The only writer of world-class who seems to have had an understanding of the industrial revolution was Ibsen in his old age: and there wasn‘t much that old man didn‘t understand.
Clearly, there is still less Sir Charles Snow doesn‘t understand: he pays the tribute with authority. We take the implication and take it the more surely at its full value because it carries the élan, the essential inspiration, of the whole self-assured performance. Yet Snow is in fact portentously ignorant. No doubt he could himself pass with ease the tests he proposes for his literary friends with the intimation that they would fail them, and so expose themselves as deplorably less well educated in respect of science than he, though a scientist, can claim to be in respect of literature. I have no doubt that he can define a machine-tool and state the second law of thermodynamics. It is even possible, I suppose (though I am obliged to say that the evidence seems to me to be against it), that he could make a plausible show of being inward with the Contradiction of Parity, that esoteric upshot of highly subtle experiment which, he suggests, if things were well with our education, would have been a major topic at our High Tables. But of history, of the nature of civilisation and the history of its recent developments, of the human history of the Industrial Revolution, of the human significances entailed in that revolution, of literature, of the nature of that kind of collaborative human creativity of which literature is the type, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Snow exposes complacently a complete ignorance.
The judgment I have to come out with is that not only is he not a genius; he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be. If that were all, and Snow were merely negligible, there would be no need to say so in any insistent public way, and one wouldn‘t choose to do it. But I used the adverb ‘portentously‘ just now with full intention: Snow is a portent. He is a portent in that, being in himself negligible, he has become for a vast public on both sides of the Atlantic a master-mind and a sage. His significance is that he has been accepted – or perhaps the point is better made by saying ‘created‘: he has been created as authoritative intellect by the cultural conditions manifested in his acceptance. Really distinguished minds are themselves, of course, of their age; they are responsive at the deepest level to its peculiar strains and challenges: that is why they are able to be truly illuminating and prophetic and to influence the world positively and creatively. Snow‘s relation to the age is of a different kind; it is characterised not by insight and spiritual energy, but by blindness, unconsciousness and automatism. He doesn‘t know what he means, and doesn‘t know he doesn‘t know. That is what his intoxicating sense of a message and a public function, his inspiration, amounts to. It is not any challenge he thinks of himself as uttering, but the challenge he is, that demands our attention. The commentary I have to make on him is necessarily drastic and dismissive; but don‘t, I beg, suppose that I am enjoying a slaughterous field-day. Snow, I repeat, is in himself negligible. My preoccupation is positive in spirit. Snow points to its nature when he turns his wisdom upon education and the university.
I have not been quick to propose for myself the duty of dealing with him: that will, I hope, be granted. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, the Rede Lecture which established him as an Intellect and a Sage, was given at this ancient university in 1959. I turned over the pages of the printed lecture in the show-room of the Cambridge University Press, was struck by the mode of expression Snow found proper and natural, perceived plainly enough what kind of performance the lecture was, and had no inclination to lay down three and sixpence. To my surprise, however, it rapidly took on the standing of a classic. It was continually being referred to – and not only in the Sunday papers – as if Snow, that rarely qualified and profoundly original mind, had given trenchant formulation to a key contemporary truth. What brought me to see that I must overcome the inner protest, and pay my three and sixpence, was the realising, from marking scholarship scripts, that sixth-form masters were making their bright boys read Snow as doctrinal, definitive and formative – and a good examination investment.
Well, I bought the lecture last summer, and, having noted that it had reached the sixth printing, read it through. I was then for the first time in a position to know how mild a statement it is to say that The Two Cultures exhibits an utter lack of intellectual distinction and an embarrassing vulgarity of style. The lecture, in fact, with its show of giving us the easily controlled spontaneity of the great man‘s talk, exemplifies kinds of bad writing in such richness and so significant a way that there would, I grant, be some point in the schoolmaster‘s using it as a text for elementary criticism; criticism of the style, here, becomes, as it follows down into analysis, criticism of the thought, the essence, the pretensions.
