The selections here placed together under the head, "The
University Group," are taken from the works of authors who
have taught or who are now teaching in the University of
Wisconsin, and who may, therefore, be said both to have
influenced it in its ideals and to have been influenced by
it. The work of the editors in this section of the volume has
been at once peculiarly pleasant and difficult. It has been
pleasant because, under the shadow of Wisconsin's greatest
institution of learning, there has come into birth a large
body of interesting, instructive, and thoroughly worth-while
literary material. The task has been difficult because the
line between technical and special material treated in a
literary way, and what may be styled pure literature, is very
hard to draw. The editors realize thoroughly their
fallibility in the making of these selections. So many books
have been written, and so many contributions to both popular
and technical magazines have been made by teachers in the
University, that it is a physical impossibility even to scan
them with any sure result of fairness or equity in the
selection of real literature from the great mass that has
been produced. The most that is claimed for the present
selections is that at least they are thoroughly worth-while.
No doubt a search covering sufficient time and dealing with a
sufficiently large portion of the output of the University
would reveal other works and other men worthy of
representation in this volume.
There is another consideration that should be mentioned as
rendering the task of the present editors peculiarly
difficult: All but one of the men whose works are mentioned
here are now living. Aside from the impossibility of wholly
pleasing any man by a selection from or a criticism of his
work, there is the inevitable fact that since most of these
men are young, their actual relative standing as producers of
literature is constantly and rapidly changing. As one reads
the selections in the following pages, he is impressed most
of all by the spirit of buoyancy and youth that pervades
them. Scarcely a single selection here, even those by the
older men, bears the imprint of satiety or completion. All
are pulsing with life, hopefulness, buoyancy, and promise.
Again, in a book of this nature, selections must necessarily
be brief. It is not possible to give really adequate
representation to any one of these men, since the laws of
space are inexorable.
Perhaps the one thing common to all sections in this
group--the thing which will most readily and profoundly
impress even the youngest reader--is a feeling of breadth of
experience, wide observation, earnest, keen, and insatiable
desire for truth,--in fact, all the opposites of narrowness,
prejudice, provincialism. One feels at once that the writers
here have read widely and well, that they have a fund of
facts gained both from books and at first hand through travel
and observation, and that their emotions and their judgments
spring from this well of truth as they see it.