Arcadian Adventures With the Idle Rich (27 page)

Behind
Arcadian Adventures
also, though perhaps at a greater distance than is often assumed, stands Thorstein Veblen’s incisive and at times humorous critique of modern American society,
The Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899). It was Veblen’s presence at the University of Chicago that attracted Leacock there to do his doctoral dissertation, a critique entitled “The Doctrine of
Laissez Faire
” (1903), and it is to Veblen we owe such phrases as “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure.” Even with only the argument of those fashionable phrases, we can feel Veblen’s presence permeating the ostentatious Mausoleum Club and painting in lurid tones the expensive pursuits of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown’s society. Veblen is present in
Arcadian Adventures
, but it could as well be argued that Alexis de Tocqueville’s mid-nineteenth-century look at America,
Democracy in America
, can be discerned behind Leacock’s satire of the idle rich. For example, consider Lucullus Fyshe’s little dinner or the meeting of the trustees of St. Asaph’s and St. Osoph’s churches in light of such remarks of de Tocqueville’s as, “At first appearance this people seems to be a company of merchants gathered together for trade; and as one dips further into the national character of
Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of all things in this world only in the answer to this one question: how much money will it bring in?”

More particularly, it might be said that
Arcadian Adventures
depicts the pursuit of money and power as, initially, the internally competitive and, ultimately, the concerted or monopolistic enterprise of a central clique of Plutorians. That is the unifying movement of this cycle of stories. The first adventure, “A Little Dinner with Mr. Lucullus Fyshe,” concerns the competitive practices of those two financial animals, Fyshe and Mr. Asmodeus Boulder (whose surnames suggest the cold-blooded and the inanimate – definitely the subhuman); it ends in protracted acrimony and determined vengefulness. The next two adventures – “The Wizard of Finance” and “The Arrested Philanthropy of Mr. Tomlinson” – contrast the decadent, empowered metropolis of Plutoria and the rural ideal of the Tomlinson farm. (For a tory such as Leacock, agrarian enterprises should form the basis of society.) In effect, these two stories portray a kind of inverse alchemy at work: the Plutorians turn the green of Tomlinson’s farm into a fool’s gold; at the end the Tomlinsons turn the false gold back to green, so that “Nature reached out its hand and drew its coverlet of green over the grave of the vanished Eldorado.” Throughout
Arcadian Adventures
the damaging effect of the pursuit of gold in all its forms plays a destructive role. “The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown” continues to chip away at the artificial Arcadia, with associations of pagan pastoral versus Judaeo-Christian that the title of
Arcadian Adventures
itself contains. In the society of Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown we see clearly the empty lives and spurious culture – the conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure – that are supported by the plutorian machine. In “The Love Story of
Mr. Peter Spillikins,” Plutoria asserts its dominion over romantic love itself. Again Leacock presents a contrast between the gold and the green, in the persons of Mrs. Everleigh with her dyed blond hair and the “Little Girl in Green.” The myopic Spillikins mistakes the gold-digging Mrs. Everleigh for the motherlode of love; the potential for true love and a natural family that the “Green Girl” promises remains unfulfilled. Thus Plutoria defeats a potentially redemptive love, a defeat which can be seen to loom more ominously in light of the redemptive role of romantic love in
Sunshine Sketches
.

In the religious adventures – “The Rival Churches of St. Asaph and St. Osoph” and “The Ministrations of the Rev. Uttermost Dumfarthing” – Leacock’s ostensible target is financially expedient ecumenism. But the true object of the satire in the religious adventures is monopoly capitalism. The religious sketches subtly recall the opening story, “The Little Dinner,” in their portrayal of the concerted efforts of those earlier competitive financial animals, Fyshe (St. Asaph’s) and Boulder (St. Osoph’s), who are the prime movers in the push for union. The church merger involves the abandonment of doctrinal distinctions that have arisen in response to genuine human needs; or as Skinyer of the legal firm of Skinyer and Beatem would say, wasteful competitiveness is ditched in favour of controlling the output of the spiritual product. The reader of
Arcadian Adventures
might well have wondered at this point in the book: If business, society, culture, love, and religion have succumbed to the now-unified Plutorians, can rule by plutocracy be far behind? The final adventure, “The Great Fight for Clean Government,” answers this question with a resounding, deadening negative.

