The Pride of Power:

...Someone more given to chances, to reaching for what in humans can't be known, to lyricism and the zest of personality...

...The other side of Snow's great knowingness is a reluctance to risk himself in chancy leaps of compassion...

...His subject is history's way in intimate circumstances of achieving itself...

...It is not a disappointing novel...

...Snow has that largeness, that authority, that seriousness, and he has that uncompromising subtlety...

...In The Masters it is in the intensity with which Snow watches a small group of men maneuvering for a college office which in itself has little but the name of authority...

...Reviewed by Marcus Klein Contributor, New York "Post," "Hudson Review" "Western Review" There isn't in England or America another novelist who knows his business so thoroughly as does C. P. Snow and who brings to his business so thoroughly committed an intelligence...

...It is the vitality of that time that makes the memory of it in this frightened time worthwhile...

...It is the sort of sense for which the novel was invented...

...His subject really, beyond, or prior to the moral discoveries and the historical insights he has converted into subjects, is the simple beauty of the struggle of persons within intimate society for the feel and the pride of power...

...Snow's imagination, that is to say, is in the most interesting sense, in the Machiavellian sense, political...

...It is the first novel of the "Strangers and Brothers" series now eight-elevenths completed, and it is now published in this country for the first time...

...And there is largeness and authority in that because in his bones Snow knows that struggle, and because his subject is greater than the items of history...

...He is a fox to Snow's lion...

...Nor does Snow have such authority because he happens to be both a physicist and a "novelist...

...The result for this novel is a pratfall avoided but a potential vitality missed...

...It is something important of the 1920s in England and America, of its dash for liberation, its passion, missed too...

...One reaches back, for adequate comparison, to George Eliot and Henry James...

...Nor does it lack either the moral energy or the historical insight of the later novels...

...The protagonist of this novel is a provincial young man, infected with Bloomsbury, who sets about revitalizing human society by celebrating individual freedom and who probably mistakes his own motives at every turn...

...Strangers and Brothers was published in England in 1940...

...He might for all that be an attractive young man, the spunk of radicalism is in him, but then he is severely diminished by heavier burdens than any such young man should bear, by Snow's inappropriate talents, his very searchingness and his absolute clarity...

...But then it is not Snow's historical judgment, despite the deliberate historicity of this novel and the subsequent ones, that makes him commanding...

...No doubt that is a lucky accident for all of us...

...The firmness of Homecoming is in the huge awareness of the struggle for dominance between a man and his women...

...His seriousness and his subtlety are in that apprehension...

...The new generation of this novel—there is always a new generation pressing into the society of Snow's novels—is that of the late 1920s, and what is on its particular mind is liberation, freedom, transvaluation of all values, youth, new beginnings and the social renaissance...

...Hypocrisy won't serve this hero, he can't get away with a thing...

...What he has to say about radicalism in the 1920s is merely wary...

...Much of American education theory has been an attempt to avoid just the danger that that discovery discovers...

...It is an 18th-century idea, circumspection before what in the 18th century was called the "new learning.'And Snow's discovery in his recent polemical pamphlet, The Two Cultures, that science and humanism are divorced in our culture, is...

...There is perhaps a luxury, beyond our means, in the cautionary admonition to which this novel comes that noble yeaners like our hero, though they weren't evil, weren't, you find when you dissect them, so very noble at all...

...He is put on trial for fraud and moral blundering...

...And he is equipped with Eliot and James' sense that society in all its smallest units is in taut and perilous adjustment, always being pulled one way and the other by restless men pressed by their ambitions, always at the point of snapping apart...

...first of all, as economist Robert Lekachman has recently pointed out, more valid for Great Britain than for America...

...The judgment implicit in his discovery—in later novels of the "Strangers and Brothers" series—of the rise in British society of a class of technicians and managers—the "new men"—that judgment is merely thrifty...

...Beyond accident and judgments which are sound but easy, Snow has the full sense, that George Eliot and James had and which is not easy, of the difficulty, the intricacy, the great and fertile thickness of society...

...What he has not always had is opportunity appropriate to his equipment...

...The odds are against him...

...It makes an absolute promise...

...The stuff and the agony within him cry not for analysis but for a bard, and in fact this is a novel that someone else should have written...

...It more than foreshadows better novels in the series, like Homecoming and The Masters...

...This novel becomes brilliant at those moments when we discover that the hero wants not so much to liberate himself as to usurp the place of those who prevent his liberation...

...There are moments in it astonishing by the sheer steadiness and weight of Snow's consciousness...

...Snow's evaluation is discreetly conservative...

...but he might for just that reason be writing science fiction...

...and it is secondly a notion with which we've lived at least since the time of Francis Bacon...

...Society is itself the issue of numberless and complicated conflicts of individuals for dominance over each other...