[In the following essay, Raspovich examines the “little man” or “uncommon common man” persona in some of Leacock's most important works, including Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, and Behind the Beyond.]

Because Canada has often been interpreted as a puritan and sober culture—a country where survival has depended on hard work and where celebration has been at a premium—Canadian humor has seemed almost not to exist. In fact, among Canadians, “the myth of the mirthless Canadian” is a well worn phrase. It is, of course, a carefully rehearsed self-deprecating joke, proving not that the typical Canadian is dour but that he is capable of devious disguises and ironic, detached postures. As a matter of history, at least two Canadian humorists have been instrumental in brilliantly shaping the direction of North American humor by partly stepping outside of their own regional or national mythologies. In the nineteenth century, the Nova Scotian Thomas Haliburton created the resonant comic prototype of the enterprising Yankee in Sam Slick, a character who eclipsed the native U.S. version, Seba Smith's Jack Downing. Similarly, Canada's most famed humorist, Stephen Leacock, is applauded by literary critics south of the border as an originator of the twentieth-century comic figure of the “little man,” a type who is known in modern American humor in his simplest definition as the inept, average middle-class citizen harassed by bureaucracy, technology and family. Earlier characterized by his sense of responsibility, decency and concern for others, the average bumbler has more recently turned into a perfect neurotic. From his pictorial representation as Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen in film and Dagwood Bumstead in comic strip, to his literary expression as a voice in Leacock's famous sketch “My Financial Career,” the little man is heralded as a comic representative of modern American society.

Not surprisingly, American critics consider Leacock one of their own, celebrating him primarily as a source of the American mainstream of little-man humor. Norris Yates explains that “it is impossible to say just when the bemused householder and white-collar man became really prominent in American humour, but by 1910 Stephen Leacock, Simeon Strunksy and Clarence Day, Jr. were writing pieces in which the disguise of each author was just that.”¹ Leacock's American biographer, Ralph Curry, also emphasizes the little-man aspect of the Leacock persona, pointing out quite correctly the Canadian writer's inspirational effect on Robert Benchley and his favorite character, “the little man in an incomprehensible world.”²

For the Canadian critic R. E. Watters, however, Ralph Curry “wearing his American spectacles,” has misread Leacock; the “little man” Curry describes is portrayed by various American humorists but not by Leacock. For Watters, concerned quite rightly with the subtlety of national characteristics and cultural attitudes which shape and direct humor, Leacock's “favorite character was indeed a ‘little man,’ but he was a Canadian type, not an American.”³ He suggests that, although they are powerless and subordinate, Leacock's little men are in control of themselves. While they wear masks of “calculated diffidence,” their comprehension of self is full and ironic. In this pose they are Canadian archetypes, reflective of the inner strength of a small nation which has survived the imperialism of larger powers. The archetype is therefore “radically different in outlook from such a character as Benchley's befuddled little man in an incomprehensible world or Thurber's Walter Mitty, who can live only by escaping into a fantasy of his own making” (p. 31).

The truth about the national identity of Leacock's little man is an important and more complicated issue than previous analyses have implied. In the first instance, Leacock cannot be easily separated from the mainstream development of American literary humor. As his critical book The Greatest Pages of American Humour reveals, he was American humor's ardent student, extremely conscious of its trends and absorbed by its milieu. If his comic voice does not compare in existential anxiety to Walter Mitty or to Benchley's urbanites, it does compare in some ways to those of earlier, admired turn-of-the-century humorists like George Ade and John Kendrick Bangs. Yet R. E. Watters is sensitive to that which escapes the American critics—that other steady side of the Leacock persona which may sometimes shift and merge into the little man profile but which remains a deliberate presence and a standard in the humor. In fact, when the narrative persona is examined closely through the broad scope of Leacock's humor, those private, certain values divined by Watters behind the character of the little man sharpen and coalesce into a definite personality—an authoritative alter ego, who is as much a striking expression of the Canadian character as Watters' insightful interpretation of the little man himself.

This alter ego as the voice of sure values is itself not entirely free from American trends at the turn of the century. The transition figure between the cracker-box philosopher, the comic oracle of nineteenth-century rural America who appeared in many guises in newspapers and magazines, and the absurd little man, the prophet of the twentieth-century metropolis, was an ideal projection of an urban, middle-class narrator. As the controlling voice behind the humor of the popular American humorist and Leacock favorite, George Ade, this transition type was the “uncommon common man,” a character type who managed the humor and who symbolized certain values which are also typical of the Leacock persona. Ade's ideal man, one who rises by his own effort from the country to the city, distrusts the culture of the new middle class but has an equal contempt for the masses, opposes the plutocracy of wealth but is simultaneously entrepreneurial,⁴ is similar to Leacock's own authorial stance.

