Culture; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century
impose on us a man with limitations and errors of his own along with
the true ideas of which he is the organ, really does the world and
Jacobinism itself a service.
So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of the past and of those
whom it makes liable for the sins of the past, cannot away with
culture,--culture with its inexhaustible indulgence, its
consideration of circumstances, its severe judgment of actions joined
to its merciful judgment of persons. "The man of culture is in
politics," cries Mr. Frederic Harrison, "one of the poorest mortals
alive!" Mr. Frederic Harrison wants to be doing business, and he
complains that the man of culture stops him with a "turn for small
fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action." Of
what use is culture, he asks, except for "a critic of new books or a
professor of belles lettres?" Why, it is of use because, in presence
of the fierce exasperation which breathes, or rather, I may say,
hisses, through the whole production in which Mr. Frederic Harrison
[47] asks that question, it reminds us that the perfection of human
nature is sweetness and light. It is of use because, like religion,-
-that other effort after perfection,--it testifies that, where bitter
envying and strife are, there is confusion and every evil work.
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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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