CHAPTER VI

TWO LITERARY LADIES OF LONDON: KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND REBECCA WEST

Many persons are so constituted that they accept any positive statement as fact unless they know it to be false. Few more positive statements are made in print than “So and So is England's or America's or France's leading or most popular writer of fiction or verse.” Publicity agents have found apparently that such claim sells books and needs no substantiation. The reading public rarely protests. It denies in a more effective way, but before the denial gets disseminated many credulous seekers of diversion and culture are misled.

There are several young women writing fiction in England today of whom it can be said truthfully that they ornament the profession of letters. Women have long justified their reputation for being intuitive by their fictional writing. It is likely that they may proceed to establish an equal reputation for accurate observation, logical inference, and temperate narrative. Had not the waves of death recently encompassed Katherine Mansfield in her early maturity she would have remained at the top of the list, the place where now, varying with individual taste and judgment, stand the names of Dorothy Richardson, Rebecca West, Stella Benson, Virginia Woolf, Sheila Kaye-Smith, Mary Webb, Rose Macaulay, to mention no others. For the first time in history women prose writers preponderate, and it is a good augury for a country which has been so quickly and successfully purged of anti-feminism.

Katherine Mansfield's output has been small, but quality has made up for quantity. Her reputation is founded on two volumes of short stories. To say that they reveal capacity to create life, to recognise the temperament, intellectuality, and morality of the ordinary human beings that one encounters, and to display their behaviour; as well as a power to analyse personality and to depict individuality that equals de Maupassant, is to make a truthful statement, and a temperate one. Indeed, she seemed to her contemporaries to be possessed of some unsanctified and secret wisdom.

Her history is brief. She was Kathleen Beauchamp, third daughter of a man of affairs, recently knighted, and was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She was 23 years old when she married, just before the war, J. Middleton Murry, the British critic and novelist. Her first book “In a German Pension,” published when she was 21, gave no promise of great talent. Her first mature work was a series of book reviews in _The Nation and Athenæum_, about 1919. She was quickly recognised to be a subtle and brilliant critic. In 1920 the publication of “Bliss and Other Stories” revealed her metal and temper. Development and maturity marked her second and last collection, “The Garden-Party and Other Stories,” which followed in 1922. Hardly had the promise of her early work been recognised before it was overshadowed by progressive pulmonary disease, and after long months of illness, during which she was obliged to spend most of her time away from England, she died in France on January 9, 1923.

Katherine Mansfield had a technique which may be compared to that of a great stage manager. When the play is put on, the scenes and the characters, the atmosphere and the environment, the sentiment and the significance are satisfying, intelligent and convincing. The world seen through her eyes, and the conduct of its most highly organised product, is the world that may be seen by anyone who has normal, keen vision. The conduct of the people who encumber it is that which an observer without inherited bias or acquired bigotry knows intuitively, and has learned from experience, is the conduct that reflects our present development, our attitudes, our interests, our desires, and most of all our dispositions.

[Illustration: KATHERINE MANSFIELD]

She prepared the stage and then her characters came on. She didn't bore with narrative of their birth, weary with incidents of their development, or disgust with details of their vegetative existence. They reacted to their immediate desires and environment in the way that people act in real life. She had a comprehensive understanding of human motives, and she realised how firmly engrained in man is the organic lust to live and to experience pleasure.

To find the balance in fiction midway between the “joy stuff” which for the last decade has been threatening to reduce American literature to a spineless pulp, and morbid realism which, in both England and this country, has been reflecting the influence of so-called psychoanalysis, is an accomplishment deserving of the thanks of all admirers of sanity in art. Miss Mansfield has succeeded in doing this, with the result that a large measure of the charm of her art lies in its sanity, its extraordinary freedom from obsessions, from delusions, and from excessive egocentricity. To borrow a term from music, she may be said to have possessed an unerring sense of pitch.

The easiest way of estimating any unknown element is to compare it to something already known, and Katherine Mansfield has been called the Chekhov of English fiction. Such a comparison may be useful as an approach to her work. In truth, however, while her position in English fiction may be compared with that of the illustrious Russian, she is in no sense an imitator, a disciple of him or of any one else. Her art is her own.