The intellectual nullity is what constitutes any difficulty there may be in dealing with Snow‘s panoptic pseudo-cogencies, his parade of a thesis: a mind to be argued with – that is not there; what we have is something other. Take that crucial term ‘culture,‘ without which and the work he relies on it to do for him Snow would be deprived of his seer‘s profundity and his show of a message. His use of it focuses for us (if I may be permitted what seems to me an apt paradox) the intellectual nullity; it confronts us unmistakably with the absence of the thought that is capable of posing problems (let alone answering them). The general nature of his position and his claim to authority are well known: there are the two uncommunicating and mutually indifferent cultures, there is the need to bring them together, and there is C. P. Snow, whose place in history is that he has them both, so that we have in him the paradigm of the desired and necessary union.
Snow is, of course, a – no, I can‘t say that; he isn‘t: Snow thinks of himself as a novelist. I don‘t want to discuss that aspect of him, but I can‘t avoid saying something. The widespread belief that he is a distinguished novelist (and that it should be widespread is significant of the conditions that produced him) has certainly its part in the success with which he has got himself accepted as a mind. The seriousness with which he takes himself as a novelist is complete – if seriousness can be so ineffably blank, so unaware. Explaining why he should have cut short a brilliant career (we are to understand) as a scientist, he tells us that it had always been his vocation to be a writer. And he assumes with a happy and undoubting matter-of-factness – the signs are unmistakable – that his sense of vocation has been triumphantly vindicated and that he is beyond question a novelist of a high order (of ‘world-class‘ even, to adopt his own idiom). Confidence so astonishingly enjoyed might politely be called memorable – if one could imagine the memory of Snow the novelist long persisting; but it won‘t, it can‘t, in spite of the British Council‘s brochure on him (he is a British Council classic). I say ‘astonishingly enjoyed,‘ for as a novelist he doesn‘t exist; he doesn‘t begin to exist. He can‘t be said to know what a novel is. The nonentity is apparent on every page of his fictions – consistently manifested, whatever aspect of a novel one looks for. I am trying to remember where I heard (can I have dreamed it?) that they are composed for him by an electronic brain called Charlie, into which the instructions are fed in the form of the chapter headings. However that may be, he – or the brain (if that‘s the explanation) – can‘t do any of the things the power to do which makes a novelist. He tells you what you are to take him as doing, but he can give you no more than the telling. When the characters are supposed to fall in love you are told they do, but he can‘t show it happening. Abundant dialogue assures you that this is the novelistic art, but never was dialogue more inept; to imagine it spoken is impossible. And Snow is helpless to suggest character in speech. He announces in his chapter-headings the themes and developments in which we are to see the significance of what follows, but what follows adds nothing to the effect of the announcement, and there is no more significance in the completed book than there is drama – or life. It is not merely that Snow can‘t make his characters live for us – that he lacks that creative power; the characters as he thinks of them are so impoverished in the interests they are supposed to have and to represent that even if they had been made to live, one would have asked of them, individually and in the lump: ‘What of life is there here, and what significance capable of engaging an educated mind could be conveyed through such representatives of humanity?‘
Among the most current novels of Snow‘s are those which offer to depict from the inside the senior academic world of Cambridge, and they suggest as characteristic of that world lives and dominant interests of such unrelieved and cultureless banality that, if one could credit Snow‘s art with any power of imaginative impact, one would say that he had done his university much harm – for this is a time when the image of the ancient university that is entertained at large matters immensely. Even when he makes a suspect piece of research central to his plot, as in that feeble exercise, The Affair, he does no more than a very incompetent manufacturer of whodunnits could do: no corresponding intellectual interest comes into the novel; science is a mere word, the vocation merely postulated. It didn‘t take a brilliant research scientist to deal with the alleged piece of research as Snow deals with it – or a scientist of any kind. Both George Eliot and Lawrence could have made such a theme incomparably more real.
