Daily Inspiration Quote by A. P. Herbert

A “high-brow” isn’t just educated here; he’s comically miswired. Herbert’s line works because it reduces a whole class anxiety - the fear of being judged unsophisticated, the suspicion that sophistication is a pose - to one absurd mental reflex: you see a sausage and your brain leaps to Picasso. That jump is the joke. It’s also the indictment.

The sausage is doing heavy cultural labor. It’s ordinary, greasy, comforting, proletarian; it belongs to the pub, the street, the unselfconscious appetite. Picasso stands in for modernism’s shock tactics and prestige economy: difficult, famous, often treated as a password rather than a pleasure. Put them together and you get a portrait of the aesthete as someone so trained in cultural signaling that even lunch becomes an art lecture.

Herbert’s intent isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-pretension. The high-brow, in this frame, can’t simply like things; he must interpret them into status. The subtext is that “taste” is less about perception than performance, and that elite culture can feel parasitic on everyday life, extracting meaning the way critics extract metaphor.

Context matters: Herbert was a satirist with a politician’s ear for public resentment. In mid-century Britain, where class was both rigid and endlessly negotiated, “high-brow” and “low-brow” were shorthand for who gets to define value. The line flatters the common reader while slyly warning that culture becomes ridiculous when it loses contact with the simple fact of hunger.