It can best be estimated from study of her last published story. If Katherine Mansfield, feeling herself already drawn into the shadow of approaching death, had tried to leave the world one final sample of her art which would epitomise her message and her method, “The Fly,” published in _The Nation and Athenæum_ of March 18, 1922, is a lasting triumph of her success. In a story of twenty-five hundred words she has said more than most authors say in a one-hundred-thousand word novel, or, indeed, in many novels. Not only is every word pregnant with meaning, but for those who can read between the lines there is an indictment of the life she is picturing too poignant for any but strong souls who can look upon the wine of life when it is red; who can even drain the cup to the bitter dregs in their sincere desire to learn its truth, without suffering the draft to send its poison into their souls. It is not that Katherine Mansfield was poisoned with the bitterness of life, or weakened with the taint of pessimism. On the contrary, she was as immune to bitterness, to poison, to weakness, as a disembodied spirit would be to disease. She was like pure white glass, reflecting fearlessly the part of life that was held before her, but never colouring it with her own personality. Her reflection was impartial.

In “The Fly” the _dramatis personæ_ are old Mr. Woodifield, the boss, and the fly. Old Mr. Woodifield is not described, but the reader sees him, small of body and of soul, shrivelled, shaky, wheezy, as he lingers in the big, blatantly new office chair on one of the Tuesdays when, since the “stroke” and retirement from his clerkship, he has escaped from the solicitude of the wife and the girls back into his old life in the city--“we cling to our last pleasures as the tree clings to its last leaves”--and revelled in the sense of being a guest in the boss's office. The boss is more graphic because he remains nameless. “Stout, rosy, five years older than Mr. Woodifield and still going strong, still at the helm” is what we are told he is, but this is what we see: A brutal, thick man, purring at the admiration of the old clerk for his prosperity revealed in the newly “done-up” office; self-satisfied, selfish, and supercilious, offering a glass of whiskey as a panacea for the old man's tottering pitifulness, and then listening, insolently tolerant, to the rambling outpourings of the old soul, harmless, disciplined to long poverty of purse, of life, of thought, about the “Girls” visit to the soldier's grave in Belgium and the price they paid for a pot of jam. Then the picture changes. The shuffling footsteps of the old man have died out, the door is closed for half-an-hour, the photograph of a “grave-looking boy in uniform standing in one of those spectral photographers' parks with photographers' storm-clouds behind him,” looks out at the boss who has “arranged to weep.” But the floodgates which have opened at the tap of the one sentiment of which the boss was capable are now suffering from the rust of six years. Tears refuse to come.

A fly drops into the pot of ink, and the boss, absent-mindedly noticing its struggles for freedom, picks it out with a pen and shakes it on to the blotting paper, where the little animal makes a heroic effort to clean off the ink and get ready for life again. But the boss has an idea. In spite of himself, his admiration is aroused by the fly's struggle, his pluck--“that was the way to tackle things, that was the right spirit. Never say die; it was only a question of.... But the fly has again finished its laborious task and the boss has just time to refill his pen, to shake fair and square on the newly cleaned body yet another dark drop. What about it this time?” And yet another. “He plunged his pen back into the ink, leaned his thick wrist on the blotting paper, and as the fly tried its wings, down came a great heavy blot. What would it make of that?... Then the boss decided that this time should be the last, as he dipped the pen deep in the inkpot. It was. The last blot fell on the soaked blotting-paper and the bedraggled fly lay in it and did not stir.” And as he rings for some new blotting-paper, a feeling of unaccountable wretchedness seizes him and he falls to wondering what it was he had been thinking about before the fly had attracted his attention. “For the life of him, he could not remember.” And that is the end of the story.

Katherine Mansfield's art resembles that of the great Russian physician-novelist in that she preaches no sermon, points no moral, expounds no philosophy. Although there is no available exposition of her theories, her work is evidence that her conception of art was to depict the problematic as it was presented to her, and leave the interpretation to the reader's own philosophy. She made Raoul Duquette say, in “Je ne parle pas Française,” one of the most psychologically remarkable of her stories: “People are like portmanteaux, packed with certain things, started going, thrown about, tossed away, dumped down, lost and found, half emptied suddenly or squeezed fatter than ever until finally the Ultimate Porter swings them on to the Ultimate Train, and away they rattle.” That may have been her own belief.

