In order to understand the type of elitist class-consciousness of European modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, here follows a quote from the book "The Revolt of the Masses" by the influential Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, published in 1932:

But nowadays the great mass believes it has the right to impose and lend force to notions deriving from its own platitudes. I doubt if it ever occurred in history that the multitude has had such direct government as is current in our time. Thus I speak of hyperdemocracy.

The same happens in other orders of life, particularly in the intellectual order. I may be mistaken, but the writer who takes up the pen in order to write about a subject that he has been studying thoroughly, must bear in mind that the average reader, who has never pondered the matter - and always assuming that he reads the writer at all - does not read in order to learn anything, but rather reads him in order to pronounce judgement on whether or not the writer's ideas coincide with the pedestrian and commonplace notions the reader already carries in his head. (...) The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself wherever it can. In the United States it is considered indecent to be different. The mass crushes everything different, everything outstanding, excellent, individual, select and choice. (1)

"The Revolt of the Masses" was not an isolated exhortation. It was written in 1929 by an erudite, politically liberal philosopher. Psychologists like Gustave le Bon, Sigmund Freud and intellectuals like Nietzscheans Oswald Spengler (author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes (2)) and D.H. Lawrence also wrote about the masses in this fashion. Their disdain was the expression of an ongoing fear that Europe and European culture were in decay. In Great Britain, the Elementary Education Act of 1871 should have opened up education for everybody (albeit that many women were still denied access to education). An ominous foreboding was the population explosion that was changing the face of Great Britain.

The greatest source of inspiration for modernist writers was, without doubt, the aforementioned German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He supplied the élites with metaphysical and moral justification for their preordainment as the aristocrats who would have to rule in a humane way over the sly, mediocre (slave) classes:

Nietzsche also opposed universal education and its consequences in art; education should remain a privilege, and great and fine things could never be common: "That everyone can learn to read will ruin in the long run not only writing, but thinking too." (4)

Nietzsche explicitly envisages the ideal Europe to be ruled by a master race, where the masses should form a slave caste. Virginia Woolf, in a reactionary fashion, only feels somewhat uncomfortable when she thinks of the emerging masses of semi-educated people. Hence Woolf's strongest dislike of the masses could well be distilled from these quotes; trying to imagine what she calls: "That anonynous monster the Man in the Street" (6).

Virginia Woolf finds herself visualising: "A vast, featureless, almost shapeless jelly of human stuff - occasionally this way or that as some instinct of hate, revenge, or admiration bubbles up beneath it." (7)

Her views were class-based and not, as in Nietzsche's work, of a totalitarian nature. They were no part of any higher universal plan. Her concern mainly limited itself to the realm of aesthetics and aristocracy, but in order to understand the sentiments of modernist writers Nietzsche's influence cannot be omitted.

What was "the mass"? It was not exclusively the working class (8). The mass represented average man who constituted the majorities within the nations. In her essay entitled Modern Fiction Virginia Woolf complains about the seeping through of mass characters into fiction (in a work by H.G. Wells):

Wells must have been sensitive to this critique, since he abhorred the anonymous masses (he referred to "the extravagant swarm of new births" (10) as "the essential disaster of the nineteenth century" (11)), yet at the same time his science-fiction prose and personal descriptions of ordinary people was popular among these same people. (12)

Since it was assumed that the majority of the populace would be able to read read by now, some modernist writers would seek to reach the masses. In her diary, on April 28th 1933, Virginia Woolf mentions accidentally meeting Shaw, quoting him: "I've written 3 or 4 books I like to give the public full weight. Books should be sold by the pound." (13) To a degree Woolf would have agreed with Shaw, since her aim was to write as artistically as possible, being independent of commerce, hence feeling free to create works and to experiment new ways of conveying thoughts. On the other hand, she also believed that all people should have the possibility to develop themselves by going to schools and universities (cf. "Three Guineas" and "A Room of One's Own"). Here we see the important area of tension between universal education and preservation of art from the semi-educated masses.

Virginia Woolf was reluctantly reading James Joyce's Ulysses, which gave an inward view of the life of Leopold Bloom; a used-to-be working-class mass man who attempts to read literature and understand sculptures of nudes. Woolf is irritated about so much attention to an unrefined soul:

Obviously, it would be absurd to compare Count Lev Tolstoi's War and Peace with the work of a mediocre man, regardless of Joyce's genius.

