The Masters

PROF. K. VISWANATHAM
Professor of English (Retired), Andhra University

The Masters, the most popular of Snow’s novels, issaid to be the best in the cycle. It won for Snow the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It is a most intelligent academic novel. There is a brilliant and fascinating gallery of characters. It is a novelisation of The Two Cultures: the scientist defeats the humanist in the election. In Corridors of Power Lewis realizes that support for Jago was wrong. The election of a master is made one of absorbing interest. The Affair is a continuation of The Masters and shares the fate of all such continuations: of Faust, of The Pilgrims Progress, etc.

It is a novel by Sir C. P. Snow and relevant to our situation. It is a novel about teachers of a college, a novel dealing with the communication hazard between the Artsmen and the Scientists, a novel that discusses specialization and broad education, a novel which is a paradigm of power structure, a novel that depicts the tug between Conservatism and Liberalism, a novel that illustrates the poet’s

we are such stuff
As dreams are made on and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

It is a novel which was reviewed in the “Public Administration Review.” It is rooted in the murky politics of a college and still it is tense. There is neither hero nor theme and still it is subtle.

II

Snow is a novelist of unique experience. He is a three-sided figure-scientist; writer, man of affairs. He starts as a brilliant physical chemist (in the words of Prof. Bernal), composes the Lewis Eliot sequence: Brothers and Strangers, becomes a Civil Servant and the Director of Technical Personnel, Ministry of Labour, Civil Service Commissioner. Lord Snow. As the Rede Lecturer in 1959 he becomes the betenoire of literary men with his meliorist philosophy that science alone can be the saviour of the world. It is curious that a novelist should condemn literary men and curiouser still that a Biochemist, Yudkin, should strike a blow for literature. Dr Lewis’s anger blazed in the Richmond lecture. He said: “Snow does not exist as a novelist. He does not begin to exist. He does not know what a novel is.” This is just like commenting that a father of a dozen children does not know what fatherhood is. As Burke puts it, if one draws up an indictment of a whole people, he succeeds in condemning one only, that is, one self. You can call X a fool or Y a fool, but if you say everybody is a fool, it only means that you are a fool. Snow’s Strangers and Brothers is an astonishing achievement of a novel cycle. As individuals we are all strangers

Enisled in the sea of life.

But as members of society we have to be brothers:

Let us unite in loving, not hating.

There is nothing revolutionary in the technique of Snow. But today tired of the experimental novel writers shout: Close thy Henry James: open thy Henry Fielding. The style of Snow is said to be pedestrian, flat-footed. It is unemphatic by design. It illustrates Eliot’s dictum that the language of poetry should be a medium to look through, not to look at. Hence his remark that the greatest poetry is that which goes behind poetry. Snow’s style is dull by design. This paper does not deal with Resonance in his novels or direct experience or observed experience. It deals with specialization and broad education, with the Arts versus Science, with the university teachers no better than others in a crisis. As the poet puts it,

There was never yet philosopher
That endured tooth-ache patiently
However they writ the style of gods.

III

The novel deals with the election of the master in a Cambridge College. The old master is dying of an inoperable cancer. A new one has to be elected. Jago and Crawford are the two contenders. Jago is the Artsman; Crawford is a scientist. Snow shows the infighting, the jealousies, the bitterness, the suppressed desires, old rivalries, defections, etc. Academic people are not angels but men and the combination room is a microcosm of the power structure of the outside world. Dinner and drinks are a technique of election. There are 13 fellows. Jago was sure of his mastership. But then three fellows defect. Nightingale is prepared to vote for Jago if he is assured of his tutorship and he spreads stories against Mrs. Jago. Chrystal thinks that, if Jago is elected, he cannot wag his tailor other’s tail. Pillbrow feels that a conservative like Jago should be the master. After his defeat Jago walks home alone. The ending is said to be the most moving in the novel like the ending in Paradise Lost:

They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way.

IV

It is the scientist Crawford that is elected. It is in tune with Snow’s Rede Lecture The Two Cultures. There is a communication hazard between the artsman and the scientist, the literate and the numerate (to adopt Savory’s technical vocabulary). The scientist thinks of poetry as useless. Science is everything and everything else nothing. Sir Richard Livingstone pertinently remarks: Outside their own field are scientists always scientific? Are they even more so than other people? Are they never wild or partial in their statements? Do they never proceed to conclusions without evidence to justifythem? Do they always do justiceto the facts of the case? Education in science is no guarantee of the scientific spirit outside the field of natural science and veracity in this field is consistent with its absence elsewhere. It isan excellent illustration of the limitations of transfer in education...Yet when the Great War broke out, German professors, world-famous masters of their subjects, forgot all the lessons of their intellectual discipline, the laws of evidence and the meaning of truth and indulged in repulsive shouts of sheer passion. (On Speaking the Truth) John Wain the author of Hurry On Down states: “I care nothing for technology, nothing for science. With all their improvements they can never touch anything but the surface of human life.” Russell in his The Impact of Science on the Modern World finds a solution to the problems of the world and salvation from its ills in Charity. Huxley in his Ends and Means writes that the only progress is progress in charity and loving-kindness. Eliot in the Choruses from The Rocks pinpoints this truth:

O weariness of men who turn from God
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited
Exploring the seas and developing the mountains
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator.

