From Matthew Arnold

Culture and Anarchy

"Sweetness and Light"

CHAPTER I

[5] The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes,
indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity.  The
culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek
and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual
as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance,
or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its
holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it.
No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as
culture, at all.  To find the real ground for the very differing
estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find
some motive for culture in the terms of which [6] may lie a real
ambiguity; and such a motive the word curiosity gives us.  I have
before now pointed out that in English we do not, like the
foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense;
with us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense; a
liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be
meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the
word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying
activity.  In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an
estimate of the celebrated French critic, Monsieur Sainte-Beuve, and
a very inadequate estimate it, in my judgment, was.  And its
inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in our English way it left
out of sight the double sense really involved in the word curiosity,
thinking enough was said to stamp Monsieur Sainte-Beuve with blame if
it was said that he was impelled in his operations as a critic by
curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that Monsieur Sainte-Beuve
himself, and many other people with him, would consider that this was
praiseworthy and not blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really
to be accounted worthy of blame [7] and not of praise.  For as there
is a curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely
a disease, so there is certainly a curiosity,--a desire after the
things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of
seeing them as they are,--which is, in an intelligent being, natural
and laudable.  Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are
implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained
without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind
and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we
blame curiosity.  Montesquieu says:--"The first motive which ought to
impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our
nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent."
This is the true ground to assign for the genuine scientific passion,
however manifested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this
passion; and it is a worthy ground, even though we let the term
curiosity stand to describe it.

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the
scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are,
natural and proper in an intelligent [8] being, appears as the ground
of it.  There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the
impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for
stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the
sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better
and happier than we found it,--motives eminently such as are called
social,--come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and
pre-eminent part.  Culture is then properly described not as having
its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of
perfection; it is a study of perfection.  It moves by the force, not
merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but
also of the moral and social passion for doing good.  As, in the
first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words:
"To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!" so, in the
second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than
these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God
prevail!"  

. . .

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and
light.  He who works for sweetness works in the end for light also;
he who works for light works in the end for sweetness also.  But he
who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and
the will of God prevail.  He who works for machinery, he who works
for hatred, works only for confusion.  Culture looks beyond
machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has but one great passion,
the passion for sweetness and light.  Yes, it has one yet greater!--
the passion for making them prevail.  It is not satisfied till we all
come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the
few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity
are touched with sweetness and light.  If I have not shrunk from
saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I
shrunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have
sweetness and light [48] for as many as possible.  Again and again I
have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those
are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those are the
flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of
genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the
whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought,
sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.  Only it must be real
thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light.  Plenty of
people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an
intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper
for the actual condition of the masses.  The ordinary popular
literature is an example of this way of working on the masses.
Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of
ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or
party.  Our religious and political organisations give an example of
this way of working on the masses.  I condemn neither way; but
culture works differently.  It does not try to teach down to the
level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or
that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. [49]
It seeks to do away with classes; to make all live in an atmosphere
of sweetness and light, and use ideas, as it uses them itself,
freely,--to be nourished and not bound by them.