Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold - A complete eBook in pages (51 / 161)

	community	directory	books	authors	images	encyclopedia

[ Table of Contents ] [ Previous Page ] [ Next Page ]

Culture and Anarchy by Matthew Arnold
Book, page 51 / 161

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.

This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles
of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a
passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end
of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their
time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh,
uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise
it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and
learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the
time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light. Such a
man was Abelard in the Middle Ages, in spite of all his
imperfections; and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which
Abelard excited. Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end
of the last century; and their services to Germany were in this way

[ Table of Contents ]

[ Previous Page ] [ Next Page ]

Knowledgerush Search