Canada at War: Good Night — Forever

“Good Night—Forever”

In 1936, when he retired from McGill University’s faculty, Stephen Leacock tentatively thought of returning to his native England, then decided to stay in Canada. Said he: “Fetch me my carpet slippers … I’ll rock it out to sleep right here.” Last week, at 74, he died in a Toronto hospital, after an operation for throat cancer. Mourning was not confined to McGill, nor to Canada.

Stephen Butler Leacock had several distinctions : he was one of the very few contemporary Canadians well-known outside of Canada; he was an economist who had a sense of humor; he taught economics and political science at McGill for 33 years; and he pleased readers throughout the world with his 30 books of light, tolerant satire. Among his best-known works: Literary Lapses, Behind the Beyond, Moonbeams from the Larger Lunacy.

Love and Twilight. On the McGill campus, he was a legend. To students who hesitated to marry while still in school he would say: “You can afford a few household articles and a can to go to the corner for beer—what more do you need?” He wore battered hats, never seemed to rule his unruly hair. He liked to play billiards, disliked telephones (though his Montreal house was full of them), was always on bad terms with dress ties.

His informal quips were as popular as his formal wit. Of language, he once said: “[Canadians] use English for literature, Scotch for sermons and American for conversation.” One of his most quoted sallies: “God takes care of fools, drunks and the United States of America.” In Nonsense Novels he created the young man in love who “flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”

When British newspapers complained that Canada was being Americanized, Leacock retorted: “If [so], then what England needs is to be Frenchified, and what France needs is to be Anglicized—and both of them to be Germanized. If then one might take the resulting amalgamation and Italianize it a little, and even give it a touch of Czechoslovak shellac rubbed on with a piece of old Russian Soviet, the world would be on the way to peace on earth.”

When he quit teaching, he said: “When I was lecturing at McGill on winter afternoons, the gathering of the twilight would give me warning that my time was up, and that I must say, ‘Good night, gentlemen.’ And now I can see that the sky has darkened and the light has faded from the windows, and I know that the time has come when I must say, ‘Good night, gentlemen—forever.’ “