Laughing Leacock

WINNOWED WISDOM -- Stephen Leacock--Dodd, Mead ($2).

Economist Leacock of McGill University, whom they now blurb as "the Canadian Mark Twain," is out with a most helpful compendium of suggestions and brief information for deepening and broadening life. He has written "The Outlines of Everything" from Shakespeare to Science, including the assurance that: "Darwin returned to Europe and wrote a book called Sartor Resartus which definitely established the descent of mankind from the avoirdupois apes," and a careful account of how Shakesbur (or Shaksper, Shicksper, Shagsber, or S.) wrote Henry V with assistance from Ben Jonson, Massinger, Marlowe and a little help from Fletcher. There is a section of international documents, summing up other people's prophecies about the next war, the oscillations of the French cabinet, weekly cable news, and tourists' conversation upon reaching home.

Many an old proverb is made over, thus: "It is a very silly boy who isn't on to his old man." The summer sorrows of the super-rich are assuaged, with instructions for amusing the butler in the evenings, getting the chauffeur's collars starched, and so on. And the author modestly relates "How My Wife and I Built Our Home for $4.90" after the approved manner of the American Magazine. Ladies' culture and gents' luncheon clubs, of which Mr. Leacock addresses a great many, will find a few genial descriptions of themselves, which may or may not move them to agree with the blurb. But if no one agrees, the author need not repine. He is most amusing most of the time and if one cannot be another Mark Twain it is something, after all, to be a Stephen Leacock.

The Significance of this brain-scattered little book is that it may be Stephen Leacock's last humorous publication. His wife died lately and he has been dedicating most of his time and energy to driving from the face of the earth the disease that killed her, cancer (TIME, Feb. 1, MEDICINE). However, his publishers have asked him to "discover America" as he did England (My Discovery of England, 1922), and it would indeed be surprising if circumstances could permanently stifle the prolific originality that has spurted from his pen for 16 years, and that has lately been applied, with superb detachment, to such a grim end.

The Author. In 1876 Master Stephen Butler Leacock, aged seven, of Swanmoor, Hants, England, decided to accompany his parents to a farm in Ontario. He attended Canadian colleges and taught in one of them until 1899, when he sickened of "the most dreary, the most thankless, and the worst paid profession in the world." He pursued economics and political science in Chicago, taking his Ph. D. in 1903. McGill University has employed him ever since. You sometimes see him in this country--a stocky, gruff, mop-headed little figure sitting in the quiet corner of a hotel dining room, or booming greetings and blocking the sidewalk with a well-met friend.

In 1910 he fell to supplying newpapers with literary parodies and burlesques, applying to his accumulation of old-world scholarship a shrewd and lively buffoonery, that evoked (at first) sniffs in England, amusement in Canada, guffaws in the U. S. He made marionettes of A, B and C in the arithmetic textbooks, pulling the strings with his left hand while he thumbed trade reports with his right. Between lectures on political science he cried out for laughing social philosophers, showing that, while Cardinal Newman had only asked for light, Charles Dickens had given it, and brazenly declaring that he would rather have written Alice's Adventures in Wonderland than the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In this respect his desires are fulfilled. Just as Mathematician Charles L. Dodgson quite vanished behind Lewis ("Wonderland") Carroll, so Political Economist Dr. Leacock is concealed-- save where the solid metal of sense frequently thrusts through the dazzling enamel of nonsense-- behind the author of Literary Lapses, Frenzied Fiction, Further Foolishness, etc., etc. These books, he modestly says, 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. . . ."

Naught but the invention of the linotype preserved them for posterity.