Second Class

IN 1915 Mr. Stephen Leacock published his sixth nonsense book, Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy. The larger moon was a planet which no one else had suspected, and it was left for the Canadian professor to ,be first man in it. It shone where all nonsense shinee, revolving eccentrically round the everyday. Fortified with logic, mathematics, and a sublime sense of the ridiculous, Mr. Leaeock 'aimed his. rocket and scored a bull's-eye.- The Moonbeams ranged from Spoof, a thousand-guinea novel on the eternal triangle, to Education

made Agreeable : ,

AWFUL CATASTROPHE.

Perpendicular falls headlong on a given line.

The line at C said to be completely bisected.

President of the Line makes Statement.

&c., &c., &e.

Now, in 1932, Mr. Leacock has given us The Dry Pickwick the qualifying adjective is his own—and we search for lunacy, in vain. Six of the sketches, including the title story, are attacks on the Eighteenth Amendment. Others try to improve on Shakespeare, or Children's Poetry, and the rest to improve our minds. That is the trouble with Mr. Leacock to-day. Nobody minds his being serious. All good nonsense is serious, from Alice in Wonderland downwards ; but when he becomes so serious that he develops a Purpose, we are not only uncomfortable, but bored. There are funny things in the book. Inflation and Deflation (from our Christmas Number) is sustained and plausible economic desipience " Everything inflated and expanded. Narrow people got broad. Heavy people got light. Small-minded people got wider ideas., The whole race improved. There were beauty contests in every. village, marathons for old men, efficiency tests for imbeciles and imbecility tests for the efficient."

Then there are our old arithmetical friends A, B and C, who first appeared in Literary Lapses twenty-two years ago.' They try to bring themselves up to date, to invest in oil, instead of doing " a certain piece of work " ; but at the end B says, " Leave those sums on the board just as they were, C.' I guess the old-fashioned stuff i3 better as it is than anything we could put over now."

I guess it is. I rather guess that Mr. Leacock guesses it too. The books before and up to Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy were amazingly good. They made hay of the average man, from his facts to his fiction. Boarding House Geometry,' for instance, which also first appeared in Literary Lapsei, is' unforgettable and unforgotten

.

` A single room is that which has no parts and no magnitude."

" A pie may be produced any number of times."

It was all true, and the average man rejoiced. The Nonsense Novels also, which appeared in 1911, were hilarious burlesque- of all average fiction.

Mr. Leaeock soon made himself Lord of the Larger Lunacy, and popularized the kingdom. And that is the trouble.' There is no more of his world for him to conquer. He hal ridiculed everything once, and can only repeat himself—or turn to reform. It must be hard for a Professor of Political. Economy to leave the- world as imperfect as he finds it : but it used to be Mr. Leacock's peculiar virtue that, for the sake of nonsense, he could do so. The unsettled conditions of to-day are not healthy for nonsense. Lewis Carroll had the best of it. If there had been no solid Victorian drawing-rooms, there could have been no logical and looking-glass lunacy. Mr. Leacock used to make mock of sterling institutions : but most things are off the gold standard now.

Nonsense is based on unimpeachable sense. It is the reduetio ad absurdum of the everyday, and it takes a wise man, such as the Rev. Charles Hodgson or Mr. Leacock; to reduee it. But Mr. Leacock has grown too wise, and not wise enough. The earlier Mr. Leacock was inimitable. No one, not even the present Mr. Leacock, can imitate him.

MONICA REDLICII•