466
PARTISAN REVIEW
certainly expect all of Shakespeare's plays to become musical comedies
soon enough, a phenomenon which should make the Metro-Goldwyn–
Mayer lion roar:
Ars gratia artis,
which, as everyone knows, means
Art for the sake of the Almighty Dollar. Mr. W. Somerset Maugham has
helped by editing Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and others, so that the discursive
and "uninteresting" passages in their masterpieces would not be present
to irritate and bore the hurried reader. And the supreme dragon of
television, which may transform motion-picture palaces into bare ruined
choirs where late Bing Crosby sang, can very well make any doubts or
hesitations about modern literature irrelevant or meaningless. Just as
Gulliver's Travels
became a children's book,
As You L ike It, Hamlet,
King Lear,
and
Oedipus R ex
may eventually appear as comic books.
Sooner or later, moreover, no one will have to read anything at all:
everything will be on the television scream. Television scripts will be
written by those who have spent their happy childhoods looking at
television performances, and then there will obviously be no need what–
ever any longer to discuss the virtues and the limitations of Gide and of
modern literature.
Delmore Schwartz
THE PRAGMATIC HERO
THE LETTERS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT: THE YEARS OF PREPARA–
TION. 1868-1900. Edited by Elting E. Mori$on. Harvard University Press.
2
volumes.
$20.
"These, then, are my last words to you," said William James
to the Harvard chapter of the Young Men's Christian Association in
1895: "Be not afraid of life. Believe that life
is
worth living, and your
belief will help create the fact." He was expressing what would become
a basic aspect of the ethics of pragmatism; he was expressing too what
was, on many levels, a characteristic faith of his time-the faith in
the capacity of the will to achieve anything. Orison Swett Marden's
Pushing to the Front: or Success u.nder Difficulties
had begun its enorm–
ous popular success the year before; William Makepeace Thayer's
Turning Points in Successful Careers
was published the same year. They
all praised the "iron will." "Life," said Marden, "is what we make it.
. _ . Give a youth resolution and the alphabet, and who shall place
limits to
his
career?" James called it "the will to believe" and Marden