The point of view of the “uncommon common man” in Leacock's humor is best illustrated in the chapter “L'Envoi” from Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. Here the voice of the narrator is that of a successful city sophisticate who makes a retrospective and affectionate comment on the rural small town. The attitude of the persona is comparable to that of the protagonist husband in such a typical Ade story as “Effie Whitlesy” from Stores of the Street and of the Town (1896). In Ade's story, the husband, who is a business success in Chicago, discovers that the new domestic his pretentious wife has hired is none other than his childhood friend from his small-town past. Although Ade's character is approaching the comic status of the hen-pecked little man in his relationship with a snobbish, middle-class wife, he is not ultimately reduced by her. Most important, he, like the Leacock narrator, upholds the memory of country community, its humanism and social democracy. The Ade character insists that his city-bred wife respect the “common” position and the maid Effie as well.⁵

Leacock came slightly late to the new, American middle-class comic mythology illustrated as a social ideal by Charles Dana Gibson, who between 1887 and 1890 created “the Gibson man” and “the Gibson girl” for Life magazine.⁶ The Gibson man represented a decorous, handsome, solid citizen who by now had substituted good English for the rural idiom of previous comic oracles, who illustrated a new city sophistication and grooming, and who evoked humor because he was burdened by a luxury loving and charmingly irresponsible wife. As one might expect, after 1900 the contours of such a solid citizen began to melt into those of the little man. A good example of the Gibson-man effect on Leacock's humor can be seen in the Fish illustrations for the fifth edition of Behind the Beyond, the book most central in the presentation of the little man persona. In “The Dentist and the Gas” and “My Lost Opportunities,” the illustrations of the oppressed persona still retain some of the suave and urbane good looks of the Gibson man.

Leacock was not remote from changing popular continental American comic mythology, its comic stereotypes and the values behind them. For example, Ade's uncommon common man who showed signs of shrinking to little-man status in “Effie Whitlesy” has shrunk another degree in Leacock's Mr. Rasselyer-Brown who is totally under the domestic influence of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. Like Ade's male character, though, Rasselyer-Brown has to be respected for his knowledge of his successful coal business and for being a good male provider. In this sense, he is a solid citizen and represents, among the satirized Arcadians, the best of a bad lot. Like early American humorists of suburbia such as Ade and Bangs, then, Leacock in his sketches of the Smiths and Joneses at cottage, club, breakfast, dinner, tennis, in courtship and in marriage, satirizes the rising middle class with their new riches, but in the same breath he affirms the enterprise and solidity of the uncommon common man.

If the Leacock persona at times reflects some of the values projected by the author's American contemporaries such as Ade and Bangs, the quintessential voice, the alter ego, remains nonetheless much more admirable, much more sophisticated, much more literate—in a word, much less common than the turn of the century American stereotype of the uncommon common man. Despite the occasional affectation of “averageness” by the Leacock narrator, the alter ego, the real voice of the humor is distinctly that of Canadian gentility. Simply speaking, the voice of this character can be identified as that of a conservative, educated and sometimes slightly dyspeptic Protestant gentleman. This is the voice which begs a preservation of the Victorian code of dignified manliness, and a separation of sexual roles, the voice which in the comic sketch,“The Restoration of Whiskers: A Neglected Factor in the Decline of Knowledge,” upholds the restoration of whiskers in place of the smooth-shaven face of the modern hero, “hardly,” the author says, “to be distinguished from a girl's.”⁷ In its extreme definition it is an identity removed from conventional domesticity, one which is singularly chauvinistic, even misogynistic. I suspect, too, that it is a definition which has its atavistic roots in pioneer Upper Canada, a masculine definition which hearkens back, not to the feminine sensibilities of Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill, but rather to the individualistic, sporting and bachelor code of the likes of William “Tiger” Dunlop, the lettered doctor of the Canadian backwoods, memorable for, among other things, his bachelor existence, his literary spirit of burlesque, his drinking and his will, in which he took a comic revenge on women.⁸

Canadians, it seems, are comfortable with this profile of a whiskered bachelor gentleman, for not only does the Leacock persona predict Robertson Davies' brilliant Canadian comic prophet, Samuel Marchbanks, but historically, from the Fathers of Confederation through our political genealogy of bachelor and pseudo-bachelor prime ministers, an authoritative, rather isolated—even lonely—gentleman has been the supreme voice of the nation. Most important to Leacock's humor, this identity often serves as a voice propounding a contrasting genteel standard to that of the larger American one represented by the modern urbanized little man—even if, in some instances, our authoritative gentleman appears to assume or pretends to little man characteristics.

While the alter ego is more noticeable in some volumes and sketches than in others, such as in the “Author's Preface” to Winnowed Wisdom where “the darned little average man,” with “his limited little mind” is the obvious butt of the superior author's joke,⁹ he comes to life with clarity as a Canadian presence in Leacock's humor when one considers in particular the persona in relation to the comic presentation of the professor, the persona in the bush landscape, and the persona in relation to women and fashion.

In an essay entitled “The Apology of a Professor: An Essay in Modern Learning,” Leacock begins, “I know no more interesting subject of speculation, nor any more calculated to allow of a fair-minded difference of opinion, than the enquiry whether a professor has any right to exist.”¹⁰ Despite this introduction of “calculated diffidence,” Leacock is sentimental and annoyed about a disappearing educational ideal—of learning as its own reward transmitted through the aworldly, moral and wise professor. For Leacock the “professor” was both a facet of self and the literate ideal of the genteel Anglo-Saxon class of Canadian society to which he belonged; it was an ideal which he upheld in his humor. Indeed, the voice of the educated professor is the prevailing one in the majority of his volumes. While he may sometimes characterize the professor as a little man in the modern world, a comic character who rides on his mule of Padua in competition with the automobile (p. 31), Leacock is not antagonistic toward the professor but toward a machine society which, with its commercial ethic, relegates the genuine professor to an anachronistic position.

