Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema A Favorite Custom painting

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema A Favorite Custom paintingGarmash Sleeping Beauty paintingMarc Chagall La Mariee painting
stops. "I'm not a writer, and it's not a novel."
I was disarmed as much by the insouciance andtimbre of his voice as by the words themselves. It sounded as though he actually meant what he said, sincerely and indifferently, as who should announce: "I'm not left-handed," or "I'm no clarinetist." And this I felt with the ruefuller twinge for its expressing, glibly as the verdict of a child, that fear no fiction is proof against, and which had dwelt a-haunt in my Fancy's garret for the twelve months past. I had just turned thirty; it was my seventh year of toil in the prevaricating art, and scant-rewarded for my labors I was weary as the Maker of us all on the seventh morning. Monday, I still trusted, would roll round; in the meanwhile I so to speak asabbatical-piece -- that book you'll never see. I knew what novels were:The Seeker wasn't one. To move folks about, to give them locales and dispositions, past histories and crossed paths -- it bored me, I hadn't taste or gumption for it. Especially was I surfeited withmovement, the without-which-not of story. One novel ago I'd hatched a plot as mattersome as any in the books, and drove a hundred characters through eight times that many pages of it; now the merest sophomore apprentice, how callow soever his art