of the professor’s very name. That was, say, from 1909 or thereabout to
the middle of 1917. During those years, having lost all my old superior
interest in Socialism, even as an amateur psychiatrist, I ceased to read
its literature, and thus lost track of its Great Thinkers. The
periodicals that I then gave an eye to, setting aside newspapers, were
chiefly the familiar American imitations of the English weeklies of
opinion, and in these the dominant Great Thinker was, first, the late
Prof. Dr. William James, and, after his decease, Prof. Dr. John Dewey.
The reign of James, as the illuminated will recall, was long and
glorious. For three or four years running he was mentioned in every one
of those American _Spectators_ and _Saturday Reviews_ at least once a
week, and often a dozen times. Among the less somber gazettes of the
republic, to be sure, there were other heroes: Maeterlinck, Rabindranath
Tagore, Judge Ben B. Lindsey, the late Major-General Roosevelt, Tom
Lawson and so on. Still further down the literary and intellectual scale
there were yet others: Hall Caine, Brieux and Jack Johnson among them,
with paper-bag cookery and the twilight sleep to dispute their
popularity. But on the majestic level of the old _Nation_, among the
white and lavender peaks of professorial ratiocination, there was
scarcely a serious rival to James. Now and then, perhaps, Jane Addams
had a month of vogue, and during one winter there was a rage for
Bergson, and for a short space the unspeakable Bernstorff tried to set
up Eucken (now damned with Wagner, Nietzsche and Ludendorff), but taking
one day with another James held his own against the field. His ideas,
immediately they were stated, became the ideas of every pedagogue from
Harvard to Leland Stanford, and the pedagogues, laboring furiously at
space rates, rammed them into the skulls of the lesser _cerebelli_. To
have called James an ass, during the year 1909, would have been as fatal
as to have written a sentence like this one without having used so many
_haves_. He died a bit later, but his ghost went marching on: it took
three or four years to interpret and pigeon-hole his philosophical
remains and to take down and redact his messages (via Sir Oliver Lodge,
Little Brighteyes, Wah-Wah the Indian Chief, and other gifted psychics)
from the spirit world. But then, gradually, he achieved the ultimate,
stupendous and irrevocable act of death, and there was a vacancy. To it
Prof. Dr. Dewey was elected by the acclamation of all right-thinking and
forward-looking men. He was an expert in pedagogics, metaphysics,
psychology, ethics, logic, politics, pedagogical metaphysics,
metaphysical psychology, psychological ethics, ethical logic, logical
politics and political pedagogics. He was _Artium Magister_,
_Philosophiæ Doctor_ and twice _Legum Doctor_. He had written a book
called “How to Think.” He sat in a professor’s chair and caned
sophomores for blowing spit-balls. _Ergo_, he was the ideal candidate,
and so he was nominated, elected and inaugurated, and for three years,
more or less, he enjoyed a peaceful reign in the groves of sapience, and
the inferior _umbilicarii_ venerated him as they had once venerated
James.
I myself greatly enjoyed and profited by the discourses of this Prof.
Dewey and was in hopes that he would last. Born so recently as 1859 and
a man of the highest bearable sobriety, he seemed likely to peg along
until 1935 or 1940, a gentle and charming volcano of correct thought.
But it was not, alas, to be. Under cover of pragmatism, that serpent’s
metaphysic, there was unrest beneath the surface. Young professors in
remote and obscure universities, apparently as harmless as so many
convicts in the death-house, were secretly flirting with new and red-hot
ideas. Whole regiments and brigades of them yielded in stealthy privacy
to rebellious and often incomprehensible yearnings. Now and then, as if
to reveal what was brewing, a hell fire blazed and a Prof. Dr. Scott
Nearing went sky-hooting through its smoke. One heard whispers of
strange heresies—economic, sociological, even political. Gossip had it
that pedagogy was hatching vipers, nay, was already brought to bed. But
not much of this got into the home-made _Saturday Reviews_ and Yankee
_Athenæums_—a hint or two maybe, but no more. In the main they kept to
their old resolute demands for a pure civil-service, the budget system
in Congress, the abolition of hazing at the Naval Academy, an honest
primary and justice to the Filipinos, with extermination of the Prussian
serpent added after August, 1914. And Dr. Dewey, on his remote Socratic
Alp, pursued the calm reënforcement of the philosophical principles
underlying these and all other lofty and indignant causes....
