The Intellectuals and The Masses Quotes

“Lewis was also disturbed by the mobility which the masses were displaying, abetted by increasing leisure and access to travel. He saw that global tourism would become an increasingly urgent problem as world populations increased. People moved ‘in great herds’ to the seaside, only to find that a sea of people rather than of water awaited them. It was exhausting, and they did not enjoy it. If a travel permit were required before tickets could be bought, much congestion and wear and tear on the roads would be avoided. Most people are ‘born molluscs’ and would be much happier staying at home. Mass tourism is, in any case, an ‘absurdity’, since only scholars are really interested in cathedrals and artworks. The tourists who gawp at them are filled with boredom and self-reproach, and would never, Lewis contends, have dreamed of such a pastime had not holiday advertisements contrived to turn them into sham students and fake cosmopolitan aristocrats.”
― John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939

“The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand – and this is what they did. The early twentieth century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture. In England this movement has become known as modernism. In other European countries it was given different names, but the ingredients were essentially similar, and they revolutionized the visual arts as well as literature. Realism of the sort that it was assumed the masses appreciated was abandoned. So was logical coherence. Irrationality and obscurity were cultivated.”
― John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939

“For some male intellectuals, a regrettable aspect of popular newspapers was that they encouraged women. In the Nietzschean tradition the emancipation and education of women were signs of modern shallowness. The man who has depth, Nietzsche pronounces, can think of women only in an ‘oriental way’. Thus Spake Zarathustra contains the famous advice ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip.’18 Northcliffe, by contrast, started a new trend among newspaper proprietors by considering women readers worthy of attention. In 1891 he launched a cheap illustrated women’s weekly, Forget-Me-Not, which achieved a circulation of over 140,000 in three years, and paved the way for the highly successful Home Chat. He also insisted on two columns of articles devoted to women’s concerns in the Daily Mail.”
― John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939

“For the primary function of culture in Gissing’s scheme of things was to segregate him from other people. To qualify as culture, knowledge had to be abstruse.”
― John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939