“The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light … He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.“ (Culture and Anarchy, 1869, Matthew Arnold)
“Instead of dirt and poison we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax; thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.” (The Battle of the Books, 1704, Jonathan Swift)
”A dogged attempt to cover the universe with mud, an inverted Victorianism, an attempt to make crassness and dirt succeed where sweetness and light failed.” (Aspects of the Novel – about James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1927, EM Forster)
My favourite Wodehouse character is the 5th Earl of Ickenham known to his friends as Uncle Fred whose mission in life is to spread sweetness and light. My bet is on PGW pinching the phrase from Swift. He kept a well-thumbed copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations to hand and the edition I looked at only has the Swift quotation. By 1940 Uncle Fred had made two appearances in the oeuvre, Uncle Fred Flits By (1935) and Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939). This will be relevant. When Wodehouse writes about Uncle Fred he combines comedy and farce. It happens in other books but Uncle Fred takes the biscuit. Now we must move on to American politics and the Democratic Convention.
When the Democratic Convention was held in Chicago in July 1940, Roosevelt was nominated for an unprecedented third term but the process did not go smoothly. He was reluctant to break the convention of standing for a third term and stayed at the White House, prepared to stand if asked by the delegates. He was nominated but the delegates wanted a personal appearance from the President. The long-serving (1933 – 1945) US Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, pleaded with him over the ‘phone “to make a speech, receive a number of delegates and go away – that is, spread light and sweetness over it”. I like to think Frances Perkins was a Wodehouse fan though she may have forgotten the mayhem that ensues when Uncle Fred distributes s & l.
You may have noticed four small stones at the head of this post. They are from Brighton beach, the South Sahara, the banks of the Oxus in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan. Of course I cannot remember which is which but picking up a stone is an economical way to accumulate souvenirs. Interviewed in How To Spend It in the WeekendFT Monty Don, gardener and writer, says “the best souvenir I ever brought home was a stone from Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire in 1979. It is almost perfectly round and about the size of a melon, and wherever I’ve been it has come with me. I keep it on the windowsill by my bed”.
The size of a melon … but then the best gardeners think big: beech mazes, laurel lawns … The biggest stone I have is the ruby-veined onyx sculpture in the garden that came from Iran, but I didn’t bring it home in my hand luggage.