Perhaps Leacock's most bluntly demarcated and most highly caricatured version of the little man as professor is that of Gildas in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. Fundamentally a sympathetic rendering, the portrait of Gildas is not, however, without satirical ambivalence. In the first place, the little professor is a scientist, who, behind heavy doors, secluded in his laboratory in the faculty of industrial and mechanical science, is blind to the spectrum of human drama outside his narrow interest. Gildas “beating off fragments with his little hammer,”¹¹ has very little interest in the effect of his gold discovery on the people at the site, the Tomlinsons of Tomlinson's Creek who are the ultimate victims of his initial stupid act. In this observation of the little professor as blinkered scientist, Leacock is the comic fellow of Benchley and other turn-of-the-century American humorists who distrusted theoretical and applied science when it did not meet the tests of common sense and humanity. In the Gildas character there is something of the distrust of the laboratory as an American joke, popularized for the common man and his suspicion of intellect by John Kendrick Bangs, Finley Peter Dunne, Don Marquis, James Thurber and Benchley.¹²

Even so, Gildas is blessedly remote from Arcadian commercial infection. He demands admiration because he is a genuine wizard playing with little blue flames as “in a magician's cavern” (p. 31). Gildas is a member of that old professorial class who, as defined by Leacock in “The Apology of a Professor,” “knew, too, something of the more occult, the almost devilish sciences, perilous to tackle, such as why the sun is suspended from falling into the ocean, or that very demonology of symbolism—the AL-GEB of the Arabians—. … A man with such knowledge simply had to teach it. What to him if he should wear a brown gown of frieze and feed on pulse! This, as beside the bursting force of the expanding steam of his knowledge, counted for nothing” (pp. 23-24). In Donald Cameron's estimation, “Leacock does not want to emulate such men [as Gildas]. He does not want to be a fool, even a holy one. He does want a share of the Arcadian force and vigour.”¹³ In truth, Leacock was alternately attracted to, and repulsed by, the fruits of commerce. In Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, however, the creator of Gildas is calculatingly diffident to the American commercial standard, for it is only through plutocratic spectacles that the little man as aworldly professor assumes comic proportion. Gildas is interpreted as a fool in terms of the values of the young laboratory demonstrator, representative of “one of the richest and best families in town,” who knows less of geology, more of finance, and who, symbolically, has “one eye half-closed” (p. 46) when he laughs at the little professor. The final voice, the ultimate persona, is one removed from this standard and this interpretation. From Leacock's vantage point, it is a poor society which allows Arcadian control to corrupt the higher aims of education and intellectualism. Ultimately, the foolishness of Gildas resides only in the foolish eyes of his beholder.

Similarly, in the comic sketch, “The Reading Public: A Book Store Study,” from Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy, the persona is a professor who appears to be a self-deprecating little man. Disguised in a sporting tie with spots as big as nickels and sage-green fedora, he is instantly recognized by the manager of the book store for what he really is—a professor. The persona appears to be a little man when he recognizes his own worthlessness as a potential customer: “And he knew, of course, that, as a professor, I was no good. … He knew that I would hang around for two hours, get in everybody's way, and finally buy a cheap reprint of the Dialogues of Plato, or the Prose Works of John Milton … or some trash of that sort. … He despised me, of course. But it is a maxim of the book business that a professor standing up in a corner looks well in a store.”¹⁴ Leacock here is using his marvellous ironic sense to shatter the illusion that the shrewd Mr. Sellyer and his clientele have the correct standards. It is not the professor who is “no good” and “little” but those who supposedly have “real taste in literature—the ability to appreciate at its worth a dollar-fifty novel of last month, in a spring jacket with a tango frontispiece” (p. 24).

The Leacock persona's positive definition as a professor is, in part, Leacock the man but it also suggests the special Canadian perspective of his humor. Unlike, for example, the American humorist, Robert Benchley, who had scholarly interests but literally kept his more erudite books hidden in the closet,¹⁵ Leacock was more committed to the academic way than to the American standard of mass culture which persuaded many humorists like Benchley. The Canadian author felt an obligation to philosophize about humor, to dignify it with theoretical books, while Benchley wrote only the occasional lighthearted essay. Benchley, antagonistic toward an academic analysis of humor, typically defined humor in these zany, unmistakably American lines which were meant to parody Max Eastman's serious psycho-analytical book, Enjoyment of Laughter: “laughter is really caused by a small tropical fly carried from Central America to Spain by Columbus's men, ‘returning to America, on a visit, in 1667, on a man named George Altschuh’” (Yates, p. 83). While Benchley was known to cover his volume of Proust with a dust jacket from a murder mystery, one can hardly imagine the professorial Leacock so fearful of appearing pretentious in his reading.

