When by efforts literary you might scale the summits airy
Which the eminent in fiction are ascending every day,
Why obscurely crawl and grovel?--I will write (I said) a Novel!
So I started and I planned it in the ordinary way.
I'd a Heroine--a creature of resplendent form and feature,
With a spell in every motion and a charm in every look:
I'd a Villain--worse than Nero,--I'd a most superior Hero:
And the host of minor persons which is needed in a book:
Each was drawn from observation: yet was each a pure creation
Which revealed at once the genius of originating mind:
Not a man and not a woman but combined the Broadly Human
With a something quite peculiar of an interesting kind:
What a wealth of meaning inner in the things they said at dinner!
How their conversation sparkled (like the ripples on the deep),
Half disclosing, half concealing a Profundity of Feeling
Which would move the gay to laughter and incite the grave to weep!
There they stood in grace and vigour, each imaginary figure,
Each a masterpiece of drawing for the world to wonder at:
There was really nothing more I had to find but just the story,
Nothing more, but just the story--but I couldn't think of that.
Yet (I cried), in other writers, how the lovers and the fighters
Are conducted through the mazes of a complicated plan,--
How the incidents are planted just precisely where they're wanted--
How the man invites the moment, and the moment finds the man!
How a Barrie or a Kipling guides the maiden and the stripling
Till they're ultimately landed in the matrimonial state,--
And they die, or else they marry (in a Kipling or a Barrie)
Just as if the thing was ordered by unalterable Fate,--
While with me, alas! to balance my innumerable talents,
There's a fatal imperfection and a melancholy blot:
All the forms of my creating stand continually waiting
For a charitable person to provide them with a Plot!
Still I put the endless query why I wander lone and dreary
(Barred from Eden like the Peri) minus fame and minus fee,
Why the idols of the masses have an entree to Parnassus,
While a want of mere invention is an obstacle to me!