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.
From what I have seen of girls in Bath I should say that the system of education in girls' schools is no better than that of boys: they certainly know a little more about English literature, because their mistresses read aloud to them passages out of the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray. They also devote more time to poetry than we do, but they forget it all as soon as they leave school. They don't see that these books taken altogether form a complete introduction to life. The average girl I have danced with lately seems to have read nothing at all. Her conversation invariably runs on the same lines. Have I been in London lately? Don't I just adore Du Maurier and Martin Harvey? Do I rink? Do I hunt? Do I punish my boys very severely? Am I sorry that I am not in the Army? Do I like dancing? Do I like girls? Am I an outrageous flirt? Would I like to sit out somewhere more secluded than this rather open spot? Am I certain that I had enough supper? Isn't the way Jim Dainton and Sophie Harrington are behaving "perfectly disgusting"? Don't I love Irene Fairhaven? Isn't Joyce, or Corelli Windyatt, or Moritz, or Stanislaus Würm, or whoever is playing on this particular evening, divine, topping, ducky, dinky, perfectly sweet, ripping—or whatever the word of the moment is? Shall I be at the Morrisons' on Tuesday or the Dohertys' on Thursday?
I get most infernally tired of all this claptrap. No one ever says anything that he or she means: it is all superficial. The girls think of nothing but their frocks and the effect they are making on their partners. I want to talk sense and instead have to rattle on with sheer nonsense. I suppose I am getting prosy and sedate, but I do just love talking about books and different views on life. I seem to have no ready change of small-talk. Of course one cannot expect to get to know all the people with whom one dances, but this constant chopping and changing is rotten. I want to keep to one girl, Ruth for preference, all through the night. Then one doesn't have to think of something polite to say: if we feel like silence we just keep silent, if we want to talk we talk, about anything that comes into our heads, serious or gay. We understand each other's moods without having to go through a long rigmarole of introductory icebreaking. One great advantage of Bath is the number of clubs and places where one can browse among the reviews and periodicals of all sorts. How I manage to keep abreast of any modern work in a hole like Radchester, I can't think. Without the Times Literary Supplement and the book reviews in the Telegraph and Morning Post I should be entirely at sea. And yet with all these incentives to read, the ignorance of these townspeople is extraordinary. They nearly all rely on their bookseller for everything they read. They leave the choice always to him.
[X]
February 23, 1912