25 JANUARY 1946, Page 18

BOOKS OF THE DAY

The Bliss of Sensibility

The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. (Constable. 15s.)

WHEN Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis of the lungs in 1923 she was only thirty-four years old. Tragic and famous, she had just reached, was just reaching, a point of full command of her creative powers when death took her. The battle had been a long and losing one, and she had known that the last enemy would almost certainly catch her before she was willing to go ; we gather from her Journals that as ill-health deepened courage and curiosity for life increased, increased in step with and probably because of her increasing grasp of her vocation. So it was a particular pity that she died young. She did not have a fair chance ; but with the odds against her she achieved a fresh and special kind of fame, and left some lovely and enduring work behind her.

We turn cautiously, perhaps, to re-assess those stories, some at least of which we remember so well that we might have preferred not to read them again. We were young then ; now we are forty-six, of the century is, and let that age serve for those of us who a shade outstrip it. The literary judgements of youth, of people in their twenties, may at all times be more valuable than those of middle age ; anyway, there are many arguments in favour of them. And in any case, I think that the response of the young to acute sensibility is usually more grateful and patient than is that of the mature. But we who acclaimed Katherine Mansfield and mourned the loss of an innovator and an evolving great artist have had to live on into a particularly desolate and uncharitable elderliness. When she died no doubt we thought the loss was at least as much hers as the world's ; now, were she alive, she would only be in her middle- fifties—but what would the intervening years have done to her very specialised, highly personal art? And in the place where the world has got to now, what would her sensitivity have found to feed upon? For the new predicament of artists is that they cannot seek or find significance any longer in what is particular to one soul. In face of what civilisation has become, in face of all the hardly apprehensible facts, it has become futile, they say, to analyse the cargo of any one silly spirit. Sensibility is out ; the close-up, the careful inward probe, the search through memory or through the insanities of personal pain or joy—all these have been tried, and they yield no more nourishment ; there is no help in them now.

But these were the things Katherine Mansfield could do, and it was inward to the particular that, if I understand her observations about her own work, she intended to press in pursuit of inspiration. So, fearing perhaps one's own loss, and to have the blunting and deterioration of the years demonstrated once again, one turned up the first titles that came to memory. The Daughters of the Late Colonel, The Man Without a Temperament, Mr. and Mrs. Dove, 7e Ne Pane Pas Francais, The Doll's House. They not only remain good, but for all that she was and still is so widely imitated in the

short story, they remain unmistakably hers ; rising, with all their small, incidental faults, high in accuracy of feeling and form above most of the English short stories of the last twenty years. They are simpler than much of the deservedly acclaimed short-story work. which has been appearing in recent years ; there are careless passages and even sloppy phrases ; but I do not see that they fail anywhere in any essential of intelligence—they are indeed piercingly, and at times innocently, intelligent. They illustrate also the author's easy pictorial power, and each carries its weather and atmosphere in its very texture, an inseparable part of it. And—proof, I think, of rare power—no matter how well you think you remember these stories, begin any one of the ones I have named, or any of a dozen others in the collection, and resist as you may, you finish it.

When I had read a great deal else in the book, I went back to Prelude, which I had always remembered with especial vividness. At this reading I admired it less in detail but more in general than I had done long ago. If it was going to be a novel, surely the form Katherine Mansfield had apparently decided upon was going to be graceless and wearisome? And how would it have worn, such intense femininity of mood; such vibrating tenuousness—even in the great portrait of the husband—how would it have stood up to the long and sometimes necessarily flat and practical extractions of the hovel form? Could we have borne it, even steadied by the wise beauty of Grandma and the bustling virility of Harry, Laura, Beryl, Kezia, all those quivering, helpless, sensitive variations of the feminine in frustration or in pain?

And that reminds me—while commending Prelude as it stands as perhaps on the whole the best thing in a book containing many good things—I do not think that straight through, one after another, is a good way to acquaint oneself with Katherine Mansfield's stories. Her mood is too uniformly tensed, and too simply lyrical and melodic. She gives the reader only one thing to attend to at a time, and she demands the attention of the nerves rather more than of the mind- s° that to be fair to her, to contain her for reflection, to hold her echo, it is best to read her in short flights, two or three pieces together at most. This edition is very'well done, and is good value for money, for it contains many things that the sensitive will be glad to read more than once. But it seems a pity that it contains the author's first stories, the collection called In A German Pension, which ve not good, which she disliked herself, and which she said she would only re-publish if she could write a preface in apology for them. She did not write her preface—so it seems odd that all the same the