While it may be true in a certain sense that the artist sees only himself in his art, there is an essential difference between seeing himself reflected in life and in seeing life as in himself. Katherine Mansfield habitually did the latter. And it is this fact that enabled her to use as models, or accessories, or background any of the chance travellers she may have encountered with almost equal success. If she ever reflected herself in her art, it was a normal and objective self, a self which was interested in the drama being enacted about her, not merely the drama of her own soul; and in the fine points of this drama as well as in its leading actors and more obvious aspects.

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.

“A few minutes later the back door of one of the bungalows opened, and a figure in a broad-striped bathing suit flung down the paddock, cleared the stile, rushed through the tussock grass into the hollow, staggered up the sandy hillock, and raced for dear life over the big porous stones, over the cold, wet pebbles, on to the hard sand that gleamed like oil. Splish-splosh! Splish-splosh! The water bubbled round his legs as Stanley Burnell waded out exulting. First man in as usual! He'd beaten them all again. And he swooped down to souse his head and neck.”

This is a complete revelation of his character--smug, righteous, selfish, the centre of a world in which every tomorrow shall be like today, and today is without romance. He feels cheated when Jonathan Trout tries to talk to him.

“But curse the fellow! He'd ruined Stanley's bathe. What an unpractical idiot the man was! Stanley struck out to sea again, and then as quickly swam in again, and away he rushed up the beach.”

There is something pathetic in his determination to make a task of everything, even the entailments of matrimony.

“You couldn't help feeling he'd be caught out one day, and then what an almighty cropper he'd come! At that moment an immense wave lifted Jonathan, rode past him, and broke along the beach with a joyful sound. What a beauty! And now there was another. That was the way to live--carelessly, recklessly, spending oneself. He got on to his feet and began to wade towards the shore, pressing his toes into the firm, wrinkled sand. To take things easy, not to fight against the ebb and flow of life, but to give way to it--that was what was needed. It was this tension that was all wrong. To live--to live!”

The whole world of his home moves round Stanley. When he returns for breakfast he has every member of the family working for him. When Beryl does not help him at once, its mechanism must be dislocated. But Linda he can't draw into the net. “Linda's vagueness on these occasions could not be real, Stanley decided.”

The bathing hour on the beach for the women and children is as vivid as if taken by a camera.

“The firm, compact little girls were not half so brave as the tender, delicate-looking little boys. Pip and Rags, shivering, crouching down, slapping the water, never hesitated. But Isabel, who could swim twelve strokes, and Kezia, who could nearly swim eight, only followed on the strict understanding they were not to be splashed. As for Lottie, she didn't follow at all. She liked to be left to go in her own way, please. And that way was to sit down at the edge of the water, her legs straight, her knees pressed together, and to make vague motions with her arms as if she expected to be wafted out to sea. But when a bigger wave than usual, an old whiskery one, came lolloping along in her direction, she scrambled to her feet with a face of horror and flew up the beach again.”

Mrs. Harry Kember and Beryl give an exhibition of the vampire and the novice, while Linda dreams the morning away in revery and retrospect. Beryl's dream of romance when she is alone in the garden after everybody else in the household has gone to bed receives a rude jolt from Harry Kember.

The story is illustrative of Miss Mansfield's art in leaving her characters without killing or marrying them or bringing great adventure into their lives. It leaves one with a keen interest in what is next for Beryl, although she is not the most attractive of the figures in the story, but there is no indication that we shall meet her again. “Granma” and the children are the features of this story, and appear as real as life. The author's faculty in making the reader interested in characters who do not play heroic or leading rôles is distinctive. Even the sheep-dog's encounter with the cat on the gatepost is delightful, also the glimpse of Mrs. Stubbs' cottage with its array of bathing suits and shoes and the lady's reception of Alice are art: “With her broad smile and the long bacon knife in her hand, she looked like a friendly brigand.”

“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:

“At the cemetery while the coffin was lowered, to think that she and Constantia had done this thing without asking his permission. What would father say when he found out? For he was bound to find out sooner or later. He always did. 'Buried. You two girls had me buried.' She could hear his stick thumping.”

