“Prelude,” the introductory story of “Bliss and Other Stories,” is a further revelation of Beryl, with side lights on her sister Linda and Linda's husband, Stanley, and her quite wonderful mother. The Narcissus in Beryl has bloomed. Forced to accept bed and board from her brother-in-law, she bewails her fate while chanting the praises of her physical charms and mental possessions. Linda, by this time, has given herself all the air of confirmed invalidism. Linda gets her emotional appeasement from what might have been; Beryl, from what is going to be—both foundationed in introspection. When Linda first met Stanley out in Australia she scorned him, but previous to or after their marriage she fell in love with him. But her antipathy to childbearing and her fear of it are so profound that they colour all her thoughts and emotions. This is best seen when she relates her dream about birds.
“Prelude” is not a story of Linda, but of Beryl and her hypocrisy. It should be dovetailed into “At the Bay.” The overtures and the temptation which were made to her by Mr. and Mrs. Harry Kember have not borne fruit. She is in love with herself and it may be that that is what the author meant to convey. The description of herself and her comment on her own appearance: “Yes, my dear, there is no doubt about it, you really are a lovely little thing” is very illuminating. She persuades herself that she is a potential Nina Declos and that if opportunity had not been denied her she could rival Messalina. Hypocrisy is bearing in on her and it is not quite evident, at the close of “Prelude,” where it is going to lead her.
The burden of the story is to intensify interest in Beryl, and her influences and surroundings, and to heighten the suspense of the reader. On finishing “At the Bay” one has a picture of the romantic girl; at the close of “Prelude” one feels that something is going to happen to her before the author finishes with her. The reader gets no clue, however, to what it might be, except that it would be the working out of her temperament—admiration for self and longing for romance through which to express this self. Her longing at first seemed to be for expression of self biologically and intellectually; now it seems to be to find a setting in which to frame becomingly this adorable self—an essential difference in character and the difference that is the axis upon which the story might be expected to turn. If people are their temperaments, it is such subtle differences of temperament which determine destiny, or what they shall work out for themselves from given circumstances.
Beryl is more cold-blooded, more calculating than she at first appeared to be, and never again will she be in danger of capitulating to a Kember. What she wants is to shine, and she is going to use her valued attractions designedly as currency to accomplish this. Beryl and Linda are studies in selfishness and introspection. The latter is phlegmatic and lazy, mentally and emotionally as well as physically.
“Granma” and the children are still the most attractive figures in the family. How such a woman as “Granma” could have had daughters like Beryl and Linda is truer to life than to fiction. Had we known their father they might not have been so enigmatic.
Katherine Mansfield had a genius for catching the exact meaning of the little touches in life, the little ironies and comedies as well as the single little wild flower in a rank growth of weeds. She was delightfully objective. She had a quality rare in women writers, especially, of not putting all her treasures in one basket, of not concentrating upon one character and that character more or less the expression of herself; and of being interested in the whole drama as it passed. She could enter into the soul of a charwoman or a cat and take a snap-shot of it which made the reader love the charwoman or the cat, as well as she could paint a picture that gives the very atmosphere of children at play or of dawn at the seashore or night in a quiet house—even better than she could make an X-ray study of the soul of a selfish woman or a stupid self-righteous man.
The “high light” of “The Garden-Party” is the contrast between a typical happy prosperous family and an equally unhappy poor one; a garden-party for the young girls of the first family, the accidental death of the man and the wage-earner of the second. One lives on the hill in the sunlight; the other in the damp forbidding hollow below. They are near neighbours in point of space; strangers in all other respects. One makes an art of the graces and pleasures of life; the other is familiar with the gloom typified by poverty and death. Both accept their existences unquestioningly, in worlds as different psychologically as they are physically.
The author does not preach; there is no straining for effect. Laura, one of three sisters, is more sensitive than the other members of the family. She alone feels contrasts. She is revelling in the preparations for the garden-party when she hears from the workmen of the man's sudden death, and her joy is clouded. But her mother and sisters make light of it, and the party proceeds—a picture of average wholesome young joyousness. Then the mother sends Laura, with a basket of cakes, to the man's family. The dramatic contrast is in Laura's impressions when she goes, in her party clothes, with the frivolous-looking basket, down into the hollow at dusk. That is all. There is no antagonism, no questioning of fate, no sociology—just a picture. Only the ability not to use an extra word, the taste and the humour which kept out any mawkishness saved the story from being “sob stuff.”
When Katherine Mansfield read virtues into her female characters she usually made them humble, lowly, or plain, such as Ma Parker, Miss Brill, and Beryl's mother. She could introduce Ma Parker who cleaned the flat of the literary gentleman every Tuesday, and in eleven pages, without a single approach to sentimentality, make you in love with the old scrubwoman, with her hard life and heroic unselfish soul, when you left her standing in the cold street wondering whether there was any place in the world where she could have a cry at last. The motive of this story is much the same as that of “The Garden-Party,” the sharp contrast between two extreme types of life which circumstances bring close together.
In “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” the author walked with a sure step on thin ice from the first sentence to the last, never taking a false step or undignified slide. Humour alone preserved the balance where the ice was not too thin, and kept her from slipping over the invisible line of safety in the direction of bathos on the one side, or of the coarsely comic on the other. To make two old ladies who had spent their lives “looking after father, and at the same time keeping out of father's way” and who at father's death find themselves among those whom life had passed by, interesting and intriguing, is a severe test for a writer. Not only are they dead emotionally, but their habit of thought has become too set to be readjusted to their new freedom. Miss Mansfield made them as funny as they naturally would have been, without “making fun” of them. Their funniness is lovable. For instance: