The fact is we didn't get along very well until photography came into its own. Then - motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass. And because they had mass, they became simpler. Once books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, trilpe, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of pastepuding norm.
Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.
Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio-shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of "Hamlet" was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with you neighbours. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the mursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.