The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical EditionVol. 1: Apprentice Years, 1905-1918

Mr. Leacock Serious: A review of Essays and Literary Studies, by Stephen Leacock

New York: John Lane, 1916. Pp. 310.

The New Statesman,7 (29 July 1916) 404-05

Although Mr. Leacock employs many Americanisms which may sound slipshod to an English ear, he succeeds, as most writers of his continent fail, in being amusing and at the same time conveying some hard, important, and unpopular truths. The truths are universal; the humour is American, and may not appeal to English readers. It gains its effect often by a trick of comic simplicity and bluntness (such as the author himself remarks in American humorists) rather than by a sudden penetration to the intrinsic absurdity of its subject matter. Thus, in ridiculing modern superstitiousness, he illustrates by reference to Nadir the Nameless, the Hindoo astrologer:

By the waiting clients Nadir is understood to be in consultation with the twin fates, Isis and Osiris. In reality Nadir is frying potatoes. Presently he will come out from behind the curtain and announce that Osiris has spoken (that is, the potatoes are now finished and on the back of the stove) and that he is prepared to reveal hidden treasure at 40 cents a revelation. ²

The humour of this episode is not found in the eternal comedy of the mountebank: it lies in the fact that Nadir is frying potatoes. We are not led to insight, through laughter; we are told of our superstition, then allowed to relax our minds in mirth. The great weakness of American humour is that it usually stands at most for the hearty laugh; the reader of Candideor Pickwick Paperscannot wholly escape from exercise of intellect or feelings; ³ in America the hearty laugh triumphs. But Mr. Leacock, unlike most American humorists, has a sharp and serious meaning to insert between the roars.

One could hardly read this book and be merely amused. In the essays entitled “The Apology of a Professor,” “The Lot of the Schoolmaster,” and especially “Literature and Education in America,” Mr. Leacock has exposed some of the essential faults of American education, some of the reasons for the insolvency of American literature. He draws a truthful picture of the American graduate student, the prospective Doctor of Philosophy: his specialisation in knowledge, his expansion in ignorance, his laborious dulness, his years of labour and his crowning achievement–the Thesis. ⁴

Now it is not to be thought that this post-graduate work upon the preparation of a thesis, this so-called original scholarship, is difficult. It is pretentious, plausible, esoteric, cryptographic, occult, if you will, but difficult it is not. [83]

This labour is fatal to the development of intellectual powers. It crushes originality, it kills style. Few, very few, of these “original contributions” are well written or even readable. At the other end of the scale, a product of the same social conditions, stands the “American Reporter, tireless in his activity, omnipresent, omnivorous, and omni-ignorant” (89). The reporter writes no better than the Ph.D. Of this scandal of a continent the causes are first commercialism, and second, according to Mr. Leacock,

American civilisation with its public school and the dead level of its elementary instruction, with its simple code of republicanism and its ignorance of the glamour and mystery of monarchy, with its bread and work for all and its universal hope of the betterment of personal fortune, contains in itself an atmosphere in which the flower of literature cannot live. [94]

In the American scene Mr. Leacock finds material for ridicule. But his criticism, as the quotation above will show, is more than “horse-sense”; his diversions conceal a positive and formidable point of view. He upholds the classical, the Oxford education: Latin and Greek as “the starting point for a general knowledge of the literature, the history, and the philosophy of all ages” (76). His attitude is austere, pessimistic, almost mediaevalist. He believes in discipline, form, restraint; in...