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Updated: June 2, 2025
Collier's long since assigned to Haughton, author of Englishmen for my Money, or A Woman will have her Will: a spirited, vigorous, and remarkably regular comedy of intrigue, full of rough and ready incident, bright boisterous humour, honest lively provinciality and gay high-handed Philistinism.
Cronshaw was astute enough to know that the young man disapproved of him, and he attacked his philistinism with an irony which was sometimes playful but often very keen. "You're a tradesman," he told Philip, "you want to invest life in consols so that it shall bring you in a safe three per cent. I'm a spendthrift, I run through my capital. I shall spend my last penny with my last heartbeat."
First, there are the sons of intellectualists, sent either to a freak school or to no school at all; secondly, sons of intellectualists of a slightly different type, sent to a public school yet nevertheless retaining in the new environment their own peculiar stamp; and, thirdly, the clever sons of "ordinary" parents, sent to a public school and becoming intellectualists by revolt against the philistinism of it and of their homes.
Thus these singular defenders of musical chastity stand towards our great classical music in the position of eunuchs in the Grand-Turk's Harem; and by the same token German Philistinism is ready to entrust them with the care of music in the family since it is plain that anything ambiguous is not likely to proceed from that quarter.
It is a fair guess that in the end it will be called the artistic mistake of a novelist of genius. Its harsh reception by critics in England and America was referred to by the author privately as an example of the "crass Philistinism" of criticism in those lands: Mr. Hardy felt that on the continent alone was the book understood, appreciated.
To Arthur Fenton's keen perception there seemed more feeling in the tone than an inquiry into the affairs of a stranger would be likely to evoke, but he gave the matter no especial thought. "Yes," he echoed lightly, "what is she here for? There is no art in this country. New York is the home of barbarism and Boston of Philistinism; while Cincinnati is a chromo imitation of both.
A weaker professor of Æsthetics would have been discouraged by the monetary and other difficulties of his position and would have lost heart at the outset in front of the impenetrable blank wall of English philistinism and contempt. But Oscar Wilde was conscious of great ability and was driven by an inordinate vanity.
Within the last four or five years there has been throughout the whole English-speaking world what Mr. Grant Allen happily calls the "recrudescence" of taste in fiction. The effect is less noticeable in America than in England, where effete Philistinism, conscious of the dry-rot of its conventionality, is casting about for cure in anything that is wild and strange and unlike itself.
It has the strong, full-blooded, passionate love of life characteristic of its author, "the many-souled" Brentano, whose Romantic irony resulted from his being ashamed of his sentimentality, and whose hatred of philistinism was caused by his fear of his own latent tendency toward that point of view.
Schumann tells us that the year 1834 was the most important one of his life, for it witnessed the birth of the "N'eue Zeitschrift fur Musik," a journal which was to embody his notions of ideal music, and to be the organ of a clique of enthusiasts in lifting the art out of Philistinism and commonplace.
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