Those in
Arcadian Adventures
who are close to the values at the centre of Leacock’s tory-humanist norm – true
manners (the Duke, the Little Girl in Green), agrarian simplicity and virtuous action (the Tomlinsons), continuity with the past (Concordia College), romantic love, the spirit of religion (the Rev. McTeague), and the ideals of democracy – are subsumed by the ascendant plutocracy in a final triumph of darkness. These “good people,” as Leacock calls them, offer but an ineffectual opposition to the empowered plutocrats: they and what they represent are rejected, defeated, or vulgarized beyond recognition. The only real opposition to a plutocracy is suggested by the closing words not of
Arcadian Adventures
but of
Sunshine Sketches
: “the little Town in the Sunshine that once we knew,” referring, of course, to Mariposa. By recovering the values of the small Canadian community, by knowing again what once we knew, we will be able to avoid the dead end that is so starkly depicted in
Arcadian Adventures
. In Leacock’s view, this is the only way for Canadian Mausoleum clubbers to re-route the Canadian train that may careen southwards. Taken together,
Arcadian Adventures
and
Sunshine Sketches
teach the need for a kind of memory-mining for the true gold of human community. As to resisting the sort of plutocratic totalitarianism that dominates the close of
Arcadian Adventures
, all else is fool’s gold, as worthless finally as the beguiling stuff that is found beside Tomlinson’s creek and the deadly dye that glitters in Mrs. Everleigh’s hair.

BY STEPHEN LEACOCK

AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The Boy I Left Behind Me (1946)

BIOGRAPHY
Mark Twain (1932)
Charles Dickens: His Life and Work (1933)

DRAMA
‘Q’: A Farce in One Act [with Basil Macdonald] (1915)

ECONOMICS
Economic Prosperity in the British Empire (1930)
Back to Prosperity: The Great Opportunity
of the Empire Conference (1932)
The Gathering Financial Crisis in Canada:
A Survey of the Present Critical Situation (1936)

EDUCATION
The Pursuit of Knowledge: A Discussion
of Freedom and Compulsion in Education (1934)
Too Much College, or Education Eating Up Life (1939)

HISTORY
Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks: Responsible Government (1907)
Adventures of the Far North:
A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas (1914)
The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of
Aboriginal Canada and the Coming of the White Man (1914)
The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle
of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier (1914)
Mackenzie, Baldwin, Lafontaine, Hincks (1926)
Lincoln Frees the Slaves (1934)
The British Empire: Its Structure, Its History, Its Strength (1940)
Canada: The Foundations of Its Future (1941)
Our Heritage of Liberty: Its Origins, Its Achievement, Its Crisis:
A Book for War Time (1942)
Montreal: Seaport and City (1942)
Canada and the Sea (1944)

HUMOUR
Literary Lapses (1910)
Nonsense Novels (1911)
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912)
Behind the Beyond, and Other Contributions
to Human Knowledge (1913)
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914)
Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy (1915)
Further Foolishness: Sketches and Satires
on the Follies of the Day (1916)
Frenzied Fiction (1918)
The Hohenzollerns in America; with the
Bolsheviks in Berlin, and Other Impossibilities (1919)
Winsome Winnie, and Other New Nonsense Novels (1920)
My Discovery of England (1922)
College Days (1923)
Over the Footlights (1923)
The Garden of Folly (1924)
Winnowed Wisdom (1926)
Short Circuits (1928)
The Iron Man and the Tin Woman,
with Other Such Futurities (1929)
Wet Wit and Dry Humour: Distilled
from the Pages of Stephen Leacock (1931)
The Dry Pickwick and Other Incongruities (1932)
Afternoons in Utopia: Tales of the New Time (1932)
Hellements of Hickonomics in Hiccoughs
of Verse Done in Our Social Planning Mill (1936)
Funny Pieces: A Book of Random Sketches (1936)
Here Are My Lectures (1937)
Model Memoirs, and Other Sketches
from Simple to Serious (1938)
My Remarkable Uncle and Other Sketches (1942)
Happy Stories Just to Laugh At (1943)
Last Leaves (1945)

LITERARY CRITICISM
Essays and Literary Studies (1916)
Humour: Its Theory and Technique (1935)
The Greatest Pages of American Humor (1936)
Humour and Humanity: An Introduction
to the Study of Humour (1937)
How to Write (1943)

POLITICAL SCIENCE
Elements of Political Science (1906)
The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice (1920)
My Discovery of the West: A Discussion
of East and West in Canada (1937)
While There Is Time: The Case against Social Catastrophe (1945)