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The celebrated “Dop Doctor” (published by Heinemann) and Mr. Temple Thurston’s “City of Beautiful Nonsense” (published by Chapman and Hall) have both sold very well indeed throughout the entire year.  In fact, they were selling better in December than many successful novels published in the autumn.  Yet neither of them, assuming that there had been a book of the year, would have had much chance of being that book.  The reason is that they have not been sufficiently “talked about.”  I mean “talked about” by “the right people.”  And by “right people” I mean the people who make a practice of dining out at least three times a week in the West End of London to the accompaniment of cultured conversation.  I mean the people who are “in the know,” politically, socially, and intellectually—­who know what Mr. F.E.  Smith says to Mr. Winston Churchill in private, why Mrs. Humphry Ward made such an enormous pother at the last council meeting of the Authors’ Society, what is really the matter with Mr. Bernard Shaw’s later work, whether Mr. Balfour does indeed help Mr. Garvin to write the Daily Telegraph leaders, and whether the Savoy Restaurant is as good under the new management as under the old.  I reckon there are about 12,055 of these people.  They constitute the elite.  Without their aid, without their refined and judicial twittering, no book can hope to be a book of the year.

Now I am in a position to state that no novel for very many years has been so discussed by the elite as Mr. Forster’s “Howard’s End” (published by Edward Arnold).  The ordinary library reader knows that it has been a very considerable popular success; persons of genuine taste know that it is a very considerable literary achievement; but its triumph is that it has been mightily argued about during the repasts of the elite.  I need scarcely say that it is not Mr. Forster’s best book; no author’s best book is ever the best received—­this is a rule practically without exception.  A more curious point about it is that it contains a lot of very straight criticism of the elite.  And yet this point is not very curious either.  For the elite have no objection whatever to being criticized.  They rather like it, as the alligator likes being tickled with peas out of a pea-shooter.  Their hides are superbly impenetrable.  And I know not which to admire the more, the American’s sensitiveness to pea-shooting, or the truly correct Englishman’s indestructible indifference to it.  Mr. Forster is a young man.  I believe he is still under thirty, if not under twenty-nine.  If he continues to write one book a year regularly, to be discreet and mysterious, to refrain absolutely from certain themes, and to avoid a too marked tendency to humour, he will be the most fashionable novelist in England in ten years’ time.  His worldly prospects are very brilliant indeed.  If, on the other hand, he writes solely to please himself, forgetting utterly the existence of the elite, he may produce some first-class literature.  The responsibilities lying upon him at this crisis of his career are terrific.  And he so young too!