Stephen Leacock's
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich

The ideas in the following commentary on Arcadian Adventures are entirely derived from Gerald Lynch's Stephen Leacock: Humour and Humanity (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988), Donald Cameron's Faces of Leacock (Toronto: Ryerson, 1967. pp. 102-121), and Robertson Davies's Stephen Leacock (Canadian Writers, no. 7. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1970).

Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich is considered Leacock's funniest, most organized, and most tightly knit work. Arcadian Adventures (1914) was published just two years after the publication of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912). For good reason the two books are sister texts; one cannot be entirely understood without the other. The two books together reveal the entire breadth of Leacock's concerns as an artist and thinker. Gerald Lynch explains that at opposite poles of Leacock's artistic vision are Plutoria of Arcadian Adventures and Mariposa of Sunshine Sketches. Mariposa is a little Canadian town (an ideal community) that allows for human folly whereas Plutoria is an American metropolis (a negative exemplar of community) that supports absurd individualism. The centre which both of these books turn on is the Mausoleum Club: Arcadian Adventures begins in the Mausoleum Club and Sunshine Sketches ends in the Mausoleum Club. The Mausoleum Club represents a fixed point and yet it is a point from which both books depart. Mariposa is a town that a Mausoleum Club member was likely raised in; Mariposa represents for this Mausoleum Club member a past to be remembered, a pastoral and idyllic town. Plutoria, on the other hand, is a city that a Mausoleum Club member is likely moving towards; Plutoria is what the future holds if it is not already a reality, an obsession for what is mechanical and material.

The narrator in Arcadian Adventures is easy to identify because his spirited attack of plutocracy is clearly and grossly displayed. We never for a moment have to question what the narrator's position is with regard to the idle rich. The narrator of Arcadian Adventures, as opposed to the narrator of Sunshine Sketches, is a skilled marksman who seems to shoot down his objects of prey - plutocrats - at will. For this reason, Robertson Davies has called Arcadian Adventures a "very angry book" where the "satire is crude" (Stephen Leacock, pp. 32-33). The satire is crude indeed but the narrator's critique of the idle rich remains just. No matter how cold his judgement, the universal sins of greed, pride, and hypocrisy are not acceptable to even an extreme individualist. It is in this way, Gerald Lynch explains, that the narrator does not go beyond the decorum of "kindliness":

Readers should know, however, that for Leacock the word "kindliness" carried associations of kinship, of humanity; the word was not synonymous with gentleness. Those characters who live in disregard of humanity, those such as the plutocrats of Arcadian Adventures, become prime targets for Leacock's humorous satire. ("Afterword." Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1989. p. 207)

Leacock's humour in Arcadian Adventures is in the immediate sense harsh but is "kindly" from a broader perspective. Arcadian Adventures is still a simple book, much simpler than Sunshine Sketches, because of the narrator's vicious one-dimensional irony. He is nothing like the warm and chameleon-like narrator of Sunshine Sketches, whose irony is double-edged, and for this reason, more complex. It is probably for Arcadian Adventures' simplicity that it was placed on Communist Russia's school curriculum. Leacock's depiction of American capitalism "gone mad" must have served Russia's ostensible purposes admirably. Leacock's critique of American capitalism in Arcadian Adventures is influenced by Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).

Any attack of American capitalism should include a picture of the labouring class to evoke pathos, and by slight-of-hand, Leacock achieves this. The slum-dwellers are mentioned at the beginning and at the end of the book, thereby acting as a framing device for the entire narrative. It is true that the lazy and decadent lifestyle of the plutocrats will only materialize upon the actions of the proletarian class: the idle rich need the slum-dwellers while the slum-dwellers could do without the idle rich. The first chapter, "A Little Dinner With Mr. Lucullus Fyshe," emphasizes the motif that the idle rich are never far away from the slum-dwellers. Union organizers are in the background of the Mausoleum Club's kitchen, and likewise, we are to imagine that the slum-dwellers are in the background of all Plutorian affairs. The labouring class' shadow is cast like a blanket over the whole of Arcadian Adventures; only those who rise above this blanket, and peer from atop the Masuelum Club's roof, will see the disparaging poverty.

Plutoria is a community of imposters. In Plutoria you will find: surrogate fathers (Peter Spillikins), fraudulent mystics (Mr. Yahi-Bahi), pseudo-poets (Sikleigh Snoop the sex-poet), usurping ministers (Reverend Uttermost Dumfarthing), poor aristocrats (Duke Dulham), stock-market scams (Gildas), bronze statues (the governor), phony naturalists (Mr. Newberry), affected architecture (Mrs. Rasselyer-Brown's mansion), imagined cures for imagined illnesses (Dr. Slyder), patronizing honorary degrees (Dr. Boomer), feigned religiosity (merger of St. Asaph and St. Osoph), hypocritical municipal politics (the Clean Government Association), and lastly, women with dyed hair (Mrs. Everleigh). Plutoria is a usurping society that in its insipidity values expediency over loyalty, age over youth, hypocrisy over truth.

The pathos of Arcadian Adventures culminates in a sophisticated parody of the scapegoat ritual. Plutoria purges itself of irreconciliable elements, which means it expels anything authentic. Such figures as Nora, the Tomlinsons, Rev. McTeague, and Concordia College are ridiculed and beaten. This expulsion of authentic individuals is a parody of the scapegoat ritual where only the authentic individuals are excised from Plutoria. Even authentic love in Plutoria, the love Nora has for Peter Spillikins, is swindled and aborted. Such exposure and disgrace call for pathos. Dr. McTeague's youthful romanticism is a further example of the scapegoat ritual parodied. Plutoria is a place for the old, not the young. In Plutoria, the world of youth is kidnapped by the world of age, and as is expected, Peter Spillikins is kidnapped by Mrs. Everleigh.