Then, of a sudden, Siss! Boom! Ah! Then, overnight, the upspringing of
the intellectual soviets, the headlong assault upon all the old axioms
of pedagogical speculation, the nihilistic dethronement of Prof.
Dewey—and rah, rah, rah for Prof. Dr. Thorstein Veblen! Veblen? Could it
be—? Aye, it was! My old acquaintance! The _Doctor obscurus_ of my
half-forgotten bout with the so-called intellectual Socialist! The Great
Thinker _redivivus_! Here, indeed, he was again, and in a few
months—almost it seemed a few days—he was all over the _Nation_, the
_Dial_, the _New Republic_ and the rest of them, and his books and
pamphlets began to pour from the presses, and the newspapers reported
his every wink and whisper, and everybody who was anybody began gabbling
about him. The spectacle, I do not hesitate to say, somewhat
disconcerted me and even distressed me. On the one hand, I was sorry to
see so learned and interesting a man as Dr. Dewey sent back to the
insufferable dungeons of Columbia, there to lecture in imperfect Yiddish
to classes of Grand Street Platos. And on the other hand, I shrunk
supinely from the appalling job, newly rearing itself before me, of
re-reading the whole canon of the singularly laborious and muggy, the
incomparably tangled and unintelligible works of Prof. Dr. Thorstein
Veblen....
But if a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve
prodigies, and so I managed to get through the whole infernal job. I
read “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” I read “The Theory of Business
Enterprise,” and then I read “The Instinct of Workmanship.” An hiatus
followed; I was racked by a severe neuralgia, with delusions of
persecution. On recovering I tackled “Imperial Germany and the
Industrial Revolution.” Malaria for a month, and then “The Nature of
Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation.” What ensued was never
diagnosed; probably it was some low infection of the mesentery or
spleen. When it passed off, leaving only an asthmatic cough, I read “The
Higher Learning in America,” and then went to Mt. Clemens to drink the
Glauber’s salts. Eureka! the business was done! It had strained me, but
now it was over. Alas, a good part of the agony had been needless. What
I found myself aware of, coming to the end, was that practically the
whole system of Prof. Dr. Veblen was in his first book and his last—that
is, in “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” and “The Higher Learning in
America.” I pass on the good news. Read these two, and you won’t have to
read the others. And if even two daunt you, then read the first. Once
through it, though you will have missed many a pearl and many a pain,
you will have a fairly good general acquaintance with the gifted
metaphysician’s ideas.
For those ideas, in the main, are quite simple, and often anything but
revolutionary in essence. What is genuinely remarkable about them is not
their novelty, or their complexity, nor even the fact that a professor
should harbor them; it is the astoundingly grandiose and rococo manner
of their statement, the almost unbelievable tediousness and flatulence
of the gifted headmaster’s prose, his unprecedented talent for saying
nothing in an august and heroic manner. There are tales of an actress of
the last generation, probably Sarah Bernhardt, who could put pathos and
even terror into a recitation of the multiplication table. The late
Louis James did something of the sort; he introduced limericks into
“Peer Gynt” and still held the yokelry agape. The same talent, raised to
a high power, is in this Prof. Dr. Veblen. Tunnel under his great
moraines and stalagmites of words, dig down into his vast kitchen-midden
of discordant and raucous polysyllables, blow up the hard, thick shell
of his almost theological manner, and what you will find in his
discourse is chiefly a mass of platitudes—the self-evident made
horrifying, the obvious in terms of the staggering. Marx, I daresay,
said a good deal of it, and what Marx overlooked has been said over and
over again by his heirs and assigns. But Marx, at this business, labored
under a technical handicap: he wrote in German, a language he actually
understood. Prof. Dr. Veblen submits himself to no such disadvantage.
Though born, I believe, in These States, and resident here all his life,
he achieves the effect, perhaps without employing the means, of thinking
in some unearthly foreign language—say Swahili, Sumerian or Old
Bulgarian—and then painfully clawing his thoughts into a copious but
uncertain and book-learned English. The result is a style that affects
the higher cerebral centers like a constant roll of subway expresses.
