Literary Lapses (13 page)

 

A, B, AND C

THE HUMAN ELEMENT IN MATHEMATICS

T
he student of arithmetic who has mastered the first four rules of his art, and successfully striven with money sums and fractions, finds himself confronted by an unbroken expanse of questions known as problems. These are short stories of adventure and industry with the end omitted, and though betraying a strong family resemblance, are not without a certain element of romance.

The characters in the plot of a problem are three people called A, B, and C. The form of the question is generally of this sort:

“A, B, and C do a certain piece of work. A can do as much work in one hour as B in two, or C in four. Find how long they work at it.”

Or thus:

“A, B, and C are employed to dig a ditch. A can dig as much in one hour as B can dig in two, and B can dig twice as fast as C. Find how long, etc., etc.”

Or after this wise:

“A lays a wager that he can walk faster than B or C. A
can walk half as fast again as B, and C is only an indifferent walker. Find how far, and so forth.”

The occupations of A, B, and C are many and varied. In the older arithmetics they contented themselves with doing “a certain piece of work.” This statement of the case, however, was found too sly and mysterious, or possibly lacking in romantic charm. It became the fashion to define the job more clearly and to set them at walking-matches, ditch-digging, regattas, and piling cord wood. At times they became commercial and entered into partnership, having with their old mystery a “certain” capital. Above all they revel in motion. When they tire of walking-matches–A rides on horseback, or borrows a bicycle and competes with his weaker-minded associates on foot. Now they race on locomotives; now they row; or again they become historical and engage stage-coaches; or at times they are aquatic and swim. If their occupation is actual work they prefer to pump water into cisterns, two of which leak through holes in the bottom and one of which is water-tight. A, of course, has the good one; he also takes the bicycle, and the best locomotive, and the right of swimming with the current. Whatever they do they put money on it, being all three sports. A always wins.

In the early chapters of the arithmetic, their identity is concealed under the names John, William, and Henry, and they wrangle over the division of marbles. In algebra they are often called X, Y, and Z. But these are only their Christian names, and they are really the same people.

Now to one who has followed the history of these men through countless pages of problems, watched them in their leisure hours dallying with cord wood, and seen their panting sides heave in the full frenzy of filling a cistern with a leak in it, they become something more than mere symbols. They
appear as creatures of flesh and blood, living men with their own passions, ambitions, and aspirations like the rest of us. Let us view them in turn. A is a full-blooded blustering fellow, of energetic temperament, hot-headed and strong-willed. It is he who proposes everything, challenges B to work, makes the bets, and bends the others to his will. He is a man of great physical strength and phenomenal endurance. He has been known to walk forty-eight hours at a stretch, and to pump ninety-six. His life is arduous and full of peril. A mistake in the working of a sum may keep him digging a fortnight without sleep. A repeating decimal in the answer might kill him.

B is a quiet, easy-going fellow, afraid of A and bullied by him, but very gentle and brotherly to little C, the weakling. He is quite in A's power, having lost all his money in bets.

Poor C is an undersized, frail man, with a plaintive face. Constant walking, digging, and pumping has broken his health and ruined his nervous system. His joyless life has driven him to drink and smoke more than is good for him, and his hand often shakes as he digs ditches. He has not the strength to work as the others can, in fact, as Hamlin Smith has said, “A can do more work in one hour than C in four.”

The first time that ever I saw these men was one evening after a regatta. They had all been rowing in it, and it had transpired that A could row as much in one hour as B in two, or C in four. B and C had come in dead fagged and C was coughing badly. “Never mind, old fellow,” I heard B say, “I'll fix you up on the sofa and get you some hot tea.” Just then A came blustering in and shouted, “I say, you fellows, Hamlin Smith has shown me three cisterns in his garden and he says we can pump them until tomorrow night. I bet I can beat you both. Come on. You can pump in your rowing things, you know. Your cistern leaks a little, I think, C.” I heard B growl that it
was a dirty shame and that C was used up now, but they went, and presently I could tell from the sound of the water that A was pumping four times as fast as C.

For years after that I used to see them constantly about town and always busy. I never heard of any of them eating or sleeping. Then owing to a long absence from home, I lost sight of them. On my return I was surprised to no longer find A, B, and C at their accustomed tasks; on inquiry I heard that work in this line was now done by N, M, and O, and that some people were employing for algebraical jobs four foreigners called Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta.

Now it chanced one day that I stumbled upon old D, in the little garden in front of his cottage, hoeing in the sun. D is an aged labouring man who used occasionally to be called in to help A, B, and C. “Did I know 'em, sir?” he answered. “Why, I knowed 'em ever since they was little fellows in brackets. Master A, he were a fine lad, sir, though I always said, give me Master B for kind-heartedness-like. Many's the job as we've been on together, sir, though I never did no racing nor aught of that, but just the plain labour, as you might say. I'm getting a bit too old and stiff for it nowadays, sir–just scratch about in the garden here and grow a bit of a logarithm, or raise a common denominator or two. But Mr. Euclid he use me still for them propositions, he do.”

