"'Isn't life,' she stammered, 'isn't life—' But what life was she couldn't explain."
The other characters come no nearer to explanation, but they discover life to be wonderful and very disagreeable, just as did little Laura Sheridan. The moment from their existence which Katherine Mansfield chooses to describe is the moment of this realization.
The method is excellent, and the thesis which it enforces is vague enough and sufficiently probable to be justified aesthetically. Only, there is sometimes a suspicion—I hate to mention it in the case of an author so delicate and so apparently just, but there is sometimes a suspicion that she stacks the cards. She seems to choose characters that will support her thesis. The unsympathetic ones are too aggressively drawn, and the good and simple folk confronted with misfortunes too undeviating; she doesn't treat them fairly.
One situation recurs constantly in her work. There is a woman: neurotic, arty, hateful, and a good, stupid man whom she constantly torments. He suffers and she laughs, and he loves her still. It is the situation which Anne Proctor explains so carefully to her suitor in Mr and Mrs Dove. She shows him her two pigeons. "The one in front, she's Mrs Dove. She looks at Mr Dove and gives that little laugh and runs forward, and he follows her, bowing and bowing. And that makes her laugh again. Away she runs and after her comes poor Mr Dove, bowing and bowing . . . and that's their whole life." Often with Katherine Mansfield that is the whole story. . . . Another situation, which she repeats rather less frequently, is that of the destruction of a woman's individuality by some stronger member of her family, as, for example, in The Daughters of the Late Colonel or in The Lady's Maid. These two situations by their recurrence give a faint air of monotony to The Garden Party.
This second volume, compared with the first, adheres more faithfully to the technique of Chekhov, and the adherence begins to be dangerous. He avoided monotonousness only, and not always, by the immense range of his knowledge and sympathy. Katherine Mansfield's stories have no such range; they are literature, but they are limited. She has three backgrounds only: continental hotels, New Zealand upper-class society, and a certain artistic set in London. Her characters reduce to half a dozen types; when she deserts