What the novelist really believes in, the experience he identifies his profoundest ego with because it makes him feel himself a distinguished man and a lord of life, is given us in Lewis Eliot. Eliot has inhabited the Corridors of Power; that is what really matters; that is what qualifies him to look down upon these dons, the scientists as well as the literary intellectuals, with a genially ‘placing‘ wisdom from above; there we have the actual Snow, who, I repeat, is a portent of our civilisation; there we have the explanation of his confident sense of importance, which, in an extraordinary way, becomes where his writing is concerned a conviction of genius: he has known from inside the Corridors of Power. That he has really been a scientist, that science as such has ever, in any important inward way, existed for him, there is no evidence in his fiction.
And I have to say now that in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution there is no evidence, either. The only presence science has is as a matter of external reference, entailed in a show of knowledgeableness. Of qualities that one might set to the credit of a scientific training there are none. 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. I was on the point of illustrating this truth from Snow‘s way with the term ‘culture‘ – a term so important for his purposes. By way of enforcing his testimony that the scientists ‘have their own culture,‘ he tells us: ‘This culture contains a great deal of argument, usually much more rigorous, and almost always at a higher conceptual level, than literary persons‘ arguments.‘ But the argument of Snow‘s Rede Lecture is at an immensely lower conceptual level, and incomparably more loose and inconsequent, than any I myself, a literary person, should permit in a group discussion I was conducting, let alone a pupil‘s essay.
Thought, it is true, in the field in which Snow challenges us, doesn‘t admit of control by strict definition of the key terms; but the more fully one realizes this the more aware will one be of the need to cultivate a vigilant responsibility in using them, and an alert consciousness of any changes of force they may incur as the argument passes from context to context. And what I have to say is that Snow‘s argument proceeds with so extreme a naïveté of unconsciousness and irresponsibility that to call it a movement of thought is to flatter it.
Take the confident ease of his way with what he calls ‘the Literary Culture,‘ that one of his opposed pair which, as a novelist, he feels himself qualified to present to us with a peculiar personal authority. He identifies ‘the Literary Culture‘ with, to use his own phrase, the ‘literary intellectual‘ – by which he means the modish literary world; his ‘intellectual‘ is the intellectual of the New Statesman circle and the reviewing in the Sunday papers. Snow accepts this ‘culture‘ implicitly as the haute culture of our time; he takes it as representing the age‘s finer consciousness so far as a culture ignorant of science can. He, we are to understand, has it, and at the same time the scientific culture; he unites the two. I can‘t help remarking that this suggested equivalence (equivalence at any rate in reality) must constitute for me, a literary person, the gravest suspicion regarding the scientific one of Snow‘s two cultures. 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.
Note with what sublime, comic and frightening ease (for this sage is after all a Cambridge man) Snow, without any sense of there having been a shift, slips from his ‘literary culture‘ into ‘the traditional culture.‘ The feat of innocent unawareness is striking and significant enough when he is talking of the contemporary scene. But when, with the same ease, he carries the matter-of-fact identification into the past – ‘the traditional culture,‘ he tells us, with reference to the Industrial Revolution, ‘didn‘t notice: or when it did notice, didn‘t like what it saw‘– the significance becomes so portentous as to be hardly credible. But Snow, we must remind ourselves, is frightening in his capacity of representative phenomenon. He knows nothing of history. He pronounces about it with as complete a confidence as he pronounces about literature (French, Russian and American as well as English), but he is equally ignorant of both. He has no notion of the changes in civilisation that have produced his ‘literary culture‘ and made it possible for C. P. Snow to enjoy a status of distinguished intellectual, have the encouragement of knowing that his Rede Lecture is earnestly studied in sixth forms, and be (with practical consequences) an authority in the field of higher education: things that the real, the living ‘traditional culture‘ (for there is a reality answering to that phrase) can no more countenance today that it could have foreseen them in the nineteenth century.