The second result is a sort of bewildered numbness of the senses, as
before some fabulous and unearthly marvel. And the third result, if I
make no mistake, is the celebrity of the professor as a Great Thinker.
In brief, he states his hollow nothings in such high, astounding terms
that they must inevitably arrest and blister the right-thinking mind. He
makes them mysterious. He makes them shocking. He makes them portentous.
And so, flinging them at naïve and believing minds, he makes them stick
and burn.
No doubt you think that I exaggerate—perhaps even that I lie. If so,
then consider this specimen—the first paragraph of Chapter XIII of “The
Theory of the Leisure Class”:
In an increasing proportion as time goes on, the anthropomorphic
cult, with its code of devout observances, suffers a progressive
disintegration through the stress of economic exigencies and the
decay of the system of status. As this disintegration proceeds,
there come to be associated and blended with the devout attitude
certain other motives and impulses that are not always of an
anthropomorphic origin, nor traceable to the habit of personal
subservience. Not all of these subsidiary impulses that blend with
the bait of devoutness in the later devotional life are altogether
congruous with the devout attitude or with the anthropomorphic
apprehension of sequence of phenomena. Their origin being not the
same, their action upon the scheme of devout life is also not in
the same direction. In many ways they traverse the underlying norm
of subservience or vicarious life to which the code of devout
observances and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions are
to be traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence of
these alien motives the social and industrial régime of status
gradually disintegrates, and the canon of personal subservience
loses the support derived from an unbroken tradition. Extraneous
habits and proclivities encroach upon the field of action occupied
by this canon, and it presently comes about that the
ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures are partially converted
to other uses, in some measure alien to the purposes of the scheme
of devout life as it stood in the days of the most vigorous and
characteristic development of the priesthood.
Well, what have we here? What does this appalling salvo of rhetorical
artillery signify? What is the sweating professor trying to say? What is
his Message now? Simply that in the course of time, the worship of God
is commonly corrupted by other enterprises, and that the church, ceasing
to be a mere temple of adoration, becomes the headquarters of these
other enterprises. More simply still, that men sometimes vary serving
God by serving other men, which means, of course, serving themselves.
This bald platitude, which must be obvious to any child who has ever
been to a church bazaar or a parish house, is here tortured, worried and
run through rollers until it is spread out to 241 words, of which fully
200 are unnecessary. The next paragraph is even worse. In it the master
undertakes to explain in his peculiar dialect the meaning of “that
non-reverent sense of æsthetic congruity with the environment which is
left as a residue of the latter-day act of worship after elimination of
its anthropomorphic content.” Just what does he mean by this
“non-reverent sense of æsthetic congruity”? I have studied the whole
paragraph for three days, halting only for prayer and sleep, and I have
come to certain conclusions. I may be wrong, but nevertheless it is the
best that I can do. What I conclude is this: he is trying to say that
many people go to church, not because they are afraid of the devil but
because they enjoy the music, and like to look at the stained glass, the
potted lilies and the rev. pastor. To get this profound and highly
original observation upon paper, he wastes, not merely 241, but more
than 300 words! To say what might be said on a postage stamp he takes
more than a page in his book!...
And so it goes, alas, alas, in all his other volumes—a cent’s worth of
information wrapped in a bale of polysyllables. In “The Higher Learning
in America” the thing perhaps reaches its damndest and worst. It is as
if the practice of that incredibly obscure and malodorous style were a
relentless disease, a sort of progressive intellectual diabetes, a
leprosy of the horse sense. Words are flung upon words until all
recollection that there must be a meaning in them, a ground and excuse
for them, is lost. One wanders in a labyrinth of nouns, adjectives,
verbs, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and participles,
most of them swollen and nearly all of them unable to walk. It is
difficult to imagine worse English, within the limits of intelligible
grammar. It is clumsy, affected, opaque, bombastic, windy, empty. It is
without grace or distinction and it is often without the most elementary
order. The learned professor gets himself enmeshed in his gnarled
sentences like a bull trapped by barbed wire, and his efforts to
extricate himself are quite as furious and quite as spectacular. He
heaves, he leaps, he writhes; at times he seems to be at the point of
yelling for the police. It is a picture to bemuse the vulgar and to give
the judicious grief.
