=3 .sx Technique and Culture :sx Three Cambridge Portraits .sx S. GORLEY PUTT .sx =1 .sx IN the opening paragraphs of his already famous Rede Lecture for 1959 , The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution ( Cambridge University Press ) , Sir Charles Snow discloses some of the personal accidents that led him to move , at an impressionable age , between those two cultures the separation of which forms the main theme of his essay .sx 'By training,' he says , 'I was a scientist :sx by vocation I was a writer .sx ' He continues :sx 'There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with scientists and then gone off at night with some literary colleagues .sx ' It so happened that while Snow was thus employed I was an undergraduate at his college ( Christ's ) , spending my own working hours in and around the English Tripos and some of my happiest evenings in Snow's rooms .sx I may even have been , though his junior in years and status , one of these 'literary colleagues' to whom he refers .sx I notice that I have dropped at once into the old habit of calling my friend 'Snow' rather than 'Charles' .sx His old friends call him Snow :sx only his new friends call him Charles .sx I wonder why ?sx I think it must be because he seemed to us in those days to be less a man than a conglomeration of qualities .sx We went to him for judgements , and watched our own opinions first drawn out and then appraised .sx 'I think you are probably right' , he may nowadays say with immense and even hearty graciousness ; but when he delivered a Cambridge judgment he would say , firmly and quietly , 'There is no doubt' .sx This serene abstraction caused us , personally devoted as we were , to think of him nevertheless as a little other than human .sx ( However fond one might have been of Dr. Johnson , one would not have called him 'Sam' .sx ) But now that C. P. Snow has impinged on the public scene at many points- now that he is at once novelist , knight , critic , administrator , business man , lecturer , husband , father , seer- he has embodied his manifold abstractions and has become a baptized human being called 'Charles' .sx A pity .sx To those of us who first knew him at Christ's , the word sounds strangely formal .sx For many undergraduates of my own generation , Snow figured as the great emancipator .sx Emancipator from what , it is difficult to say .sx From shyness , I think .sx His work was mainly , in those days , in molecules ; his talk , without the slightest trace of donnish moderation , sprayed over life , love , politics , Proust .sx . All his friends were Snows , all his geese were Swanns .sx Let a member of the circle open his mouth in song , and he would be a Caruso ; let another string a short story together , and we were bidden to see in him another Proust .sx It was all , at times , like a Verdurin party .sx And although most of the Snow circle have indeed come to occupy places of considerable eminence , some of them still show traces of his early boisterousness- as when one habitue@2 splendidly announced , in the midst of wartime privations :sx 'My landlady has four thousands hens .sx ' ( The landlady's name was Rothschild .sx ) Others have merely retained an undergraduate tendency to refer to public personages by their Christian names- as though in reaction to their habit of calling their private friend by his surname .sx Yet all these minor quirks are far less important than the fact that their young talents had been encouraged to flower , at exactly the appropriate time , in the sun of Snow's approval .sx The very carelessness of Snow's approach was salutary to us , in those days .sx It mattered less , to our personal growth , that Snow spoke rudely of The Book of Kells , than that he should have scattered his own books and papers all over the floor , should talk away into the night while playing like a kitten with a ping-pong ball , or even that he should show an Olympian ineptitude for the simple business of keeping his coal fire alight .sx There was nothing prim about him or about his friends , and it was important for a somewhat priggish undergraduate to learn , at that stage of his development , that neatness is not a major virtue .sx It is not difficult for his friends to detect in the present-day Sir Charles , the Rede Lecturer , those same qualities which in C. P. Snow the scientific research-worker might seem to have indicated a fixed temperamental opposition to the very kind of prestige he now enjoys .sx For 'moral vanity' has always been , and still is , his favourite Aunt Sally at which to shy coconuts .sx He has never pretended that self-interest was a higher manifestation of moral philosophy , nor has he ever held it a virtue to 'do a man down' , as he says , 'in his own best interests' .sx Even his enjoyment of fame , to those who know him well , remains one of his modest and disarming characteristics .sx Snow was much given to headstrong gnomic pronouncements such as :sx 'In many Irish houses , several kinds of bread are eaten .sx ' Torn from their context , they were even more impressive than the set-piece Johnsonian broadsides- as , of Oxford Group house-parties , the comment :sx 'It seems to me a pity that frankness about one's private life has come to mean the public confession of things that never happened .sx ' Now , this kind of thing invites parody ; but it has preserved among older fiends a certain cosmic cosiness .sx Yet if , because of his broad generalizations and his imperviousness to tinsel compliments , we used to think him unworldly , we were at once overestimating and underestimating him .sx For he has shown- and it is why the Rede Lecture has such an authoritative ring- a fine grasp of the realities of power .sx It is one reason , too , why in his novels the pictures of closed societies , clubs or departments are so horribly accurate .sx In his Cambridge days , he used to display a corresponding indifference to the outward appearance of power .sx In recent years , to be sure , like many others who have specialized in the study of the power behind the throne , Snow has come to feel that it might be rather fun to sit upon it too .sx Thus , while engaged upon the cycle of novels on which he pedals towards the G.O.M.