Another example of the difficulty which literary people have in waking up into the age of science is the attitude of Frank Harris and H. L. Mencken toward the works of Professor Thorstein Veblen. Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class is one of the two or three original and indispensable additions to the understanding of mankind in society that have been made in the lifetime of these critics. It is a book the fundamental ideas of which have become common currency in the intercourse of all alert men of scientific mind. Indeed, I do not see how any one who is interested in general truth can do without it, once he has made its ideas his own. But "literary" people have rather a pale interest in general truth. Their interest is in particular experiences. The apprehension of general truth is a particular experience, and as such they usually judge it. If it does not make something of a poetic "go" among their emotions, they reject it offhand, the idea of general verification being foreign to the whole aim and tenor of their lives. I am putting this in extreme language, but hardly 2extreme enough to explain the contemptuous attitude of two men as brainy as Frank Harris and H. L. Mencken toward Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. Veblen is not only an "original thinker"; he is also, without a doubt, the most learned man in the United States, the most perspicaciously learned, and that too makes their attitude toward his intellect a little hard to explain.

As to their attitude toward his literary style, I do not know what can explain it. I thought that everybody who has a lively appreciation even of contemporary literature knew that Veblen is a Satirist. Aristophanes went up into the clouds, Plato to the moon, Voltaire to another planet, Rabelais among the giants, Swift to the Lilliputians, and Anatole France to the penguins, in order to make fun of human nature from a distance and with playful indirectness. With the same motive Thorstein Veblen goes up into a realm of ineffable abstraction--and with the same success, for those who have sufficient mental energy to follow him. It makes us smile to hear these critics poking fun at Veblen's big words when Veblen with his big words is only more delicately poking fun at them, and himself, and the whole pretentious race of mankind to 3which we all have the ridiculous folly to belong. I do not mean to give unqualified endorsement to Veblen as an artist. I think that he has conceived and created an absolutely new and original literary flavor, and in many passages he has achieved it to the point of perfection; but upon the whole his performance is careless, impatient; he is not sure; he is not the master of what he is doing. Like most Americans in art, he is satisfied with a half performance. And in many cases he is not an artist at all and deserves to be condemned from the standpoint of his own achievement. But to judge him in the essence of that achievement as anything but an artist in irony seems surprising in critics as proud of their perception as Menchen and Frank Harris. They remind me, with their serious jokes on Veblen's style, of the man who was advised by a neighbor to pull down his blinds.

"I saw you getting into bed with your wife last night," said the neighbor.

"That's a good joke on you," replied the husband. "I was out of town last night."