The Pose Novel

I watched the little spurts of flame jet out from between the writhing
pages of my manuscript, watched the sheets coil up in their fiery
anguish and start one from another. I helped the fire to the very vitals
of the mass by poking the brittle heap, and at last the sacrifice was
over, the flames turned from pink to blue and died out, the red glow
gave place to black, little luminous red streaks coiled across the
charred sheets and vanished at the margins, and only the ashes of my
inspiration remained. The ink was a lustrous black on the dull blackness
of the burnt paper. I could still read this much of my indiscretion
remaining, "He smiled at them all and said nothing."

"Fool!" I said, and stirred the crackling mass into a featureless heap
of black scraps. Then with my chin on my fists and elbows on knees I
stared at the end of my labours.

I suppose, after all, there has been some profit out of the thing. Satan
finds some mischief still for idle hands to do, and one may well thank
Heaven it was only a novel. Still, it means many days out of my life,
and I would be glad to find some positive benefit accruing. Clearly, in
the first place, I have eased my mind of some execrable English. I am
cleaner now by some dozen faulty phrases that I committed and saw
afterwards in all the nakedness of typewriting. (Thank Heaven for
typewriting! Were it not for that, this thing had gone to the scoffing
of some publisher's reader, and another had known my shame.) And I shall
not write another pose novel.

I am inclined to think these pose novels the wild oats of authorship. We
sit down in the heyday of our youth to write the masterpiece.
Obviously, it must be a novel about a man and a woman, and something as
splendid as we can conceive of in that way. We look about us. We do not
go far for perfection. One of the brace holds the pen and the other is
inside his or her head; and so Off! to the willing pen. Only a few years
ago we went slashing among the poppies with a walking-stick, and were,
we said boldly and openly, Harolds and Hectors slaying our thousands.
Now of course we are grown up to self-respect, and must needs be a
little disingenuous about it. But as the story unfolds there is no
mistaking the likeness, in spite of the transfiguration. This bold,
decided man who performs such deeds of derring-do in the noisome slum,
knocks down the burly wife-beater, rescues an unmistakable Miss Clapton
from the knife of a Lascar, and is all the while cultivating a virtuous
consumption that stretches him on an edifying, pathetic, and altogether
beautiful deathbed in the last chapter----My dear Authorling, cry my
friends, we hear the squeak of that little voice of yours in every word
he utters. Is