As for these notes--heaven help any reader if I ever make of them a chapter in a book. That book! Fiction or criticism, or both? The novel as a literary form is stale. I should like to write a story, not all empty incident, nor yet all barren analysis. Neither Henry James, nor old Dumas--I'm not flying high, am I?--but one in which the idealogies of Barrès and the concrete narrative of De Maupassant would be merged. A second Dickens, a second Thackeray are inconceivable. A soul-biography framed in harmonious happenings--Ah! what an ideal is Walter Pater who, when his critical prose plays second-fiddle to his fiction, will be called the master-psychologist of them all. Marius, Imaginary Portraits, Gaston--those are unapproachable. Pater has revealed to us the rarest of souls. He achieves ecstasy in a prose-music never sounded since the Greeks. As Tristan is to Aida, so Marius to all fiction--oh, but now I'm going off my handle again, grumbled Ulick. Vanity Fair and Pickwick are good enough for me, even if I do admire Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Mérimée and the Russians. The man who doesn't read Pickwick once a year is fit for treason. If only Dostoievsky, the greatest psychologist since Balzac, had mastered the compression of Turgenev? What a scooper of souls. There's too much descriptive padding in modern novels, too many landscapes, not enough characterization. I don't mean descriptive characterization-- the clothes, the gait and the eternal simper of the pulchritudinous gum-chewing heroine--but a searching characterization that not only paints your man without, but also within. Think of Julien Sorel in Red and Black. Not the master that is Tolstoy could better Stendhal. A detestable character? Admitted, but what has that to do with the vitality of his characters, the validity of his portraiture? Too much cluttered-up with futile things our novel reminds me of a drawing-room which you can't see because of the furniture or the bric-à-brac, so crowded is it with everything.