An Introduction

An introduction BY ALAN BOWKER This page intentionally left blank Introduction ix 'DO NOT ever try to be funny,' Stephen Leacock once told a young friend, 'it is a terrible curse. Here is a world going to pieces and I am worried. Yet when I stand up before an audience to deliver my serious thoughts they begin laughing. I have been advertised to them as funny and they refuse to accept me as anything else.' 1 Such has been Leacock's fate over the years. He is remembered as the best selling humorist in the English language from 1910 to 1925, the man who made three generations perceive their foibles and forget their troubles, the genial jester whose sunshine humour put Mariposa on the literary map of the world. A grateful public has named moun tains and schools and medals after him, has put his smiling comic face on a postage stamp, but has paid only grudging and even apolo getic recognition to the fact that he was also a professorof political economy, more than half of whose published writings were of a highly serious nature. In his later life, Leacock agreed to wear the comic mask his public demanded. Seeking affection and proud of his ability to conjure up laughter, he almost - but never quite - drowned his serious voice in a flood of mirth. The public then and since has been content to ignore Leacock the social scientist altogether. By doing so, we have deprived ourselves of a perceptive Canadian social critic who had much to say about his world - and ours; and we have made him seem a smaller, narrower, and less significant figure in our history than he actually was. This book is an attempt to remedy this distor tion by re-examining Leacock's life and thought in the years before 1921, and by presenting to the modern reader some of the best of his early writings on imperiaiism, education and culture, religion and morality, feminism,prohibition, and social justice. Stephen Leacock was born in England in 1869, and as a boy of six migrated with his family to a small backwoods farm near Sutton, Ontario. After private tuition, he was educated at Upper Canada College and at the University of Toronto, where he studied 'lan guages, living, dead, and half-dead,' and then was forced by poverty to enter school-teaching. From 1889 to 1899 he was Modern Language Master at Upper Canada, where, according to Principal (Sir) George Parkin, he 'gained the reputation of being a very excellent teacher.' 'In some ways,' Parkin told Leacock's later em ployer, Principal Peterson of McGill, 'he was the most clever, ready and versatile man that I had here on the whole staff.'2 X Alan Bowker Upper Canada College must have been in many ways an interest ing place for a young master in the 1890s. Parkin was appointed principal in I 895, after having pursued a successful career as speaker and writer in the cause of imperial unity; he brought to the college high ideals, an acquaintance with men and affairs, and a zeal for the British Empire, which inspired masters and boys alike. Under his influence Upper Canada produced a disproportionate number of the leaders of the imperialist movement in the next generation. Lea cock's con temporaries as masters there included Pelham Edgar, W.L. Grant, and E.R. Peacock. But Leacock did not consider himself fortunate. He always hated school-teaching, which he called 'the most dreary, the most thank less, and the worst paid profession in the world.' Parkin noted this dissatisfaction. 'In some ways I do not think him exactly suited for being a school master, and especially a house master, as he was somewhat impatient of the infinite detail and routine necessary in a residential school. I always told him that Professorial work was more completely in his line than housemastership.'3 feeling his considerable talents wasted in the routine of teaching, Leacock sought a way out. Between I 894 and 1898 he wrote a fairly large number of humorous sketches which were published in several Canadian and American magazines. But these brought slight fame and slighter remuneration, and this career was abandoned. A more promising avenue was political economy, which Leacock began to study privately about 1895. In 1899, he left teaching to begin gradu ate study at the University of Chicago. After a brilliant career there he presented his thesis on 'The Doctrine of Laissez-Faire' and was awarded hjs PH o. 