Forty years on, the "Two Cultures" controversy seems almost prehistoric. CP Snow had denounced the gulf between arts and science, berating literary intellectuals with their ignorance of science. Then, in 1962, FR Leavis denounced Snow, while defending his own distinctive brand of literature-as-revealed-religion.
Our problem now is not that we have two cultures but that we have 200. Scholars are expected, in the phrase, to know more and more about less and less, and journalists contemptuously excluded from their esoteric counsels.
What makes Leavis's defence of humane values so ironical is that he more than most was responsible for creating one of these fragmented specialisms: "EngLit" itself (rather than literature in English) became a mystery to be interpreted by and for academic initiates, rather than what Johnson had once called the common sense of the common reader.
Leavis was the first to make English a hermetic cult comprehensible only to the elect. But what came after was almost worse, the still weirder byways of structuralism, deconstructionism and critical theory.
When English was first proposed as a university curriculum, sceptical voices believed it would be a soft option, or (worse still!) a "woman's subject". Others wondered whether the study of a living language and its literature really was a scholarly discipline, in the same sense as classical textual criticism, or maths.
It's hard to deny that those misgivings have been partly justified, and that EngLit has illustrated another of Johnson's sayings, that most of life's follies stem from the attempt to emulate what we do not resemble. Aesthetics is an authentic branch of philosophy and literary criticism is a legitimate branch of literature, which must be judged by literary standards, of intelligence, elegance and lucidity.
Until the 20th century, literary critics by definition had not "read English" at university, but it would be rash to argue that Johnson, Coleridge, Arnold and all the great names of the 19th-century reviews were the inferiors of present-day English faculties.
When there was "one culture", its homogeneity could be seen in the interaction between literary, journalistic and public life. The Edinburgh Review was edited for 30 years by Jeffrey, a lawyer, MP and lord advocate, and its most famous writer was Macaulay, MP and Indian administrator. Later in the 19th century, be fore he became prime minister, Salisbury was a prolific magazine writer. Today, journalism is for journalists, politics is for politicians - and literature is for pedants.
No one foresaw the degree to which EngLit would create a separate culture, or the pernicious effects that this would have on literature itself. Literary modernism, it has been plausibly argued, was in part a defensive response by the educated classes to mass literacy, but at least its first exponents weren't writing for an academic audience, and hadn't yet achieved what Gore Vidal calls the novel designed to be taught rather than read.
Even now the division between academy and journalism isn't complete. There are very readable critics who happen to be professors, and there are journalists who are erudite. But literary journalism has been severely infected by academicism, as Derwent May's history of the TLS showed. In its early days it published some of the best essays written by Virginia Woolf, not a graduate but merely a brilliant critic writing for "the true reader". Later, two of the best critics of the century were George Orwell and VS Pritchett, neither of whom had set foot in a university. Do they have successors today? Could they have? We need them more than ever, to reclaim our common culture from academic appropriation.
