Sweetness and light

Sweetness and light is an English idiom that indicates a person's friendliness and ease. Today, it is generally used ironically to describe insincere courtesy. For example: The two had been fighting for a month, but around others it was all sweetness and light.

Jonathan Swift famously used the term in his brief mock-heroic prose satire, "The Battle of the Books" (1704), which he published as a prolegomena to his A Tale of a Tub. The English poet and essayist Matthew Arnold picked it up as the title of the first section of his in his 1869 book Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism, where "sweetness and light" stands for the intelligence and beauty that art and culture add to life.

Coining

Jonathan Swift's spoof, "The Battle of the Books" is a humorous takeoff on 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, over which was better, classical literature (i.e., the writings of such ancient Greek and Latin authors as Homer, Horace, Virgil, Plato, and Aristotle) or the modern writings of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Milton, Bacon, and Descartes, and others, who wrote in such living vernacular languages as Italian, French, and English and who often invented new genres, like the fairy tale or novel. In On Ancient and Modern Learning (1697), Swift's patron, the urbane Sir William Temple, had weighed in on the losing side, that of the Ancients, repeating the famous paradox used by Newton (but originally from Bernard of Chartres), that we moderns see further only because we are dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. Swift has the books come to life and stage a mock-Homeric battle with spears and chariots, while the goddess Criticism (a hideous hag) intervenes on the side of her beloved "Moderns".

Midway through, one of Swift's ancient books, Aesop, who has had his title page torn out and is mis-shelved as a Modern, stumbles on a bee and a spider arguing about who is better. The bee had just ruined the spider's web it had been trying to escape. The spider claims that the bee is useless, because it creates nothing of its own; whereas the spider "spins and spits wholly from himself, and scorns to own any obligation or assistance from without" and his web is a triumph of architecture and mathematics. The bee counters that the spider's web is spun from digested flies and consists of dirt and that all the spider really contributes is his poison. Bees range far and wide to search out the very best flowers, which they do not harm, while the spider only moves four inches and feeds on insects and other "vermin of the age". Aesop judges the argument, equating the spider to the Moderns, and the bee to the Ancients. The ancient writers, he says, are like bees, who fill their "hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light." The Ancients are able to do this, Aesop says, because they "are content with the bee to pretend to nothing of [their] own, beyond…flights and…language." That is to say, the Ancient or Classical tradition is one of creative imitation of the very best authors, which results in beneficial "sweetness and light" – or, in terms of classical aesthetics, works which are filled with delight (sweetness) and moral wisdom (light).

Popularization

The Victorian poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, who was also an inspector of schools, popularized Swift's phrase in the essay that makes up the first chapter, entitled "Sweetness and Light", of his 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 "the essential character of human perfection", which had its fullest development, he believed, among the ancient Greeks. Arnold criticizes the religious and utilitarian reformers of his own day for wanting only improve humanity's moral and material condition, or for focussing "solely on the scientific passion for knowing", while neglecting the human need for beauty and intelligence which comes about through life-long self-cultivation. Arnold concedes that the Greeks may have neglected the moral and material, but:

Greece did not err in having the idea of beauty and harmony and complete human perfection so present and paramount; it is impossible to have this idea too present and paramount; but the moral fiber must be braced too. And we, because we have braced the moral fibre, are not on that account in the right way, if at the same time the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection is wanting or misapprehended amongst us; and evidently it is wanting or misapprehended at present. And when we rely as we do on our religious organisations, which in themselves do not and cannot give us this idea, and think we have done enough if we make them spread and prevail, then, I say, we fall into our common fault of overvaluing machinery.

The phrase came into regular use as an English language idiom after the publication of Arnold's essay.

Modern usage

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. However, 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 and light. Or: Fred was all sweetness and light around his ex-wife.

The single "Sweetness and Light" was released by Australian electronic dance outfit Itch-E and Scratch-E on their 1994 album. The single reached the twenty-first place on the 1994 Triple J Hottest 100, and led to a 1995 Australian Recording Industry Association award for best dance single. The duo caused a brief controversy during the presentation of their award on national television, Mac and Sheriff Lindo (Little known 3rd member of the band for a few years), thanked "the ecstasy dealers of Sydney", which was subsequently bleeped out of the telecast.