The Fine and the Good - Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America - page 94

stained glass window dapples the ample bodice of a duchess. So, the more the American
values of industry and self-discipline thrive, the more the European virtues will flourish.
Yet the opposite is true as well. The more ruthlessly acquisitive people become, the more
civilised values come under siege. The process of amassing wealth threatens to undermine
the fine living that can result from it. Life is more agreeable if you are rich, but actually
making money is not particularly agreeable.
James moved in the kind of social world in which you can see that a man and a woman
must be having an affair because when you come across them alone in a drawing room, he
is sitting down while she is standing up. Yet in the chilling words of his secretary, Theodora
Bosanquet, “When he walked out of the refuge of his study and into the world and looked
about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws
into the quivering flesh of doomed, defenceless children of light.” In this cut-throat civil-
isation, the only way to avoid harming others may be to renounce life altogether. Or it may
be to live vicariously, through the consciousness of others, as the artist does. Art is a way
of engaging with life while keeping it at arm's length. It is the bitter fruit of never hav-
ing really lived. It combines the American virtues of austerity and self-restraint with the
European values of fine living.
Divided Nation
James, who died in 1916, was not to know that American and European values would be-
come even more interwoven in the century after his death. One of the most striking para-
doxes of the United States is that a nation of austere, industrious men and women gave
birth to a culture of liberal values and rampant hedonism. In the end, all that draining of
swamps and hacking down forests resulted in one of the world's great civilisations. It also
resulted in Hugh Hefner and Ben & Jerry. Or, to put the point differently, industrial capital-
ism eventually yielded to consumer capitalism, as it did elsewhere in the world. Elsewhere,
however, the contrast between the two is not always so glaring. Italy and Greece are con-
sumer societies, but these nations were not founded by men in white collars and tall black
hats who believed that enjoyment for its own sake was the work of the devil.
There is no mystery about how men in tall black hats ended up as cigar-chewing Holly-
wood moguls. Entertainment is big business. Adventure was converted into enterprise. You
could consecrate the profane realm of pleasure by absorbing it into the sober domain of
commerce. Rather as Henry James explored reality through the arm's-length device known
as art, so you can engage with humour, drama, and sensual enjoyment through the arm's-
length device known as profit. You must not wallow mindlessly in the senses, but it is al-
right to do so if it serves an abstract, rational end beyond itself, namely, the expansion of
your capital.