On the other hand, Woolf truly appreciated the touch of class found in literature and within her social life: Mrs. Dalloway, the main character of Woolf's novel of the same name, might have been overtly class-conscious by setting store by wearing gloves and correct shoes, but her ideals and principles (particularly when she was an adolescent) can hardly be distinguished from Virginia Woolf's own ideals and disappointments. The character of Mrs Dalloway is the heroine of the book of the same name. Her thoughts are meticulously being recorded, and -- keeping in mind Virginia Woolf's complaints about male dominance and underestimation of women's intellectual capacities, see striking parallels:

Although it was Clarissa Dalloway who bent over backwards to organise the upper-middle class party around which the whole story of the novel revolves (it was also her idea to organise it), the party-goers were supposed to think that it was the man of the house who should show off with the party's sucess. And as women -- no matter how bright their spirits were -- had to be preoccupied with homely matters, their intellectual performances could impossibly be ascribed to their own feminine genius:

Also Virginia Woolf's strong love for women is shared by Clarissa when she remembers her friend Sally Seton, whom she fell in love with when she was an adolescent:

The resentful spirit of the poor towards the rich is well depicted when we see what Miss Kilman thinks of the Dalloways and their class:

Virginia Woolf's admiration for middle-class refinement and her dislike of religion is noted where the embittered Miss Kilman is the antithesis of Mrs Dalloway who does know what finesse means. We can compare this quote with the way Nietzsche speaks about the people of the slave class who need a religion through which they express their resentment:

Another example comes from A Writer's Diary:

Mental freedom and a non-materialistic, sublime sense of art was not at everybody's disposal: in Mrs Dalloway, the aforementioned working-class character Miss Kilman is depicted as the typical example of Nietzsche's over-exited and exhausted décadent (20). From the previous and the following quotation of Miss Kilman we can see that Kilman is driven by resentment, an inferiority complex and christian religious fanaticism. More importantly; as a member of the working class, she is not artistic. Her interest in music does not offer any redeeming value, because she will not be able to play the violin well anyway:

In Virginia Woolf's days it was not uncommon both to be on the left wing of politics and to retain and foster class consciousness; José Ortega y Gasset was a liberal; Wilhelm Reich and Theodor Adorno -- of the Frankfurter Schule -- were influenced by Karl Marx but still they thought that the labouring masses did not deserve to be regarded as creators of a new and free society. Mass man was prone to vote for a fascist regime, as Italy and Germany showed (arguably, being a Marxist, Reich did know what was best for the working class) (22). But even the sources of inspiration for German and Italian fascism were elitist: both the German author and philosopher Ernst Jünger (23, 24) of the Conservative Revolution and the Italian fascist philosopher Julius Evola (25) thought that Hitler's and Mussolini's mass-parties were 'treason to the Idea'.

In England, fear of the masses grew more intense because of the way mass movements nurtured fascist organisations. Keep in mind that in the previous century, the 19th century, population growth had been remarkable. And population growth was still on the increase in Woolf's days. Another totalitarian system, communism, had gained total power in Russia, by overtly speaking on behalf of the working class. In such an intellectual climate one may ask oneself whether it is realistic to expect from an English antifascist and refined intellectual such as Virginia Woolf, to have confidence in the forces of the masses without being biased or without occasionally retreating into her own class.

It is argued that Woolf's modernist art was conceived to be the antithesis of mass culture (26). The hoi polloi were mainly interested in facts and human interest. In the nineteenth century, the introduction of affordable photo-cameras, newspapers and mass literature had lead to a countermovement that had "L'art pour l'art" as its motto. Art should no longer be accessible to anybody, but it should be a world of its own, achieving the pure aesthetics (27). Art should become too difficult for the masses to understand. It was an ideal that Ortega y Gasset explicitly proposed as La deshumanización del arte e ideas sobre la novela (1927) (28). Virginia Woolf deprived her later works from facts, (clear) plots, human interest and an all-too personal narrator. The stream of consciousness writing technique should enable Woolf to break away from the old patterns.

A symbolic representation of the lack of aestheticism in newspapers and the beauty of the stream of conscience was the brusque interruption of the narrator's stream of consciousness caused by a newspaper, as shown in Woolf's early work The Mark on the Wall (1917):

However lofty as this quotation may seem, it is full of symbolism. With its onset in the late 1800's, the newspaper industry was booming as this was becoming the main source of information for the great gulf of the people of the working classes who could read. Their thirst for short chunks of trivial information and their shunning the aestheticism of art was thus met with by the press. John Carey (2002) writes, in his interesting, yet pedantically moralising book on the intellectuals of the modernist era:

Woolf writes about the mass element of the press when she compares newspapers with crocuses, stating that newspapers are not made to last:

We could imagine pieces of newspapers lying scattered in the parks, as if they were flowers (an interesting parallell can be made: today South Africans ironically speak about their 'new national flowers' when they refer to the thousands of little plastic bags (known as 'checkers' in South African English), that are stuck in thornbushes in the vicinity of African townships and locations, in present-day South Africa).

In Mrs Dalloway we see what trivial things newspapers can write about nowadays:

In the aforementioned stream of consciousness of "The mark on the Wall" we are taken up to a level of telling which will not be understood by everybody, as the intruder with the newspaper demonstrates in a confronting way. The other symbol is that of the need for 'a room of one's own' for women; the language of the intruder has a masculine tone, and thus the presence of a man in a woman's meandering thoughts will likely interrupt this way of thinking by straight forward facts. Women are more peaceful than men ("It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately, but something is getting in the way...."), they could prevent the war if they had more right of speech. We will address this issue of women and pacifism below.

In order to escape the ugliness and the artistic limitations of commercial writing Woolf decided to no longer write for The Times Literary Supplement as she continued to explore ways of writing novels by 'dehumanizing' it and by shunning 'egotistic subjects (note how she felt about Joyce's novel "Ulysses", when she considered it "egotistic"). In her Diary she wrote, inter alia:

Not egotistic, but impersonal. No facts, more thoughts: quoting Michel de Montaigne, she would not teach, but tell: 'Je n'enseigne point, je raconte' (34). The semi-educated and the lower classes needed instant information, but this is the new way of telling, sometimes being chaotic, having no clear plot, and even Woolf's essays lack facts for the sake of beautiful writing. This should create a new form of art which we now call Modernism. How topical this is today, in the 21st century, when we see that on television and on the radio people need chunks of information in the shape of soundbytes and oneliners, when politicians attempt to attract the masses by saying what the masses think, by using the commonest language. And what to think of the popularity of the tabloid newspapers?

About shunning the facts for the sake of believing in one's stories Woolf (also with the barrenness of contemporary post-Great War literature in mind) writes:

When we compare Mrs Dalloway with the later novel The Waves, we see the characters in her novels become more introspective, sharing a mass of thoughts and memories, as if they have been de-individualising.

We find misery and heartache in Mrs Dalloway, where Septimus Warren Smith kills himself due to the effects of being shell-shocked during the Great War. Causes have clear consequences in the novel. The frictions that atheism vs. blind belief, class differences and envy cause in Mrs Dalloway are everyday sentiments that can be found and expressed overtly in daily life. The novel contains many facts and more than one human interest subplot, and it all takes place within one day. It could be accessible to a large public. Woolf's other novel, The Waves, however, is full of poetic language, it is an "abstract playpoem, (...) an abstract, mystical eyeless book" as she says herself in her Diary (36). Woolf intended to mix the scenes in the book together: "Suppose I could run all the scenes together more -- by rhythm, chiefly." (37), and the work lacks a plot. Rather, the thoughts and the talks of an intellectual (upper-middle class) group of people are described, throughout their lives. The characters repeatedly meet each other and think about each other, expressing their impressions of each other. Life is represented as one single day, where the sun reaches its zenith and sets. Here a day is merely symbolical, and not twenty-four hours. The evening encompasses - predictably - the days of the characters' old age. Thus Woolf attempts to make her work less accessible to the large public. It is often said that the modernists have tried to abalienate the great public from their work by making it difficult to comprehend, by changing both the topics and the methods of writing.

