This is about what is culture according to Matthew Arnold.

1. ARNOLD’S CONCEPT OF
CULTURE
Ajit A Kaliya
M.A. Semester 2
Paper No 6 Victorian Literature
Roll No 1
Enrolment No 2069108420170013
Batch 2016-18
Department of English, MKBU

2. INTRODUCTION
 Full Title: Culture and Anarchy: An essay in political and social
criticism
 Written by Victorian writer Matthew Arnold in 1869.
 Composed during unexampled social and political change.
 It is believed that the essay is written for restructuring of England’s
social ideology.

3. ACCORDING TO ARNOLD
 Culture is,
“Culture can be recommend as the great help
out of present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of
our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all
the matters which most concern us, “the best which has
been thought and said in the world” and through this
knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought
upon our stock notions and habits, which we now
follow staunchly but mechanically.”

4.  By culture present difficulties can be remove.
 Getting the best in everything is culture.
 Remove old ideas which we have been following
mechanically and getting new and fresh thoughts which
can lead us toward perfection.

5. CULTURE AS A STUDY IN PERFECTION
 A harmonious perfection.
- Developing all sides of our humanity.
- Developing all parts of our society.
- If one suffers, other must suffer too.
- Moral, social, and beneficent character of culture
becomes manifest.

6.  Endless additions in human perfection.
 Endless expansion of powers.
 Endless growth in wisdom and beauty.
 Not having and resting, but growing and becoming.
 Inward condition of mind and spirit, not an outward set of
circumstances.
 The formation of the spirit and character must be real concern.

7. SWEETNESS & LIGHT
 Beauty and intelligence.
 Arnold believed that in harmonious perfection beauty and
intelligence both require.
 Uses Greek words aphuia or euphuia (which means well grown,
goodly, graceful, clever, witty, of good disposition) and says, “the
notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive it: a
harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of
beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites the two
noblest of things, as Swift most happily calls them in his ‘Battle of
the books’‘sweetness and light.”

8.  The pursuit of perfection is the pursuit of sweetness and
light.
 Who works for sweetness and light, works to make
reason. Who works for machinery, who works for hatred,
works for confusion.
 Culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness
and light.

9. CONCEPT OF GREATNESS
 Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to excite love,
interest, and admiration.
 Who possess more love, interest and admiration are
greater.

10. CONCLUSION
 In conclusion we can say that culture is a continuous process which
includes all people who search for best things. Power, wisdom,
beauty, intelligence, mind and spirit. Which is more intellectual thing
than material things. And by it find out the best way of life. It is
Achieve perfection but an infinite run towards perfection that is the
culture.

12. Thank You