hold of him, it is interesting to mark the direction in which he looked for social salvation.  He did not turn to our traditional institutions; to the Church or the Throne or the House of Lords:  to a military despotism, or an established religion, or a governing Aristocracy:  certainly not to the Middle Class with its wealth and industry—­least of all to the Populace, with its “bright powers of sympathy.”  In an age which made an idol of individual action, and warred against all collectivism as tyranny, he looked for salvation to the State.  But the State, if it was to fulfil its high function, must be a State in which every man felt that he had a place and a share, and the authority of which he could accept without loss of self-respect.  “If ever,” Arnold said in 1866, “there comes a more equal state of society in England, the power of the State for repression will be a thousand times stronger.”  He was for widening the province of the State, and strengthening its hands, and “stablishing it on behalf of whatever great changes are needed, just as much as on behalf of order.”  And, forasmuch as the State, in its ideal, was “the organ of our collective best self,” our first duty was to cultivate, each man for himself, what in himself was best—­in short, Perfection.  “We find no basis for a firm State-power in our ordinary selves; culture suggests one to us in our best self.”  And so we come back to the governing idea of the book before us, that Culture is the foe of Anarchy.

In the Third Chapter—­“Barbarians, Philistines, Populace”—­he divided English Society into three main classes, to which he gave three well-remembered nicknames.  The aristocracy he named (not very happily, seeing that he so greatly admired their fine manners) the Barbarians; the Middle Class he had already named the Philistines; and to the great mass which lies below the Middle Class he gave the name of “Populace.”  The name of “Philistine” in its application to the great Middle Class dates from the Lecture on Heine delivered from the Chair of Poetry at Oxford in 1863.  And it seems to have supplied a want in our system of nomenclature, for it struck, and it has remained, at least as a name for a type of mind, if not exactly as a name for a social class.

When we originally encounter the word in the Lecture[30] on Heine, Arnold is speaking of Heine’s life-long battle—­with what?  With Philistinism. “Philistinism! 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; 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 term 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