The Two Cultures Revisited

"Snow or Leavis? The bland scientism of The Two Cultures or, violent and ill-mannered, the one-track, moralistic literarism of the Richmond Lecture?"--that was the choice offered by Aldous Huxley's Literature and Science, published in 1963, four years after Snow's Rede Lecture. Huxley's characterization of Leavis seems almost temperate-after all, Leavis had termed Snow "a poseur, a vulgar stylist, a dispenser of cliches and an expounder of 'Sunday paper culture.' " Snow, according to Leavis, was "intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be." Lacking mental rigor, he presented but a "show of knowledgeableness," and his Rede Lecture had moreover betrayed "an embarrassing vulgarity of style," though that was hardly surprising in view of Snow's failings as an author. "Snow is