into life’ was ever afraid to die out of it. Bodily death would have been a welcome release from the pangs of the dying soul.
But the miracle of rebirth comes. Out of death life. And “everything for ever is changed.” This is the Divine Vision, in which alone things are seen for what they are, veritably are. The soul that has suffered death and rebirth enters into this vision. It is what Blake called the world of spiritual sensation — a world of sensation, because it is a world of immediate experience; a Spiritual world, because it is closed from the five senses, and their ratio which is the Intellect. It is beyond all these; yet it does not deny all these. As Katherine Mansfield put it:”There is something added. Everything has its shadow.” Truly and perfectly; for it is a world on which a new Sun has risen.
The light of that sun and its shadows are reflected in Katherine Mansfield’s stories. They are perfectly simple: childishly simple, the clever critics tell us — even Lawrence, her friend, found them no more than charming. And yet, after all, the condition out of which they came was unknown to Lawrence till his last days on earth, when he had ceased to struggle for the life he could not have and turned his soul for the first time serenely towards the death which he could: when he also “sat still and uncovered his eyes.” Then he chanted the simple, the childishly simple, the profoundest and the loveliest of all his songs:”The Ship of Death.” At that moment, I believe, Lawrence would have understood Katherine as he had never understood her before.
Compared to Lawrence’s, Katherine’s achievement was tiny indeed; yet there is in it a quality which eluded Lawrence till the end. It is serene; and we know that its serenity comes from a heart at peace,”in spite of all.” Katherine could look back on her life, with all its miseries and all its brevity, and declare that,”in spite of all” it was good.”In spite of all” — the phrase, mysterious and simple, contains the secret of herself and her art. It is a phrase which, more than any other, echoes in my heart, with all the sweetness of a long familiar pain, when I think back upon what she was, and what she wrote from what she was.”In spite of all.” In spite of all, the little lamp glows gently and eternally in The Doll’s House; in spite of all, the sleeping face in The Garden Party murmurs that all is well;”in spite of all,” she wrote to her husband in a letter found among her belongings, to be opened only after her death;”no truer lovers ever walked the earth than we were — in spite of all, in spite of all.”
J. Middleton Murry.
CHAPTER I
THE PA MEN
1
KARORI was exactly the place that Katherine Mansfield would have chosen for Kezia to live in as a little girl. Wellington had its magic of sea, and the docks where ships blossomed from the dark water like lilies from a stagnant pond. But Karori had something quite other vibrating in its keen air — an electric current, stimulating, exhilarating, charged with exuberance. How completely, as she breathed it, she became a child of that country. An instinct more powerful than reason woke in her a thousand inherited impulses and desires. It was the instinct impelling the pioneers before her to “search behind the mountain ranges”; and which had rooted them, at last, in that Island. Growing in her, it was fanned by that air, fed by the sound of the sea, and by sight of those sharply-folded hills. It was to live on in her, and grow continually more living, all her life. No matter what country was stamped upon her passport, it was by virtue of Karori that she was to remain “the little Colonial.”
But Katherine Mansfield’s Karori was a Karori that had suffered a sea-change, and been transmuted into something rich and strange. It was to become for her, and for certain of her readers, the symbol of a quality of experience — of that experience of the external world which came to her when she was “crystal-clear.” The seed of this pearl of price was a certain quality of physical atmosphere:
“I love this place more and more” (she wrote of the Isola Bella at Mentone).”One is conscious of it as I used to be conscious of New Zealand. I mean if I went for a walk there and lay down under a pine tree and looked up at the wispy clouds through the branches I came home plus the pine tree.”
But it was far more than a physical effect.”Un paysage, c’est un état d’âme,” said Amiel. And the crystal clarity of Katherine Mansfield’s memory of Karori was not due to the light of the sun. Karori shone for her in another light.
“Why should one love? No reason; it’s just a mystery. But it is like a light. I can only see things truly in its rays.”
What had come to pass in those later days was her emergence out of the valley of the shadow of Experience into the light of Innocence regained, and just as William Blake turned to the child world to find terms to express his wisdom, so Katherine Mansfield turned back to Karori.
Therefore it would be to deny the very inmost law of high human experience to believe that if only her memory of Karori had remained with her undimmed from childhood, she might have been spared much suffering, or escaped that constraint of destiny which compelled her to meet unhappiness in the pursuit of strange gods whose ways were not her ways, and to be caught in the toils of experience which “wasn’t All experience.” The experience that “isn’t All experience” is precisely what Experience is. And it was in virtue of that suffering, that pursuit of strange gods, that “waste,” that she became crystalline. She was marked out to tread “the road of excess that leads to the palace of wisdom.” It was not merely after, but because, she had felt the full impact of life — not merely after, but because she had reached the conclusion:”I adore Life, but my experience of the world is that it’s pretty terrible” — that she came fully into her possession of Karori. That possession was the reward of a spiritual victory.
Her flowering was the flowering of the aloe— “that flower safety” — which, rooted in its own soil, pushing through its nettles, measures its height in the upper air, at last — and flowering, dies. But the first stirring, the first breaking of that ground which was to nourish the plant, began generations before the conception of Prelude or The Doll’s House — began even before the Pa Men had left their England to pioneer in their New Zealand.
2
The Pa Men were a vigorous race. They were descended from characteristic English merchant stock. The Beauchamps were goldsmiths and silversmiths in the City of London for two centuries. It appears to have been the seventeenth-century head of the house, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, who had Samuel Pepys for a customer.
“I went into Cheepside to Mr. Beauchamp’s, the goldsmith, to look out a piece of plate … and did choose a gilt tankard,”
Pepys recorded on November 14th of 1660. And on the 19th:
“So home, and there came Mr. Beauchamp to me with the gilt tankard, and did pay him for it £20.”
Three years later (June 1st, 1663) the goldsmith was involved in Pepys’ more serious affairs:
“So to Mr. Beauchamp, the goldsmith, he being one of the jury to-morrow in Sir W. Batten’s case against Field. I have been telling him our case, and I believe he will do us good service.”
And on November 23rd of that year:
“I went to Mr. Beauchamp’s, one of our jury, to confer with him about our business with Field at our trial to-morrow.”
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