Or when the organ-grinding and the spot of sunshine on their mother's picture start in both silent reminiscence as to whether life might have been different if she had lived.

“Might they have married? But there had been nobody for them to marry. There had been father's Anglo-Indian friends before he quarrelled with them. But after that she and Constantia never met a single man except clergymen. How did one meet men? Or even if they'd met them, how could one have got to know men well enough to be more than strangers? One read of people having adventures, being followed, and so on. But nobody had ever followed Constantia and her.”

“Miss Brill” is a sketch with a whimsical pathos. A little old maiden lady who dresses up every Sunday and goes to the _Jardin Publiques_ in Paris and sits on a bench, getting her romance out of watching people and feeling that she is a part of the passing life, goes one Sunday as usual. The feature in the sketch is the little fur piece around her neck.

“Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken out the mothpowder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes.”

It is to her like a pet animal or even a child. At first she finds the park less interesting than usual, but finally, as she senses romance in a pair of park lovers who sit down on her bench, she hears the boy say, “that stupid old thing at the end there. Why does she come here at all--who wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?” And the girl, giggling, replies, “It's her fu-fur which is so funny.... It's exactly like a fried whiting.” Suddenly the romance and the joy have all gone out of the old lady, and when she lays away her little fur piece in its box sadly and puts on the lid she thinks she hears something crying.

Ability to depict the hidden speck of beauty under an uncompromising exterior not only inspired some of Katherine Mansfield's finest touches, but is especially refreshing after acquaintance with many writers who seem bent solely upon discovering some inmost rottenness and turning upon it the X-rays. There are many old ladies in this book, and the loving skill with which she has reproduced for the reader the charm she was able to see in them is indicative not only of her art, but also of her essential wholesomeness.

“The Man Without a Temperament” is an objective study of an unpopular man. One knows him from the few outward glimpses given of him as well as if the author had made an intensive psychological study of him. That is, one knows him as one knows other people, not as he knows himself. The sketch is pregnant with irony and pathos. Without a temperament--unfeeling--is the world's verdict of him. In reality, he has more feeling than his critics. What he lacks is not feeling, but expression. He is like a person with a pocketful of “paper” who has to walk because he hasn't change to pay his carfare, or to go hungry because he can't pay for a meal. People who know him trust him, even if they do not fancy him or feel quite at ease with him; but with strangers he has no chance. A life study of such a character would make him interesting. A photograph shows him as one of the people who “never take good pictures.”

In “Bliss and Other Stories,” the author went into deeper water than in the other collection. She was less concerned with the little ironies and with the fine points of her characters, and more with great passions.

“Bliss,” the story, shows the same method as do many of her other stories, but reversed. It is as if her reel were being run before the reader backwards. Instead of hunting out the one flower in a patch of weeds, she painted a young married woman's Garden of Eden and then hunted down the snake. From the first note of Bertha Young's unexplainable bliss one knows that the snake motive is coming, but does not know how or where. The feeling of it runs through Bertha's psychical sense of secret understanding--the “something in common” between herself and Pearl Fulton, who, by a subtle uncanniness, is made to suggest a glorified “vamp.” The leading motive of the story is the psychic sympathy between the women, who are antitheses. Commonly such a sense of understanding would take the form of antipathy. That it is attraction--harking back in all likelihood to something in Bertha remote and unrecognised--constitutes the distinctiveness of the motive. The art is revealed in a clear-cut picture--nothing more. Katherine Mansfield knew so marvellously where to stop. She had a good eye, a deft hand, an understanding mind, a sense of humour, and she loved her fellow-beings.

