after (nearly) 50 years.
In 1959 C.P. Snow delivered the annual Rede lecture in Cambridge, entitled, ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, in which he asserted that there were two distinct and mutually uncomprehending groups, composed on the one hand by scientists, and on the other by ‘literary intellectuals’ – a division which he dubbed ‘the two cultures’. The phrase, and the lecture itself, quickly gained a certain currency both in Britain and the United States (President Kennedy was said to admire it). Its notoriety was fully confirmed, however, in 1962, when F.R. Leavis, an important literary critic and teacher at Cambridge, delivered a stinging counterblast in another annual lecture at the university entitled ‘Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow’, which, because of the satirical virulence of its critique of Snow, unleashed a furious exchange in newspapers and weekly journals: for a time everyone seemed either ‘for Snow’ or ‘for Leavis’.
So why revisit this ‘academic squabble’ now? Well partly because of the approaching anniversary – whch has already been marked by a couple of programmes on Radio 4, very inadequately judging by the first of them – but more importantly because the issues raised by Leavis in his reply are still vital, and finally because Leavis himself is now regrettably ‘out of fashion’: if I could encourage a few people to engage actively with his work, this piece will have justified itself.
The first thing that may strike a contemporary reader is the force of the attack on Snow himself. The following extracts may give an idea of what I mean:
“…The Two Cultures exhibits an utter lack of intellectual distinction and an embarrassing vulgarity of style.” (p.44) “As far as the internal evidence goes, the lecture was conceived and written by someone who had not had the advantage of an intellectual discipline of any kind.’ (p.47) ‘If his lecture has any value for use in schools – or universities – it is as a document for the study of cliché.’ (p.50)
(The paragraphs which follow this, on the nature of clichés and their impact on thinking are themselves worth reading and pondering). The remarks on Snow as a novelist are also devastating (and right). But the real substance of Leavis’s critique is that the opposition advanced by Snow is a false one; that Snow himself gives no evidence of a scientific training; and that his opposed term ‘the literary intellectual’, “is the intellectual of the New Statesman circle and the reviewing in the Sunday papers… For his ‘literary culture’ is something that those genuinely interested in literature can only regard with contempt and resolute hostility. Snow’s ‘literary intellectual’ is the enemy of art and life.” (pp.48-9)
By way of illustrating the vacuity of Snow’s implied claim that he himself bridged these two cultures, Leavis comments: “He enforces his intention by telling us, after reporting the failure of his literary friends to describe the second law of thermodynamics: ‘yet I was asking something which is about the equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?’ There is no scientific equivalent of that question; equations between orders so disparate are meaningless…” (p.61)
But the real importance of Leavis’s lecture for us today are the positive remarks – for as he says at the outset, “My preoccupation is positive in spirit.” First there are his remarks on literature, of which the following is fairly representative:
“The urgent creative exploring represented by questions is immeasurably more complex in Women in Love [than in Conrad’s The Shadow Line] a comprehensive and intensely ‘engaged’ study of modern civilization. Of course, to such questions there can’t be, in any ordinary sense of the word ‘answers’, and the effect of total ‘ answer’ differs between Conrad and Lawrence as between any two great writers. But life in the civilization of an age for which such creative questioning is not done and is not influential on general sensibility tends characteristically to lack a dimension: it tends to have no depth – no depth against which it doesn’t tacitly protect itself by the habit of unawareness (so Snow enjoins us to do our living in the dimension of ‘social hope’). In coming to terms with great literature we discover what at bottom we really believe. What for – what ultimately for? What do men live by? – the questions work and tell at what I can only call a religious depth of thought and feeling. Perhaps, with my eye on the adjective, I may just recall for you Tom Brangwen, in The Rainbow, watching by the fold in lambing-time under the night sky: ‘He knew he did not belong to himself.’” (p.56)
I’m grateful for such remarks, and wish I could hear more critics and teachers talk in this way. Of course I write as someone with a literary training and an enduring interest in “English”, but I often reread certain pieces by Leavis because he combines a passionate engagement with a real sensibility and a rare ability to think. (I recommend ‘Tragedy’ and the ‘Medium’, in ‘The Common Pursuit’, together with ‘Literature and Society’ in the same volume, both of which demonstrate that genuine literary criticism is inevitably concerned with much more than the “literary”).
Late in his life, Leavis described the critic as ‘anti-philosopher’, (he knew Wittgenstein – and wrote a fascinating memoir of their encounters – who one day urged him to “give up literary criticism!” which Leavis always regretted not countering with “give up philosophy!”). However, his work does have “philosophical” implications, in particular his remarks on judgment and the “third realm”:
“It is in the study of literature, the literature of one’s own language in the first place, that one comes to recognize the nature and the priorities of the third realm (as, unphilosophically, no doubt, I call it, talking with my pupils), the realm of that which is neither merely private and personal nor public in the sense that it can be brought into the laboratory or pointed to. You cannot point to the poem; it is ‘there’ only in the re-creative response of individual minds to the black marks on the page. But – a necessary faith – it is something in which minds can meet. The process in which this faith is justified is given fairly enough in an account of the nature of criticism. A judgment is personal or it is nothing; you cannot take over someone else’s. The implicit form of a judgment is: This is so, isn’t it? The question is an appeal for confirmation that the thing is so; implicitly that, though expecting, characteristically, an answer in the form, ‘yes, but –’ the ‘but’ standing for qualifications, reserves, corrections. Here we have a diagram of the collaborative-creative process in which the poem comes to be established as something ‘out there’, of common access in what is in some sense a public world. It gives us, too, the nature of the existence of English literature, a living whole that can have its life only in the living present, in the creative response of individuals, who collaboratively renew and perpetuate what they participate in – a cultural community of consciousness. More, it gives us the nature in general of what I have called the ‘third realm’ to which all that makes us human belongs.” (p.62)
Finally who can remain untouched by his extension of this approach to his conception of the university?
“Like Snow I look to the university. Unlike Snow, I am concerned to make it really a university, something (that is) more than a collocation of specialist departments – to make it a centre of human consciousness: perception, knowledge, judgment and responsibility.” (p.63)
Given that the university as it has become in our time can no longer fulfill this lofty – but essential – ideal, what form could such a centre take?
Note: my references are to the version of the lecture printed in Nor Shall My Sword (1972)
Julian Arloff