Later writers, notably Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. He was the son of Thomas Arnold, the famed headmaster of Rugby School, and brother to both Tom Arnold, literary professor, and William Delafield Arnold, novelist and colonial administrat…
What does Arnold mean by sweetness and light?
Arnold borrowed the phrase 'sweetness and light' from Swift. The character of a man of culture is moulded by religion and poetry. The aim of religion is to make man perfect ethically, where as the poetry possesses the idea of beauty and of human nature perfect on all its sides.
Where did the phrase sweetness and light come from?
Arnold borrowed the phrase ‘sweetness and light’ from Swift. The character of a man of culture is moulded by religion and poetry. The aim of religion is to make man perfect ethically, where as the poetry possesses the idea of beauty and of human nature perfect on all its sides.
What is the concept of ‘sweetness&light’?
Here, we analyze his concept about ‘Sweetness &Light’. In this treatise, his central focus and argument is on curiosity. It is defined as a liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of mind or mental activities. According to him, the natal place of curiosity is a desire. It is desires that make some body pursue.
What is Arnold's view about a social aspect of Culture?
Matthew Arnold views about a social aspect of culture. It comes out from the love of neighbor. In other words, it can be said that this aspect of culture gets birth from the desire for removing human errors and diminishing human misery. It is a person of culture who works in the society for its betterment.
What does the phrase sweetness and light mean?
Definition of sweetness and light 1 : a harmonious combination of beauty and enlightenment viewed as a hallmark of culture. 2a : amiable reasonableness of disposition they were all sweetness and light. b : an untroubled or harmonious state or condition but all was not sweetness and light.
Where does the phrase sweetness and light come from?
Ostentatious amiability and friendliness, as in One day she has a temper tantrum, the next day she's all sweetness and light. This phrase was coined by Jonathan Swift in his Battle of the Books (1704), where it referred literally to the products of bees: honey and light from beeswax candles.
Who first used the term sweetness and light?
Jonathan SwiftIn 1704 Jonathan Swift wrote of beauty and intelligence as ''the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.
What are the main concepts in Matthew Arnold's the study of poetry?
Perhaps Arnold's most famous piece of literary criticism is his essay “The Study of Poetry.” In this work, Arnold is fundamentally concerned with poetry's “high destiny;” he believes that “mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us” as science and ...
What was Arnold's idea of culture?
Arnold argues that there must be three aspects to the perfection pursued by culture : it must be harmonious perfection, general perfection, and perfection in action. Culture, then, is the development of all sides of our human nature. perfection must embody “ sweetness and light ”.
What is hebraism and Hellenism?
As Hellenism speaks of thinking clearly, seeing things in their essence and beauty, as a grand and precious feat for man to achieve, so Hebraism speaks of becoming conscious of sin, of wakening to a sense of sin, as a feat of this kind.
What is anarchy according to Matthew Arnold?
Culture and Anarchy, major work of criticism by Matthew Arnold, published in 1869. In it Arnold contrasts culture, which he defines as “the study of perfection,” with anarchy, the prevalent mood of England's then new democracy, which lacks standards and a sense of direction.
Is the scientific passion for pure knowledge and moral and social passion for doing well?
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.
What event is referred to as the Hyde Park protest in Culture and Anarchy?
Hyde Park Demonstration of the Major Reform League on 23 July 1866. After the British government banned a meeting organized to press for voting rights, 200,000 people entered the Park and clashed with police and soldiers.
What are the three 3 estimates in the study of poetry?
Reading Poetry: It happens in three ways- the real estimate, the historic estimate, and the personal estimate.
What is Arnold's view about truth?
He proclaims that truth and high seriousness are two essential qualities of excellent poetry. He tries to represent them as a proper standard for evaluation of poetry. Poetic truth and poetic beauty mean matter and manner respectively. They are later on called high seriousness.
How does Matthew Arnold use nature in his poem?
In his presentation nature is not gorgeous or spectacular, but rather calm and silent. His emphasis is on natural beauty, quietude and gracefulness. 'Dover Beach', acknowledged universally as a typical instance of Arnold's great poetry, testifies to his genius as a poet-painter of nature.
What is another word for sweetness?
What is another word for sweetness?saccharinitysugarinesssyrupinesssweetsuavitysweet tastetreaclinesscloyingness
What is the definition of a sweet person?
If you describe someone as sweet, you mean that they are pleasant, kind, and gentle toward other people. He is a very kind and sweet man. Synonyms: charming, kind, gentle, tender More Synonyms of sweet. sweetly adverb.
How do you measure sweetness?
When measuring sugar and sweetness levels, a refractometer is most commonly used to measure on the Brix scale. The OPTi digital handheld refractometer is a simple to use portable meter that will tell you the levels of sugar (sucrose) present in your sample in a matter of seconds.
What is the noun of sweetness?
sweetness. The condition of being sweet or sugary.
Who wrote the poem "sweetness and light"?
The Victorian poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, who was also an inspector of schools, popularized Swift's phrase as the theme and title of the first chapter of his celebrated book of cultural criticism, Culture and Anarchy. Arnold contends that the most valuable aspect of civilization is its ability to confer "sweetness and light," and he contrasts this to the moralism, hatred, and fanaticism of some of the would-be educators and materialistic improvers of mankind. For Arnold, sweetness is beauty, and light is intelligence – and together they make up "the essential character of human perfection," which had its fullest development, he believed, among the ancient Greeks.
What does sweetness and light stand for?
It gained widespread currency in the Victorian era, when English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold picked it up as the title of the first section of his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, where "sweetness and light" stands for beauty and intelligence, the two key components of an excellent culture.
Why did Arnold criticize the religious and utilitarian reformers of his own day?