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Until “The Judge” was published Miss Rebecca West, in the opinion of many amateur and professional critics, was the most promising young woman to enter the field of literature in the reign of King George. Her advent to the literary world was impressive, and in a little book on Henry James in the “Writers of the Day” series she revealed a capacity of interpretation and facility of expression which made her elders envious and her contemporaries jealous. It was obvious to the casual reader of this book, and of her journalistic contributions, that not only had she the artistic temperament, but that she was familiar with its display in others, and that she had read widely, discriminatingly, and understandingly. Moreover, she was a thoroughly emancipated young woman and bore no marks of the cage that had restrained her sex. Her cleverness, her erudition, her resourcefulness were admitted. It was rated to be an asset, also, that she did not hesitate to call a spade a spade or to use the birch unsparingly when she felt it was for the benefit of the reading public, misled and deluded as it so often is by false prophets, erring evangelists, and self-seeking promoters. In other words, though she had sentiment and sympathy, she knew how to use them judiciously. In “Notes on Novels” she constantly reminds herself that there is a draught that we must drink or not be fully human. One must know the truth. When one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine of truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk but draws the mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Miss West does not intend that her countrymen shall display these deformities.

Her first novel, “The Return of the Soldier,” a fictional exposition of the Freudian wish, was acclaimed by critics as the first fulfilment of the promise she had given. The teachings of the Austrian mystic were not much known then in England, the country that now seems to have swallowed them, bait, line, and sinker, not only in the fields of fiction but in pedagogy and in medicine; so Miss West's little book was more widely read and discussed than it might be today when Miss May Sinclair, Mr. J. D. Beresford, Mr. D. H. Lawrence, and many other popular novelists have made his theories look like facts to the uninitiated.

The story is of Christopher, the ideal type of young Englishman who knows how to fight and to love.

“He possessed in a great measure the loveliness of young men, which is like the loveliness of the spring, foal or the sapling, but in him it was vexed with a serious and moving beauty by the inhabiting soul. To see him was to desire intimacy with him so that one might intervene between this body which was formed for happiness and the soul which cherished so deep a faith in tragedy.”

It is narrated by his cousin who has loved him platonically since youth. Chris had a romantic and ardent love affair with an inn-keeper's daughter in his youth, but he married Kitty, a beautiful little conventional non-temperamental young woman with a charming and cultivated soprano voice, of the class of women who

“are obscurely aware it is their civilising mission to flash the jewel of their beauty before all men so that they shall desire and work to get the wealth to buy it, and thus be seduced by a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the future.”

He goes to the war, gets concussion of the brain which causes amnesia, or forgetfulness of certain epochal events in his life, particularly his marriage to Kitty. “Who the devil is Kitty?” he replies when he is told she might have something to say on hearing of his plan to marry Margaret Allingham. Though some of the events of his life from twenty-one, when he fell in love with Margaret, to thirty-six, when he got injured, can be revived in his memory by Jenny, a resourceful understanding person, the sort of cousin every man should have, no argumentation can reconcile him to Kitty, and “he said that his body and soul were consumed with desire for Margaret and that he would never rest until he once more held her in his arms.”

After exhausting every means that love and science can suggest to jog his memory or wipe out the amnesia, it is decided to bring him and Margaret together. No one who had known her as the “Venus of Monkey Island,” a composite of charity and love, would recognise her now, seamed and scarred and ravaged by squalid circumstance, including dreary matrimony to a man with a weak chest that needed constant attention. Moreover, “all her life long Margaret had partaken of the inalienable dignity of a requited love, and lived with men who wore carpet slippers in the house.” Such experience had left deforming scars. However, Chris sees her with the eyes of youth, and her presence resurrects juvenile emotions. Under their influence Margaret undergoes transformation.

“She had a little smile in her eyes as though she were listening to a familiar air played far away, her awkwardness seemed indecision as to whether she would walk or dance to that distant music, her shabbiness was no more repulsive than the untidiness of a child who had been so eager to get to the party that it has not let its nurse fasten its frock.”

However, their interviews do not get them anywhere from Kitty's standpoint, and she decides to send for Dr. Gilbert Anderson.

“Heaven knows she had no reason for faith in any doctor, for during the past week so many of them sleek as seals with their neatly brushed hair and their frockcoats, had stood around Chris and looked at him with the consequential deliberation of a plumber.”

But Dr. Anderson was different.

“He was a little man with winking blue eyes, a flushed and crumpled forehead, a little grey moustache that gave him the profile of an amiable cat and a lively taste in spotted ties, and he lacked that appetiteless look which is affected by distinguished practitioners.”