From the garrulous old man I learned the melancholy end of my former acquaintances. Soon after I left town, he told me, C had been taken ill. It seems that A and B had been rowing on the river for a wager, and C had been running on the bank and then sat in a draught. Of course the bank had refused the draught and C was taken ill. A and B came home and found C lying helpless in bed. A shook him roughly and said, “Get up, C, we're going to pile wood.” C looked so worn
and pitiful that B said, “Look here, A, I won't stand this, he isn't fit to pile wood to-night.” C smiled feebly and said; “Perhaps I might pile a little if I sat up in bed.” Then B, thoroughly alarmed, said, “See here, A, I'm going to fetch a doctor; he's dying.” A flared up and answered, “You've no money to fetch a doctor.” “I'll reduce him to his lowest terms,” B said firmly, “that'll fetch him.” C's life might even then have been saved but they made a mistake about the medicine. It stood at the head of the bed on a bracket, and the nurse accidentally removed it from the bracket without changing the sign. After the fatal blunder C seems to have sunk rapidly. On the evening of the next day, as the shadows deepened in the little room, it was clear to all that the end was near. I think that even A was affected at the last as he stood with bowed head, aimlessly offering to bet with the doctor on C's laboured breathing. “A,” whispered C, “I think I'm going fast.” “How fast do you think you'll go, old man?” murmured A. “I don't know,” said C, “but I'm going at any rate.”–The end came soon after that. C rallied for a moment and asked for a certain piece of work that he had left downstairs. A put it in his arms and he expired. As his soul sped heavenward A watched its flight with melancholy admiration. B burst into a passionate flood of tears and sobbed, “Put away his little cistern and the rowing clothes he used to wear. I feel as if I could hardly ever dig again.”–The funeral was plain and unostentatious. It differed in nothing from the ordinary, except that out of deference to sporting men and mathematicians, A engaged two hearses. Both vehicles started at the same time, B driving the one which bore the sable parallelopiped containing the last remains of his ill-fated friend. A on the box of the empty hearse generously consented to a handicap of a hundred yards, but arrived first at the cemetery by driving four times as fast
as B. (Find the distance to the cemetery.) As the sarcophagus was lowered, the grave was surrounded by the broken figures of the first book of Euclid. –It was noticed that after the death of C, A became a changed man. He lost interest in racing with B, and dug but languidly. He finally gave up his work and settled down to live on the interest of his bets. –B never recovered from the shock of C's death; his grief preyed upon his intellect and it became deranged. He grew moody and spoke only in monosyllables. His disease became rapidly aggravated, and he presently spoke only in words whose spelling was regular and which presented no difficulty to the beginner. Realising his precarious condition he voluntarily submitted to be incarcerated in an asylum, where he abjured mathematics and devoted himself to writing the History of the Swiss Family Robinson in words of one syllable.

 

AFTERWORD

BY ROBERTSON DAVIES

L
iterary Lapse
s was Stephen Leacock's first book, and he published it himself in
1910
, when he was forty. It may seem odd to us now that he should have begun his career as an author so late in life, but we must remember that in his twenties and thirties he was busily engaged in fitting himself for work as a university professor; this meant some years of teaching school, which he greatly disliked, and study at the University of Chicago for the Ph.D., which made him eligible for a university appointment. During his thirties he did a great deal of writing on history and political science, and also wrote occasional light articles and sketches for the periodical press. He does not seem to have thought of these as comprising the better part of his literary output, or as marking the channel in which the best of his talent would flow. But in
1910
he gathered his fugitive pieces together, and had them printed by the Gazette Printing Company of Montreal; it appears to have been his notion that this book, offered for sale on railway news stands, might be welcome to travellers in search of light entertainment.

The book quickly found its way into the hands of John Lane, of the Bodley Head publishing house in London; Lane
was at that time rising toward the crest of his wave as a publisher of strongly individual character and unusual taste; within the year he had brought out a much more professional edition of the book in England, and in
1911
this was followed by
Nonsense Novels
. Leacock was launched on his career as a popular, best-selling humorist.

The first edition of
Literary Lapses
is now rare. It is a pleasant little book, bound in green boards with a green buckram spine, to which the title is fixed on a buff label. It contains one hundred and twenty-five pages of good paper with a deckle edge; and adorning the first page, above “My Financial Career,” is an engraving of a bookshelf of Edwardian sinuosity, containing seventeen books of that unreadable appearance which is supposed by artists to go with guaranteed literary worth; quite plainly none of these is a work of humour. In a modest preface the author acknowledges permission to republish given by
Truth
of New York,
Punch
,
Puck
,
Life
,
The Lancet
, and
Saturday Night
of Toronto. He also lets it be known that his sketches have been “frequently reprinted,” which means that they had been widely stolen, for those were days when authors had little recourse against such piracy, and had to take it as a compliment. The price of the book was thirty-five cents–a sum which raised it above the vulgarity of ten and twenty-five-cent “railway” books, but did not thrust it into the elegant company of the fifty-centers.

