Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity

212 Pages·1988·11.627 MB·English

by  Gerald Lynch

Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity
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Stephen Leacock
Humour and Humanity
GERALD LYNCH
McGill-Queen's University Press
Kingston and Montreal
©McGill-Queen's University Press 1988
ISBN 0-7735-0652-7
Legal deposit third quarter 1988
Bibliotheque Rationale du Quebec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
This book has been published with the help of a grant
from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, us-
ing funds provided by the Social Sciences and Human-
ities Research Council of Canada.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Lynch, Gerald, 1953-
Rounded with a smile: Stephen Leacock's tory-human-
ist humour
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7735-0652-7
i. Leacock, Stephen, 1869-1944 - Criticism and inter-
pretation. I. Title.
PS8523.E15Z76 1988 c8i8'.52O9 088-090143-8
PR9199.3.1,367778 1988
This book is dedicated to Mary Jo.
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Abbreviations xiii
1 The Middle Way: An Introduction to
Leacock's Tory-Humanist Norm 3
2 Between Satire and Sentimentality:
Leacock's Theory of Humour 24
3 Sunshine Sketches: Mariposa Versus
Mr Smith 57
4 Religion and Romance in Mariposa -
En Voiture! 86
5 Arcadian Adventures: The City of the
End of Things 121
6 Between a Vault and a Dark Place:
Religion and Politics in Plutoria 152
7 Humour and Humanity 173
Notes 177
Index 195
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Prefa ce
Stephen Leacock is still often regarded as a writer of lightweight
amusements and unchallenging satire, as an author without an im-
aginative centre who lacked a vision of sufficient power and clarity
to sustain a lifetime of serious writing. According to this view, which
has been too easily accepted, Leacock squandered an early, prom-
ising talent (though he was, in fact, middle-aged when in 1912 he
published Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town), and consequently his
writings, like his legendary Lord Ronald, "rode madly off in all
directions." After years of chasing down Leacock's numerous literary
mounts, I can assert that none of this is true. Leacock's writings
emerge from a centre that is the confluence of the two traditions of
humanism and toryism, traditions that found in Leacock fertile
ground for the propagation of such qualities as a tolerance of human
fallibility and an acceptance of social responsibility. What is re-
markable with respect to Leacock's literary output is that even his
furthest-flung, seemingly inconsequential humorous pieces move in
relation to this tory-humanist centre. Without an understanding of
Leacock's humanism and toryism, the understanding that he made
readily accessible in The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice (1920) and
Our Heritage of Liberty (1942), even his theory of humour will seem,
especially in view of his otherwise firmly stated opinions, somehow
curiously limp, if not insipid, in its insistence on the need for "kin-
dliness." And without the context of Leacock's tory humanism and