The intellectual nullity apparent in his way with the term ‘culture‘ is only emphasised for us when, coming to his other culture, that of the scientist, he makes, as himself a scientist, his odd show of a concern for a ‘high conceptual level.‘ ‘At one pole,‘ he says, ‘the scientific culture really is a culture, not only in an intellectual, but also in an anthropological sense.‘ The offered justification for that ‘anthropological sense‘ is given, we find, if we examine the context, in this sentence: ‘Without thinking about it they respond alike.‘ Snow adds: ‘That is what a culture means.‘ We needn‘t bother one way or the other about the ‘anthropological‘; what is certain is that Snow gives us here a hint worth taking up. He, of course, is supposed to be thinking, and thinking profoundly, in that Rede Lecture, but actually it is a perfect document of the kind of ‘culture,‘ to use his word, that he here defines – defines, even though unconscious of the full significance of what he says, the formal definition getting its completion and charge from the whole context – that is, from the actual performance. His unconsciousness is an essential characteristic. ‘Without thinking, they respond alike‘: Snow‘s habits as an intellectual and a sage were formed in such a milieu. Thinking is a difficult art and requires training and practice in any given field. It is a pathetic and comic – and menacing – illusion on Snow‘s part that he is capable of thought on the problems he offers to advise us on. If his lecture has any value for use in schools – or universities – it is as a document for the study of cliché.
We think of cliché commonly as a matter of style. But style is a habit of expression, and a habit of expression that runs to the cliché tells us something adverse about the quality of the thought expressed. ‘History is merciless to failure‘: Snow makes play with a good many propositions of that kind – if ‘proposition‘ is the right word. We call them clichés because, though Snow clearly feels that he is expressing thought, the thought, considered even for a moment, is seen to be a mere phantom, and Snow‘s illusion is due to the fact that he is not thinking, but resting inertly (though with a sense of power) on vague memories of the way in which he has heard (or seen) such phrases used. They carry for him – he belonging to what he calls a ‘culture‘ – a charge of currency-value which is independent of first-hand, that is, actual, thinking. He would be surprised if he were told they are clichés.
He would be still more surprised to be told it is cliché when, describing the distinctive traits of his scientists, he says: ‘they have the future in their bones.‘ He clearly feels that it has an idiosyncratic speech-raciness that gives his wisdom a genial authority. But it is basic cliché – for Snow‘s pretensions, more damagingly cliché than the kind of thing I instanced first, for it dismisses the issue, tacitly eliminates the problem, discussion of which would have been the raison d‟être of the lecture if Snow had been capable of the preoccupation, and the accordant exercise of thought, he advertises.
Such a phrase as ‘they have the future in their bones‘ (and Snow repeats it) cannot be explained as a meaningful proposition, and in that sense has no meaning. It emerges spontaneously from the cultural world to which Snow belongs and it registers uncritically (hence the self-evident force it has for him) its assumptions and attitudes and ignorances. That world, I was on the point of saying, is the world of his ‘scientific culture,‘ but I might equally have said that it is the world of the New Statesman, the Guardian and the Sunday papers. And Snow rides on an advancing swell of cliché: this exhilarating motion is what he takes for inspired and authoritative thought.
He brings out the intended commendatory force, and the actual large significance, of ‘they have the future in their bones‘ (there is nothing else by way of clarification) by telling us antithetically of the representatives of ‘the traditional culture‘: ‘they are natural Luddites.‘ It is a general charge, and he makes quite plain that he includes in it the creators of English literature in the nineteenth century and the twentieth. The upshot is that if you insist on the need for any other kind of concern, entailing forethought, action and provision, about the human future – any other kind of misgiving – than that which talks in terms of productivity, material standards of living, hygienic and technological progress, then you are a Luddite. Snow‘s position, for all the mess of clichés and sentimental banalities that constitutes his style, is unequivocal.