In considering Leacock's work as a whole, it is interesting to observe that his humorous writing does not vary greatly in quality; though
Literary Lapses
is his first book it contains some of his best work. His books on serious subjects were of uneven merit, but his fountain of humour seems to have bubbled with strength and clarity all through his life. “My Financial Career,” in which he writes of the embarrassment of a man opening a
bank account, is as sure in touch as anything he wrote at any time in his life. “Boarding-House Geometry,” written by a man who had lived in seventeen different Toronto boarding-houses during his student days, could not be improved by the addition or subtraction of a single word. So also with “A, B, and C” children of today still find it extremely funny, though methods of teaching arithmetic have changed radically in fifty years. These pieces seize immediately upon the reader and move him to laughter, though they speak of a time which is now long past. The fact that Leacock's humour sets time at nought is one of the most telling proofs that it is humour of genius.

Most of what appears in this book is mined from his golden vein, but there are exceptions. “Number Fifty-Six” is all very well, and we can still read it with pleasure, but it is fun in the mode of an era which has gone; it shows us Leacock in one of his rare moods of imitation; stuff like “Number Fifty-Six” was to be found in all the funny magazines at the turn of the century and, like most humour which follows a formula, it has had its day.

There is nothing dated, however, about “Telling His Faults,” or “The Awful Fate of Melpomenus Jones” beautiful girls are not encountered as often at summer hotels as they were in Leacock's time, for the summer hotel as such has lost its hold on the public; but beautiful girls still use the technique which brought Mr. Sapling to their feet. And which of us, not born with a soul of brass, has not feared that he might suffer the fate of Melpomenus Jones? As for “The Conjurer's Revenge,” is there anyone who has spoken, or acted, or played on a musical instrument, or in any way striven to entertain the public, who has not learned to spot the Quick Man in each audience, and to wish that he might revenge himself ruthlessly upon this enemy of humankind?

Leacock's humour avoided the tiresomeness of formulas and repetitions because it was truly an emanation of his own remarkable character. Though he owed something to Dickens and Mark Twain, he was no imitator. Not only was he very funny on paper; he was much funnier in his own person. The word which occurs again and again in newspaper accounts of his lecture tours is “fun.” It is a word which is a little out of favour at present, for this is not an age in which simple fun is much understood or valued. In our day, humour has become, as never before, a marketable commodity, created and sold by committees of industrious, ulcerous, clever but basically humourless men, to the movies, the radio, and television. Much of what passes as humour today is this manufactured stuff, supported by the synthetic clangour of empty laughter from studio audiences. We have also a brittle, egghead wit, so fast and wry and nervous that it is exhausting rather than refreshing in its effect. But of fun–fun in the sense in which the Edwardians used the word–we have very little.

Leacock was a master of fun. He convulsed his audiences, by a flow of nonsense which seemed so wonderfully easy that nobody sought to analyse how it was created. In
My Discovery of England
he tells how he almost killed a man in an English audience with laughing. This account is only slightly exaggerated. People who went to Leacock's lectures laughed until they hurt themselves; they laughed until mildly disgraceful personal misfortunes befell them. And Leacock laughed with them. He delighted in their laughter and he gloried in his own power to provoke it. There was nothing of the dry humorist or the pawky joker about him. He was plenteous and bountiful in his evocation of laughter. He was in the greatest tradition, not of wit, not of irony or sarcasm, but of true, deep humour, the full and joyous recognition of the Comic Spirit at work in life.

This is not the place to discuss the special cast of temperament which makes a man a humorist. It is enough to say that a man who is a great humorist, as Leacock was, is a man of unusual breadth of sympathy, and that the extension of feeling which gives him a strong sense of the comic at one end of his emotional range, is balanced by an understanding of what is tragic at the other end of the scale. Leacock wrote remarkable comic books, and he was a master of the exceedingly difficult art of comic lecturing. But it would not have needed a very great shift in the foundations of his temperament to have made him a writer of tragedies.

For this reason we do ill if we consider him, in our Canadian literature, as a funny-man, to be esteemed below other writers who have chosen tragic or pastoral happenings upon which to rest their work. He was a great writer–one of the greatest we have ever possessed.

In
Literary Lapses
you hold the first work of a man who was to achieve great fame as a writer. But there is about it nothing of the 'prentice hand; Leacock's apprenticeship to the hard craft of humour was contemporaneous with those hateful days of schoolmastering and living the life of a poor student at the University of Toronto.
Literary Lapses
is, in the true sense of the word, a masterpiece–which is to say, the work which the apprentice offers at the end of his training and which shows him to be a master indeed.