This teaching, no doubt, leads to fields of pleasantness and charm, and not at all to the high places of self-sacrifice, or the austere peaks of martyrdom. Burning indignation against intolerable things, fierce denunciation of the cruelties and abominations of the world find no encouragement or sympathy from this serene, detached, and therefore somewhat ineffectual, teaching.
Sweetness and light would never have interfered with the slave trade, or fiercely fought beside Plimsoll for the load-line on the sides of ships.
We did not fight the Germans under the doctrine of sweetness and light.
It was a beautiful and edifying adornment for the drawing-room in times of Victorian self-satisfied peace, but was a tinsel armour for the battle of life, and entirely futile as a sword for combating wrong.
I am not sure that Matthew Arnold would not have called those who wrathfully slash about them at abominable evils, Philistines.
After all, the great men of action and the great writers of the world have been capable of harbouring great enthusiasms and deep indignations in their hearts; and these emotions do not emerge from a "passion for sweetness and light."
A better doctrine, Antony, is, I think, to try to push things along cheerfully but strenuously in the right direction wherever and whenever you can.
As a writer I think Matthew Arnold's best passage is to be found in the Preface to his Essays in Criticism:—
"Oxford. Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!
"There are our young barbarians, all at play!