Stephen Leacock: A Reappraisal ed. by David Staines (review)

HUMANITIES 161 'talk to each other' in what is increasingly a shared discourse. All of them pose (if they cannot resolve) the interesting problem of writing about the self in its social and natural world from a standpoint neither hierarchical nor revolutionary. These editions will ensure that the conversation between these poems will one day be understood; if the task of reading was originally neglected, that of rereading will not be. (GERMAINE WARKENTIN) David Staines, editor. Stephen Leacock: A Reappraisal. Reappraisals: Canadian Writers 12 University of Ottawa Press 1986. vi, 172. $29.95; $14.95 paper Each of the volumes in this series represents the proceedings of a symposium, in this case a Leacock symposium held in April 1985 at the University of Ottawa. Ralph L. Curry, Leacock's bibliographer and first biographer, has added to the symposium material that is from one point of view the book's most valuable feature: a twenty-eight-page list of Leacock's published writings that is the most complete and correct now available. The beginning point for any reappraisal this collection might stimulate is Ian Ross Robertson's informative 'The Historical Leacock,' which recommends a 'holistic approach' to Leacock's career and illuminates several aspects of it. The fruitfulness of a global examination of Leacock's writings and life is also demonstrated by James Steele's 'Imperial Cosmopolitanism, or the Partly Solved Riddle of Leacock's MultiNational Persona' and by Myron J. Frankman's 'Stephen Leacock, Economist: An Owl Among the Parrots,' which illuminates the backgrounds of Leacock's economic and political thought, points out its consistent vision, and suggests its value. Robertson calls attention to Leacock's historical writings, to some ofhis essays and books on social issues (notably The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice), and to the Montreal Pen and Pencil Club and Andrew Macphail's University Magazine as matrices of Leacock's thought from 1901 to 1915, when he began his professional activities in education, social science, and literature, and produced several of his best books. In addition, Robertson valuably recalls and summarizes essays and books by Frank Watt, Ramsay Cook, Carl Berger, and Alan Bowker that begin to bring Leacock's literary and social science writings to bear on each other. Robertson draws from this tradition the concept of Leacock as a 'red Tory,' a deviser of his own brand of radical conservatism. This approach seems promising; Theresa Moritz and I also used it in Leacock: A Biography (1985), which has as a main thesis that in all aspects of his life and thought Leacock was drivenin part by 'a passionate belief that 162 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 English tradition must be reformed to preserve, refine and democratize its advantages' and that change must come 'by re-interpreting inherited forms rather than radically attacking them.' In his life and his writings in all fields, Leacock expressed the idea that the loved, inherited ways are proof against radical criticism and replacement because they themselves, properly understood, provide the most adamant refutation of the evil and folly done in their names. He can be seen, then, in the Romantic and Victorian tradition of conservative radicalism that criticized abuses of the new urban industrial society by appeal to older traditions, including those that the new order claimed to represent, such as English political institutions and Christianity. What Robertson, Frankman, and Steele trace in some of Leacock's history and political science is an encompassing concern of the writer, partly a belief and partly a desire he strove to make belief: that his own traditions can be found to contain the springs of innocence, or at least of such good as humanity can achieve. In personal terms, Leacock has the need to affirm an identity experienced both as inherited and as self-made, and so the inheritance must be defended against powerful indictments that the self itself makes, though it projects the most threatening forms of them onto those who make them publicly. This dynamic seems a key to a complete view of Leacock's work, uniting its most disparate facets, major and minor, from his relationship to Dickens and other literary forebears, to his complementary valuations and criticisms of England and...