It might seem an odd position for one who proudly thinks of himself as a major novelist. But I now come to the point when I have again to say, with a more sharply focused intention this time, that Snow not only hasn‘t in him the beginnings of a novelist; he is utterly without a glimmer of what creative literature is, or why it matters. That significant truth comes home to us, amusingly but finally, when, near his opening, he makes a point of impressing on us that, as himself a creative writer, he is humanly (shall I say?) supremely well qualified – that he emphatically has a soul. ‘The individual condition of each of us,‘ he tells us, ‘is tragic,‘ and, by way of explaining that statement, he adds, ‘we die alone.‘ Once he says ‘we live alone,‘ but in general – for he makes his point redundantly – he prefers to stress dying; it‘s more solemn. He is enforcing a superiority to be recognised in the scientists: they, he says, ‘see no reason why, just because the individual condition is tragic, so must the social condition be.‘ For himself, with tragic stoicism, he says, ‘we die alone: all right,‘ but – which is his message, the sum of his wisdom – ‘there is social hope.‘
He is repetitious, but he develops no explanation further than this. It doesn‘t occur to him that there is any need, stultifying as anyone capable of thought can see the antithesis to be. What is the ‘social condition‘ that has nothing to do with the ‘individual condition‘? What is the ‘social hope‘ that transcends, cancels or makes indifferent the inescapable tragic condition of each individual? Where, if not in individuals, is what is hoped for – a non-tragic condition, one supposes – to be located? Or are we to find the reality of life in hoping for other people a kind of felicity about which as proposed for ourselves (‘jam,‘ Snow calls it later – we die alone, but there‘s jam to be had first) we have no illusions? Snow‘s pompous phrases give us the central and supreme instance of what I have called ‘basic cliché.‘ He takes over inertly – takes over as a self-evident simple clarity – the characteristic and disastrous confusion of the civilisation he is offering to instruct.
It is a confusion to which all creative writers are tacit enemies. The greatest English writer of our century dealt with it explicitly – dealt with it again and again, in many ways, and left to our hand what should be the classical exposure. But Snow, exhibiting his inwardness with modern literature by enumerating the writers who above all matter, leaves Lawrence out (though he offers us Wyndham Lewis – the brutal and boring Wyndham Lewis). Lawrence, intent with all his being on the nature and movement of the civilisation of the West, turned the intelligence of genius on what I have called the characteristic confusion. He diagnoses it in his supreme novel, Women in Love, both discursively and by the poetic means of a great novelist. Concerned with enforcing in relation to what may be called a quintessential presentment of the modern world the Laurentian maxim that ‘nothing matters but life,‘ he insists on the truth that only in living individuals is life there, and individual lives cannot be aggregated or equated or dealt with quantitatively in any way.
The provocation for the insistence in the place I have in mind is given by the word ‘equality,‘ and the context in which the word is introduced may be suggested by saying that the liberal-idealist sage and social philosopher, Sir Joshua Mattheson, who figures in Women in Love, reminds us irresistibly of Bertrand Russell (something of a paradigmatic hero for Snow, who is himself the spiritual son of H. G. Wells). The Lawrence-like Birkin of Lawrence‘s novel says: ‘I want every man to have his share in the world‘s goods, so that I am rid of his importunity . . .‘ The un-Laurentian tone given by ‘rid‘ and ‘importunity‘ belongs to the dramatic Birkin and the dramatic context, but in what Birkin has just said we have pure Lawrence: ‘ ―We are all different and unequal in spirit – it is only the social differences that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all abstractly and mathematically equal, if you like. Every man has hunger and thirst, two eyes, one nose and two legs. We‘re all the same in point of number. But spiritually, there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts.‖
The point is intimately related to that which Lawrence makes when he says that few people live on the spot where they are – which is equivalent to saying that few people really live. Snow, in exhorting us to put aside our individual living and live instead on ‘social hope,‘ preaches as the way of salvation the characteristic modern mode of refusing to live on the spot where one is. ‘Live,‘ of course, is a word of many possible values, as great novelists and poets make us know. Snow, refraining from permitting himself a morbid consciousness of his individual tragedy, enjoys a personal life, I suspect, that gives him considerable satisfaction – being a sage, a familiar of the Corridors of Power, a member of the Athenæum, a great figure in the Sunday papers, a great novelist, a maker of young novelists, a maker (perhaps) of academic careers. He can hardly, for the myriads for whom he generously entertains ‘social hope,‘ plan or foresee lives that will be filled with satisfaction and significance in that way. But what primarily calls for emphasis is the poverty of Snow‘s own ostensible range of satisfactions – which is a poverty of his own canons, and of his sense of significance; a poverty in considering which one finds oneself considering the inadequacy of his sense of human nature and human need.
