Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
by Leacock, Stephen, 1869-1944
Preface
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.
