SOURCE: “The Preposterous and the Profound: A New Look at the Envoi of Sunshine Sketches,” in Journal of Canadian Fiction, No. 19, 1977, pp. 95-105.

In the following essay, Mantz urges us to read Leacock not only for his genial nonsense or bitter satire but for his “ontological awareness”; he then examines the envoi in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town to show how Leacock moves toward the profound by way of the commonplace.

“Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica.”¹ This remark, in the preface to Sunshine Sketches, suggests Leacock should be taken seriously as an artist, that his work—or some of it, at any rate—has what E. R. Wassermann used to call the “ontological seriousness” of a work of art.² Of course, Alice in Wonderland has long since been rehabilitated for intellectual study, and the same dignity might be...