Sweetness or Light
Jonathan Swift who invented the phrase “sweetness and light” and Matthew Arnold who made it what it has become are not themselves precisely a congruous pair; but then, neither are the qualities they bracketed. Or at least they occur together in the minds and tempers of none but the utterly elect. Most persons who have either of them have never more than one or at best have only one at a time. Consider, for instance, your perfect optimist: he is a mine, a quarry, a very bee-tree of sweetness, a honey-dripping fellow, a foaming pail of the milk of human kindness. But when now and then the light falls on him from some alien source he shrivels or scurries to a shady nook where the illumination is not so deadly. Or consider your perfect pessimist: he is a vial of light imprisoned, a storage battery charged with the sun, and unless the properest precautions are taken he explodes when sweetness touches him.
But then, however, consider those eclectic citizens who go in for both at once. They usually undertake to be sweet in a light way or to be light in a sweet way. When they are lightly sweet they flit through the sunshine with the prettiest iridescence, stopping at all the prosperous flowers but stopping no longer than a moment and never really exhausting the deepest stores of sugar at the heart of the blossom. When they are sweetly light they sport admirably in the sun in the morning hours while its beams are still young and generous and again toward the evening after mellowness has set in; but they do not often care to venture into the noon at its full splendours. Sweetness, it appears to most of them, is a question of the coat rather than of the constitution; light, it appears to most of them, comes from the air itself rather than from the fire which uses the air merely as its medium. If they had studied the history of sweetness they would realize that it is the fruit of powerful processes working with matter not altogether sweet itself and arriving at the final essence only with patience and strife and victory. If they had observed the methods and effects of light they would understand that though it can heal it can also kill and that though it may throw a radiance around plain things it can quite as truly strip off glamour and halo and luxurious subterfuge.
It is a lamentable arithmetic which has led millions to put sweetness and light together and to make out of the combination something less than either might be by itself. Each has been played off against the other as an excuse. If you follow light too far, says sweetness, you will grow fierce and lose me. If you follow sweetness too far, says light, you will grow soft and forget what I have taught you. Here is the danger. Left to themselves, sweetness and light quarrel a hundred times for once they kiss. Even Socrates and Shakespeare must have had many hours when the war was hot within them. Was Swift, for all his light, ever really sweet? Was Arnold, for all his sweetness, not now and then negligent of the light while he mooned it with his Senancours and Amiels and missed the point of the diamond which Heine actually was?
For my part, while urging no one to refrain from being a Socrates or a Shakespeare if he can, I hint that light was first in the universe and that sweetness, invented since, is its creation. If I cannot have them both I choose light.