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,” 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 word Philistine itself.

“Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a sturdy, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the Chosen People, of the Children of 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....  Philistia has come to be thought by us the true Land of Promise, and it is anything but that; the born lover of ideas, the born hater of commonplaces, must feel in this country that the sky over his head is of brass and iron.  The enthusiast for the idea, for reason, values reason, the idea, in and for themselves; he values them, irrespectively of the practical conveniences which their triumphs may obtain for him, and the man who regards the profession of these practical conveniences as something sufficient in itself which compensates for the absence or surrender of the idea, of reason, is, in his eyes, a Philistine.”

In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold thus elaborates the term “Philistine,” and justifies, not without some misgiving, its exclusive appropriation to the Middle Class.  “Philistine gives the notion of something particularly stiffnecked and perverse in the resistance to light and its children, and therein it specially suits our Middle Class, who not only do not pursue Sweetness and Light, but who even prefer to them that sort of machinery of business, chapels, tea-meetings, and addresses from Mr. Murphy,[31] which make up the dismal and illiberal life on which I have so often touched.”  The force of Philistinism in English life and society is the force which, from first to last, he set himself most steadily to fight, and, if possible, transform.  That the effort was arduous, and even perilous, he was fully aware.  He must, he said, pursue his object through literature, “freer perhaps in that sphere than I could be in any other, but with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces by him, and, even if I succeed to the utmost and convert him, of dying in a ditch or a workhouse at the end of it all.”