Worse, there is nothing at the bottom of all this strident
wind-music—the ideas it is designed to set forth are, in the
overwhelming main, poor ideas, and often they are ideas that are almost
idiotic. One never gets the thrill of sharp and original thinking,
dexterously put into phrases. The concepts underlying, say, “The Theory
of the Leisure Class” are simply Socialism and water; the concepts
underlying “The Higher Learning in America” are so childishly obvious
that even the poor drudges who write editorials for newspapers have
often voiced them. When, now and then, the professor tires of this
emission of stale bosh and attempts flights of a more original
character, he straightway comes tumbling down into absurdity. What the
reader then has to struggle with is not only intolerably bad writing,
but also loose, flabby, cocksure and preposterous thinking.... Again I
take refuge in an example. It is from Chapter IV of “The Theory of the
Leisure Class.” The problem before the author here has to do with the
social convention which frowns upon the consumption of alcohol by
women—at least to the extent to which men may consume it decorously.
Well, then, what is his explanation of this convention? Here, in brief,
is his process of reasoning:
1. The leisure class, which is the predatory class of feudal
times, reserves all luxuries for itself, and disapproves their use
by members of the lower classes, for this use takes away their
charm by taking away their exclusive possession.
2. Women are chattels in the possession of the leisure class, and
hence subject to the rules made for inferiors. “The patriarchal
tradition ... says that the woman, being a chattel, should consume
only what is necessary to her sustenance, except so far as her
further consumption contributes to the comfort or the good repute
of her master.”
3. The consumption of alcohol contributes nothing to the comfort
or good repute of the woman’s master, but “detracts sensibly from
the comfort or pleasure” of her master. _Ergo_, she is forbidden
to drink.
This, I believe, is a fair specimen of the Veblenian ratiocination.
Observe it well, for it is typical. That is to say, it starts off with a
gratuitous and highly dubious assumption, proceeds to an equally dubious
deduction, and then ends with a platitude which begs the whole question.
What sound reason is there for believing that exclusive possession is
the hall-mark of luxury? There is none that I can see. It may be true of
a few luxuries, but it is certainly not true of the most familiar ones.
Do I enjoy a decent bath because I know that John Smith cannot afford
one—or because I delight in being clean? Do I admire Beethoven’s Fifth
Symphony because it is incomprehensible to Congressmen and Methodists—or
because I genuinely love music? Do I prefer terrapin à la Maryland to
fried liver because plow-hands must put up with the liver—or because the
terrapin is intrinsically a more charming dose? Do I prefer kissing a
pretty girl to kissing a charwoman because even a janitor may kiss a
charwoman—or because the pretty girl looks better, smells better and
kisses better? Now and then, to be sure, the idea of exclusive
possession enters into the concept of luxury. I may, if I am a
bibliophile, esteem a book because it is a unique first edition. I may,
if I am fond, esteem a woman because she smiles on no one else. But even
here, save in a very small minority of cases, other attractions plainly
enter into the matter. It pleases me to have a unique first edition, but
I wouldn’t care anything for a unique first edition of Robert W.
Chambers or Elinor Glyn; the author must have my respect, the book must
be intrinsically valuable, there must be much more to it than its mere
uniqueness. And if, being fond, I glory in the exclusive smiles of a
certain Miss —— or Mrs. ——, then surely my satisfaction depends chiefly
upon the lady herself, and not upon my mere monopoly. Would I delight in
the fidelity of the charwoman? Would it give me any joy to learn that,
through a sense of duty to me, she had ceased to kiss the janitor?
