-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."

The nickname of "Barbarians" for the Aristocracy he justified on the
ground that, like the Barbarians of history who reinvigorated and
renewed our worn-out Europe, they had eminent merits, among w