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 different
estimate which serious people will set upon culture we must find some
motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity; and
such a motive the word curiosity gives us.
[Footnote 57: From "Culture and Anarchy."]
I have before now pointed out that we English 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, M. Sainte-Beuve, and a very inadequate
estimate of it in my judgment it 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 M. 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 M. 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 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 tho 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 being, appears as the ground of
it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbor, the
impulses toward action, help, and beneficence; the desire for removing
human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing 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 preeminent 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 and light 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 one great passion, the passion for
sweetness and light. It has one even 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
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 religions and political organizations 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. 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. 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 labored to divest
knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract,
professional, exclusive; to humanize 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 Abélard in the Middle Ages, in spite of all his
imperfections; and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which
Abélard excited. Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end
of the last century; and their services to Germany were in this way
inestimably precious. Generations will pass, and literary monuments
will accumulate, and works far more perfect than the works of Lessing
and Herder will be produced in Germany; and yet the names of these
two men will fill a German with a reverence and enthusiasm such as the
names of the most gifted masters will hardly awaken.
And why? Because they humanized knowledge; because they broadened the
basis of life and intelligence; because they worked powerfully to
diffuse the sweetness and light, to make reason and the will of God
prevail. With Saint Augustine they said: "Let us not leave thee alone
to make in the secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst before the
creation of the firmament, the division of light from darkness; let
the children of thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their
light shine upon the earth, mark the division of night and day, and
announce the revolution of the times; for the old order is passed, and
the new arises; the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou
shalt crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth
laborers into thy harvest sown by other hands than theirs; when thou
shalt send forth new laborers to new seedtimes, whereof the harvest
shall be not yet."