MATTHEW ARNOLD Born in 1822, died in 1888; son of "Arnold of Rugby"; educated at Rugby and Oxford; fellow of Oriel; lay inspector of schools in 1851: professor of poetry at Oxford in 1857; visited the United States in 1883 and 1886; published "Empedocles on Etna" in 1853, "Essays in Criticism" in 1865, "Literature and Dogma" in 1873, "Culture and Anarchy" in 1877. THE MOTIVE FOR CULTURE[57] 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.