The Fine and the Good - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 93

able but not charming. But this may be the price they have to pay for not injuring others.
It is a fearsomely steep price, not least in the eyes of the supremely stylish James, but you
cannot quarrel with it in the end. In the end, the good must win out over the fine. Yet it is
the fine who make life worth living. If you have to choose between style and substance,
then you must go for substance. But the fact that you have to choose in the first place sug-
gests that something is amiss.
Europe is a civilisation rich in experience, but one that is somehow tainted. Guilt and
corruption are never far from the coruscating surfaces of social life. Because they are more
“aesthetic” than Americans, more taken with form, pleasure, and a dazzling play of appear-
ances, Europeans look at the world with the detached, wryly amused stance of an artistic
observer, and this can prove morally irresponsible. They can also treat other people as aes-
thetic objects. Art is the fullest way to live, but it is never far from exploitation. It is also
never far from a sort of sterility, one which is ironically close to the way James sees so
much everyday American existence. Art must radiate a sense of how to live; but it may
be that the artist can achieve this only by devoting himself religiously to his art, and thus,
ironically, failing to live himself.
Art for James is a constant self-sacrifice. It involves giving the self away, not noisily
asserting it in the manner of entrepreneurial America. If being an artist means not living
to the full, then art is a kind of failure and vacancy, as well as a supreme expression of
human life. It is not on the side of the success ethic. There is thus a sense in which art is
un-American. It is also un-American because it involves the tragedy of the unfulfilled self.
Yet this may not be the whole story. One of James's most acute insights is his sense of
how close self-abandonment may be to a kind of selfishness. It is hard to say whether some
of his characters are behaving with beautiful disinterestedness or brutal egoism. They may
be either martyrs or monsters. So art, which involves self-sacrifice, may not be all that far
from self-interest after all.
If Europe and America were simple opposites, things would be relatively straightfor-
ward. But for James this is by no means true. Culture of the European kind is the product
of leisure, and leisure is the product of labour. Only by the kind of Protestant work ethic
for which America is renowned can you pile up enough wealth to set people free for the
higher things in life. Only if the many toil away in their workshops can the few stroll the
art galleries of Florence and Vienna. In this sense, civilised values rest on violence and ex-
ploitation. The European virtues are dependent on the American ones. The two places are
not such opposites after all. Civility means the kind of gracious living that has lost sight of
its own murky origins. If it could recall them—if it lacked this saving blind spot—it might
not be able to survive.
The point is to have so much money that you don't need to think about it. Having an
enormous amount of wealth sets you free from wealth. It grants you the time instead to
note how the fragrance of lilies drifts through the gathering dusk, or how the light from a