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_?"[425]
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 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 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 indoctr