e and death battle with
Philistinism.

_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,