My roving thoughts were caught back to the divine score which Arnold Dolmetsch was reading to me.  How well placed they were, those semibreves!  Could anyone but Palestrina have placed them so nicely?  I wondered what girl Palestrina was courting when he conceived them.  She must have been blonde, surely, and with narrow flanks....  There are moments when one does not think of girls, are there not, dear reader?  And I swear to you that such a moment came to me while Dolmetsch mumbled the last two bars of that Mass.  The notes were “do, la, sol, do, fa, do, sol, la,” and as he mumbled them I sat upright and stared into space, for it had become suddenly plain to me why when people talked of Tintoretto I always found myself thinking of Turgeneff.

I do not say that this story that I have told to you is a very good story, and I am afraid that I have not well told it.  Some day, when I have time, I should like to re-write it.  But meantime I let it stand, because without it you could not receive what is upmost in my thoughts, and which I wish you to share with me.  Without it, what I am yearning to say might seem to you a hard saying; but now you will understand me.

There never was a writer except Dickens.  Perhaps you have never heard say of him?  No matter, till a few days past he was only a name to me.  I remember that when I was a young man in Paris, I read a praise of him in some journal; but in those days I was kneeling at other altars, I was scrubbing other doorsteps....  So has it been ever since; always a false god, always the wrong doorstep.  I am sick of the smell of the incense I have swung to this and that false god—­Zola, Yeats, et tous ces autres.  I am angry to have got housemaid’s knee, because I got it on doorsteps that led to nowhere.  There is but one doorstep worth scrubbing.  The doorstep of Charles Dickens....

Did he write many books?  I know not, it does not greatly matter, he wrote the “Pickwick Papers”; that suffices.  I have read as yet but one chapter, describing a Christmas party in a country house.  Strange that anyone should have essayed to write about anything but that!  Christmas—­I see it now—­is the only moment in which men and women are really alive, are really worth writing about.  At other seasons they do not exist for the purpose of art.  I spit on all seasons except Christmas....  Is he not in all fiction the greatest figure, this Mr. Wardell, this old “squire” rosy-cheeked, who entertains this Christmas party at his house?  He is more truthful, he is more significant, than any figure in Balzac.  He is better than all Balzac’s figures rolled into one....  I used to kneel on that doorstep.  Balzac wrote many books.  But now it behoves me to ask myself whether he ever wrote a good book.  One knows that he used to write for fifteen hours at a stretch, gulping down coffee all the while.  But it does not follow that the coffee was good, nor does it follow that what he wrote was good.  The Comedie Humaine is all chicory....  I had wished for some years to say this, I am glad d’avoir debarrasse ma poitrine de ca.