The significance of his blankness in the face of literature is immense. It is a significance the more damning (in relation to his pretensions) because of the conviction with which he offers himself as an authority on the literature of the present and the past. I didn‘t exaggerate when I said that he doesn‘t know what literature is. Every pronouncement he makes about it – and he makes a great many – enforces that truth. Illustrating his notion of the important kind of relation between art and life, the writer and the contemporary world, he tells us that the Russians (he knows all about Russian literature) ‘are as ready to cope in art with the processes of production as Balzac was with the processes of craft manufacture.‘ But, for those preoccupied with the problems Snow confronts us with, unintentionally, literature has its immediate and crucial relevance because of the kind of writer who asks, who lives in his art and makes us live, kinds of question that, except as conventional profundities to which one should sometimes lift one‘s hat, seem never to have come within Snow‘s cognisance (an effect only emphasised by his ‘tragic‘ and ‘we die alone‘ – which belong, of course, to the most abject journalism). What for – what ultimately for? What, ultimately, do men live by? These questions are in and of the creative drive that produces great art in Conrad and Lawrence (to instance two very different novelists of the century who haven‘t, one gathers, impressed Snow).
Take, as a simple illustration, Conrad‘s The Shadow Line, and note – well, note everything, but note particularly the evocation of the young master‘s inner response when he first sets eyes on his ship, his first command. The urgent creative exploring represented by the questions is immeasurably more complex in Women in Love, a comprehensive and intensely ‘engaged‘ study of modern civilisation. Of course, to such questions there can‘t be, in any ordinary sense of the word, ‘answers,‘ and the effect as of total ‘answer‘ differs as between Conrad and Lawrence, or as between any two great writers. But life in the civilisation 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 lambingtime under the night-sky: ‘He knew he did not belong to himself.‘
It is characteristic of Snow that ‘believe‘ for him should be a very simple word. ‘Statistically,‘ he says, ‘I suppose slightly more scientists are in religious terms unbelievers, compared with the rest of the intellectual world.‘ There are believers and unbelievers; we all know what ‘religious terms‘ are; and everything relevant in relation to the adjective has been said. Snow goes on at once: ‘Statistically, I suppose slightly more scientists are on the Left in open politics.‘ The naïveté is complete; it is a naïveté indistinguishable from the portentous ignorance. The ignorance is that which appears as historical ignorance in his account of the Industrial Revolution, and its consequences, in the nineteenth century. It manifests itself as a terrifying confidence of simplification – terrifying because of the distortions and falsifications it entails, and the part it plays in that spirit of practical wisdom about the human future of which Snow‘s Rede Lecture might be called a classic. Disposing with noble scorn of a wholly imaginary kind of opposition to his crass Wellsianism, he says (and this is his history – and his logic) : ‘For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.‘ This, of course, is mere brute assertion, callous in its irresponsibility. But it is essential to Snow‘s wisdom. If one points out that the actual history has been, with significance for one‘s apprehension of the full human problem, incomparably and poignantly more complex than that, Snow dismisses one as a ‘natural Luddite.‘ He dismisses so – sees no further significance in – Dickens and Ruskin, and all the writers leading down to Lawrence. Yet – to confine myself to the non-creative writer, about whom the challenged comment is most easily made – it was Ruskin who put into currency the distinction between wealth and well-being, which runs down through Morris and the British Socialist movement to the Welfare State.