Confronted by such considerations, it seems to me that there is little
truth left in Prof. Dr. Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption and
conspicuous waste—that what remains of it, after it is practically
applied a few times, is no more than a wraith of balderdash. In so far
as it is true it is obvious. All the professor accomplishes with it is
to take what every one knows and pump it up to such proportions that
every one begins to doubt it. What could be plainer than his failure in
the case just cited? He starts off with a platitude, and ends in
absurdity. No one denies, I take it, that in a clearly limited sense,
women occupy a place in the world—or, more accurately, aspire to a place
in the world—that is a good deal like that of a chattel. Marriage, the
goal of their only honest and permanent hopes, invades their
individuality; a married woman becomes the function of another
individuality. Thus the appearance she presents to the world is often
the mirror of her husband’s egoism. A rich man hangs his wife with
expensive clothes and jewels for the same reason, among others, that he
adorns his own head with a plug hat: to notify everybody that he can
afford it—in brief, to excite the envy of Socialists. But he also does
it, let us hope, for another and far better and more powerful reason, to
wit, that she intrigues him, that he delights in her, that he loves
her—and so wants to make her gaudy and happy. This reason may not appeal
to Socialist sociologists. In Russia, according to an old scandal
(officially endorsed by the British bureau for pulling Yankee noses) the
Bolsheviki actually repudiated it as insane. Nevertheless, it continues
to appeal very forcibly to the majority of normal husbands in the
nations of the West, and I am convinced that it is a hundred times as
potent as any other reason. The American husband, in particular, dresses
his wife like a circus horse, not primarily because he wants to display
his wealth upon her person, but because he is a soft and moony fellow
and ever ready to yield to her desires, however preposterous. If any
conception of her as a chattel were actively in him, even unconsciously,
he would be a good deal less her slave. As it is, her vicarious practice
of conspicuous waste commonly reaches such a development that her master
himself is forced into renunciations—which brings Prof. Dr. Veblen’s
theory to self-destruction.
His final conclusion is as unsound as his premisses. All it comes to is
a plain begging of the question. Why does a man forbid his wife to drink
all the alcohol she can hold? Because, he says, it “detracts sensibly
from his comfort or pleasure.” In other words, it detracts from his
comfort and pleasure because it detracts from his comfort and pleasure.
Meanwhile, the real answer is so plain that even a professor should know
it. A man forbids his wife to drink too much because, deep in his secret
archives, he has records of the behavior of other women who drank too
much, and is eager to safeguard his wife’s self-respect and his own
dignity against what he knows to be certain invasion. In brief, it is a
commonplace of observation, familiar to all males beyond the age of
twenty-one, that once a woman is drunk the rest is a mere matter of time
and place: the girl is already there. A husband, viewing this prospect,
perhaps shrinks from having his chattel damaged. But let us be soft
enough to think that he may also shrink from seeing humiliation,
ridicule and bitter regret inflicted upon one who is under his
protection, and one whose dignity and happiness are precious to him, and
one whom he regards with deep and (I surely hope) lasting affection. A
man’s grandfather is surely not his chattel, even by the terms of the
Veblen theory, and yet I am sure that no sane man would let the old
gentleman go beyond a discreet cocktail or two if a bout of genuine
bibbing were certain to be followed by the complete destruction of his
dignity, his chastity and (if a Presbyterian) his immortal soul....
One more example of the Veblenian logic and I must pass on: I have other
fish to fry. On page 135 of “The Theory of the Leisure Class” he turns
his garish and buzzing search-light upon another problem of the domestic
hearth, this time a double one. First, why do we have lawns around our
country houses? Secondly, why don’t we employ cows to keep them clipped,
instead of importing Italians, Croatians and blackamoors? The first
question is answered by an appeal to ethnology: we delight in lawns
because we are the descendants of “a pastoral people inhabiting a region
with a humid climate.” True enough, there is in a well-kept lawn “an
element of sensuous beauty,” but that is secondary: the main thing is
that our dolicho-blond ancestors had flocks, and thus took a keen
professional interest in grass. (The Marx _motif_! The economic
interpretation of history in E flat.) But why don’t _we_ keep flocks?
Why do we renounce cows and hire Jugo-Slavs? Because “to the average
popular apprehension a herd of cattle so pointedly suggests thrift and
usefulness that their presence ... would be intolerably cheap.” With the
highest veneration, Bosh! Plowing through a bad book from end to end, I
can find nothing sillier than this. Here, indeed, the whole “theory of
conspicuous waste” is exposed for precisely what it is: one per cent.
platitude and ninety-nine per cent. nonsense. Has the genial professor,
pondering his great problems, ever taken a walk in the country? And has
he, in the course of that walk, ever crossed a pasture inhabited by a
cow (_Bos taurus_)? And has he, making that crossing, ever passed astern
of the cow herself? And has he, thus passing astern, ever stepped
carelessly, and—