The Two Cultures Profess°, J. D. Bernal, Ian Parsons, Geoprey

Wagner, T. T. Roe, Michael A yrton, Sarah Gainham, Dr. Peter Green; Remington Rose, A. M. Mitnardiere and P. A. Bill, Margot Heinemann. J. Bodingion, G. N. A. Guinness, J. F. L. Long, Oswald Harland. Bernard Miles

Father Ammo Douglas Partnee Lady Chatterley's Lover Professor G. Wilson Knight The Hall of Fame Christopher Searles The Wen Rodney A. Burbeck All Round the Clock H. G. Wareham Draught Beer Rev. Austin Lee Honours and Party Polities Andrew Roth

THE TWO CULTURES

SIR,—If anything was needed to convince people of the truth and timeliness of the thesis of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures, it would be Dr. Leavis's lecture and its publication in the Spectator. As a caricature of the literary culture, with its dogmatism and ill-mannered

assertions of ineffable superiority, it could hardly be surpassed. Dr. Leavis considers Snow a portent of an uncultured future. He, himself, may well appear as a sad memento of the result of refusing to live in the present and preferring, at least in theory, the life of a bushman.

In my early days at Cambridge, 1. A. Richards upset the English School there by irducing students

to read and to understand the texts on which they

were supposed to pass judgment. His pupil, Dr. Leavis, found that a better and a far easier way was

to pass judgment first. His students need not read extensively, for Dr. Leavis knows which are the books worth reading. He set up a canon of good authors, very few but most of them long admitted masters. In so far as he considered any others. it was to express with the singular unpleasantness of his style his utter contempt for their work. Even among these Snow is in very good company.

Snow's logic, according to Dr. Leavis, would not have been tolerated in his classes. If his own logic is to be judged by his lecture, it must be remarkably easy to learn. There are no premises or arguments and the conclusions are simple assertions on the

authority o.' Dr. Leavis himself, speaking as an unchallengeanle representative of the Great Tradi- tion of English culture. It must be on some such

intuition that he judges that Snow knows no history. There is absolutely no evidence given in the lecture that he does not know as much as Dr. Leavis.

Dr. Leavis's own method is infallible. If anyone should dare to admit that he thinks Snow's novels literature, it simply shows that he is uncultured. As these include a great number of the readers of Sunday papers and literary weeklies, these arc also damned, leaving real culture and literature in the hands of Dr. Leavis and his followers.

Now I can have no such claim to pass judgment in matters of literature and language. If I find Snow's novels interesting and worth reading, it is because he, almost alone among writers of today, seems to know the kind of world of organisation and machines in which we are now living.

Dr, Leavis claims to refute the very concept of the two cultures by the simple device of reducing to nullity this world of science of which he prides him- self on being totally ignorant. What is insufferable is for this ignoramus to sneerrat Snow for being no scientist.

1 worked with Snow at Cambridge in the most exciting year of 1932 when the neutron was dis- covered and Scrutiny founded. He was a brilliant physical chemist whose work on photo-chemistry in the solid state could easily have opened up for him a new field of research. His abandonment of active work in science at this point was a most deliberate and voluntary choice which he explains freely enough in The Search:Snow was more interested in scientists, as people, and in their effect on the world they lived in. When he came to write novels he maintained and extended his interest in science, with which he always remained sensitively in contact. What evidently fascinated him most was the use to which science was put in government and industry. And he was not content to write about it. He lived and worked in it, He held no sinecures. His work in the Civil Service Commission, particularly during the war on the National Register, showed his real ability for getting the most out of people by under- standing them and letting them have their heads. If the Germans had been able to find a man of the same calibre to make as good use of their scientists, the victory would have been a far nearer thing than it was.

All this work was, ot its nature, unpublicised. The rewards in the Corridors of Power are rarely external. It did put Snow in a unique position of knowing what is what in the twentieth century and of taking the measure of the men, at all levels, who controlled it or served in it.

Late, but not too late, Snow stepped out of this anonymous world of the Civil Service to issue a series of warnings on the misuse and neglect of science particularly in this country. Our society is corrupt, our values arc perverted in the pursuit of profit and in the preservation of outgrown institu- tions. We have to avert--what no previous genera- tion has had to face—the threat of universal destruction. The threat itself, indeed, comes from the work of the scientists. Most natural scientists, formed as they have been in a narrow mould of science education, do not yet realise what they can do to avert this fate. One may hope that their efforts for a better world might be supplemented by those of the professed interpreters of the humanities and that Dr. Leavis's tirade is only an eccentric parting shot from the past.

What is at issue here is not the particular expres- sion of the Two Cultures to be found in Snow's Redc Lecture but the reality behind it. We cannot afford to split still further an already divided culture but should unite it for action. As Bacon said: 'I entrust men to believe that it is not an opinion to be held but a work to be done.' and already there is an increasing band ot those who are trying to do so.

J. D. BERNAL

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