But for Ruskin ‘well-being‘ or ‘welfare‘ could not conceivably be matters of merely material standard of living, with the advantages of technology and scientific hygiene. And there we have the gap – the gap that is the emptiness beneath Snow‘s ignorance – between Snow and not only Ruskin, but the great creative writers of the century before Snow: they don‘t exist for him; nor does civilisation. Pressing on this ancient university his sense of the urgency of the effort to which we must give ourselves, he says: ‘Yet‘ – in spite, that is, of the ‘horror‘ which, he says, is ‘hard to look at straight‘ – ‘yet they‘ve proved that common men can show astonishing fortitude in chasing jam tomorrow. Jam today, and men aren‘t at their most exciting: jam tomorrow, and one often sees them at their noblest. The transformations have also proved something which only the scientific culture can take in its stride. Yet, when we don‘t take it in our stride, it makes us look silly.‘
The callously ugly insensitiveness of the mode of expression is wholly significant. It gives us Snow, who is wholly representative of the world, or culture, to which it belongs. It is the world in which Mr Macmillan said – or might, taking a tip from Snow, have varied his phrase by saying – ‘You never had so much jam‘; and in which, if you are enlightened, you see that the sum of wisdom lies in expediting the processes which will ensure the Congolese, the Indonesians, and Bushmen (no, not the Bushmen – there aren‘t enough of them), the Chinese, the Indians, their increasing supplies of jam. It is the world in which the vital inspiration, the creative drive, is ‘Jam tomorrow‘ (if you haven‘t any today) or (if you have it today) „More jam tomorrow.‘ It is the world in which, even at the level of the intellectual weeklies, ‘standard of living‘ is an ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim, a matter of wages and salaries and what you can buy with them, reduced hours of work, and the technological resources that make your increasing leisure worth having, so that productivity – the supremely important thing – must be kept on the rise, at whatever cost to protesting conservative habit.
Don‘t mistake me. I am not preaching that we should defy, or try to reverse, the accelerating movement of external civilisation (the phrase sufficiently explains itself, I hope) that is determined by advancing technology. Nor am I suggesting that Snow, in so far as he is advocating improvements in scientific education, is wrong suspect he isn‘t very original). What I am saying is that such a concern is not enough – disastrously not enough. Snow himself is proof of that, product as he is of the initial cultural consequences of the kind of rapid change he wants to see accelerated to the utmost and assimilating all the world, bringing (he is convinced), provided we are foresighted enough to perceive that no one now will long consent to be without abundant jam, salvation and lasting felicity to all mankind.
It must be recognised, though, that he doesn‘t say ‘salvation‘ or ‘felicity,‘ but ‘jam.‘ And if ‘jam‘ means (as it does) the prosperity and leisure enjoyed by our wellto-do working class, then the significant fact not noticed by Snow is that the felicity it represents cannot be regarded by a fully human mind as a matter for happy contemplation. Nor is it felt by the beneficiaries to be satisfying. I haven‘t time to enlarge on this last point. I will only remark that the observation is not confined to ‘natural Luddites‘: I recently read in the Economist a disturbed review of a book by a French sociologist of which the theme is (not a new idea to us) the incapacity of the industrial worker, who – inevitably – looks on real living as reserved for his leisure, to use his leisure in any but essentially passive ways. And this, for me, evokes that total vision which makes Snow‘s ‘social hope‘ unintoxicating to many of us – the vision of our imminent tomorrow in today‘s America: the energy, the triumphant technology, the productivity, the high standard of living and the life impoverishment – the human emptiness; emptiness and boredom craving alcohol – of one kind or another. Who will assert that the average member of a modern society is more fully human, or more alive, than a Bushman, an Indian peasant, or a member of one of those poignantly surviving primitive peoples, with their marvellous art and skills and vital intelligence?
