"Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it"
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Perfection, Arnold insists, is not a trophy you mount on the wall; it is a verb you keep conjugating. The line rejects the Victorian temptation to treat “culture” as a kind of curated property - books acquired, manners mastered, status secured. “Not a having and a resting” takes aim at the complacency of the already “improved,” the classes who could afford refinement and then mistake it for moral completion. Arnold’s phrasing is deliberately kinetic: “growing and becoming” turns culture from possession into process, a standard that can’t be met once and banked.
The subtext is sharper than the serenity of “perfection” suggests. Arnold is writing in an England rattled by industrialization, widening class conflict, and the political pressure of expanding democracy. When he talks about culture, he’s not really talking about leisure; he’s talking about social coherence. Culture, for Arnold, is a counterweight to the era’s coarse materialism and factional noise - a way to cultivate what he famously called “sweetness and light.” This sentence quietly polices that ideal: if culture becomes a badge, it hardens into snobbery; if it stays “becoming,” it can claim a more public purpose.
It works because of its moral misdirection. “Perfection” usually flatters our desire to arrive. Arnold denies the arrival, keeps the horizon moving, and turns self-improvement into a civic ethic: the cultivated person isn’t finished, and a healthy society can’t be either.
The subtext is sharper than the serenity of “perfection” suggests. Arnold is writing in an England rattled by industrialization, widening class conflict, and the political pressure of expanding democracy. When he talks about culture, he’s not really talking about leisure; he’s talking about social coherence. Culture, for Arnold, is a counterweight to the era’s coarse materialism and factional noise - a way to cultivate what he famously called “sweetness and light.” This sentence quietly polices that ideal: if culture becomes a badge, it hardens into snobbery; if it stays “becoming,” it can claim a more public purpose.
It works because of its moral misdirection. “Perfection” usually flatters our desire to arrive. Arnold denies the arrival, keeps the horizon moving, and turns self-improvement into a civic ethic: the cultivated person isn’t finished, and a healthy society can’t be either.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
|---|---|
| Source | Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (1869). Contains the passage commonly cited as: "Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it." |
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