I know no way in which a writer may more fittingly introduce his work to
the public than by giving a brief account of who and what he is. By this
means some of the blame for what he has done is very properly shifted to
the extenuating circumstances of his life.
I was born at Swanmoor, Hants, England, on December 30, 1869. I am not
aware that there was any particular conjunction of the planets at the
time, but should think it extremely likely. My parents migrated to
Canada in 1876, and I decided to go with them. My father took up a farm
near Lake Simcoe, in Ontario. This was during the hard times of Canadian
farming, and my father was just able by great diligence to pay the hired
men and, in years of plenty, to raise enough grain to have seed for the
next year's crop without buying any. By this process my brothers and
I were inevitably driven off the land, and have become professors,
business men, and engineers, instead of being able to grow up as farm
labourers. Yet I saw enough of farming to speak exuberantly in political
addresses of the joy of early rising and the deep sleep, both of body
and intellect, that is induced by honest manual toil.
I was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, of which I was head
boy in 1887. From there I went to the University of Toronto, where
I graduated in 1891. At the University I spent my entire time in the
acquisition of languages, living, dead, and half-dead, and knew nothing
of the outside world. In this diligent pursuit of words I spent about
sixteen hours of each day. Very soon after graduation I had forgotten
the languages, and found myself intellectually bankrupt. In other words
I was what is called a distinguished graduate, and, as such, I took
to school teaching as the only trade I could find that need neither
experience nor intellect. I spent my time from 1891 to 1899 on the staff
of Upper Canada College, an experience which has left me with a profound
sympathy for the many gifted and brilliant men who are compelled to
spend their lives in the most dreary, the most thankless, and the worst
paid profession in the world. I have noted that of my pupils, those who
seemed the laziest and the least enamoured of books are now rising
to eminence at the bar, in business, and in public life; the really
promising boys who took all the prizes are now able with difficulty to
earn the wages of a clerk in a summer hotel or a deck hand on a canal
boat.
In 1899 I gave up school teaching in disgust, borrowing enough money
to live upon for a few months, and went to the University of Chicago
to study economics and political science. I was soon appointed to a
Fellowship in political economy, and by means of this and some temporary
employment by McGill University, I survived until I took the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy in 1903. The meaning of this degree 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.
From this time, and since my marriage, which had occurred at this
period, I have belonged to the staff of McGill University, first as
lecturer in Political Science, and later as head of the department of
Economics and Political Science. As this position is one of the prizes
of my profession, I am able to regard myself as singularly fortunate.
The emolument is so high as to place me distinctly above the policemen,
postmen, street-car conductors, and other salaried officials of the
neighbourhood, while I am able to mix with the poorer of the business
men of the city on terms of something like equality. In point of
leisure, I enjoy more in the four corners of a single year than a
business man knows in his whole life. I thus have what the business man
can never enjoy, an ability to think, and, what is still better, to stop
thinking altogether for months at a time.
I have written a number of things in connection with my college life--a
book on Political Science, and many essays, magazine articles, and so
on. I belong to the Political Science Association of America, to the
Royal Colonial Institute, and to the Church of England. These things,
surely, are a proof of respectability. I have had some small connection
with politics and public life. A few years ago I went all round the
British Empire delivering addresses on Imperial organization. When I
state that these lectures were followed almost immediately by the Union
of South Africa, the Banana Riots in Trinidad, and the Turco-Italian
war, I think the reader can form some idea of their importance. In
Canada I belong to the Conservative party, but as yet I have failed
entirely in Canadian politics, never having received a contract to build
a bridge, or make a wharf, nor to construct even the smallest section
of the Transcontinental Railway. This, however, is a form of national
ingratitude to which one becomes accustomed in this Dominion.
Apart from my college work, I have written two books, one called
"Literary Lapses" and the other "Nonsense Novels." Each of these is
published by John Lane (London and New York), and either of them can be
obtained, absurd though it sounds, for the mere sum of three shillings
and sixpence. Any reader of this preface, for example, ridiculous though
it appears, could walk into a bookstore and buy both of these books for
seven shillings. Yet these works 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 and gasping for air.
Nothing but the intervention of the linotype machine--or rather, of the
kind of men who operate it--made it possible to print these books. Even
now people have to be very careful in circulating them, and the books
should never be put into the hands of persons not in robust health.
Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous
nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the
serious labours of the economist. My own experience is exactly the other
way. The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and
figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific
treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry
into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write
something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an
arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few
and far between. Personally, I would sooner have written "Alice in
Wonderland" than the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In regard to the present work I must disclaim at once all intentions of
trying to do anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place
and real people. Mariposa is not a real town. On the contrary, it is
about seventy or eighty of them. You may find them all the way from Lake
Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple
trees and the same churches and hotels, and everywhere the sunshine of
the land of hope.
Similarly, the Reverend Mr. Drone is not one person but about eight or
ten. To make him I clapped the gaiters of one ecclesiastic round the
legs of another, added the sermons of a third and the character of a
fourth, and so let him start on his way in the book to pick up such
individual attributes as he might find for himself. Mullins and Bagshaw
and Judge Pepperleigh and the rest are, it is true, personal friends
of mine. But I have known them in such a variety of forms, with such
alternations of tall and short, dark and fair, that, individually,
I should have much ado to know them. Mr. Pupkin is found whenever a
Canadian bank opens a branch in a county town and needs a teller. As for
Mr. Smith, with his two hundred and eighty pounds, his hoarse voice,
his loud check suit, his diamonds, the roughness of his address and
the goodness of his heart,--all of this is known by everybody to be a
necessary and universal adjunct of the hotel business.
The inspiration of the book,--a land of hope and sunshine where little
towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside
placid lakes almost within echo of the primeval forest,--is large
enough. If it fails in its portrayal of the scenes and the country that
it depicts the fault lies rather with an art that is deficient than in
an affection that is wanting.
Stephen Leacock. McGill University, June, 1912.