[Illustration: REBECCA WEST] Photograph by _Yevonde, London._

Dr. Anderson explains to the family that Christopher's amnesia is the manifestation of a suppressed wish and that his unconscious self is refusing to let him resume his relations with his normal life. He forgot his life with his wife because he was discontented, and there was no justification for it for “Kitty was the falsest thing on earth, in tune with every kind of falsity.” The doctor proposes psychoanalysis, but Margaret says she knows a memory so strong that it will recall everything else, in spite of his discontent, the memory of the boy, his only child who had died five years before. Dr. Anderson urges her to take Christopher something the boy had worn, some toy they used to play with. So she takes a jersey and ball and meets Chris in the garden where there is only a column of birds swimming across the lake of green light that lays before the sunset, and as Chris gazes at Margaret mothering them in her arms the scales fall from his eyes and he makes obeisance to convention and bids his creative libido _au revoir_.

Jenny is witness of the transformation and when Kitty asks “How does he look?” she answers, though her tongue cleaves to the roof of her mouth, “Every inch a soldier.”

When Miss West next essayed fiction in “The Judge” it was the diagnosis of the creative urge that was her theme. It is one of Freud's contentions that the male child, before it hears the voice of conscience and the admonition of convention, has carnal yearnings for the mother, the female child for the father. With the advent of sense, with the development of individuality, with the recognition of obligation to others, and particularly with the acquisition of the sense of morality, these are replaced with what are called normal desires. In some instances the transformation does not take place. The original trend remains, and it is spoken of as an infantile fixation. Its juvenile and adult display is called sin ethically and crime socially.

The wages of sin still is death, according to Miss West's portrayal, but it is not called sin. It is merely behaviourism interpreted in the light of the New Psychology.

“Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father” is her thesis. As a work of art “The Judge” has elicited much praise. As a human document, a mirror held up to actual life, a statement of the accepted facts of heredity and of behaviour, and of the dominancy and display of passion, lust, jealousy, anger, revenge, I doubt that it merits unqualified approbation.

Marion Yaverland, daughter of a Kentish father and a French mother, had yielded without compunction to the wooing of the local squire and had borne a child, Richard, around whose development, personality, and loving the story is built.

“Vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents' passion. He had been begotten when beauty, like a strong goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, hence beauty would disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose begetting she was not concerned.”

But the goddess did not give him straight genesic endowment, so he was not able to keep filial love and carnal love in their proper channels. And from this flowed all the tragedy. His mother realised his infirmity, though she didn't look upon it as an infirmity, from the earliest days; and, unfortunately, she did not attempt to eradicate it--if it is ever eradicable.

Squire Harry behaved badly to Marion, save financially, and public opinion backed up by a stoning in the streets (a real Old Testament touch) by a moron and his more youthful companions, made her accept an offer of marriage from the squire's butler, a loathsome creature called Peacey. In proposing marriage and promising immunity to its obligations he said:

“Marion, I hope you understand what I'm asking you to do. I'm asking you to marry me. But not to be my wife. I never would bother you for that. I'm getting on in life, you see, so that I can make the promise with some chance of keeping it.”

But Peacey deceived no one save Marion. Miss West's description of the one visit of violence which he made to his wife, and which was followed in due time by Roger, whom Richard hated from birth, is a bit of realism that in verisimilitude has rarely been excelled. Roger was a pasty, snivelling, rhachitic child who developed into a high-grade imbecile of the hobo type, and finally managed to filter through the Salvation Army owing to some filter paper furnished by his mother that bore the legend “For the Gov^t and Comp^a of the Bank of England.”

From earliest childhood Richard and his mother both realised that their intimacy was unnatural and unpromising for happiness. When he was two years old

“He used to point his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders; and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent.”

Poor little monster, how unfortunate that he could not then have been given a hormone that would extrovert his budding perversion!

“She always changed her dress for tea, and arranged her hair loosely like a woman in a picture, and went out into the garden to gather burning leaves and put them in vases about the room, and when it fell dark she set lighted candles on the table because they were kinder than the lamp to her pain-flawed handsomeness and because they kept corners of dusk in which these leaves glowed like fire with the kind of beauty that she and Richard liked. She would arrange all this long before Richard came in, and sit waiting in a browse of happiness, thinking that really she had lost nothing by being cut off from the love of man for this was very much better than anything she could have had from Harry.”

