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Updated: June 11, 2025
I wish also to recall to memory an instance from the Old Testament applicable to this subject. David offered himself to Saul to fight with Goliath, the Philistine champion, and, to give him courage, Saul armed him with his own weapons; which David rejected as soon as he had them on his back, saying he could make no use of them, and that he wished to meet the enemy with his sling and his knife.
The Samson Agonistes, were his life passed like that of Samuel Johnson in dirty garrets, and the produce of it only some bits of written paper, the Agonistes, and how he will comport himself in the Philistine mill; this is always a spectacle of truly epic and tragic nature.
He stood and called to the ranks of Israel: "Why have you come out to form the line of battle? Am I not a Philistine and you servants of Saul? Choose a man for yourselves and let him come down to me. If he is able to fight with me and kill me, then we will become your servants; but if I conquer and kill him, then you shall become our servants and serve us."
They regarded me as a meritorious aspirant towards a higher life, and I was paraded before their friends with the suggestion of a vivid, if Philistine, past. If I had any gift for writing, I would make a book about the inhabitants of Biggleswick.
They listened all but the chauffeur, that philistine, who opened the hood and gingerly felt of the heated engine. And the voice of the wind, wandering through the forest, came to them. David heard a long wondering sigh from the girl beside him. Jonathan, too, heard and turned quickly. "That is real music, isn't it?" She nodded. "Is it worth the long ride?"
The Philistine School of Art was represented by a Zoological hearthrug; three Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor; a table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly bolster and a patchwork cushion, supported the long, thin, black clad figure of the Reverend Julius Fraithorn, who was lying down.
Have you ever gloatingly pictured their absolute bewilderment as, with a stern sense of family pride, they sit down to cut your pages? Think of the poor souls thus 'moving about in worlds not realised. A perfect instance of this cruelty to the Philistine occurs to me. The poet in question is one whose forte is children's poetry. Very tender some of his poems are.
I may remark, however, that a man who has no mental needs, because his intellect is of the narrow and normal amount, is, in the strict sense of the word, what is called a philistine an expression at first peculiar to the German language, a kind of slang term at the Universities, afterwards used, by analogy, in a higher sense, though still in its original meaning, as denoting one who is not a Son of the Muses.
He introduces not merely Mr Spurgeon, a Philistine of some substance and memory, but hapless forgotten shadows like "Mr Clay," "Mr Diffanger," "Inspector Tanner," "Professor Pepper" to the contempt of the world.
French writers have kept Europe in the path of analysis and philosophical criticism from age to age by their powerful style and the original turn given by them to ideas. Here, for the benefit of the philistine, insert a panegyric on Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Buffon. Hold forth upon the inexorable French language; show how it spreads a varnish, as it were, over thought.
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