'The meaning of this degree,' he later wrote, '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.' At Chicago, Leacock was exposed to the latest progressive poli tical economy. In the previous thirty years, German-trained Ameri can scholars had challenged the precepts of the classical economists and were propounding a far more positive role for the state in regu lating monopolies, influencing the economy, and caring for the wel fare of the citizen. Social Darwinism, once domjnant in economics and sociology, was being repudiated or at least modified to stress man's collective rather than his individual survival. Four teachers in Introduction xi particular made an impression on Leacock: Henry Pratt Judson, Caspar Miller, J. Laurence Laughlin, and especially Thorstein Veblen.4 Leacock may have read Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class before going to Chicago, and much of his later work bears the stamp of Veblen's ideas. It is worth noting, however, that Veblen did not impress Leacock as a teacher; and his cynicism, detachment, and proposals for technocracy were repugnant to his Canadian pupil.5 Though Leacock returned to work in his native land and was an ardent imperialist, the influence of the Chicago school shows in all his social science writings and in his preoccupation with American problems in addition to those of Canada and the Empire. Now fortune began to smile on Leacock. In 1900 he married the grand-daughter of Sir Henry Pellatt, millionaire financier, imperialist, and later builder of Toronto's Casa Loma; the following year he began his thirty-five-year career as teacher of political economy at McGill. 'Personally, he is very taking,'6 wrote Principal Peterson after their first meeting, and the judgement was echoed in a few years by the students, the faculty, and many of the most influential men of Montreal. Finally occupying a position which challenged his abilities and satisfied his ambitions, Leacock rose so quickly that by 1905 he was being clearly marked out by his principal as the likely successor to the head of his department.7 In 1906 Leacock c;apped his meteoric ascent by publishing a textbook, Elements of Political Science. It was immediately successful and remained throughout his life Leacock's best-selling book. More than three dozen American universities adopted it, but its greatest influence lay in the British Empire, China, and Japan, where it was used for two generations. The following year he published Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Governmentin the 'Makers of Canada' series, and accom panied this with several scholarly and popular papers on the winning of responsible government in Canada. Before 1914 he wrote three volumes in the 'Chronicles of Canada' series, one of which, The Dawn of Canadian History, was fairly original in its use of Icelandic sagas and recent scholarship regarding the Norse exploration of America. In a few short years, Leacock had established himself as a writer of considerable range and talent and a scholar of international reputation. As a young man in a new field of study in a growing country, Leacock had bright prospects for advancement, and ample oppor tunity for development. Just as he had escaped his personal Slough xii Alan Bowker of Despond, so Canada itself at the turn of the century shook off a decade of pessimism and depression and embarked on a wave of expansion, prosperity, and optimism. 'The poor relation has come into her fortune,' wrote the British analyst, J .A. Hobson, 'a single decade has swept away all her diffidence, and has replaced it" by a spirit of boundless confidence and booming _enterprise.'8 Railways snaked into unpopulated territory, immigrants poured into the 'last, best west,' miners penetrated the rocky shield, and lumbermen ac celerated their assault upon the forest frontier. With the expansion of industry came urban growth; by 1911 more than half the people of Ontario and Quebec lived in cities and towns. The boom pro duced a class of very wealthy men, and it also produced poverty, slums, urban blight, and alienation. Intellectuals like Leacock, look ing at these rapid changes, gave their concerned attention to the new problems of materialism, urbanism, and an altered social structure. Moreover, the sense of fulfilled destiny brought by the great boom, coupled with the consciousness of new responsibilities and new dangers in a world beginning to lose the peace and security of pax Britannica, produced a heated debate about the relationship between mother country and colony. It was in this discussion of imperial relations that Leacock first made his public mark. In 1905 Governor-General Lord Grey, himself an ardent im perialist, asked Principal Peterson for a promising young lecturer to conduct a university extension course in the capital city. Peterson recommended Leacock as a man who could, as Grey put it, 'wake up Ottawa + keep it awake.'9 Leacock lived up to every expectation, dazzling the audience (which included not only the students, but Grey and his entourage, MP's, cabinet ministers, and senior civil servants) with a series of brilliant lectures on 'The British Empire,' which provoked widespread attention and debate.10 As a result, Leacock was soon being asked to speak all over eastern Canada.

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