I have not read all of Leacock’s old humour books, yet. There were quite a few of them, not to mention various collections and omnibuses. This 1916 volume, in general, is a sharp falling off in quality from the genius of Sunshine Sketches . But it does contain two fine items. One is “The Retroactive Existence of Mr. Juggins” whose fate is comprehensible to anyone who has set out to sharpen a pencil and ended up spending three hours at it, or started to study Gravity’s Rainbow and ended up reading Beowulf. All of Juggins’ existence is like that, and in the end we find him passing “back through childhood into infancy, and presently, just as his annuity runs to a point and vanishes, he will back up clear through the Curtain of Existence and die, or be born, I don’t know which to call it.”
But even better is “Homer and Humbug”. Leacock pokes ingenious fun at his own thoroughly Classical education. He knows he is supposed to mourn the absence of the missing books of Tacitus, but admits that “if the books that Tacitus lost were like those he didn’t, I wouldn’t.”. He knows that many famous and powerful men have claimed that reading the Classics “made them what they are” ― but states flatly that “In my opinion some of these men would have been what the are, no matter what they were.” And he ends with a wonderful parody of the “catalog of ships” in the Iliad , translated into a catalog of locomotives in the New York Central Railway:
They say her engineer some time ago
Lived on a farm outside of Buffalo
Whereas his fireman Henry Edward Foy
Attended school in Springfield, Illinois.
Thus does the race of man decay or rot.
Some men can hold their jobs and some cannot.
“The Classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.” He only half meant it, but Leacock loved to tug at academic legs.
contents:
14545. (Donald Cameron) Introduction [preface]
14546. (Stephen Leacock) Behind the Beyond, A Modern Problem Play [article]
14547. (Stephen Leacock) With the Photographer [article]
14548. (Stephen Leacock) The Dentist and the Gas [article]
14549. (Stephen Leacock) My Lost Opportunities [article]
14550. (Stephen Leacock) My Unknown Friend [article]
14551. (Stephen Leacock) Under the Barber’s Knife [article]
14552. (Stephen Leacock) The Advantages of a Polite Education [article]
14553. (Stephen Leacock) The Joys of Philanthropy [article]
14554. (Stephen Leacock) The Simple Life in Paris [article]
14555. (Stephen Leacock) A Visit to Versailles [article]
14556. (Stephen Leacock) Paris at Night [article]
14557. (Stephen Leacock) The Retroactive Existence of Mr. Juggins [article]
14558. (Stephen Leacock) Making a Magazine [article]
14559. (Stephen Leacock) Homer and Humbug [article]
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