This is nicely illustrated by Matthew Arnold,
one of the most accomplished of pure critics. The opening paragraphs of
the first chapter of "Culture and Anarchy"---the chapter entitled
"Sweetness and Light"---will serve for illustration, and the student is
referred to the complete work for material for further study and imitation.
From "Sweetness and Light."
The disparagers of culture, [says Mr. Arnold], make its motive
curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness
and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a
smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing
so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity
and ignorance, or else as an engine of social and class distinction,
separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have
not got it. No serious man would call this _culture,_ or attach any
value to it, as culture, at all. To find the real ground for the very
different estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must
find some motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real
ambiguity; and such a motive the word _curiosity_ gives us.
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