_The Dove’s Nest._ By KATHERINE MANSFIELD. (Boni & Liveright.)
Here are stories that are literature: they move us by the presence
of the genuine elements of literature, and not by the elements of
painting, music, or any other art. Their language is neither colorful
nor melodious, but it is significantly expressive, related inextricably
to the subject matter. They help make the short story as distinct a
literary form as a landscape by Cezanne or a sonata by Beethoven.
Katherine Mansfield, scarcely a year after her death, has come to be
regarded as one of the most finished artists that ever worked with the
short story as their medium.
The present collection includes several unfinished fragments which are
invaluable to anyone interested in her art or in the short story as a
whole. They are cross-sections of her method which enable us to see
the processes that produce the half-dozen little masterpieces at the
beginning of the book.
“The Doll’s House” is at once the best and the most typical of all
the stories she has written. It shows us in an unforgetable manner
her complete mastery of the difficult trick of epitomizing the whole
of life in a minute and almost ridiculously petty episode. All the
aspirations of the many, all the heartless prejudice of the few, are
concentrated in a toy lamp in one of the little rooms of a doll’s
house. It might easily be sentimental, and very likely ridiculous, if
it were not for the implacable aloofness of her art. Again, in “A Cup
of Tea” we have a bitter, though inoffensive, exhibition of the quality
of mercy by somewhat the same whimsical concentration on little things.
A lady of high degree is accosted on Bond Street by another lady of
lesser degree who requests the price of a cup of tea. The first lady,
thinking it would be a charming adventure, takes the pathetic creature
into her own home for her cup of tea. She is impressed by her own
magnanimity, even considers doing something more worthwhile for the
stranger, when the great lady’s husband appears. Because the latter
ventured the remark that the visitor is really quite pretty, because
the great lady suddenly detects the shadow of age on her face as she
passes the mirror, the visitor is forthwith despatched with a few
shillings, and the great lady asks her husband that evening, “Do you
think I’m pretty?”
All the stories of Katherine Mansfield are more or less like that,
displaying the difficult accomplishment of a worker in miniature, and,
like the art of the miniature, possessing a rare and almost forgotten
spirit.