Sensibility
The Letters of Katherine Mansfield. Edited by J. Middleton Murry. (Constable. 2 vols. 16s.)
THE trouble about Katherine Mansfield is that it hurts to read her. She has only to let fall a casual sentence in a letter, and the person who receives it is pricked by some poignant reality. She is a sort of John Keats with an added feminine minuteness of intuition and sensibility. She thinks through the pores of her skin ; such exquisite and tender thought too, as though the Daphne pursued and tormented by Apollo Were strayed, through fear, into our modern world, still sun- dazzled, still indolent after his caress, yet with a knowledge bred of metamorphosis.
" The trees on the island are in full leaf," she writes, " I had quite forgotten the life that goes on within a tree—how it flutters and almost plumes itself, and how the topmost branches tremble and the lowest branches of all swing lazy."
This rare creature is a puzzle to the everyday mind with which one usually ,estimates the ebbing and flowing tide of humanity that flows round the shores of life. There is a stark cleanliness about her, no sour and stale sentimental reserve : and she creates round her—so one may judge from her writing—an atmosphere as of sunlight shining on clean linen, and filling large airy rooms, and glinting on plates of grapes and apples. She pours out her personality, and it is like delicious water caught in goblets whose sides are misted with the coldness.
She writes to one of her men friends, " I have just finished Two Frightful Hours trying to buy a corset—not really a corset but a kind of belt—I have spent every penny that I haven't got upon an affair of violet silk which is so exquisite that I lament my lonely life. Now Frieda would say I was being very wicked, but you understand, don't you ? All the while I write I am looking at you and laughing a little and you are saying to me, ' Really, you are a deplorable creature."' This is the lighter side of her sensuous acuteness ; a side that was inclined sometimes to override her will, making her weary with little warnings of indolence and clinging languor that were later to betray their origin in tubercle. When she was more virile, however—and that was her most characteristic self—she put her quick senses through the discipline of thought, thus generalizing her sensations into a philosophy of feeling. " The sun," she says in such a moment, " is very warm to-day and lazy—the kind of sun that loves to make patterns out of shadows and puts freckles on steeping babies—a pleasant creature." So she reaches out with her genius of touch, and familiarizes her fingers, her lips, her hair even, with the elemental forces of the universe, taming them, and bringing them, by this devious means, under the direction of her swift feminine mind.
Herein, I believe, lies the secret of her power. From these subject forces she accumulated a nimbus of magnetic energy, so that whatever came from her brain had to pass through it, and in passing be impregnated by it. She seemed to be incapable of stating an idea abstractly, in the detached syllo- gistic way which gives rise to theories, systems, policies, and bureaucracies. She must always particularize, changing the mood, the idea, into a clear image moulded and made vital by her five senses.
Her acute intelligence soon made her aware that in these five she had an abnormally strong equipment with which to achieve her aim. That aim was to become a trustworthy and economical artist ; one who could deliberately organize the overwhelming chaos of substance and event which made up the world around her.
This purpose was a ceaseless passion with her, tormenting her, forcing her to a body-destroying vigilance that no doubt• assisted the disease which cut her life short. She read, thought, watched, always with this purpose in the forefront of her mind. It ordered her life ; and her perional hopes and loves and desires were subordinated to it. That it made her suffer is certain, 'tor the very vitality which gave it birth 'also made her susceptible to the most piercing emotions. She was a great lover of her fellow-mortals, and therefore a great hater of those who tended to shatter her ideals of a right humanity. Infinite tenderness made her long for children, for someone on whom she could lavish all the riches of her nature. The letters make us feel that she was disappointed in this quest ; that human relationship proved to her to be a tragic falling- short rather than a solace in equality. Her attitude, there- fore, tended towards a wary compassion for her loved ones, betrayed by occasional outbursts of passion when she could no longer disguise the yearning hunger which was the basis of her. nature. This was the self which she fought to subdue to her vigilant artist-self, the expression of this latter being her more. individualized . birthright. The warfare between
the. two went on persistently ; and it was a struggle harrowing for those who looked on. I think the following extract from a letter to her husband illustrates what I am trying to convey.
' " I walked on to-day and came to a garden behind Notre Dame. The pink and white flowering trees were so lovely that I sat down on a bench. In the middle of the garden there was a grass plot and a marble basin. Sparrows taking their baths turned the basin into a fountain and pigeons walked through the velvety grass, pluming their feathers. Every.bench and every chair was occupied by a mother or a nurse or a grandfather and little staggering babies with spades and buckets made mud pies or filled their buckets with fallen chestnut flowers or threw their grandfathers' caps on to the forbidden grass plot. And then there came a chinese nurse trailing two babies. Oh, she was a funny little thing in her green trousers and black tunic, with a small turban clamped to her head. Shs sat down with her darning and kept up a long bird-like chatter all the time, blinking at the children and running the darning needle through her turban.
" But after I had watched a long time I realised that I was in the middle of a dream. Why haven't I got a real home '—a real life— why haven't I got a chinese nurse with green trousers and two babies who rush at me and clasp my knees ? I'm not a girl—I'm a woman. I want things. Shall I ever have them ? To write all the morning and then to get lunch over quickly and to write again in the afternoon and have supper and one cigarette together and then to be alone again till bedtime—and all this love and joy that fights for outlet, and all this life drying up, like milk, in an old breast. Oh, I want life ! I want friends and people and a house. I want to give and to spend."
There we see the artist training her eye, hand, and memory, even in the moments when she is writing to an intimate about matters nearest to her heart. Throughout the two volumes this effort is apparent ; the careful descriptive and evocative writing, the choosing of the right epithet and image. Breaking through that impersonal effort is the cry of the individual, the woman demanding the fruits of womanhood ; leisure, brooding maternity, material ministry to beings whom she might passionately call her own. But her genius, conspiring with the demon of disease, denied her these things ; and one feels that she died of spiritual hunger, resigned, noble—but starving.
Mr. Middleton Murry has edited these letters with much discretion and modesty, a service which he has already paid to her Journals. In addition he has given two photograph portraits of her which show that this rare spirit was beautifully housed.
RICHARD CHURCH.
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