Moreover, if Benchley's pose in print, his depiction of the little man as a middle-brow bumbler, was, as Norris Yates argues, a response to the demands of middle-brow America, Leacock's comic anti-hero, the little man as academic, and his larger authorial voice of an educated persona were similarly rooted in Canadian custom. To view the academic as established wit and humorist in Canadian letters is not a profound observation, but it is a significant one. It signifies a stronger and more conservative division between the literary establishment and the mass of the people, between the voices of cultural authority and those of its followers in Canada, than there is between the masses and literary leaders in the United States. It suggests, in effect, the ongoing legacy of the Anglo-Canadian belles lettres tradition on the frontier, the cultured sensibilities of such early Canadian writers as Judge Haliburton, Tiger Dunlop, Susanna Moodie, Catherine Parr Traill and the Stricklands. The modern result, so reflected in the writings of Peter McArthur, Stephen Leacock and Robertson Davies, is a stratum of humor in Canada which is sophisticated, pensive, literary and decorous. Perhaps it predicts too—at least it has in the case of Leacock and Davies—the ongoing development of an authoritative, literate, comic voice.

Although the essential Leacock persona is urbane, he nonetheless remains very much an expression of the Upper Canadian frontier and a rural mythology. For most Canadians, in fact, the true Leacock is the gentleman pioneer farmer, a persona dependent not as much on his authorial voice, but as with the fictionalized “Mark Twain,” on his country's popular response to the man and the inherent mythology of his work. This is the Leacock of our popular Canadian poster who is conspicuous in his gentility with cuff-links and tie, and who leans genially on his hoe issuing this wise comic maxim: “I am a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” A symbol of a dominating aspect of our pioneer past, of the British gentry of old Ontario, this image of Leacock is conveyed through his own mythic recollections of his homestead beginnings and his happy playing at such, as the gentleman-farmer of Orillia. It is a face of Leacock which has become a symbol and statement of a national fantasy and which is very apparent in these sketches about nature and fishing where, unlike the modern neurotic little man, the Leacock persona proves to be experienced in the bush. For Robert Benchley, the little man is a suburbanite who experiences nature over his head and in his backyard. Like Benchley himself, who felt heckled by pigeons and who once was unforgettably attacked by terns on Nantucket Beach, his little man is constantly humiliated in his bouts with his non-human environment. In contrast, in Leacock's humor the essential persona knows the bush, wishes, as a gentleman, to avoid its discomforts, and laughs at those urban little people who ignorantly romanticize it.

The piece most like Benchley's work, and one which is not typical of Leacock's nature sketches, is a neurotic modern comedy of the little man in nature entitled “To Nature and Back Again.” Here the persona is an American urbanite whose plan is to go to New England for his vacation and to spend it naked in the bush: “for one month, cast off all the travail and cares of civilized life and become again the wild man of the woods that Nature made me.”¹⁶ The persona and his absurd fantasy are caught and exposed through the author's mastery of comic exaggeration as, naked in the bush, he meets another vacationer:

“Do you realize that you are the nineteenth man that I've met in the last three days running about naked in the woods? …”

“You don't say so!” I gasped.

“Fact. Wherever you go in the bush you find naked men all working out this same blasted old experiment. Why, when you get a little farther in you'll see signs up: NAKED MEN NOT ALLOWED IN THIS BUSH, and NAKED MEN KEEP OFF, and GENTLEMEN WHO ARE NAKED WILL KINDLY KEEP TO THE HIGH ROAD, and a lot of things like that.”

(p. 86)

When the persona awakens from this bad dream to discover himself seminude, an erotically suspect sleepwalker, apprehended by the “cops” in Central Park, the author is clearly saying that the romanticization of the bush by the modern city dweller is a mad self-deception and that really a gentleman ought to know better.

The persistent vision behind Leacock's humorous pieces on nature is not that of omnipotent natural forces overwhelming the little man but rather an experienced appraisal of the hardships of nature and the firm conviction that civilized man ought to avoid such primitive conditions whenever he can. We understand the narrator to be stupid in “To Nature and Back Again” because, foolish puppet to the real voice of the piece, he thinks civilization a “curse,” preferring “boiled grass and fungi cooked in a hollow stone” to dining at home (p. 82). And in the sketch, “Back to the Bush,” from the second edition of Literary Lapses, we understand the self-possessed persona to be superior because we credit him with the knowledge of bush life. Here the persona and the reader are in the company of well-educated men who, all but the narrator, have gone a little silly. Taken in by the idyllic travel brochures written by the narrator himself, these city men flock to the bush with the illusion of happy survival. Here, too, the message is that vastly superior to the reality of bush-flies, moose, bears and skunks is a standard of dignified and comfortable living. The authorial edict is often, moreover, the enjoyment of nature from the comfortable armchair of the private men's club, or with such luxuries as champagne and hotel dinner-dances close at hand, as in “Roughing It in the Bush: My Plans for Moose-Hunting in the Canadian Wilderness” in Over the Footlights.

