397
PARTISAN REVIEW
It
is for this reason that Rahv's contrast of paleface James and
redskin Whitman was the reverse of felicitous. On the one hand,
the mature James greatly esteemed Whitman as poet and man,
notwithstanding a harshly critical essay about Whitman written
very early in James's career. On the other hand, James identified
himself not with palefaces but with the American Indians. He
did so, moreover, in the context of a devastating social and cul–
tural indictment of the United
States-The American Scene.
Like
Nietzsche, the prophesizer of "the fight for the dominion of the
earth," James showed (as Leon Edel has pointed out) remarkable
prescience in his political and cultural commentary, especially
that pertaining to the future of England and the United States.
My point is not that James should be regarded as a writer
oriented toward social and political reform but rather that his re–
lationship to such concerns was far more complex than the usual
image of him implies. Born in 1843 and 1844 respectively, James
and Nietzsche lived during a time when the relationship of the
artist and intellectual to his cultural milieu was being radically
transformed. "With the fall of the aristocratic world," Leon
Schucking said, there developed "a conception of artistic creative
work in which no regard was paid to the existing public and the
writer had in view only the ideal reader." The changed concep–
tion was to result in the cult of
l'art pour l'art,
exemplified in
f.ngl~nd
by Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and in Germany by
Stefar. George. That James and Nietzsche were (and still some–
times ilre) associated with these figures is not surprising. Both
saw themselves, especially during their late periods, as writing
for an
~li~e.
Nonetheless, their aestheticism was balanced by an
equally
~tp::mg
affinity for a classical ideal of wholeness of char–
acter championed by Goethe and Arnold. Whether in James's
cosmopolitanism or Nietzsche's notion of the "Good European,"
there is projected a sort of nineteenth-century Renaissance man,
~n
aristocr<ltic notion of the strong, integrated personality who
poes not separate art from life but appropriates both for his own
self-~xpression.
Nietzsche's hostility toward the specialized sci–
ence
p,f
G-erman philology and James's disdain for the abstract
philosophizing of his brother reflect their view that knowledge is
useful only when put in the service of life. The conservatism of
the two writers is illustrated by their tendency-a tendency
shared by Arnold and Goethe-to despise the "equality" cham-
