A RARE ARTIST

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 131, 8 December 1928, Page 21

A RARE ARTIST

KATHEMNE MANSFIELD'S LETTERS "The Letters of Katharine Mansfield." Edited by J. Middlcton Murry. Two volumes. London: Constable. London reviewers appear to be in accord in dealing with "The Letters of Katbcrinc Mansfield." The opening of "The Times" review begins: "How good these letters are! How brightly vivid, how keen their vision, and how continuous the awareness they express. The very first, 'Summer, 1913,' from Cholosbury, in Buckinghamshire, is wholly individual and characteristic, and the pages which follow are brilliant, even in recording their writer's loneliness abroad, with pen-pictures complete, detailed, and satisfying. Katherine Mansfield had always the gift of portraying a scene or an incident to perfection in a few happy phrases, and in her letters it served her well. She was never trivial, because her pen transformed eveu her trivialities to ' something sometimes levely, sometimes amusing, always readable. For matter she had only to walk along a street or look out of her window; but her impressions and comments are always relevant to her circumstances or her mood. '' Theso 600 pages of Jotters give a . very complete account of tho last ten years of Katherine Mansfield's life. They were scarcely happy years. Fate ordained that the greater part of them should be lived away from her home, her husband, and her friends, usually abroad and in increasing ill-health. It was early in 1918. that her fatal illness first appeared, and thenceforward she had to spend more and more time in France, Italy, or Switzerland. But the number and quality of her letters were, of course, the direct result of her isolation. She had not many correspondents, but those she had were practically all intimate friends, and she could address them with free heart j and pen. Denied other outlet, she wrote to them as she would have talked, and indr '. she does in page after page aeh<:ve the effect of good, and lively talk. She covered a wide j range of topics—the routine and incidents of daily life, recollections, visitors, her work, the books she road, art, literature, life. She was above all an artist, and as such she know her job; her criticisms of her fellow-writers —though her confessed preference was for the 'old masters'—were almost always just and perceptive. Her standards were the highest; of Mr. Shaw she wrote: — ■ There's no getting over it: he's a kind of concierge in the house of literature —sits in a glass case, sees everything, knows everything, examines tho letters, cleans tho stairs, but has no part, no part in the life that is going on. But as I wrote that I thought: Yes, but who is living there, living there as we mean life'' Dostoevsky, Tchehov, and Tolstoy and Hardy. I cant' think of anybody else. ' 'SHE WAS A BRAVE WOMAN." "The letters express all moods, from the despondent to the hilarious; there were certain times, one feels, when she had to laugh to preserve her sanity. These painful moments arc few, and in fact grow rarer as disease gains upon her; she has not much, all things considered, to say about her illness, and when she does complain it is usually because- she cannot do more or better work. She was a brave woman. As a writer she took herself seriously, not so much for what she had done as what she felt it in her to do. The sense which is apparent in these pages of a profundity* deepening to a fine placidity marks the development of one of the rarest artists of our time to a point the topping of which, in essence if not in obvious achievement, places her in the company of those great ones whose names she continually invoked." "THESE IGNORANT REVIEWERS." I. B. Priestley, in "The Evening News," began his review with a quotation from one of Katherine Mansfield's letters, in which she wrote: "But oh! how ignorant these reviewers are, how far away and barred out from all they write!" And he confesses: "I, too, am far away and barred out because I never knew her, nor can such a book be reviewed at all in tho usual way. Its contents are not offered to the public as a diversion. You cannot say of these letters, written by a brilliant, doomed girl when her days were horribly toboganning towards death, '1 like this one,' 'I don't eare for that.' But perhaps something may be snid of the book as a whole. It is a tragic affair. Even the gaieties, the glittering splash of phrases, the sudden rushes of high spirits, only serve to remind you again that there is blood in the fifth act." Mr. Priestley remarks that the author of these letters, I "with all her faults, could write most people's he'ads off. Her early death | was a piece of sheer bad luck for contemporary literature." SPIRITUAL HUNGER. Mr. Richard Church remarked, in "The Spectator": —"The trouble about i Katherine Mansfield is that it hurts to read her. She has only to let fall a casual sentence in a letter, and the perj son 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 tho Daphne pursued and tor- ! mented by Apollo were strayed, through fear, into our modern world, still sundazzled, still indolent after his caress, yet with a knowledge bred of metamorphosis. "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 abo'ut 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 tho coldness. . . "Her acute intelligence soon, made hoi1 aware that .. . 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 organise tho overwhelming chaos of substance and event which made up tho world around her. A CEASELESS PASSION. "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 nor life; and her personal hopes and loves, and desires wore subordinated to it. That it made her suffer is certain, for 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 thoso 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. .. . '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 iu 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 tho individual, thp 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. Middlcton Murry has edited these letters with much discretion and modesty, a service which he lias already paid to her Journals. In addition, he has given two photograph portraits of her which 1 show that this rare spirit was beautifully housed.'' A SENSITIVE MIND. Mr. Arthur Waugh, in the "Daily Telegraph," considered it an open question whether true service to a friend's memory is done by publishing private and intimate correspondence. The letters do not show the Katherine Mansfield of the inimitable short stories the acutely sensitive and sympathetic observer of so mauy twisted characters. These are the letters of a sick woman, weary of her burden. "Is it altogether kind to expose such symptoms to an indiseriminatiug public? The question must bo faced," writes Mr. Waugh. "And yet, in spite of all lets and hindrances, there remains a sound and memorable residue of true, sincere, and often poignant sentiment in these letters, the revelation of a nervous, sensitive, but essentially courageous temperament. Her little pictures of scenery and character in the byways of Paris; her amusing anecdotes of the misadventures of life in exile; and her swift reflections upon tho problems and mysteries of human suffering, are intensely real and arresting."