Sam Dresser at Aeon Magazine:
Pretty much everybody, on both sides of the Atlantic, was appalled by Leavis’s cruelty, by the searing petulance so unexpectedly served up in the hallowed halls of an ancient university. The English writer Hilary Corke, after allowing that Snow’s lecture was ‘not very original’, spoke for many startled onlookers when he wrote that ‘there is really not the slightest reason why the thought of the good Snow should bring blood-flecked froth to the mouth.’
But froth Leavis did. Why? Because, for Leavis, Snow had become a symbol of the times, the primary example of its vacuity, its thoughtlessness, its bloodlessness. The point is that for Snow to be considered a ‘sage’ – and he was – then something very wrong had happened to intellectual life. As Leavis says, it was the fact that prospective students of Downing College, Cambridge continued to reference Snow’s lecture in their applications that set him off – as if Snow was anything like the ‘great English novelists’ that he once enumerated with typical definitiveness (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad). In a world attuned to the values of great literature, Snow would’ve been laughed into annihilation; instead, he was crowned a leader of thought. So, in taking down Snow, Leavis meant to take down the whole soulless system that had raised him up in the first place.
more here.
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