New Zealand’s Brilliant Katherine Mansfield

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1076, 13 September 1930, Page 8

New Zealand’s Brilliant Katherine Mansfield

ANOTHER POSTHUMOUS VOLUME TOURING 1919 and 1920 Katherine Mansfield, who won the most prominent place in the world of literature ever held by a New Zealander, reviewed novels for the “Athenaeum,” and Mr. Middleton Murry, her husband, lias nosv published the reviews, under the title “Novels and Novelists.'’ There are few reviewers who would gain by such a test as this, but Katherine Mansfield is one of the few (writes A.N.M., in the Manchester “Guardian”). Mr. Murry has not thought it necessary to omit or to select; he gives the reviews in chronological order, believing, doubtless, that Katherine Mansfield did not write what is not worth reading. A good many of the novelists reviewed may read or reread these notices with little pleasure, and we could have spared some rather contemptuous reference to inferior work by those who have done better things. As there are something more than 120 novelists reviewed, there must be a considerable number who have little claim to distinction. Perhaps there was no need to accelerate the disappearance of such reputations as those of Lucas Malet and Mrs. Humphrey Ward.

Possibly the interesting criticism of Mr. Galsworthy suffers a little from his not being taken at his best; Miss Mansfield feels here the want of mystery and “unplumbed depth.” even though there is “a brilliant display of analysis and dissection.” His mind, it is suggested, has been too much for his creative energy; there is, too, an ironic comment on this veteran’s discovery of a supposed new school bereft of some of the old virtue. But it must not be supposed that Katherine Mansfield could not praise strongly and with fine perception. Conrad fulfils her condition that mystery, interrogation, even failure, must not be obliterated by accomplishment. There are real appreciations of Tomlinson, Virginia Woolf, Ibanez, Stella Benson, Couperus, Knut Hamsun, E. M. Poster and others; appreciations qualified or less ardent of many more. It is a book for novelists to read. Conceivably it might have two effects. One is to convince certain novelists that they might as well go out of business, the other to stimulate them to probing for something in their souls that is not common property. Yet various kinds of novelists will continue. and possibly Mr. George Moore will not be overwhelmed by “Without emotion writing is dead; it becomes a record rather than a revelation.” He will not be overwhelmed, but it is one of the things that is worth reiterating. It gives some indication of the trend of Katherine Mansfield's own .art.