the enthusiasm for things other than the arts, and the constant strain of ill health. As Poulton says, "Professor Bradley has spoken of the errors of interpretation due to the reading of Shakespeare with a slack imagination; and any literature worth calling literature demands effort on the part of the reader. Effort was the one thing Darwin could not give." The whole group of factors formed a vicious ring which was bound to exclude everything but work—a ring not very different from that which forms about the average graduate student in our modern colleges.[1] Perhaps had Darwin never given up literature it would have required less strain of him in later years, but that he did so was no sign, as he seemed to think, of a mind not highly organized.
A little farther on is another piece of self-analysis of equal candor, and perhaps even greater value as substantiating the claim that
- ↑ Few people realize the approximate illiteracy of the American graduate student, just as they fail to understand the similar failing among the undergraduate body. I well remember that, even as a freshman, I was astonished at the slight knowledge of literature and painting shown by graduate students at the University of Chicago. Not only are they ignorant of the better modern artists, but they do not even know the names of many leaders of the last century. In music they are nearly as bad; they form their judgments in accordance with the Victrola advertisements; such music as that of Russia, which calls for thought as well as feeling. is beyond most of them. Yet the student is matched by some, at least, of the professors. Just this year (1923) a department head in one of the country's foremost universities confused Eugene O'Neill, America’s leading playwright, with Edgar Rice Burroughs, of "Tarzan" fame.—C. L. F.