This voice and this posture are not those of the typical urbanized American little man but those of the Ontario pioneer gentry. Even in humor, Leacock can be seen to belong to a frontier Ontario psychology and the belles lettres tradition of nature writing initiated by Susanna Moodie, her sister and the nineteenth-century Otonabee school of nature writers. While these writers recognized and knew the coarse realities of living in the bush, they persisted in presenting a literary view of nature which was essentially romantic and which was meant as a genteel escape from the hard facts of the natural world.¹⁷ Leacock carries on this romantic pioneer tradition in his genial and gently humorous sketches where he idealizes pastoral possibility and leisure in nature through the gentlemanly art of angling. Like the famous and influential Canadian nature writer, Roderick Haig-Brown,¹⁸ Leacock explicitly associates himself with the original company of belles lettres nature writers, the Izaac Walton school of fishing, in “What Can Izaac Walton Teach Us?” from Last Leaves.

Unlike Walton's serious pastoralism, however, Leacock's fishing and nature idylls can also be pointed comic illusions, ironically understood by the Canadian gentleman in the difficult Canadian climate as pastoral fiction, preferable even as literary events rather than real ones. In “Angel Pond, Lure of the North,” for example, the Leacock persona mocks from a superior distance and with an eastern eye those who inhabit the landscape of North-western Ontario and pretend to an easy, rugged frontier ethos. The persona very definitely knows better when Charlie of Angel Pond nonchalantly replies to the question, “Are the flies bad in summer?” with “Oh, the flies are nothing to us … you just smear your face thick with any kind of fat, groundhog fat, skunk's fat. … They never get you that way.”¹⁹ Ultimately for the sly persona, the best and proper way to enjoy fishing is with comfort and elegance, telling stories about it “round a winter fire, with a glass of something warm within easy reach, at a time when statements cannot be checked. …”²⁰

Quite obviously, then, the Leacock persona is in nature a member of the Eastern gentry, as knowledgeable about the bush and as unwilling to accept its unpleasantries as he is wise and guarded about love and women. It is well understood that the little man as lover is a constant theme of Leacock's humor and that the author is entirely sympathetic to him in his awkward courtships and unrequited affairs. In “A Transit of Venus,” the laughter for the little man and inept lover, Lancelot Kitter, is sympathetic, as it is for Joe in “A Humble Lover” whose courtship of Miss Carson is a figment of his imagination. Because Leacock kept faith with the Victorian ideal of hearth and home, family solidarity and the sweet help-mate who is revered in the chapter as “The Little Girl in Green” in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich, he does not want to dismiss the romantic quests of the Lancelot Kitters or Peter Pupkins. In the sunshine, he celebrates their enchanted vision.

The dominant persona is not, however, identifiable with the little man as lover, the domestic little rabbit of twentieth-century American humor. Instead, he is the distanced protector of the little lover and husband, the I who is “all for Joe's love affair” in the following excerpt from “A Humble Lover”: “I asked Joe, a little later in his courtship, if he had spoken yet to Miss Carson about marriage. He said no, but he had discussed it with his mother. His mother was all for it. He was going to wait awhile and then talk to his father. If his father was for it and his mother and if I was for it, that made three.”²¹ Remaining outside of the domestic situation, he is the gentleman interloper and observer who may be reduced to little man status by the domestic ménage he visits, but who has the ingenuity to escape and to preserve his ego.

This sense of self-preservation is apparent in “The Sorrows of a Summer Guest,” where the persona seems to be a little man when he is unable to master the conventions of being a summer guest at the fashionable Beverly-Jones's. When he fails to please these people, his neurotic sense of displacement is magnified in the style of modern psychological little man comedy: “Not that these people are not doing all they can for me. I know that. I admit it. If I should meet my end here and if—to put the thing straight out—my lifeless body is found floating on the surface of this pond, I should like there to be documentary evidence of that much.”²² Finally, through his overwhelming fear of being a master-of-ceremonies at an evening gathering of parlor-games, he invents an extravagant excuse and leaves post-haste. By so doing, he is able to preserve his certain, private and superior identity as gentleman traveller and respected club man:

Just these two bags, porter, and there's a dollar for you. What merry, merry fellows these darky porters are, anyway!

And so here I am in the train, safe bound for home and the summer quiet of my club.

(p. 74)

Moreover, unlike the humor of Robert Benchley where the wife of the little man is just a shadow, in Leacock's humor the persona periodically attacks the dominating wife of the milquetoast character with vengeance. In “The Cave Man as He Is,” from Frenzied Fiction, the persona begins by identifying with the modern little man in his inability to woo women in a “fierce primordial way”—the way that the fifteen-cent magazine and the new fiction advise. The persona seems like the little man himself, lazily fantasizing about dragging women off by hiring an express man to carry one: “But would they come? That's the deuce of it. Would they come right along, like the cave-woman merely biting off my ear as they came, or are they degenerate enough to bring an action against me, indicting the express company as a party of the second part?” (p. 93). But with the discovery of hidden caves with original cave-men still in them, the persona more clearly becomes an aloof and dignified alter ego. Here he unravels the pathetic deceit of the cave-man dream. The cave-man “has lost all appearance of size,” is “quite little,” and is completely overrun in the modern way by a virago, a “big-boned woman in a suit of skins” (p. 100). In fact, there is some truth in the cave-man's interpretation of the persona as the real man, the “Outside Man” who knows how “to treat your women! By gee! You take no nonsense from them—you fellows are the real primordial primitive men. We've lost it somehow” (p. 99).

