Literature. An International Gazette of Criticism, No. 16, New Series (Apr., 28, 
1899), pp. 361-362; and No. 17, New Series (May, 5, 1899).
Article: An Opportunity for American Fiction.
Book Review by: William D[ean] Howells.
The Theory of the Leisure Class. An Economic Study in the Evolution of 
Institutions. By THORSTEIN VEBLEN. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1899.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An Opportunity for American Fiction.
I.
(April 28, 1899)

One of the most interesting books which has fallen in my way since I read The 
Workers of Mr. Wyckoff is Mr. Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class 
(Macmillan). It does for the Idlers in terms of cold, scientific. analysis the 
office which Mr. Wyckoff's book dramatically performs for the Workers; and I 
think that it is all the more important because it deals, like that book, with a 
class newly circumstanced rather than newly conditioned. The workers and the 
idlers of America are essentially the same as the workers and the idlers of 
occidental civilisation everywhere; but there is a novelty in their environment 
peculiarly piquant to the imagination. In the sociological region the spectacle 
has for the witness some such fascination as geological stratification would 
have for the inquirer if he could look on at its processes; and it is apparently 
with as strong a zest as this would inspire that Mr. Veblen considers the nature 
and the growth of the leisure class among us.
His name is newer to me than it should be, or than it will hereafter be to any 
student of our status; but it must be already well known to those whose 
interests or pleasures have led them into the same field of inquiry. To others, 
like myself, the clear method, the graphic and easy style, and the delightful 
accuracy of characterisation will be part of the surprise which the book has to 
offer. In the passionless calm with which the author pursues his investigation, 
there is apparently no animus for or against a leisure class. It is his affair 
simply to find out how and why and what it is. If the result is to leave the 
reader with a feeling which the author never shows, that seems to be solely the 
effect of the facts. But I have no purpose, as I doubt if I have the 
qualification, to criticise the book, and it is only with one of its manifold 
suggestions that this notice will concern itself.
The suggestion, which is rather a conclusion, is the curious fact, noted less 
securely and less scientifically before, that the flower of the American leisure 
class does not fruit in its native air, and perhaps cannot yet perpetuate itself 
on our soil. In other words, the words of Mr. Veblen, "the English leisure class 
being, for purposes of reputable usage, the upper leisure class of this 
country," the extraordinary impulse among us toward the aristocraticisation of 
society can as yet fulfill itself only in monarchical conditions. A conspicuous 
proof of this is the frequent intermarriage of our moneyed bourgeoisie with the 
English aristocracy, and another proof, less conspicuous, is the frequent 
absenteeism of our rich people. The newspapers from time to time make a foolish 
and futile clamor about both these things, as if they were abnormal, or as if 
they were not the necessary logic of great wealth and leisure in a democracy. 
Such things result as infallibly from wealth and leisure as indigence and 
servility, and are in no wise to be deprecated. They are only representations on 
a wider stage of the perpetual and universal drama of our daily life. The man 
who makes money in a small town goes into the nearest large town to spend it - 
that is, to waste it; waste in some form or other being the corollary of wealth; 
and he seeks to marry his children there into rich and old families. He does 
this from the instinct of self-preservation, which is as strong in classes as in 
individuals; if he has made his money in a large town, he goes to some such 
inland metropolis as Chicago to waste his wealth and to marry his children above 
him. The Chicago, and San Francisco, and St. Louis, and Cleveland millionaires 
come to New York with the same ambitions and purposes.
But these are all intermediate stages in the evolution of the American magnate. 
At every step he discovers that he is less and less in his own country, that he 
is living in a provisional exile, and that his true home is in monarchical 
conditions, where his future establishes itself often without his willing it, 
and sometimes against his willing it. The American life is the life of labor, 
and he is now of the life of leisure, or if he is not, his wife is, his 
daughters and his sons are. The logic of their existence, which they cannot 
struggle against, and on which all the fatuous invective of pseudo public spirit 
launches itself effectlessly, is intermarriage with the European aristocracies, 
and residence abroad. Short of this there is no rest, and can be none for the 
American leisure class. This may not be its ideal, but it is its destiny.
It is far the most dramatic social fact of our time, and if some man of creative 
imagination were to seize upon it, he would find in it the material of that 
great American novel which after so much travail has not yet seen the light. It 
is, above all our other facts, synthetic; it sums up and includes in itself the 
whole American story: the relentless will, the tireless force, the vague ideal, 
the inexorable destiny, the often bewildered acquiescence. If the novelist were 
a man of very great imagination indeed, he might forecast a future in which the 
cycle would round itself, and our wealth would return from European sojourn, and 
dwell among us again, bringing its upper class with it, so that we should have a 
leisure class ultimated and established on our own ground. But for my part I 
should prefer the novel which kept itself entirely to the actualities, and 
studied in them the most profoundly interesting spectacle which life has ever 
offered to the art of fiction, with elements of equal tragedy and comedy, and a 
pathos through all which must be expressed, if the full significance of the 
spectacle were to be felt.

