This seems to me the Golden Age of the novel. There are about thirty or forty people writing really great stuff, full of a philosophy of life, candid, human, extraordinarily real and interesting: their books do not sell in great numbers, but they occupy a place on one's bookshelf that one wants to refer to almost daily. All the other thousand or so novelists don't count at all. I hate the unreality and false glamour of these popular writers: they are like the halfpenny papers which cater for a low and vicious, ignorant taste, only to be compared with the shoddier melodramas that we see on the cinema. I often wonder how these old ladies get on who crowd daily into Smith's Library in Milsom Street and ask the girl behind the counter for an interesting book. She must have her work cut out to remember the million or so different connotations that the word "interesting" bears to the circulating library subscriber. I wonder how many of them would like to plunge into the inconsequent medley which constitutes my diary. When you see one old lady bearing off under her arm a copy of "The Revelations of a Duchess," Samuel Butler's "Life and Habit," Gertie de S. Wentworth-James's latest narcotic, and some of A. C. Benson's Essays, it almost frights you to think of the aggregate effect of such a mixture. Talk about mixing drinks! The reading habit seems to be ingrained in the British public, but I cannot help wondering how much of the best stuff is ever understood by people who commonly feed on garbage. I should like to publish a sort of annual guide to be called "The Hundred Best Books of the Year," to be divided up into sections for Parsons, Doctors, Schoolmasters, Socialists, Capitalists, Politicians, Flappers, Nursemaids, Factory Hands, Maiden Aunts, Subalterns, and Young Matrons. I wonder how many would overlap. Not many, I fancy. I don't think criticisms of books make any appreciable difference to their sale. I have seen heaps of novels, damned by all the papers, go into five or six large editions and others that have been acclaimed as sheer genius die at birth. I wonder, for instance, how many copies of E. C. Booth's "Cliff End" were sold during the first year after its appearance, yet I can't remember any novel which made so deep an impression on me at the time. Yet on every bookstall you see copies of "Paul the Pauper," which every sane man would condemn as simply silly. It has sold over 200,000 copies in two years. It seems incredible: there isn't a single human character in the book, not a single natural sentence: everything is untrue to life in every respect. The passions are laid on with a trowel. There are Grandisonian heroes and double-dyed villains: coincidences of a kind which violate every natural law occur on every other page. The only thing that I can compare to this amazing book is a Lyceum tragedy and the wit of a music-hall comedian. I wonder if England will ever become educated.