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!

“And yet steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection,—­to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?—­nearer perhaps than all the science of Tuebingen.  Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!...  Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this Queen of Romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?”

As a man and a companion,[1] if you expected nothing but delightful humour, brilliant discourse, and urbane outlook upon everything, few could rival his personal charm; but he would never really join you in a last ditch to defend the right, or actually charge with you against the wrong, although in his poem “The Last Word,” while not participating himself in such strenuous doings, he seems to yield a reluctant admiration to him who does so charge, and who leaves his “body by the wall.”

Much has happened since Matthew Arnold poured his scorn upon the unregenerate Philistines; but let us remember, Antony, that thousands and thousands of these contemned neglecters of sweetness and light stood unflinchingly and died upon the plains of France that our country and its freedom should survive.

Your loving old
G.P.

[Footnote 1:  See my Memories, pp. 46-52 and 55.]