Philistinism![140]—­we have not the expression in English.  Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.  At Soli, I imagine, they did not talk of solecisms;[141] and here, at the very headquarters of Goliath, nobody talks of Philistinism.  The French have adopted the term epicier (grocer), to designate the sort of being whom the Germans designate by the Philistine; but the French term—­besides that it casts a slur upon a respectable class, composed of living and susceptible members, while the original Philistines are dead and buried long ago—­is really, I think, in itself much less apt and expressive than the German term.  Efforts have been made to obtain in English some term equivalent to Philister or epicier; Mr. Carlyle has made several such efforts:  “respectability with its thousand gigs,"[142] he says;—­well, the occupant of every one of these gigs is, Mr. Carlyle means, a Philistine.  However, the word respectable is far too valuable a word to be thus perverted from its proper meaning; if the English are ever to have a word for the thing we are speaking of,—­and so prodigious are the changes which the modern spirit is introducing, that even we English shall perhaps one day come to want such a word,—­I think we had much better take the term Philistine itself.

Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light.  The party of change, the would-be remodellers of the old traditional European order, the invokers of reason against custom, the representatives of the modern spirit in every sphere where it is applicable, regarded themselves, with the robust self-confidence natural to reformers as a chosen people, as children of the light.  They regarded their adversaries as humdrum people, slaves to routine, enemies to light; stupid and oppressive, but at the same time very strong.  This explains the love which Heine, that Paladin of the modern spirit, has for France; it explains the preference which he gives to France over Germany:  “The French,” he says, “are the chosen people of the new religion, its first gospels and dogmas have been drawn up in their language; Paris is the new Jerusalem, and the Rhine is the Jordan which divides the consecrated land of freedom from the land of the Philistines."[143] He means that the French, as a people, have shown more accessibility to ideas than any other people; that prescription and routine have had less hold upon them than upon any other people; that they have shown most readiness to move and to alter at the bidding (real or supposed) of reason.  This explains, too, the detestation which Heine had for the English:  “I might settle in England,” he says, in his exile, “if it were not that I should find there two things, coal-smoke and Englishmen; I cannot abide either.”  What he hated in the English