A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
THE remarkable interest in art among undergraduates is, I think, something rather new in the university firma- ment. At Cambridge, Professor Nicolas Pevsner, who now holds the Slade Chair of Fine Arts, is drawing audiences of from five to six hundred, in the largest lecture - room
available, for a series of seven lectures on Dffrer, and at the same time a series on broader aspects of art at the Fitzwilliam Museum is proving in its way equally popular. At Oxford, Sir Kenneth Clark's lectures were so crowded that he had to move into the Town Hall. This, I fancy, is something entirely new, which should cheer the hearts of humanists generally. All the same, there is another aspect. Lecturers whose job it is to get their pupils through exams, and who hold that on principle it is a good thing for pupils to get through exams, feel that the said pupils tend to seize the opportunity of dashing off to get a veneer of culture instead of throwing their energies into those aspects of political economy or quadrics in four or five dimensions which happen to be relevant at the moment. That may be true, too. But it is hard not to welcome the action of science students at Cambridge in appealing formally to the English Faculty to arrange some lectures in the universities for their benefit.
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