I wrote at 4:35 above:
"And then he [Lovecraft] had his literary arts side (I don’t have the sense that he was very knowledgeable about music, the visual arts, theater and dance, etc., or history aside from his immediate passion for New England. So in either case his *method* was basically to please himself, and he had not undergone the rigors of advanced learning on either side."
I didn't spell out the thought here. Lovecraft did have firsthand knowledge of some canonical novels, poetry, and essays.* He certainly knew these things better than some current college grads with bachelor's degrees in English. But he read pretty much, so far as I know, to please himself, so, again, there is that limitations with reference to the "Two Cultures" idea. I hasten to add that Lovecraft
would, so far as I know, have been able to answer the simple questions that Snow suggested could be asked of a party of arts people --
"Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics...I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language."
[
en.wikipedia.org]
So I suggest Lovecraft was -- in a degree -- a man with a foot in each of the "two cultures" (to the extent that that's a valid concept), while Smith had both feet in (his corner of) the humanities.
Does anyone know, by the way, how competent of a mathematician Lovecraft was?
*So far as I know, Lovecraft possessed very little philological or linguistic knowledge -- something from which I suffer myself although I studied English in college, a situation that is getting worse all the time as universities drop English major requirements regarding proficiency, or even a working knowledge of, Old English/Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. (The pathetic state to which things have arrived is suggested by an academic seminar of which I was aware a few short years ago. It was to be devoted to "early British literature." From the list of presentations, "early British" had come to accommodate works from far more recent times than the time of
Beowulf. There was even a presentation dealing with "Lawrence" and someone or something else. Whether T. E. or, as I assume, D. H., that "Lawrence" seemed awfully recent to me, for a gathering of scholarship on "early British" literature......It looked to me like they had to stretch the concept out of shape to try to make sure they had enough people present to fill up the time. I declined to attend (and got a bit of stick about that).