But clerisy is a mild term

I am reading a collection of essays and speeches by Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart.

There are two lectures, Reading and Writing, which he delivered as part of Yale University's Tanner lecture series. Filled with marvellous quotes and thoughts. Page 233.

Its first chapter was titled A Call to the Clerisy, and it said rather the sort of thing I have been saying in this lecture. It proposed that an educated class should recognize itself in North America, and take into its own hands the literary influence which had been pretty much abandoned to the universities and the academic critics. By an educated class I certainly did not mean people of substantial means with university degrees; I meant anybody who knew how to use a public library and did so with zeal and devotion. I expressed no enmity toward the academic critics but I did say that I thought their professionalism and the need they had to establish personal reputations made them less-thanperfect guides for the public at large. I called for the rise and self-recognition of a group of readers whom I defined as “those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books but do not live by books.” And to that group, the members of which are to be found everywhere, I applied the almost forgotten word clerisy.

[snip]

But clerisy is a mild term, one might almost say a Trollopian term. It could not frighten the most neurotic banker. And the clerisy do not want to take anything from anybody; they merely want to recover what was their own in those distant days before so much of our intellectual life was abandoned to the universities. They want to have a say in the world of books. They want the world of books, through them, to have its influence in the national life — social and political. To return, somewhat apologetically, to Matthew Arnold, they want the history of the human spirit to have its influence in the history of our own times.