3 . technique and culture : three Cambridge portraits . S Gorley Putt . 1 . 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 . by training , he says , I was a scientist : by vocation I was a writer . he continues : 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 . it so happened that while Snow was thus employed I was an undergraduate at his college ( Christ &apos;s ) , spending my own working hours in and around the English tripos and some of my happiest evenings in Snow &apos;s rooms . I may even have been , though his junior in years and status , one of these literary colleagues to whom he refers . I notice that I have dropped at once into the old habit of calling my friend Snow rather than Charles . his old friends call him Snow : only his new friends call him Charles . I wonder why ? I think it must be because he seemed to us in those days to be less a man than a conglomeration of qualities . we went to him for judgements , and watched our own opinions first drawn out and then appraised . 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 . this serene abstraction caused us , personally devoted as we were , to think of him nevertheless as a little other than human . ( however fond one might have been of Dr Johnson , one would not have called him Sam . ) 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 . a pity . to those of us who first knew him at Christ &apos;s , the word sounds strangely formal . for many undergraduates of my own generation , Snow figured as the great emancipator . emancipator from what , it is difficult to say . from shyness , I think . his work was mainly , in those days , in molecules ; his talk , without the slightest trace of donnish moderation , sprayed over life , love , politics , Proust &amp;hellip; . all his friends were Snows , all his geese were Swanns . 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 . it was all , at times , like a Verdurin party . 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 habitu&amp;eacute; splendidly announced , in the midst of wartime privations : my landlady has four thousands hens . ( the landlady &apos;s name was Rothschild . ) 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 . 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 &apos;s approval . the very carelessness of Snow &apos;s approach was salutary to us , in those days . 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 . 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 . 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 . for moral vanity has always been , and still is , his favourite Aunt Sally at which to shy coconuts . 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 . even his enjoyment of fame , to those who know him well , remains one of his modest and disarming characteristics . Snow was much given to headstrong gnomic pronouncements such as : in many Irish houses , several kinds of bread are eaten . torn from their context , they were even more impressive than the set-piece Johnsonian broadsides - as , of Oxford group house-parties , the comment : it seems to me a pity that frankness about one &apos;s private life has come to mean the public confession of things that never happened . now , this kind of thing invites parody ; but it has preserved among older friends a certain cosmic cosiness . 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 . for he has shown - and it is why the Rede lecture has such an authoritative ring - a fine grasp of the realities of power . it is one reason , too , why in his novels the pictures of closed societies , clubs or departments are so horribly accurate . in his Cambridge days , he used to display a corresponding indifference to the outward appearance of power . 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 . 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 . 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 . that is not quite true . there are , it is true , two things he can not tolerate : one is pretentiousness and the other is intolerance . he can still lodge a humble protest as well as deliver a critical ukase , and the phrase it &apos;s a bit much ! is ever on his lips . I have heard him say , ruefully , I shall never be as good as Dostoievski . 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 : 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 ! and return with woeful countenance to face his guests : I feel more and more like a nigger minstrel . 2 . the relevance of these rather impudent personal asides will appear , I trust , when one or two of my friend &apos;s recent dicta are examined against the background of my own knowledge of and admiration for his personality . 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 . you might suppose , when I introduce my second Cambridge figure of the 1930&apos;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 . far from it . 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 . 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 . 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 &apos;s impetuous scoffing at certain political and literary windbags would be clearing a space in my mind for Tolstoi . from the few tales I have been telling out of school it should be evident that an evening of talk in Snow &apos;s room at Christ &apos;s College provided a very healthy complement to the English tripos . 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 . a literary sensibility can be accepted as an important faculty in life , but it is safe to admit this only in accordance with one &apos;s readiness to agree that it is not the only equipment for life - or , for that matter , for literature . 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 &apos;s response . 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 &apos;s territory . 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 . what is the use of a wide outlook if the quality of vision is poor ? what on earth are you going to do with all your sensibility ? the masters themselves are safe enough . 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 . Snow &apos;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 . the masters , then , are safe . what of their pupils ? 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 . 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 . but with no such correctives , the submission of undergraduate minds exclusively to one or other of these enthusiasms can provide unlovely results . which is the sadder sight : a puny intellect dismissing Edmund Spenser on the grounds that he is n&apos;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 ? after the war , Snow left Cambridge and the academic life . 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 . 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 . this is largely because he has acquired a quite undeserved label as a detractor . 