II.
(May 5, 1899)

Mr. Thorstein Veblen does not evolve his Theory of the Leisure Class from his 
knowledge of that class in America alone. Until very lately we had no such 
class, and we rather longed for it. We thought it would edify us, or, if not 
that, at least ornament us; but now that we have got it, on certain terms, we 
can hardly be sure that it does either. The good things that we expected of it 
have not come to pass, and perhaps it is too soon; but in Mr. Veblen's analysis 
our leisure class does not seem essentially different from any of the older 
aristocracies, which seem not to have brought to pass the good things expected 
of them and often attributed to them. As with these, "pecuniary emulation" and 
"conspicuous leisure" are the first evidences of its superiority, and 
"conspicuous consumption," direct or delegated in the splendid apparelling and 
housing of its women and its dependents, is one of the gross means of striking 
the popular imagination. The "pecuniary standard of living" is really the only 
standard, and the "pecuniary canons of taste" are finally the only canons; for 
if the costly things are not always beautiful, all beautiful things which are 
cheap must be rejected because they are not costly. "Dress as an expression of 
pecuniary culture" is left in our day mostly to women by the leisure class; but 
the men of that class share in it at least as fully as in the "devout 
observances" and "the higher learning." Both sexes in our leisure class, as in 
the European aristocracies, are distinguished by the love of sport, in which 
they prolong their own childhood and the childhood of the race, and they are 
about equally devoted to the opera and the fine arts, as these minister to their 
magnificence. It would be hard, in fact, to draw the line between our leisure 
class and any aristocracy in the traits of piety, predacity, courage, prowess, 
charity, luxury, conservatism, authority, and the other virtues and vices which 
have characterised the patricians in all times.
The most notable difference, and the difference which would most invite the 
study of the novelist, is that hitherto our leisure class has had no political 
standing. It has had no place in the civic mechanism; but we seem to be at the 
moment when this is ceasing to be less apparently so. It is idle to suppose 
because the leisure class, which with us is the moneyed class, does not hold 
public offices that it does not control public affairs; and possibly it has 
always controlled them more than we have imagined. The present proof is in the 
fact that the industrial classes, with all the means of power in their hands, 
are really powerless in any contest with a group of rich men; it is almost 
impossible for the people to balk the purpose of such a group; to undo what 
money has done has been so impossible, with all the apparatus of the elections, 
the legislatures, the courts, that there is hardly yet an instance of the kind 
in our history.
All this, however, makes the situation the more attractive to a novelist of 
imaginative force. This is the most dramatic moment, the most psychological 
moment which has ever offered itself to fiction; this is the supreme opportunity 
of the American novelist. Hitherto our politics have repelled the artist by 
their want of social complexity, by their rude simplicity, as a fight between 
parties. But if he can look at the situation from the point of view suggested, 
as an inevitable result from the nature of the class which Mr. Veblen has 
studied, I believe he will find it full of charm. If he is psychologist enough 
he will be fascinated by the operation of the silent forces which are, almost 
unconsciously, working out the permanency of a leisure class, and preparing for 
it in our own circumstance the ultimation it now seeks elsewhere.

But I should be content if he would portray the life of our leisure class 
without an eye to such implications, with an eye merely to its superficial 
facts. If he did this he would appeal to the widest general interest in our 
reading public. Our appetite for everything that relates to the life removed 
from the life of work, from the simple republican ideal, is almost insatiable. 
It strives to satisfy itself, in plays and romances, with the doings of princes 
and nobles in realms as surely fictitious as Lilliput and Brobdingnag; it gluts 
itself, in the newspapers, with fables almost as gross as Gulliver's concerning 
the social affairs of our leisure class.
Seen truly and reproduced faithfully these would be extremely interesting, and 
the field they offer to inquiry is almost wholly unexplored. Our fiction has 
brought pretty fully into literature the country and village life of the 
Americans of all sections. We know this through our short stories in New 
England, in the South, in the middle and farther West, and on the Pacific Slope; 
and in a certain measure our novels have acquainted us with the lower and upper 
middleclass life in the minor and even the greater cities. But the attempts to 
deal with the life of fashion, of luxury, of leisure, have been so insufficient 
that they cannot be considered. This life can hardly be studied by one who is a 
part of it, not merely because that sort of life is not fruitful in talent, but 
because the procession cannot very well look on at itself. The observer must 
have some favorable position on the outside, and must regard it neither "with a 
foolish face of praise," nor with a satiric scorn. Like every other phase of 
life, it has its seriousness, its importance, and one who studies it rightly 
will find in it the old elements of interest so newly compounded that they will 
merit his most intelligent scrutiny, often his most sympathetic scrutiny. It 
would be easy to burlesque it, but to burlesque it would be intolerable, and the 
witness who did this would be bearing false testimony where the whole truth and 
nothing but the truth is desirable. A democracy, the proudest, the most sincere, 
the most ardent that history has ever known, has evolved here a leisure class 
which has all the distinguishing traits of a patriciate, and which by the 
chemistry of intermarriage with European aristocracies is rapidly acquiring 
antiquity. Is not this a phenomenon worthy the highest fiction?
Mr. Veblen has brought to its study the methods and habits of scientific 
inquiry. To translate these into dramatic terms would form the unequalled 
triumph of the novelist who had the seeing eye and the thinking mind, not to 
mention the feeling heart. That such a thing has not been done hitherto is all 
the stranger, because fiction, in other countries, has always employed itself 
with the leisure class, with the aristocracy; and our own leisure class now 
offers not only as high an opportunity as any which fiction has elsewhere 
enjoyed, but by its ultimation in the English leisure class, it invites the 
American imagination abroad on conditions of unparalleled advantage.
--- The End ---