KATHERINE MANSFIELD.
ENGLISH literature has, within the last month, suffered a severe loss in the untimely death of Katherine Mansfield. Time alone will show to what extent her work has influenced the short story and the popular conception of the short story in England ; but that her influence has been and will be large there is little doubt, for, more completely than any other English writer, she broke away from the firmly rooted idea that a short story (and a novel) should display a develop- ment of external events in which problems rise and are solved, and that at the end a very definite terminus should be reached. That idea is put more baldly, more uncompromisingly, when the popular magazine states its requirements—a strong plot and a strong love interest. Such a conception of the short story disregards the fact that in life a tremendous and exciting development may occur without any material action what- ever, as in Andreev's story The Dark, in which the plot— the development—is entirely psychological ; and it would exclude such stories as many of Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches, which simply display a human personality in appro- priate surroundings, and many of Tchekov's masterpieces, which are no more than glimpses of psychological moments either presented without comment or thrown into brilliant relief by the implication flashed from some apparently irrelevant detail.
Tchekov's is the name most frequently mentioned with Katherine Mansfield's, and it is obvious that she learned much of the technique of story writing from him ; but she was far too original a writer to fail to assimilate what she derived from him, and even when she produces a story such as Marriage a la Mode, which is an English parallel of Tchekov's Not Wanted—each is a study of the home life of a hard-worked husband who finds himself crowded out by his wife's flippant artistic friends—her version is vividly alive and vividly her own. Her chief charaeteristic is an exquisite sensibility. She is like a delicate spring in tension, quivering at the smallest stimulus : she is waiting, it seems, for the moment of release, waiting for something to happen. And this is true not only of her artistic personality but also (curiously so) of many of her characters—Beryl and Linda in Prelude and At the Bay, " the young girl " in the story of that name, Bertha Young in Bliss, Ian French in Feuille d'Album. Her stories fall roughly into two classes. In one we are shown a personality reacting more or less acutely to a moment of psychological crisis or revealed for a moment in its own special psychological atmosphere—poor Miss Ada Moss, her worldly wealth reduced to one-and-three ; the fatuous Mr. Reginald Peacock, amid the cheap romance of his imaginary life and the tangle of irritation which he has made of his real one ; Laura, for whom the death of the young man, thrown from his cart, broke so tragically through the delightful excitement of the garden- party. And there is the other class which presents, as it were, two or three yards out of a long strip of unimportant events in the life of an unimportant family—stories such as
Prelude and At the Bay, with no beginning, no middle, and no end, which nevertheless are such complete and exquisitely formed works of art because the writer's sensibility acts upon the whole as a flux, melts it into a single consistent experience, g fact so real and so transparent that we no -longer question the relevance and significance of the details which constitute it. Yet that does not state the whole case. Sensibility alone cannot produce form, and it is easy to overlook the nicety of selection which has gone to the making of these stories. It is hardly paradoxical to say that they are as remarkable for what they omit as for what they include. No one, perhaps, outside those who have tried to write stories themselves can fully appreciate Katherine Mansfield's economy. Another of her most characteristic qualities is her cynicism. When so sharp a sensibility is directed towards human character, cynicism is inevitable. All the small peculiarities and absurdities which make up the average personality have been observed because they have tortured the observer. She has been exasperated by them before she has come to be amused by them and finally to love them : and the point, with Katherine Mansfield, is that her cynicism hates only that which deserves hatred. It hates Mr. Reginald Peacock, but it loves poor Connie and Jug, " the Daughters of the late Colonel," even while it strips them bare to their frustrated, ineffectual souls. It is searchingly humorous at their expense, but with a humour which is endearing and not scornful. In that story another characteristic appears with the humour— her method of using apparently trivial details as symbols which illuminate her characters. Instead of generalizing about the dryness, the timidity, the frail old-maidishness of Connie and Jug, she simply tells us that Connie "winced faintly as she broke through the shell of her miSringue," and that Jug, answering letters of condolence, had to " soak up a very light-blue tear with an edge of blotting-paper." The same symbolism appears on a larger scale in The Escape and Bliss, where a tree is the outward and visible form of an inward emotional state in a person of the story. It is this constant flicker of implications and complementary meanings, added to her sharp awareness of details of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste, which makes the world she shows to us even in her least important stories so vividly real. Both con- sciously and unconsciously we react to the succession of skilfully selected stimuli, which compel us to see, hear, feel, and, even when intellectually puzzled, emotionally to accept and understand. We are constantly meeting in her stories with definitions of impressions which we have frequently experienced but never defined. What could be better, both in this respect and in its general vividness, than this descrip- tion of a seashore on a hot day : " Nothing seemed to move but the small sand-hoppers. Pit-pit-pit I They were never still. Over there, on the weed-hung rocks that looked at low tide like shaggy beasts come down to the water to drink, the sunlight seemed to spin like a silver coin dropped into each of the small rock pools" ; or what could more convinc- ingly reproduce the sensation of emerging from a bathe than the simple statement that " he got on to his feet and began to wade towards the shore, pressing his toes into the firm, wrinkled sand." Among all these entrancing impressions and the delicate emotional tension which possesses so many of her characters we hardly notice the lack of a profounder humanit3
MARTIN ARMSTRONG.
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