Her world from which she has gathered the material for her two books of stories has been richly variegated, and her readers are given the full benefit of a versatile experience. She was La Gioconda of English fiction writers. “Je ne parle pas Française” shows that she knew the soul maladies and, like Walter Pater's conception of Leonardo's masterpiece, she knew some of the secrets of the grave: though she had not “been a diver in deep seas,” nor “trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants.” She did not finish an individual. She narrated an episode which revealed his or her character; she didn't lead up to some epochal event like marriage, a dramatic reconciliation, a studied folly, or a crime. She depicted an episode, and left you to put such interpretation upon it, or to continue it, as your experience, imagination, or desire might suggest. She was a picture maker, not pigment by pigment, cell by cell, but with great sweeps of the brush.
She usually depicted sentimental men, whose long suits were fidelity and constancy, or men whose fundamental urges were not harmonised to convention. Her women were, in the main, fickle, designing, inconstant, shallow, truckling, vain. “Marriage à la Mode,” is a specimen. William keeps his romantic and sentimental view of life after prosperity and progeny come. Isabel doesn't. She is all for progress and evolution—new house, new environment, new friends, new valuation of life's possessions. He goes home for week-ends chockful of love and sentimentality. She meets him at the station with her new friends—sybarites and hedonists in search of sensation. He soon finds he isn't in the game at all as Isabel now plays it. So he decides to abbreviate his visit. On the way back to town he concocts a long letter full of protestations of unselfish love, and willingness to stand aside if his presence is a drag on her happiness. She reads it aloud to her guests who receive it with sneers and jeers. Isabel has a moment of self-respect, and withdraws to her room and experiences the vulgarity and loathesomeness of her conduct. She will write to William at once and dispel his fears and reassure him, but while she is holding her character up to her eyes disparagingly she hears her guests calling her and decides “I'll go with them and write to William later—some other time. Not now. But I shall certainly write.” Procrastination, not hesitation, condition her downfall.
In “Je ne parle pas Française” she handled a subject—the implantation of the genesic instinct—in such a way that the reader may get little or much from it, depending upon his knowledge and experience. But in the lines and between the lines there is exposition of practically all that is known of the strange deviations of the libido. Raoul Duquette and Dick, his English friend, who cannot kill his mother, cannot give her the final blow of letting her know that he has fallen in love with Mouse, are as truly drawn to life as Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, or as Encolpius and Giton of the Satyricon.
It is a far cry from the depths glimpsed—but with such terrible sureness—in this story, to the budding soul of a young girl from the country as pictured in Leila in “Her First Ball”; or to the very spirit of healthy youth, both frivolous, superficial youth, and sensitive idealising youth, which exudes from the pages of “The Garden-Party.”
She depicted transformation of mental states, the result of suggestion or impulse, much as a prestidigitator handles his Aaron's rod. This is particularly well seen in Leila. The reader shares her joyous mental state, full of vistas of hope and love and joy. Then a fat man who has been going to parties for thirty years dances with her and pictures her future follies, strifes, struggles, and selfishness at forty. At once she realises her doll is stuffed with sawdust, and cries and wants to go home, but a young man comes along, dances with her again, and behold the filling isn't sawdust, but radium!
Katherine Mansfield's art may be studied in such a story as “At the Bay.” The dramatis personæ are: Beryl, a temperamental young lady looking for romance, seeking fulfilment of destiny, thwarted by a Narcissus inhibition; Linda, her sister, without temperament, to whom fulfilment is repellant; Mrs. Harry Kember, unmoral and immoral, a vampire with a past and keen for a future; Harry Kember, her husband of whom many things are said, but none adequate to describe him; Stanley Burnell, a conventional good man—mollycoddle; Jonathan Trout, a poet compelled by fate to be a drone; Alice, a servant in transformation from chrysalis to butterfly; Mrs. Stubbs, a vegetative hedonist; and several delightful children and a devoted “Granma.”
They spend a holiday at the seashore and Beryl looks for romance. Here is the picture:
“Very early morning. The sun was not yet risen, and the whole of Crescent Bay was hidden under a white sea-mist. The big bush-covered hills at the back were smothered. You could not see where they ended and the paddocks and bungalows began. The sandy road was gone and the paddocks and bungalows the other side of it; there were no white dunes covered with reddish grass beyond them; there was nothing to mark which was beach and where was the sea. A heavy dew had fallen. The grass was blue. Big drops hung on the bushes and just did not fall; the silvery, fluffy toi-toi was limp on its long stalks, and all the marigolds and the pinks in the bungalow gardens were bowed to the earth with wetness. Drenched were the cold fuchsias, round pearls of dew lay on the flat nasturtium leaves. It looked as though the sea had beaten up softly in the darkness, as though one immense wave had come tippling, rippling—how far? Perhaps if you had waked up in the middle of the night you might have seen a big fish flicking in at the window and gone again....”
You feel the wetness of it. Then come the first signs of waking up in the place: the shepherd with his dog and flock making for the Downs, the cat waiting on the gatepost for the milk-girl—harbingers of the day's activities.
Then the picture is animated.