Page:Carroll Lane Fenton - Darwin and the Theory of Evolution.djvu/60

 Rh 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. 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