Arnold criticizes the religious and utilitarian reformers of his own day for wanting only to improve humanity's moral and material condition, or for focusing "solely on the scientific passion for knowing," while neglecting the human need for beauty and intelligence, which comes about through lifelong self-cultivation.
What is the meaning of Sweetness and Light?
A significant portion of Matthew Arnold’s cultural and intellectual thinking derived from a phrase by Jonathan Swift: ‘sweetness and light’ . This merits critical and historical investigation because its usage marks a highpoint in Arnold’s engagement with two competing kinds of erudition throughout the 1860s, echoing Swift’s own commitments at the turn of the eighteenth century. In his discussion of Liberal politics, Francis Newman and Homeric poetry, and the parochialism of the English middle class, Arnold restaged the battle between urbanity and philology which Swift and the Tory wits fought in response to Richard Bentley. This article juxtaposes and interweaves these debates to show that articulacy twice attempted to lay total claim to knowledge; on each occasion, the effort to protect literature and ambiguity spurred Swift and Arnold to discrete imaginative acts engendered by the same anxiety over minute scholarship. It is suggested this disquiet was especially acute because the techniques of satire and artistry made those forms appear less disinterested and more pedantic than they professed to be, whilst Bentley’s philological work was truly exemplary of the vital creativity Swift and Arnold espoused. At work was a double irony: Swift and Arnold encouraged a ranging and cursory approach whilst in fact employing the subtlest stylistic manoeuvres to attenuate the rise of a discipline which was in reality concerned with the aesthetic as well as the historical.
Why is Sweetness and Light important?
‘ Sweetness and light ’ was consistently reformulated to address discrete intellectual and political pressures, testifying both to the self-serving flexibility with which the phrase was employed in the protective vanguard of cultural politeness to detract from the potency of Humanist scholarship or the prospect of non-monarchical rule, and to the energies of internal contradiction latent within the quarrel itself. Rather than simply structuring a debate which unmistakably pitched poetry against philology, the Horatian idiom dramatized the complex kinds of self-adjustments made as individuals embodied opposing sets of values. It was precisely because of this concealed ideological parity that the myth arose of a strictly bipartisan encounter in which neither side respected the other. This was easier to sustain than interrogating the true workings of a dispute in which the same person frequently held conflicting views regarding the nature of creativity and the appropriate methods of investigative practice.
What is the significance of Matthew Arnold's opening chapter of Culture and Anarchy?
2 His rhetorical manner, easy with colloquialism and imprecision, exemplified the intellectual policy advanced in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864) to cultivate a ‘disinterested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects’, where freedom is imagined to reside in a critical syntax which privileges the spirit of speculation over the dispiriting detail of hard fact (III. 268). 3 As an analytical faculty, ‘disinterestedness’ aspired to the forgiving energies of speech, safeguarding inaccuracy and untidiness from the oppressively singular or purely ‘practical considerations’ (III. 270) of the world in pursuit of a grammar of intelligence able to countenance curiosities.
What was Arnold's lecture on translating Homer about?
Arnold’s lectures On Translating Homer (1860-1861) were the ultimate celebrations in academic ‘sweetness’. His key strategy for nourishing a ‘disinterested love’ for poetry was a brilliantly counter-intuitive ‘acquiescence’ in his own ‘lack of learning’ (I. 175):
Who was talking nonsense under pretence of talking wisdom and morality?
There I read: "While Xenophon was writing his history and Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of talking wisdom and morality. This morality of theirs consisted in words; this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every man's experience.".
What is the ideal of complete harmonious human perfection?
There is sweetness and light, and an ideal of complete harmonious human perfection! One need not go to culture and poetry to find language to judge it. Religion, with its instinct for perfection, supplies language to judge it: "Finally, be of one mind, united in feeling," says St. Peter.
Overview
Sweetness and light is an English idiom that can be used in common speech, either as statement of personal happy consciousness, (though this may be viewed by natives as being a trifle in earnest) or as literal report on another person. Depending upon sense-of-humour, some may use the phrase with mild irony. For example: The two had been fighting for a month, but around others it was all sweetness and light. Esteemed humorous writer P. G. Wodehouse employed the phras…
Genesis
"The Battle of the Books" spoofed the famous seventeenth-century Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, a controversy that had raged first in France and then, less intensely, in England, about which was better the Ancient or Modern learning. Should people still model their writings and artistic productions on Greek and Latin authors? Or should they study the (moderns from the Renaissance on), who used living vernacular languages (not dead ones) and produced practica…
Popularization in cultural criticism
The Victorian poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, who was also an inspector of schools, popularized Swift's phrase as the theme and title of the first chapter of his celebrated book of cultural criticism, Culture and Anarchy. Arnold contends that the most valuable aspect of civilization is its ability to confer "sweetness and light," and he contrasts this to the moralism, hatred, and fanaticism of some of the would-be educators and materialistic improvers of mankin…
Characterizing "Queen Anne" revival in architecture
In 1977, architectural historian Mark Girouard used the title Sweetness and Light: The "Queen Anne" Movement, 1860–1900, for his book chronicling the comfortably eclectic architectural style of the middle-class brick country houses that late-nineteenth-century British artists and writers built for themselves. Here "sweetness and light" implied that taste and beauty need not be restricted only to the wealthy aristocracy but could benefit all classes of society.
Mundane pleasantry
During the 20th and 21st centuries, the phrase "sweetness and light" has more typically been used, not in Arnold's sense, but more mundanely, to indicate merely a friendly demeanor or a pleasant situation. Bob's close friends knew he wasn't all sweetness and light. Or: Our time at the opera was all sweetness and light. The phrase is often used ironically to denote unexpected or insincere pleasantness. The novel's tense moments are offset by long passages of sweetness a…