But in her epistolary work "Three Guineas" (1938) we finally see that class can be both a smothering crystal house, and a means of exercising authority. After all, without Woolf's circle of friends and abilities to write, she could never have had influence on affairs - like Lady Bruton had in "Mrs Dalloway", when she was introducing one of her political solutions to her influential husband and his political friend. In "Three Guineas", Woolf's idealism invites her to stand up for the rights of women and all the oppressed; moving straight through exclusionist class conventions. She addressed a male treasurer who had previously asked her to donate money and who wanted to have her advise on how to prevent the war (World War II). "Three Guineas" contains the ingredients of religion (organised Christianity oppresses women (38)), and of her own class (the writes to a person of her own class, repeatedly referring to women of her own class).

On the second page of "Three Guineas", the narrator shifts from a personal point of view to that of "the daughters of educated men" (39). On this page we are given an idea of what Woolf associates with class and class consciousness, but she expresses neither contempt nor great sympathy for her own class :

Speaking on behalf of a large group within that influential class, she seems to create a separate class within the learned class. The narrator, the I-figure, disappears when she writes: "Let us ask Mary Kingsley to speak for us."

From this moment on the problem of war and oppression seems a binary question; 'we' is used to indicate 'daughters of learned men' and 'you' is used to address 'men / militarist men / sexist oppressors within the upper middle class'.

It becomes clear that the daughters of educated men suffer material inequity. If they could own money, get degrees and have a share of the power, the world might be a better place, she asserted. Woolf here radically broke out of the classical upper-class Tory idea of an 'organic society' where women remain at home, being the proverbial 'angel of the house'. Strictly speaking, if 'the daughters of educated men' cannot possess large capital like their men do, they do not belong to that class:

Our ideology is still so inveterately anthropocentric that it has been necessary to coin this clumsy term -- educated man's daughter -- to describe the class whose fathers have been educated at public schools and universities. Obviously, if the term 'bourgeois' fits her brother, it is grossly incorrect to use it of one who differs so profoundly in the two prime characteristics of the bourgeoisie -- capital and environment (41).

According to Woolf women are pacifists. About women joining the war industry in World War I, Woolf poignantly wrote that they wanted to escape the smothering environment of the bourgeoisie. Politicians pettily congratulated the women for their contribution to the war. But being powerless and deceived, women of her class could do no other thing than to join the war industry:

Suddenly we are made aware that, for women, the class of learned men and women was not that privileged. The wings of the 'Angels of the House' had been clipped. Their men already took care of everything. For a woman, bourgeoisie was a frustrating stranglehold. Working-class women were better off:

If need be, Woolf wrote, she will have to call on women of her own class to form, what she calls "The Outsiders' Society". Further in the text, this Society should have to swear that they

On page 205 we read that this new class should not only help other women, but all qualified people, of whatever sex, class or colour, to enter their profession (45). The reader should realise that now the idea of class has been inflated. It is no longer an exclusionist group; it is not an elect or an organically developed stratum of society. This is 'the rest of society', leaving the educated men on their own, in a minority. From now on, the masses should be considered partners. Woolf will donate one guinea:

Class consciousness and fear of the masses is no longer relevant here, after Woolf is asked what to do in order to prevent the war. She is, as it were, turned into a class-ridden internationalist and we start realising that we can viewing the numerical strength as a numerical and political superiority. Virginia Woolf asserts that extension of the Outsiders' Society will gain freedom of movement and power by mentioning the case where the Northants Football Association was to forbid women's football because it was growing too popular. The greater the group will grow, the smaller the elite's freedom of movement will be. Here classes have become totally irrelevant and gender is the issue:

Seen from our contemporary perspective, Virginia Woolf may seem elitist and disdainful. In her days, and particularly among the intelligentsia, this was a normal attitude. It was the time when democracy changed the face of the Western world, when banalitiy and triviality were taking over. Art was losing its sublimeness as it was becoming common property. Being a member of the intellectual aristocracy, she could view the demise of her aristocracy in no other way than from a worried observer's point of view. But despite her artistic contempt for mass culture, socially Virginia Woolf did consistently cherish ideals that opposed élitism. For while she saw fascism growing, she advocated the emancipation of all subordinated groups, so that they could stop the brutality and discrimination by the 'educated men'. Without Virginia Woolf's class endorsing and facilitating her deeds, she could not have reached the millions of people that would be inspired by her writings. She disliked her class for its sexism, but, as she also realised, it was this same class that enabled her to do the powerful things that other women could not do.