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It means that the world lost two or three immortal operas, which he might have, and probably would have, written in these six years had not an unsympathetic world forced him into the role of an aggressive reformer and revolutionist." He received some money, and more fame, and still more enemies as a result of his powerful literary tilts against Philistinism.
Philistinism and shoddy do not like the woods, unless it becomes fashionable to do so; and then, as speedily as possible, they introduce their artificial luxuries, and reduce the life in the wilderness to the vulgarity of a well-fed picnic. It is they who have strewn the Adirondacks with paper collars and tin cans.
More than Heine, or Rousseau, or Molière, or Byron, was Whitman a victim of the literary Philistinism of his country and times; but, fortunately for himself, his was a nature so large, tolerant, and self-sufficing that his martyrdom sat very lightly upon him. His unpopularity was rather a tonic to him than otherwise.
He whom one might suppose almost native to the Paris of Debussy and Magnard and Ravel, of Verlaine and Gustave Kahn and Huysmans, has found comfortable an environment essentially tight and illiberal, a society that masks philistinism with toryism, and manages to drive its radical and vital and artistic youth, in increasing numbers every year, to other places in search of air.
The Pagans, so far as they were to be regarded as an entity, represented the protest of the artistic soul against shams. They stood for sincerity above everything; for utter honesty in art, in life, in manners and morals alike. To them Philistinism was the substitution of convention for conviction. For the spirit of imitation, of blind subservience to authority, the Pagans had no tolerance.
But three months had been enough to show her the kind of thing the hopeless narrowness and Philistinism of these English back-waters. What did these small squires and country clergy know of the real world, the world that mattered to her, where people had free minds and progressive ideas?
His professional duties did not leave him very much time for reading, but he had a mind far above the common Philistinism that cannot appreciate literature. I must have wearied him sadly sometimes by reading my own verses, always a most foolish thing to do, and at this day quite remote from my notions of an author's dignity.
Now, culture admits the necessity of the movement towards fortune-making and exaggerated industrialism, readily allows that the future may derive benefit from it; but insists, at the same time, that the passing generations of industrialists, forming, for the most part, the stout main body of Philistinism, are sacrificed to it.
He saw, or thought he saw, the mistakes of the system under which he lived; and without pausing to consider its merits wished to sweep away the whole foundation into the sea, and to build upon some illusory basis a new heaven and new earth. He had yet to read the essay in which Matthew Arnold says that "Byron shattered, inevitably shattered himself against the black rock of British Philistinism."
Just why the pleasure, may be left to the psychologists; but it is of indisputable charm, and Trollope possesses it. We may talk wisely and at length of his commonplaceness, lack of spice, philistinism; he can be counted on to amuse us. He lived valiantly up to his own injunction: "Of all the needs a book has, the chief need is that it is readable."
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