Musings...

Friday

Katherine Mansfield! Who has ever known this enchantress and afterward managed to escape the working of her attraction upon him? Her distinction — and how many distinctions she has! — is that she does not come seeking you out to impose herself upon you in a way that would entitle her to meddle in those of your affairs and privacies that are none of her concern; rather she makes you seek her out, as one seeks the good things of life, to harvest from them what pleasure and enjoyment may fall to one's lot.

Her particular stamp is her style — that style which flows sweet and limpid, without complication, as water glides among the furrows of the mountains and the windings of the valleys, sweet and crystalline, without twisting or faltering. The knots of life soften and smooth themselves out through this style; and human nature — woman's nature above all — is revealed in its manifold contradictions and its shades of obscurity, to the point that you imagine the secret of the human soul, whose comprehension had seemed to you impossible, has had its riddle solved and stands disclosed.

Her mastery lies in this: that in all her stories she excels at binding the beginning to the end, and finds — or discovers — the link between the different voices of life... Often the happy conclusion of an event in her stories is a heartbreaking conclusion; and often disappointment is the ending of a strong hope... And this striking feature of her stories does not spring from a pessimistic temper; it goes back rather to the nature of her translucent, mystical soul, which attained such delicacy that every barrier between it and life was lifted away.

And do not hope, if you are a lover of grandiosity in word and meaning, to win it from this writer. For she is a woman before she is a writer — and the writer's personality in her is forever reflected through the woman's personality, with its stamp, its properties, and its distinctions — and here lies the secret of this writer's greatness.

For Katherine Mansfield reaches the "whole" of life's meaning through its particulars. Not once, in all the stories she wrote, did she attempt to confront the "whole" in its entirety so as to arrive at the particulars, as is the way of man, for instance. And this striking trait in her — one of the most striking of the traits that distinguish woman from man — has shed over her art and her style the enchantment and charm of woman, and above all her femininity in its full meaning and splendor.

As for the subjects she treated in her stories, they do not go beyond the situations of daily life and its events, which never leave the sphere of the known and familiar.

But the writer was able, by her skill and her capacity, to draw from these events and situations pictures and scenes torn from the very heart of humanity; and by her descriptions of the characters she invented she likewise immortalized the problems of this eternal humanity, with its pains, its joys, and its disappointments.

And when you read this description, you would take it for a living scene passing before you, not for literature whose ornate and so often hollow words you peruse.

The writer's capacity is revealed in its full splendor in the variety she diffuses through her stories, even though she intended it by stealth. In her story called "Prelude," for example, you touch four generations of women living together, yet each of them has the characteristics stamped upon her by the stage of age through which she is passing. You see the grandmother, her two daughters — one married and the other single — and her two granddaughters; and you discern the nature and qualities of each of these through what she says to herself or to the others, and through whatever passing fancy or thought may stir in her mind.

In Katherine Mansfield was fulfilled the definition of the true artist, who leaves others no room to feel him as an artist, but makes them touch the fruits of this quality and its traces through what proceeds from him.

And Katherine Mansfield was a true artist, because she was a distinguished element among the elements of this universe, one that gave to existence what it could give, with simplicity and humility.

Sunday...

The strains I am hearing now rise by degrees, then descend, then slip suddenly down. And the instruments from which they issue gather and unite at one moment, each speaking its own word, yet in harmony and concord; then they part, that each may say, alone, what it means as an assertion of its own personality.

The strains are flying now, and soaring... their wings have the softness of air and its lightness... They have drawn away from the earth, and their talk has become whisper and murmur; they quiver with rapture as they draw near the sky, as though the soul that rose with these strains to those heights had cast itself into the homeland of the true artist, where no barriers divide the diverse children of humanity and no greeds set them apart; and so it gave itself over to the nature of art within it, sending forth its treasures and scattering its hidden stores, in its utmost gaiety and delight.

But what ails them, that they shrink so suddenly, as though some gloom had begun to steal into them and spread through them, spoiling the atmosphere of gaiety and delight in which they had been turning and fluttering? Ah... they are sinking down toward the earth, where there is shrinking, and confinement, and the binding of bounds and fetters! They seethe among themselves — and there, they explode... and from them fly the sparks of defiance and rebellion, and from this explosion rises the anthem of liberty... the liberty of man, whatever his race, his color, his creed... Yet a measure of tranquility has now come back to them, and the violoncello has begun to speak of it, as though the artist had grown certain, at the last, that his refuge in existence is the nature of art within him, which widens the horizons before him whenever society narrows them upon him. And is it any wonder that this soul, teeming with every color of art, should be the soul of the great Beethoven?

Wednesday...

The oddities of the human soul... who could number them? This evening I was in one of the cinema houses, contemplating, before the showing of the film, the reflection of the lights upon things and their effect on them. At first the white lights were spread through the hall to a degree so indiscreet that it proclaimed everything carved upon its ceiling and walls. When the eye looked at these things it saw nothing wondrous in them, and did not suppose that behind them lay anything at all! But no sooner had the red lights taken the place of the white, which withdrew behind them, than the eye beheld a wonder: it saw the shaded red light bestow upon things a magic that transformed their very shapes to the foundation, and clothed them in meanings that set the soul wandering through their worlds and their hidden places. But the true wonder the eye beheld when the two halves of the translucent screen-curtain began to draw apart little by little, separating bit by bit from one another, with the red light between them shedding an enchantment over them, deluding the eye that behind it lay hidden a world that was paradise itself.