This attack against the little man's wife is apparent in those pieces, “John and I” from Winsome Winnie and “The Intimate Disclosures of a Wronged Woman” from The Iron Man and the Tin Woman, where the real persona is obviously male but curiously assumes a feminine disguise. The intention of this pose is sharply satirical. Burlesques of the confessional narratives of women's magazines, such pieces nevertheless function as serious social comments which expose the feminine psyche in marriage as deceptive and overbearing. Beneath Minn's facade of sympathetic attention in “John and I” is a hard, manipulating will: “I have always felt that every woman should make all that she can of her husband. So I did my best first of all to straighten up John's appearance. I shifted the style of collar he was wearing to a tighter kind that I liked better, and I brushed his hair straight backward instead of forward, which give him a much more alert look. Mother said that John needed waking up, and so we did all we could to wake him up.”²³ In “The Intimate Disclosures of a Wronged Woman” from The Iron Man and the Tin Woman, the persona is more absurd and trivial in her observations, her feminine illogic the source of the amusement, but her attitude to men, particularly in the chapter “Married Life,” is shrewd, unsympathetic and highly rational. One of the foremost characteristics of the real Leacock voice, then, is his tenacious male patriarchical position. Infinitely preferable to “The Awful Woman with the Spectacles”²⁴ is the Soft Lady, the doll.²⁵ Infinitely preferable to the modern age of Gibson girls, the suffragettes, the domineering Mrs. Rasselyer-Browns and Beverly-Joneses are the “good old Victorian days, where women were angels, fairies, godmothers and such. …”²⁶

Although this detachment from the little man as lover and husband, and the accompanying satire of the little man's wife, may not be exclusively Canadian, it does perhaps suggest a Canadian bias. As John D. Robbins suggests in A Book of Canadian Humour, Canadian society, in theory at least, is patriarchal. Because the husband is head of the house, there is nothing inherently funny or incongruous about the domineering husband. The henpecked husband is, however, fair game.²⁷ Perhaps, too, the selection of a feminine persona as a method of satirical attack against women may portend something less conscious and less deliberate than the humorist's method. It may, in effect, reflect a submerged Victorian neurosis. As child of Queen Victoria's reign and Victorian assumptions in Anglo-Saxon Ontario, Leacock's—perhaps even Canada's—authentic psyche may well be that of a bachelor gentleman, hating and rejecting feminine power in order to preserve his masculinity but ambivalently attracted to and respectful of femininity and the mother-code. Certainly, as the recent revelations of Mackenzie King's diaries and the emerging burlesques of them indicate, it is a psychology understood well enough to be fast becoming a national joke. In any case, the voice of this Leacock persona seems to be a patriarchal Canadian one for it accords with that of Samuel Marchbanks who explains with gentlemanly dignity that, “Nobody has to live in the pattern of Dagwood and Blondie or like a creation of Jimmie Hatlo, who does not choose to do so.”²⁸ The Leacock persona, it seems, is in league with Marchbanks. While the pattern of Blondie and Dagwood is traced, the authorial voice is removed from Blondie's authority—and the subordinate position of the little man.

An Anglo-Canadian statement is also made in those Leacock pieces which deal with fashion, particularly those wherein the persona is incongrously transformed by “feminine” dress. In A Treasury of Canadian Humour, Robert Thomas Allen points out that in nineteenth-century Canadian humor jokes were often made at the expense of the Americans. In humorous periodicals such as “The Moon,” for example, the idea of the civilized American struck the Canadian as hilariously funny.²⁹ For Britannia's noblest daughter, the American society girl was particularly vulgar. This Canadian aversion to fashion and affectation lingers on in Leacock, directed not so much toward the Americans, but, with stolid Upper Canadian prejudice, toward the French. In Literary Lapses, the humor of “Society Chit-Chat” depends on the affectation of the fine French phrase in contrast to the realities of practical daily life. In Behind the Beyond, too, the travelling persona approaches French fashion and culture with the same puritan Anglo-Canadian and commonsense standard. The humor results when the persona falls from this standard into La Mode Parisienne and makes a fool of himself. Taking the “stuffy black ribbon” from his “Canadian Christie hat,” he replaces it with a “single black ostrich feather … fashioned with just the plainest silver aigrette. When I had put that on and pinned a piece of old lace to the tail of my coat with just one safety pin, I walked the street with the quiet dignity of a person whose one idea is not to be conspicuous.”³⁰

In conclusion, while Leacock was an inventive and prophetic humorist who introduced continental America to the comic archetype of the little man, he did so with a Canadian knowledge of his own pioneer roots and ancestral place and with an aversion to a displacement of the past by modernism. Because he represents the consequence of Leacock's avowed enemy, the Machine Age, the milquetoast figure, the inconsequential man of the masses, was largely unacceptable to the real persona of Leacock's humor, that of the educated, Anglo-Saxon gentleman. With his sure values of dignified living, his books, his club, his civilized comforts, he was the author's instructive response to his own quickly developing industrial society and to North American society at large.

