SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1923.
TH MIHI' A' AL
PAGE THREE
THICIANDIL AG HrR
"Movement, after all, seemed futile travagant, absurd desire by a subtle
to him. He felt that imagination could subterfuge, by a slight modification
easily be substituted for the vulgas of the object of one's wishes."
realities of things. It was possible, -from "Against The Grain"
In his opinion, to gratify the most ex- by Joris Karl tHuysmans.
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A Last Book
DONALD E. L. SNYDER
THE DOVE'S NEST AND OTHER close to her sister. But now she had
STORIES, by Katherine Mansfield. forgotten the cross lady. She put out
Alfred A. Knopf, 1923,$2.50. a -finger and stroked her sister's
Katherine Mansfield's stories, all quill; she smiled her rare smile.
that remain of them unpublished, are 'I seen the little lamp,' she said,
put into a reliquary of emerald and softly.
magenta, labeled with the inscription Then both were silent once more."
Dove's Nest and Other Stories, and II
the sarcophagus offered to the world. Almost all the stories are tiny eng-
Within its cardboard walls lie frag- mas challenging the reader to an ex-
ments of the greatest tale she ever planation of words and deeds. In this
{ wrote. way Miss Mansfield secures her ef-
There is a kind of elegiac melan- fects-by placing the abstruse sent-
choly In the very physical structure ence at the end of the story. In The
of the volume that symbolizes her Canary, a spinster (she must have
abortive existence. For it contains been a spinster) had a little song bird.
two groups of stories the first finish The last sentence:
ed, but sad and pessimistic, the sec- "-But isn't it extraordinary that
( and group of tales end upon minors under his sweet, joyful little singin
and sevenths-broken In the middle it was just the sadness-Oh, what was
of a paragraph, even in the midst of it-that I heard?" Well, we are not
a sentence. As one trails off upon the sure, but perhaps it is that the lady
row of dots such as in Six Years After has missed romance?
he senses an ironic pathos in the Justly, one should call these pieces
words. character studies-admirable indeed-
"-And the little steamer growing rather than contes, for there is an en.
determined, throbbed on, pressed on, tire absence of plot which after all is
as if at the end of the journey there a mere literary device.
waited. ." One striking element of the prose
The story which has the title role is the manner in which a curious sim-
belongs to the latter unfinished divis- ile or metaphor thrusts its head out
ion-a curious mixture of the trivial unexpectedly. In the Dove's Nest a
that beats with life and goes out in- Br. Prodger has presented his card
explicably while the heroine nibbles a at the villa of two ladies, mother and
lump of sugar. daughter.
Miss Mansfield might obviously "-Mother looked from the card to
enough be compared to Emily Bronte. Milly.
She never moves out of her own hor- 'Prodger, dear?' she asked mildly,
son, beyond her own observation into as though helping Milly to a never
the perilous country of Conjectures. before tasted pudding.
And as her life was that of the aver- And Milly seemed to be holding her
I age English girl of the educated mid- plate back in the way she answered
die class, the specious reader might 'I- don't-know, mother?'"
easily receive the impression of insig- But the entire tone of her stories
nificance of sbject. But there is a is inveterately feminine, and for a man
redundance of imagination in her her ideas are sometimes distasteful.
character sketches, and in her selec- The language frequently descends to
tion from the ordinary which lies so mere boudoir chat and petty collo-
close to the eyes that it is seldom quialisms that are positively fiat. By
seen or thought of. example, a 'darling' butterfly sals inte
A very rich girl is accosted on a the room, and the heroine exclaims:
dark February evening (just as in the "'-He is a duck, isn't he? I love
novels of Dostoevski, she thinks) by butterflies. I think they are great
a very poor girl who asks the price of lambs.'"
a cup of tea. Absolutely nothing ro- The description, and the ideas, and
mantic occurs, the imagination-in fact everything Is
Or, a newly married couple visit a feminine.
-cafe in the Riviera where a strange But over, beyond, and above all
man sings a touching ballad wretched- these faults towers the Journal which
ly. I believe will go down as the greatest
Or, a man dips a fly into ink three of Katherine Mansfield's short stories.
or four times to try its courage. The It is the lovely short story of her own
fly is dead after the fourth bath. All last days. She could not be artificial
of them are bits seized from life, laid here in her own personal diary. Too
down as part of that great heritage poignant are the sorrows of the strug-
of experience which art keeps for us. gle between ambition and failing
The Doll's House opens the volume. health. She threw away the petty
Being a bit of child psychology the boudoir and looked only at the vital
structure is more or less simple, nar- nucleus of her own life. She writes:
rative straightforward, and characters "-Well, I must confess I have had
delineated with a naive directness. an idle day-God knows why. All was
Miss Mansfield preserves the Greek to be written, but I just didn't write
ideal that simplicity of matter must be it. I thought I would, but I felt tired
accompanied by simple form; and her after tea and rested instead. Next
stories vary in complexity according day. Yet take this morning for in-
to this rule. The Doll's House has stance. I don't want to write any-
for its theme the inception of caste. thing. It's heavy and dull. And short
The three daughters of the town's stories seem unreal, and not write
most influential citizens receive as a doing. I don't want to write. I want
gift a splendid little puppet domicile to live. Whet does one mean by that?
There is only one school in town . . . . The last few days, what one
which all the children attend. Of notices more than anything is the
course great excitement arises in tell- blou. Blue sky, blue mountains-all
ing about the new toy at recess. And is a heavenly blueness! . . .
so all the little girls are told, and in- iBut in any case I shant write any
vited to view the marvel except the stories for three months, and I'll not
Kelveys whom nobody speaks to be- have a book ready before the spring.
cause their mother is a washwoman It doesn't matter,.
and their father a nonentity. She was seized by a sudden and fa-
Well, every girl in town has seen tal hemorrhage on the evening of Jan-
the house except the Kelveys, and one nary 9, 1922., She is buried in the
day Kezia, the youngest of the most communal cemetery of Avon near
influential citizen's cildtren, comsmits fPontai nlleaci. On lher gravestone are
a faux pas by exhibiting the house to inscribed the words of Shakespeare
them-everything, even to the minia- she chose for the title page of Bliss,
turn lamp. Kezia's aunt chases them words which had long been cherished
away and they trudge along the road by her and were to prove prophetic:
again. They-Lil and Else Kelvey- "But I tell you, my lord fool, out
sit down by the road side. . . ! of this nettle, danger, we pluck this
"-Presently our Else nudged up 'flower, safety."
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