C. R. 0. JONES I have no special admiration for
Sir Charles Snow; but my reaction to DI. Leavis's lecture must have been shared by many. How can a man able to write: `The judgment I have to come out with is that not only is he not a genius'—or indeed almost any sentence in this lecture—also be capable of criticising another man's creative work, let alone his style? How can any hope be placed in Schools of English where teachers so clumsy in the use of words, the only tools of a writer's trade, are let loose on the wretched undergraduates?. The other university, flippant and fashionable as its taste may 6e, certainly showed discrimination in preferring to such a word-murderer a mere practising poet.
For some of us outside the academic jungle, this scarcely literate outpouring of critical venom must have sent us back to Fielding's opinion of critics (Tom Jones, Book V, Chapter I) and to deploring the time when 'the clerk began to invade the power and assume the dignity of his master.'
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