Eric Ashby underlines the importance of the study of the tragedies of Shakespeare, the plays of Ibsen, the novels of Gogol to the students of engineering and technology as the text-hooks of science and technology do not mention goodness, beauty, compassion, etc., which are not irrelevant to humans at anytime. An engineer, a chemist, a physicist is also a human being; he should not allow himself to be reduced to his vocation or calling or profession. This is the great truth that Emerson teaches in his The American Scholar that a man should not imagine himself an efficient arm or leg or nose or stomach. The scientist’s attitude is like that of Omar who destroyed the famous Alexandrian library on the ground that if those books contained what was in the Koran, that was duplication and that if they contained what was not in the Koran, they should be destroyed as heretical books.

All human genius is not scientific. We need imagination, creative arts, spiritual vision. Education is awareness of the total achievement of man–of the Dynamo and the Virgin. It was a Wellsian fad to imagine that pocket encyclopaedias would save the world. If scientists read Keats and the arts, people understand entropy, is the world saved? Intellectuals may become mercenaries.

It is not true, as Snow says, that poets have been politically reactionary, politically wicked. Shelley was a revolutionary. Byron laid down his life for Greece. Auden and Spender and Day Lewis were in the forefront of progressive struggle. It is true that Shakespeare does not enable you to mend a shoe. Can we say that a shoe-mender is better than Shakespeare? Some values, writes Highet, must be postulated. Poetry is better than pinball (Man’s Unconquerable Mind, p. 77). What is being politically wicked or reactionary? If a poet says that democracy is the aristocracy of blackguards, is he reactionary or wicked? If Eliot says that classless society is a meaningless slogan as there cannot be society without classes, is he reactionary? If Louis Dumont points out that the philosophy of homo hierarchicus embodied in the caste system is mere honest and realistic and less hypocritical than homo aequalis of the west, is he dim? It is a matter of opinion. The best lack all conviction and the worst have a passionate intensity of things. The scientists and the language experts think only of skills, not values. If education means values, then poetry is inevitable. It is more pertinent to ponder

Sin grows by doing good

than talk about Generative-Transformational grammar or drills or structures. Homo sapiens should not be replaced by homo faber and values by human engineering. Education is not and should not be solely scientific, merely scientific.

V

The Masters is a unique document, a novel, not an entertainment (to adopt Greene’s bifurcation ). It makes vivid to us

(a)    that intellectuals can be petty-minded,
(b)   that a college is a snake pit of politics,
(c)    that power struggle is endemic,
(d)   that the sparring of specialization and broad education is exciting,
(e)    that there is a hiatus between the artsman and the scientist,
(f)     that power and conscience try to black out each other,
(g)    that conservatism and liberalism go on feuding,
(h)    that men do not see the utter futility of it all–the power struggle ends in the grave.

Dharmaraja tells the Yaksha that there is no greater wonder than man’s blindness to his own death though he sees death around him.

The glories of blood and state

Are shadows, not substantial things.

Snow is said to be a committee man. His world is a male World. His novels fictionalize Bacon’s: “The rising Unto place is laborious and by pains men come to greater pains and it is sometimes base and by indignities men come to dignities.” Proud man, dressed in brief little authority, struts like an angry ape as to make the angels weep. Walter Allen remarks that Snow’s knowledge of the labyrinthine ways of power comes to the finest fruition in The Masters and the massive fairness and moral agnosticism and the problems debated make The Masters the novel for students of literature. It reminds one of Mr Perrin and Mr Trail when we think of the pettiness of teachers though in touch with what has been best said and thought in the World. Easier to quarry granite rock with a razor! It reminds one of a long calendar of debates: Science versus Literature when we think of Crawford and Jago, Plato and Aristotle, Stephen Gosson and Sidney, Peacock and Shelley, T. H. Huxley and Arnold, Snow and Lewis. I shall end this paper with the opinions of three critics:

Bonamy Dobree regards him the most important novelist of the age because he deals with people who matter today: scientists and those in the corridors of power. “To read one of his novels is to obtain the pleasure of experience; to read them all is to enlarge our knowledge of humanity and the structure of society in which we have to shape our lives.”

Graham Martin on the other hand states that Snow does not succeed in giving us insights into society. “Necessarily the novelist of social insights whose presentation of social experience is so remote and so static as Snow’s defeats his own hope. (The Pelican Guide, The Modern Age, p. 414)

Raymond Las Vergnas says: “It is curious to find with what difficulty Snow’s work as a whole crosses the channel.” Snow’s is a picture which is after all unlikely to move individuals especially as the author’s style eschews any Sort of appeal to emotionalism. Even if the problems concern a world~wide threat, the painting is done in an outmoded way. Of course Vergnas realizes that a foreigner is unfitted to pass such a negative verdict on snow.

In another paper on Snow the tension between the Rede lecture and the Richmond is made to resolve itself and the metaphysical implication of pre-occupation with Time as in Eliot is sought to be explained.

The important question is: Does Snow forge accuracy and sensitiveness in his novelistic statement?