Although Leacock's character is recognizably Canadian, a member of that superior class in Canadian society identified by Robertson Davies as “the clerisy,”³¹ the tradition of Protestant gentility was not exclusive to Leacock or to Canada. The American intellectual historian Stowe Persons in The Decline of the American Gentility has traced the old, colonial tradition of gentility in the United States, which was inherited from eighteenth-century England and modified by the American experience, through to its decline at the beginning of the twentieth century. He cites as an example of moribund gentry culture the American Academy of Arts and Letters organized in 1904 by such academicians as William Dean Howells and Mark Twain. The intention of the Academy was in part to enforce dignity in manners, as well as in literary style, but as Persons explains, the Academy was founded at a time “when the tide of modernism was already beginning to engulf gentry culture.”³² and not all its members could agree about the extent to which the Academy should be accountable to democracy or to common standards. Interestingly, Persons also notes that by 1882 in the United States the gentry as a class were extremely prone to nervous disorders, to insanity and to alcoholism, and that “those prone to such afflictions constituted a definite physiological type; small in size, with a frail, fine constitution, frequently of superior intellect and a strong emotional nature” (p. 287). Moreover, the gentry had not only become physically “little men,” they contributed through their nervousness to a distinctive brand of American humor:

The distinctive American brand of humor was found to have a deep foundation in nervousness. Humor was an inevitable reaction to excessive strain. The peculiarly American humor of exaggeration, the grotesque, and the absurd had been developed not by the coarse, vulgar type of person, but by the gentry type. The humorous lecture of the later nineteenth century had replaced the cause of a deeply felt need for laughter. Laughing aloud had formerly been considered vulgar; but nervous people were now increasingly resorting to laughter because they had discovered its therapeutic value. The American language similarly showed the influence of nervousness in the course of its divergence from the mother tongue. Clipped words, compressed idioms, indistinct articulation, greater rapidity of speech, the high and monotonous sameness of pitch, all testified to the same cause. Even the musical instruments in the United States were said to be pitched higher than in Europe.

(p.289)

The comic archetype of the little man with his nervous humor can be seen to be related, then, to the decline of the gentry—even to have been gentry-inspired. For a humorist like Robert Benchley, born of New England gentry stock, the type-figure of his humor, which many critics claim was an expression of Benchley's own inept and bumbling self, was, it seems, almost a genetic legacy from an earlier generation.

Though it may be that Leacock's little man also emerged from threatened genteel values, it is not possible to identify Leacock in the way that Benchley, James Thurber and Walter Perelman have been identified: as themselves “Perfect Neurotics.”³³ While these authors lived in fast-paced urban societies and projected the phobias and neuroses of urban living through their fumbling little men, Leacock himself belonged to the quiet academic society of his University Club and the rural world of Orillia. Leacock's Canada had not yet reached the stage of urban alienation of Benchley's America; thus the Canadian author's intact, confident and distanced alter ego could make a special point of rejecting the nervous, mechanized humor of modern America and the shape of its humor to come: “short and snappy, sarcastic—a bark, a snarl, reverting toward the primitive mockery that was cast out long ago.”³⁴

Stow Persons has also suggested that the nervousness of Americans and their nervous humor were very much related to the extremes of threatening climate and the alternations of heat and cold and that there is actually, geographically, “a nervous belt, extending westward from southern New England and the Middle Atlantic States along the southern shores of the Great Lakes to southern Minnesota and Iowa eastwards through the Ohio Valley.” Persons further explains that, curiously, “North of the nervous belt, in Canada … nervousness was much less frequently encountered” (p. 292). If this theory is true, then it serves as a partial explanation, at least, for the Canadian certainty behind Leacock's depiction of the little man. It is certainly true that Canadians pride themselves on their ability quietly to survive in an awesome land and a severe climate. By providing an assured alternative to the little man aspect of his humor, Leacock, it seems, was sensitive to this pioneer fortitude Canadians claim as a national characteristic. More obviously, of course, Leacock was a comic mythologist for his own Canadian region. In his superior pose of the educated gentleman he hearkens back to the transplanted bookishness and gentry culture of the privileged settlers of old Ontario. Because this region has traditionally been the center of Canadian political and cultural power, however, the Leacock face of the lettered patriarch is as much a mythic representation of the Canadian character as Sam Slick's is of America's. Although since Leacock's time, the Canadian character has fractionized, has begun “to split into [the] many characters”³⁵ which interestingly Constance Rourke identifies in her classic study American Humor as the source and mainspring of the humorous tradition in the United States, the foremost, original face of Canada and its comic character remains the Leacock man.

