What was meant, and what was not,
By the Painter of the Pot!

* * * * *

Pots are long and life is fleeting;
Artists, when their subjects treating,
Should be very, very far
Carefuller than now they are.

THE NOVEL

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 fe