Somewhat like the way the daughter of Senator Metellus Celere, called by some Claudia and by others Lesbia, arranged the visits of Catullus.

When Richard was sixteen he forced life's hand and leapt straight from boyhood into manhood by leaving school where he had shown great promise in science, and becoming a sailor so that he should be admirable to his mother. His wanderings took him to South America where he had great success in affairs of the heart and of the purse. It is with disposition of the latter that the book opens in the office of a lubricitous old Scotch solicitor where sits a young red-haired temperamental suffragette whimpering for the moon.

Ellen Melville is a lovable Celt of seventeen, and her creator displays a comprehensive insight into her mind and emotions. She is what Rebecca West once was and wished to be. It is sad that the pathway of her life leads so early to the _Via Dura_ and that Richard Yaverland had not tarried in Vienna or Zurich to be psychoanalysed.

Richard falls in love with her at first sight. He woos her ardently, though simply, and she responds like a “nice” girl, like a girl who feels that for the endowment of that most wondrous thing in the world, the cerebral cortex, it is vouchsafed her to exercise restraints and make inhibitions which insects and animals cannot. In the highest sense she is rational and instinctive.

Ellen goes south to visit her future mother-in-law and a few days later Richard joins them. Roger meanwhile has “found Jesus,” and Poppy, a Salvation Army lassie, one stage removed from “Sin.” While knocking at Marion's door to gain entry that they may announce their intention to marry, their gaze floats upward and they see Ellen being kissed by the man to whom she will be married in three months. Roger, who is instinctive but not rational, puts a wrong interpretation upon it, and from that mal-interpretation the final tragedy flows. A few days later Marion realises there is no happiness for Richard and Ellen so long as she lives. She walks out into the marshes. Roger accuses Richard of driving his mother to it “because she saw that there was something wrong between you two.” He elaborates the accusation, and Richard drives a bread-knife into Roger's heart.

Richard knows his doom is sealed. So he invites Ellen to share a cattlemen's hut with him on the farther side of the creek where his mother had drowned herself, until the people come to take him--and to share it comprehensively.

“Her love had not been able to reach Richard across the dark waters of his mother's love and how like a doom that love had lain on him. Since life was like this she would not do what Richard asked.”

But she does.

The mode in which “The Judge” is cast is noteworthy because of its novelty and of the success attending it. Here is no sequential narrative, no time-table of events in the order in which they happened. The contact of Richard and Ellen is set forth in a straightforward way, but the main thesis of the book, the Laocoon grip of mother-love on Richard is conveyed indirectly, surreptitiously, atmospherically rather than verbally. Ellen, though she is quite normal, senses it at once when she meets Marion, and the writer approximates perfection of her art most closely in narrations of the first interviews of these two women, who are as unlike as the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady.

While this mode may not prove an obstacle to an easy grasp of the novel upon first reading by writers or critics, it is doubtful whether the casual reader for diversion will comprehend its significance without special effort and perhaps several attempts at mastering the intricacies in the development of the story. The plan which the author has adopted of beginning, in direct narrative form, with the mature life of Richard and his love for Ellen, and then revealing through retrospect and suggestion the events of his early life and that of his mother, is a tax upon the technique of any novelist. The form has been used with notable success by Miss Elizabeth Robins in “Camilla.” But Miss West has not entirely mastered its difficulties, and her failure to do so seriously mars the story.

Miss West's reputation for brilliancy has not suffered by “The Judge,” but if one were to sentence her after reading it, he would be compelled to say she is no novelist. If it is an index of her imaginative capacity, of her conception of life, of her insight into conduct, of her knowledge of behaviour, we must content ourselves with her contributions as critic and guide.

The subject of her two novels is behaviourism of sexual motivation. It is an index of the change that has taken place in Great Britain within the past ten years, a change that should be acclaimed by everyone desirous of the complete emancipation of women.

Rebecca West has leaned her ear in many a secret place where rivulets dance their wayward round, and beauty born of murmuring sound has passed into her soul, to paraphrase the words of one who, were he in the flesh, would likely not meet Miss West's entire approbation.