As a comic oracle of Canadian society, the Leacock gentleman is a figure, too, who significantly is not without an international perspective. And as one might expect, it is in the international arena that he begins to feel somewhat powerless. In an early piece called “Abdul Azziz Has His: An Adventure in the Yildiz Kiosk,” the author fantasizes directly about his own nation's impotent role. In this sketch, a Turkish sultan naively trapped in the web of international politics is the “little man” who is overpowered by a Prussianic Field-Marshall; the Canadian, equally powerless, is personified as a male professor, symbolically disguised in the pioneer garb of poke bonnet and a plain black dress. While Leacock deplores with comic melancholy his country's lack of international clout in this early sketch, in a later one called “This International Stuff” from Funny Pieces, he envisions a new role. Here the persona introduces himself as the average man picking peas in his garden but quickly supercedes this status when he describes himself in ideal terms as a Canadian and an internationally minded man. In “This International Stuff,” by confidently espousing democratic intercourse and tolerance on a global level, the Leacock persona affirms a new international authority for Canada. His country's prophet, the persona reflects, too, that orthodox Canadian pursuit of peace, interpreted by the rest of the world as feminine and described by the Canadian writer Hugh MacLennan as our “good woman's hatred of quarrels, the good woman's readiness to make endless compromises for the sake of peace.”³⁶ In the last half of the twentieth century, this national fantasy as projected by the Leacock persona, has been constructively realized. Leacock would have been glad to know that after his death Canada gained respect as the steady professor in poke bonnet, as a civilized nation with some international tact and diplomatic skill.

Notes

1. Norris Yates, The American Humorist (New York, 1965), p. 244.

2. Ralph Curry, “Robert Benchley and Stephen Leacock: An Acknowledged Literary Debt,” The American Book Collector, VII (1957), 14.

3. R. E. Watters, “A Special Tang: Stephen Leacock's Canadian Humour,” Canadian Literature, No. 5 (Summer 1960), 27.

4. See Yates (pp. 61-80), for a complete discussion of Ade's values.

5. George Ade, The Permanent Ade, ed. Fred C. Kelly (New York, 1947), p. 129.

6. Yates, p. 24.

7. Stephen Leacock, Laugh with Leacock (Toronto, 1930), p. 192.

8. Tiger Dunlop's will includes the following statements: “I leave my sister Jenny my Bible, the property of my great-great-grandmother, Bethua Hamilton of Woodall; and when she knows as much of the spirit of it as she does of the letter, she will be a better Christian than she is,” and “I'll give my silver cup, with a Sovereign in it, to my sister Janet Graham Dunlop, because she is an old maid and pious, and therefore will necessarily take to horning.” Cited in Earl B. Scarlett, In Sickness and in Health (Toronto, 1971), p. 139.

9. Leacock, Winnowed Wisdom (1926; rpt. Toronto, 1971), p. viii.

10. Leacock, Essays and Literary Studies (1916; rpt. London, 1917), p. 11.

11. Leacock, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914; rpt. Toronto, 1969), p. 30.

12. Yates, Robert Benchley (New York, 1968), pp. 74-75.

13. Donald Cameron, Faces of Leacock (Toronto, 1967), p. 114.

14. Leacock, Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915; rpt. London, 1919), p. 24.

15. See Yates, Robert Benchley, p. 80.

16. Leacock, Frenzied Fiction (1918; rpt. London, 1919), p. 77.

17. For a discussion of these nature writers see Alex Lucas, “Nature Writers and the Animal Story,” Literary History of Canada, ed. Carl F. Klinck (Toronto, 1965; rpt. 1966, 1967), p. 367.

18. Roderick Haig-Brown reveals the influence of Walton on his own attitude toward nature in “A Conversation with Roderick Haig-Brown,” by Glenys Scow in Canadian Children's Literature, I, No. 2 (Summer 1975), 10.

19. Leacock, Happy Stories (New York, 1943), p. 62.

20. Leacock, Winnowed Wisdom, p. 82.

21. Leacock, Too Much College (New York, 1939), p. 207.

22. Leacock, Frenzied Fiction, p. 69.

23. Leacock, Winsome Winnie (1920; rpt. New York, 1923), p. 54.

24. Leacock, “The Woman Question,” Essays and Literary Studies, p. 121.

25. Leacock, Further Foolishness (1916; rpt. London, 1921), p. 78.

26. Leacock, Humour: Its Theory and Technique (London, 1935), pp. 266-67.

27. John D. Robbins and Margaret O. Day, A Book of Canadian Humour (Toronto, 1934), p. xi.

28. Robertson Davies, Samuel Marchbanks' Almanak (Toronto, 1967), p. 17.

29. Robert Thomas Allen, A Treasury of Canadian Humour (Toronto, 1967), p. 17.

30. Leacock, Behind the Beyond (1916; rpt. Toronto, 1969), p. 81.

31. Davies, A Voice from the Attic (New York, 1960; rpt. 1972), pp. 1-38.

32. Stow Persons, The Decline of American Gentility (New York, 1973), p. 112.

33. Yates explains that the American literary critics, Bernard de Voto and Walter Blair, have made this claim (Robert Benchley, p. 61).

34. Leacock, The Greatest Pages of American Humor (1936; rpt. London, 1937), p. 230.

35. Constance Rourke, American Humor (New York, 1931), p. 297.

36. Hugh MacLennan, Cross-Country (Edmonton, 1949; rpt. 1962), p. 5.