But I will come to the explicit positive note that has all along been my goal (for I am not a Luddite) in this way: the advance of science and technology means a human future of change so rapid and of such kinds, of tests and challenges so unprecedented, of decisions and possible non-decisions so momentous and insidious in their consequences, that mankind – this is surely clear– will need to be in full intelligent possession of its full humanity (and ‘possession‘ here means, not confident ownership of that which belongs to us – our property, but a basic living deference towards that to which, opening as it does into the unknown and itself unmeasurable, we know we belong). I haven‘t chosen to say that mankind will need all its traditional wisdom; that might suggest a kind of conservatism that, so far as I am concerned, is the enemy. What we need, and shall continue to need not less, is something with the livingness of the deepest vital instinct; as intelligence, a power – rooted, strong in experience, and supremely human – of creative response to the new challenges of time; something that is alien to either of Snow‘s cultures.
His blankness comes out when, intimating (he supposes) that his concern for university reform envisages the total educational function, he tells us how shocking it is that educated people should not be able to appreciate the Shakespeare of science. It simply hasn‘t occurred to him that to call the master scientific mind (say Rutherford) a Shakespeare is nothing but a cheap journalistic infelicity. 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 – which is not to say that the Neo-Wellsian assurance that proposes them hasn‘t its significance. More largely, Snow exclaims: ‘As though the scientific edifice of the physical world were not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man.‘
It is pleasant to think of Snow contemplating, daily perhaps, the intellectual depth, complexity and articulation in all their beauty. But there is a prior human achievement of collaborative creation, a more basic work of the mind of man (and more than the mind), one without which the triumphant erection of the scientific edifice would not have been possible: that is, the creation of the human world, including language. It is one we cannot rest on as on something done in the past. It lives in the living creative response to change in the present. I mentioned language because it is in terms of literature that I can most easily make my meaning plain, and because of the answer that seems to me called for by Snow‘s designs on the university. It is in the study of literature, the literature of one‘s own language in the first place, that one comes to recognise the nature and priority 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 collaborativecreative 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 or 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.
Perhaps I need say no more by way of enforcing my conviction that, for the sake of our humanity – our humanness, for the sake of a human future, we must do, with intelligent resolution and with faith, all we can to maintain the full life in the present – and life is growth – of our transmitted culture. 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. perhaps I have sufficiently indicated on what lines I would justify my seeing the centre of a university in a vital English School. I mustn‘t say more now about what I mean by that, I will only say that the academic is the enemy and that the academic can be beaten, as we who ran Scrutiny for twenty years proved. We were, and knew we were, Cambridge – the essential Cambridge in spite of Cambridge: that gives you the spirit of what I have in mind. Snow gets on with what he calls ‘the traditional culture‘ better than I do. To impress us with his anti-academic astringency, he tells us of the old Master of Jesus who said about trains running into Cambridge on Sunday: ‘It is equally displeasing to God and to myself.‘ More to the point is that that, I remember, was very much the attitude of the academic powers when, thirty years ago, I wrote a pioneering book on modern poetry that made Eliot a key figure and proposed a new chart, and again when I backed Lawrence as a great writer.
It is assumed, I believe, that work in the scientific departments must be in close touch with the experimental-creative front. In the same way, for the university English School there is a creative front with which, of its function and nature, the School must be in the closest relation. I am not thinking of the fashionable idea that the right qualification for a teaching post is to be a poet – or a commercially successful novelist. I am thinking again of what Scrutiny stood – and stands – for: of the creative work it did on the contemporary intellectual-cultural frontier in maintaining the critical function. I must not try now to say more about the way in which such a school would generate in the university a centre of consciousness (and conscience) for our civilisation. I will merely insist that it is not inconceivable that Cambridge might become a place where the culture of the Sunday papers was not taken to represent the best that is thought and known in our time.
If so, it is conceivable, perhaps, that the journalistic addiction of our academic intellectuals – and journalism (in one form or another) is now the menacing disease of university ‘English‘ – might, at Cambridge, be pretty generally recognised for the thing it is. In such a Cambridge the attention I have paid to a Snow would be unnecessary.
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