THE AUTHOR OF BLISS
The Garden Party and Other Stories. By Katherine Mansfield. 12mo. 255 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.
THERE is no doubt that the stories of Katherine Mansfield are literature. That is, their qualities are literary qualities. No one would think of dramatizing these stories, of condensing them into pithy paragraphs, or of making them into a scenario for Douglas Fairbanks. They do not dissolve into music, like Mallarmé, or materialize into sculpture like Heredia. The figures are not plastic; the landscapes are not painted, but described, and they are described, usually, through the eyes of a character, so that they serve both as a background and as a character study. In the same way Katherine Mansfield does not treat events, but rather the reflection of events in someone's mind. Her stories are literature because they produce effects which can be easily attained by no other art.
Nobody ever dies in one of her stories; nobody ever marries or is born. These pompous happenings occur off-stage, discreetly, a day before the curtain rises or a year after its descent; so do most other events on which her stories touch. If one uses the word in the sense of, let us say, J. Berg Esenwein, there is no plot; instead she tries to define a situation. That is why her stories give the effect of overflowing their frame; an event has a beginning and an end, but the consequences of a situation continue indefinitely like waves of sound or the familiar ripples of a pool. This is the effect produced by the best of her work, but actually it is nothing more than a moment out of the lives of her characters; a moment not of action but of realization, and a realization of one particular sort.
These stories, at least the fifteen contained in her second volume, have a thesis: namely, that life is a very wonderful spectacle, but disagreeable for the actors. Not that she ever states it bluntly in so many words; blunt statement is the opposite of her method. She suggests it rather; it is a sentence trembling on the lips of all her characters, but never quite expressed; it is the discovery of little Laura Sheridan, who burst into tears on the evening of her successful garden party:
