1962 C.P. Snow began revolving his thesis about the ‘two cultures’ that were impeding the progress of modern Britain as early as 1956, in an article in the New Statesman. The thesis was elaborated in a talk delivered on 7 May 1959 in Cambridge, subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.
There were, Snow argued, ‘New Men’ and ‘Old Men’. The first knew Shakespeare but were stumped by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: the others vice versa. There was, he implied, one man who effortlessly bridged the two. There should be more Snows.
The two-culture thesis was influential and adopted as holy writ in the sixth-forms of Britain. Congenial as it was with liberal educationists, it provoked ferocious refutation from the leading literary critic of the time, F.R. Leavis.
In an answering lecture, delivered at Cambridge on 28 February 1962, Leavis, much the more effective polemicist, denied any such cultural split. He mocked the pontifical tone of Snow’s argument which, as he bitingly observed, only genius could justify: but, then, who could imagine genius using such a tone? As for Tolstoyan pretension:
Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t: Snow thinks of himself as a novelist … his incapacity as a novelist is … total … as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist … Not only is he not a genius … he is intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be.
Snow’s reputation among the discriminating few, and his amour propre, never recovered. With the public at large his reputation was unaffected. Sixth-formers still read and disgorge it.