-ship of English fiction , Snow has had the energy to sponsor a complementary critical movement .sx And as that sensible steam-roller of sensible criticism got under way , it may have seemed to some people in the literary world that Snow was intolerant .sx That is not quite true .sx There are , it is true , two things he cannot tolerate :sx one is pretentiousness and the other is intolerance .sx He can still lodge a humble protest as well as deliver a critical ukase , and the phrase ~'It's a bit much !sx ' is ever on his lips .sx I have heard him say , ruefully , 'I shall never be as good as Dostoievski' .sx His similes were even less self-indulgent during the war when he lived for a time in Pimlico attended by a troglodyte couple named Moon :sx he would amble , in his Teddy-bear totter , to the head of the basement stairs and call out , always with modest incredulity , ~'Oh , Mr. Moo-oon ; oh , Mr. Moo-oon !sx ' and return with woeful countenance to face his guests :sx 'I feel more and more like a nigger minstrel .sx ' =2 .sx The relevance of these rather impudent personal asides will appear , I trust , when one or two of my friend's recent dicta are examined against the background of my own knowledge of and admiration for his personality .sx It would have been pointless- and , indeed , uncivil- to make use of that knowledge without passing on to my audience at least a thumb-nail caricature of the man .sx You might suppose , when I introduce my second Cambridge figure of the 1930's , Dr. F. R. Leavis , that my aim is to add to the list of examples in the Rede Lecture of mutual incomprehensibility between modern arts and modern science .sx Far from it .sx My aim is to suggest that the kinds of attitude to life represented by these very different teachers may be complementary , mutually comprehensible , and together have an influence making for both breadth and depth of thought and sensibility .sx As an undergraduate , I myself was such a prig that I had to learn to respect both Snow and Leavis before I could learn from them both how to set decent bounds to my own unfashionable tendency to respect .sx If Leavis needed to teach me a healthy disrespect for a good number of poems in the Oxford Book of English Verse before he could demonstrate just why the other poems in it were worth reading , so Snow's impetuous scoffing at certain political and literary windbags would be clearing a space in my mind for Tolstoi .sx From the few tales I have been telling out of school it should be evident that an evening of talk in Snow's room at Christ's College provided a very healthy complement to the English Tripos .sx There we were able to learn , without being told in so many words , that it can be dangerous to become too exclusively sensitive to purely verbal discriminations .sx A literary sensibility can be accepted as an important faculty in life , but it is safe to admit this only in accordance with one's readiness to agree that it is not the only equipment for life- or , for that matter , for literature .sx At the same time I was learning at Cambridge , most notably from Dr. Leavis , how much a particular kind of trained sensibility can enrich the quality of one's response .sx It is certainly necessary to pick words very carefully here , for it would be impertinent ( and incorrect ) to suggest that Leavis and Snow were not each at home in the other's territory .sx But the young undergraduate who sees too much of one type of mentor and nothing whatever of the other may easily become too impatient a disciple to keep steady a sense of balance such as the master himself has learned to hold .sx 'What is the use of a wide outlook if the quality of vision is poor ?sx ' 'What on earth are you going to do with all your sensibility ?sx ' The masters themselves are safe enough .sx Leavis knew precisely why discrimination was important , and we , his pupils , respected him because we saw , so to say , that in the veins of his sensibility flowed blood , not ink .sx Snow's mental generosity was equally apparent , but we could accept it as the application to wide issues of a personality of quality- it was not just splashy enthusiasm .sx The masters , then , are safe .sx What of their pupils ?sx It is all very well to scoff at H. G. Wells because much of his writing betrays a perky mediocrity , if you yourself have a vision of life not indeed identical with his but somewhat comparable in scope .sx It is all very well to swallow H. G. Wells more or less whole in tribute to his breadth of outlook , if you yourself can detect shoddy thinking and shoddy expression .sx But with no such correctives , the submission of undergraduate minds exclusively to one or other of these enthusiasms can provide unlovely results .sx Which is the sadder sight :sx a puny intellect dismissing Edmund Spenser on the grounds that he isn't John Donne ( a thing Leavis himself would never do ) , or another puny intellect confidently predicting the next move of the Kremlin- a thing Snow himself would never do ?sx After the war , Snow left Cambridge and the academic life .sx He has been expressing himself in many powerful ways- via the review columns , via his own steady output of novels , via his literary partnership with his wife Pamela Hansford Johnson , via the Civil Service Commission and the English Electric Company , via television and a dozen other channels .sx Yet , oddly enough , although Snow has expressed decided views and has presumably collected his own share of literary antagonists , it is nevertheless the more retired figure of Dr. Leavis that has drawn the arrows of outraged opposition .sx This is largely because he has acquired a quite undeserved label as a detractor .sx