COMMENT
THE GR APES OF CRISI S
From knowledge comes sUffering.
From suffering comes knowledge.
Generalizations are notoriously easy, false, dangerous, and
necessary. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who declared that "no
generalization is entirely true, not even this one," a remark which,
like so many witticisms, can be quite misleading, since some general–
izations are entirely false, some are false to a large extent, some are
true except for a few exceptions, and some are entirely true (for
example, the generalization that human beings postpone and procras–
tinate about tasks which they do not like, or perform these tasks with too
much haste and impatience). The few generalizations which I intend
to propose are, I think, neither entirely true nor entirely false; and
I can only guess about the extent to which they are true. But apart
from their truth, they seem to me to be worth examining for the
sake of the examples which have suggested them and the further or
opposed generalizations which they may suggest to the reader.
TRAGEDY WITH A HAPPY ENDING
The happy ending is no longer fashionable and certainly it
is
no longer one of the iron laws of the box office. When Edith
Wharton's novel,
The Age of Innocence,
was made into a play and
produced on Broadway and soon proved to be a failure, William
Dean Howells told Mrs. Wharton that what the American public
wanted was a tragedy with a happy ending. It is not even perfectly
clear that the public wanted a tragedy at all-melodrama probably
was as far as the dramatist was supposed to go in the direction of
King Lear
(which was itself revised in the nineteenth century, thus
delighting no lesser person than Leo Tolstoy no end). And the hun–
dreds of motion pictures which have had a happy ending as hasty,
distasteful, and forced as a shot-gun marriage illustrate the obvious
