  But by the fourth chapter this fantasy world begins to withdraw and we hear the beguiling but sometimes importunate platform manner of a man confident that his audience will respond at once to his tone, his mannerisms, his public mask, his own infectious enjoyment of his own fun.  The voice, rather than the words, becomes the unifying instrument, and we cannot always catch the precise inflection that informs the words with life.  Sometimes – being, after all, a professor – he falls into ex cathedra opinionism.  He looks at Oxford as an educational institution and ends by saying how he thinks women should be educated.  He is merry at the expense of the Mother of Parliaments (as who would not be); but when he speaks about business in England, he seems to be expressing, under the clown’s immunity, personal desires that would be entirely foreign to Mariposa and unseemly even on Plutoria Avenue.

Light-hearted matter is never far from the tip of Leacock’s pen, but the undercurrents are dark.  We know what he means about the “gentle and affectionate ways” of the American customs and immigration officials; and we applaud the editor of The Times for his policy of choosing his staff from “men who know” rather than from “men who think” – and making separate arrangements for the thinking.  But flashes of a more trenchant irony break the surface of his genial manner like some bitter recollection of a renounced past.  The traumatic theme of squalid undergraduate boarding-houses flows back into this book; he notes in passing that the people of England, before they were corrupted by the Americans, were “an honest, law-abiding race, respecting their superiors and despising those below them”; he is sure that if prohibition came to England the benefit would be “intended to fall on the poorer classes” because there is “no desire to interfere with the rich.”  Chapter 7 goes more sombrely than this altogether.  Here he argues against “over-extension of government and the decline of individual self-help” and draws a picture of the sprawling octopus of governmental inefficiency clogging “the machinery of bold productive effort.”  He begins the sketch with some mocking pleasantries about mass unemployment in England and the inflation of the German mark; he ends by urging that the profiteer’s rapacity is an essential economic principle, and preaches a lyrical Gospel of Gold based upon “the eager, selfish, and reliant spirit of the man who looks after himself” and “the trained greed of the rascal.”  Could Leacock, even with his conspiratorial public manner, have made this joke palatable?

My Discovery of England ran through six American printings between June 1922 and January 1923; the Canadian edition was not reissued; the England edition of 1922 was reprinted in 1925 and a cheap edition issued in 1931; in 1924 the whole book was translated into Japanese.  There have been no other editions; and although the book includes “Oxford As I See It,” Leacock’s most frequently reprinted sketch, as a whole it has fallen in the last thirty years or more into a general neglect that at least one of Leacock’s foremost recent critics considers undeserved.  Certainly Leacock himself is to be clearly seen through the book; and the Discovery shows, perhaps more clearly than any other single book of his, the remarkable source from which much of his humour flows: an overflowing and unpredictable fancy, often bizarre, sometimes macabre, that neither exhaustion could disarm nor deliberate effort emasculate.  His sense of proportion and disproportion is made equivocal by his own personal uncertainty, yet sharpened by desire and strengthened by compassion.  His sense of the grotesque is buoyant and ingenuous enough, we suspect, to make a Siamese execution irrepressibly funny; it might make a delightful because gratuitous fantasy from an ear snipped off (in the manner of Hieronymous Bosch) and mounted between wheels as a chariot for mice to draw in harness.  In the Literary Lapses there is a classic instance of this sort of vision: in a country barber-shop, we are told, a man is stripped to the waist so that “the barber can then take a rush at him from the other side of the room, and drive the clippers up the full length of the spine, so as to come at the heavier hair on the back of the head with the impact of a lawn-mower driven into long grass.”  In the Discovery the sunnier side of such a gracious vision is represented by the way writers collect impressions from the prone position on the bowsprits of transatlantic vessels; it peeps out from that formidable resting of the brains of Oxford dons between lectures, sometimes for thirty years or more at a time; and unaccountably a female undergraduate (ancien régime) sits “for four years as silent as a frog full of shot.”  A more sinister colour tinges the boarding-house beef that was always “done up in the same way after it was dead.”  The obsessive grief that paralyses one of Leacock’s lecture audiences because of the death (at ninety-four) of the oldest inhabitant is a real sorrow in a real world though Leacock definitely tells us it is not so.  The world where, according to the Indian Intelligence in a London newspaper, “two thousand Parsees had died of the blue plague” and “four thousand agitators had been sentenced to twenty years hard labour each” – with all the foolery about the Shriek of Kowfat – foreshadows, though gaily enough, a world that has now had to accommodate Auschwitz to its memory.  His imaginary sketch of England under the blight of Prohibition, though one of the funniest things in the book, is like a communiqué from a twilight city dying of radiation: “We have had the same trouble with wood-alcohol. ... A great many of our leading actors ... are dead.  And there has been a heavy loss, too, among the literary class and in the legal profession. ... Some of the best sailors are gone, and it is very difficult to keep admirals.”  Leacock deplores the English habit of making fun of the prisoners in courts of law.  Yet his own story about nearly killing a man with laugher has the impassive horror of nightmare: it is the same sort of joke as those about sailors who break their necks by jumping off ships in cork life-jackets.

Between the ambiguous depths of the dark passages and the infectious swiftness of his gaiety lies the tough and unabashedly singular thread of Stephen Leacock’s mind and person.  Leacock, not England, stands at the heart of this book.  If the book were better unified we should probably know rather less about Leacock than we do; and our knowledge of Leacock’s idiosyncrasies, learned from this book alone, heightens our sense of the virtues of his Discovery of England and of his distinctive genius altogether.