LONDON LETTER
267
A postscript about the Snow-Leavis controversy. As the world
now knows, on February the 28th F. R. Leavis delivered, in the sheltered
atmosphere ·of the hall at Downing College Cambridge, to an audience
officially limited to the undergraduate and graduate body of the College
an attack upon Sir Charles Snow under the title "The Significance of
C. P. Snow." In 1959, in the same university, though in a more public
setting, C. P. Snow had taken on a larger target-the culture of "the
entire West"-and had attacked it no less radically though more tempe–
rately than he himself was to be by Leavis. In "The Two Cultures and
the Scientific Revolution," Snow's case was that our culture is divided,
not exhaustively but almost so, into two elements which he identified
as "the scientific culture" and the culture of "the literary intellectuals";
each of these is somewhat defective in itself, one rather more than the
other, but it is their isolation, their mutual exclusiveness, that is so
dangerous to the cause of progress. Snow's lecture had a lively though
mixed reception. Those who hate science or who cling to a rather
narrow notion, endemic to the English tradition, of what are "humane
studies," denounced Snow as a philistine. Scientists who felt either them–
selves or their subject to be despised or slighted, welcomed him as a
champion. Many people committed to neither camp thought that the
lecture might
be
useful, if only because
it
might encourage thinking to
go further in a direction in which Snow himself had obviously stopped
short.
But it cannot really be claimed that "The Two Cultures and the
Scientific Revolution" became the subject of a fruitful discussion. And
for this the poverty of Snow's text was primarily to blame. In the first
place, his characterization of the two cultures was obviously inadequate.
The scientist and (to a greater extent) the literary intellectual, whom
he conjured up for us as the two polar types of our culture, belong
more to the unreality of the British theater than to the reality of
British life. Secondly, Snow failed totally to make clear what he under–
stood to be the true cultural value of science or to show, to the
satisfaction either of the unconverted or the converted, why "education"
in the modern age was necessarily incomplete without some scientific
instruction. In this task he was not helped either by the systematic
confusion he made throughout the lecture between science and tech–
nology or by the very unfortunate examples he gave of the sort of
scientific subject that, in his opinion, an educated man might be ex–
pected to know about-the second law of thermodynamics, and the
"human organization" necessary for running a button factory. Thirdly,
the attack upon modern literature for being obscure in form and re-
