Victories in a Lost War

...As actions, they represent the choices of men confronted by moral dilemmas, and as choices, they must refer back to consequences and their concomitant ethical judgment...

...they differ only in the intensity and strategy of their response...

...I am not able to persuade them they will be any the better or happier for their accumulation, nor, by the same token, would I wish to perpetuate suffering as the price of art...

...In any event, you will be accomplishing something, and action is life...

...As artifacts, literature and criticism are the legitimate objects for the disinterested investigation of the particular laws of their own special being, analogous to the methods and purposes of science, and they therefore carry the cachet of an equal intellectual validity...

...More urbane and subtle, Frye devises a two-pronged tactic which aggrandizes to criticism not only its own values but the values of science as well...

...He takes a position which is increasingly that of the new generation of scholarcritics, men like Hazard Adams, Harvey Gross, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Murray Krieger and Roy Pearce, who have learned from Kenneth Burke to think of literature and of criticism both as artifacts and as actions...

...It is therefore a tragic view in which the nature of the future is irrelevant for the reason that external change cannot affect the intrinsic condition of man...

...The point of Leavis' attack on Snow is unabashedly direct: Snow is a philistine as a thinker, a philistine as a critic of literature, and a philistine as a novelist...

...For these new new critics, literature and criticism possess, in the face of their extinction by the domination of the means and ends of technology, a double justification, one of which indissolubly links them to the traditional criteria of criticism, the other of which ties them just as firmly to the new science...

...Moreover, it is entirely probable that such changes in external circumstances will make those affected by them better and happier...

...and I can only sympathize with Leavis' frustrated fury, for, despite his exposure of Snow's Californiaization —the phenomenon is international —of culture...

...The brute fact is they are no longer central to the public purpose as it is conceived in a consumption-directed society...

...A humanist is committed to the therapy of learning through individual suffering...

...the victory, then, must be his...

...Both win brilliant battles in a war already lost by the humanities...

...Yet despite Casals at the White House and sunrise seminars and the architectural munificence of bankers and distillers and the paperback revolution and culture centers in every town in Texas, the tables, educational, social and political, have been irrevocably turned on the humanities...

...For there is no doubt that Snow writes with the smug superiority of the insider who has learned to walk his wary way along the corridors of power...

...a thousand Othellos are ludicrous and unnecessary...

...And surely the humanities seem to have lost nothing by this innocent admission: A technologically-oriented society has created both the economic base and the public for the consumption of the printed word, music, and works of art (traditionally the most conspicuous of conspicuous consumption) on an utterly unprecedented scale...

...The argument is clever...

...Thus, when Frye writes: "Literature is a body of hypothetical thought and action: it makes, as literature, no statements or assertions...

...Privy to great secrets, he has only pity for those still naive enough to be moved by great hopes and great passions...

...Frye is not so cool as he pretends to be, and his warmth is all to his credit...

...That is, if he has not already forestalled the future through his ignorance of what the humanist knows...

...The scientist is more cheerful...

...The scientist, untroubled by such considerations, has therefore, as Snow tells us, the future in his bones...

...In fact, Leavis is so angry in his Richmond lecture, which is his reply to Snow's now-famous Rede lecture, that he writes awkwardly and with less than his usual cogency...

...The humanist sees human nature as a mixture of good and evil in which the evil may be expected to dominate at least no less, and probably even more so, than the good...

...It gives us wider sympathies and greater tolerance, and new perspectives on action...

...editor, "Centennial Review" It is less than 100 years since Thomas Henry Huxley diffidently begged permission for the inclusion of a few hours of scientific instruction in the classical curriculum of the university...

...To deny this is to lay oneself open to the charge of reactionary selfishness, and, given the direction of affairs, the charge is, I fear, convincing to most men...

...To be sure, there are still many settlers of hoti's business cheerfully and egotistically ignorant of their loss of relevance, but a Leavis and a Frye are responsibly aware of the humanist predicament...

...A man biblically dedicated to the unique values of literature as constituting the ultimate roots of culture, Leavis is embittered by what he is convinced is a triple betrayal of culture from within by Snow...

...But of course the irony of inferiority is that it corrupts its critic in the very act of his protest...

...Reviewed by HERBERT WEISINGER Department of English, Michigan State University...

...For what is so disturbing about the Snow-Schlesinger version of the wave of the future is not merely the self-granted and self-satisfied right of manipulation by which it is motivated, but even more so the abyss of ambivalence which its hard edge opens in the humanist-liberal position...

...and his observations on science and on literature alike are indeed infuriatingly Schlesingeresque in their enormous condescension...

...It neither reflects nor escapes from the world of belief and action, but contains it in its own distinctive form," he is speaking the language and taking the non-moral point of view of operations analysis (the dangers inherent in this mode of thought have brought about the crisis in sociology, political science and politics...

...Snow remains an influential member of the ideological establishment both in England and in this country...

...But a liberal is just as equally committed to the alleviation of mass suffering and by means of the very technology which he as a humanist deplores...

...To charge Leavis with bad manners because he criticizes Snow's novels, as some English and American writers have done, is precisely to miss the force of his attack: The style and the point of view of the novels are the inevitable expression of a complacency in which middleclass acceptance of things as they are, the worship of technology, and respect for political power are combined to crush that individual and unique creativity, best exemplified in Lawrence, which in Leavis' view is the mark of the great tradition of letters and of culture...

...But whether it is indignant enough and pertinent enough to constitute much of a match for Snow's cold commitment to technique at the expense of principle, a commitment significantly enough very much like that of the bright young men in Washington today, is quite doubtful...

...it increases the power of articulating convictions, whether our own or those of others," he is resting his case on the traditional moral defense of literature, the argument of Sidney, Shelley and Arnold, though the expression itself has something of a non-localized Tennysonian grandness to it...

...In the end, then, the great debate between the two cultures boils down not so much to a matter of two different kinds of knowledge, of knowing either Shakespeare or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as Snow and Leavis contend, but rather to two opposing views of the nature of human nature and to the two opposing views of the future which derive from them...

...one Othello is tragic...

...Though no less concerned than Leavis, Frye is far less furious, and therefore more controlled...

...In any case, we are dealing with a problem of considerably greater scope and significance than that of literary criticism alone...

...change external circumstances, he argues, and you change human nature...

...But when he goes on to say: "Literature thus provides a kind of reservoir of possibilities of action...