It seeks to do away with classes to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely, - nourished, and not bound by them. 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. I condemn neither way but culture works differently. Our religious and political organisations give 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. The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of working on the masses. 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.

Only it must be real thought and real beauty real sweetness and real light. 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. 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 for as many as possible. 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. It has one even yet greater! - the passion for making them prevail.

In 1704 Jonathan Swift wrote of beauty and intelligence as ''the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.'' In 1869, Matthew Arnold made Swift's latter phrase a touchstone of Victorian sensibility as the title of the first chapter of his ''Culture and Anarchy.'' The following passage suggests that he meant more than the cloying gentility with which the words have often been associated in later years.Ĭulture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

Matthew arnold view on culture