To this spirit the spirit of culture is antipodal; between the two there is inextinguishable antagonism.  They can never compromise or agree upon a truce, any more than day and night can consent to dwell together.  To destroy philistinism root and branch, to eradicate the ignorance which makes it possible for a man to believe that he possesses all things in their final forms, to empty a man of the stupidity and vulgarity of self-satisfaction, and to invigorate the immortal dissatisfaction of the soul with its present attainments, are the ends which culture is always seeking to accomplish.  The keen lance of Matthew Arnold, flashing now in one part of the field and now in another, pierced many of the fallacies of provincialism and philistinism, and mortally wounded more than one Goliath of ignorance and conceit; but the work must be done anew in every generation and in every individual.  All men are conceived in the sin of ignorance and born in the iniquity of half-knowledge; and every man needs to be saved by wider knowledge and clearer vision.  It is a matter of comparative indifference where one is born; it is a matter of supreme importance how one educates one’s self.  There is as genuine a provincialism in Paris as in the remotest frontier town; it is better dressed and better mannered, but it is not less narrow and vulgar.  There is as much vulgarity in the arrogance of a czar as in that of an African chief; as much absurdity in the self-satisfaction of the man who believes that the habit and speech of the boulevard are the ultimate habit and speech of the race, as in that of the man who accepts the manners of the mining camp as the finalities of human intercourse.  Culture is not an accident of birth, although surroundings retard or advance it; it is always a matter of individual education.

This education finds no richer material than that which is contained in literature; for the characteristic of literature, as of all the arts, is its universality of interest, its elevation of taste, its disclosure of ideas, its constant appeal to the highest in the reader by its revelation of the highest in the writer.  Many of the noblest works of literature are intensely local in colour, atmosphere, material, and allusion; but in every case that which is of universal interest is touched, evoked, and expressed.  The artist makes the figure he paints stand out with the greatest distinctness by the accuracy of the details introduced and by the skill with which they are handled; but the very definiteness of the figure gives force and clearness to the revelation of the universal trait or characteristic which is made through it.  Pere Goriot has the ineffaceable stamp of Paris upon him, but he is for that very reason the more completely disclosed as a typical individuality.  Literature abounds in illustrations of this true and artistic adjustment of the local to the universal, this disclosure of the common humanity in which all men share through the highly elaborated individuality; and this characteristic indicates one of the deepest sources of its educational power.  So searching is this power that it is safe to say that no one can know thoroughly the great books of the world and remain a provincial or a philistine; the very air of these works is fatal to narrow views, to low standards, and to self-satisfaction.