Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles)
a life of sensation rather than thought, seeking for a kind of satisfaction which neither creed nor conception can give — the wholeness of a total self-surrender to the Life without, which marvellously is also a total self-surrender to the Life within.
Of this simplicity in complexity — in art and in life — Katherine Mansfield was an example. She had what Walter Bagehot called “the experiencing nature” — which is but another name to distinguish those rare beings who are governed by an inward compulsion to expose themselves to Life. They are secretly sustained by some secret faith in Life of which smaller souls are incapable. They know what Blake meant when he proclaimed that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” They can take nothing, in this matter of life-experience, at second-hand. Always, for them, truth must be proved “in their pulses.” And so, inevitably, in the eyes of the world, they are not wise: for wisdom, in the world’s eyes, consists exactly in refusing to expose ourselves to experience. The wise accept the report of others: of that great other who is the worldly prudence of the race. They know that the master of Life is a hard man, reaping where he did not sow, and they hide their talent in the earth. They take no risks with him.
And, in this, they are wise. But there is a greater wisdom than theirs. It was the wisdom of Jesus, which despised their prudence. It is the wisdom which whispers:”Take the risk! If that is truly the urge of your secret soul, obey it. No matter what the cost, obey!” This is the voice of the Life within urging Man to yet more Life. This is the voice to which Jesus of Nazareth was himself obedient unto death: in the strength of which he laughed at the wise and the prudent, and knew, on his pulses, that the Father of Life loved the Prodigal Son.
The wise and the prudent have emasculated these great and wonderful parables, because they dare not believe that what they say is true. It would never do to believe what they say. And not only would it never do to believe what they say; it is impossible to believe what they say. Men obey the precepts of Jesus not because they can, or because they choose, or because they believe, but because they must. They do not take the risk: the risk is taken. They go the grievous path because they can go no other. They do not know that salvation awaits them. No man was ever sustained in advance by the knowledge that by losing his life he would save it. The man who knows that beforehand is incapable of losing his life: he has clung to it, he has never known what it is to be alone. Take away from Jesus his final and utter despair, and you take away all his meaning, all his triumph.
It may be said that these are tremendous com- parisons. What has Jesus to do with Blake, with Keats, with Katherine Mansfield? He has everything to do with them. They belong to his pattern. They are the life-adventurers, who turn from the wisdom of prudence and seek the wisdom of experience. They are the children of whom Life is justified. We may say, if we will, that it is God who drives them on. It is true; but let us beware to whom we say it, as Katherine Mansfield was ware. She wrote to her husband in 1920:
“And then suffering, bodily suffering such as I’ve known for three years. It has changed forever everything — even the appearance of the world is not the same — there is something added. Everything has its shadow. Is it right to resist such suffering? Do you know I feel it has been an immense privilege. Yes, in spite of all. How blind we little creatures are! It’s only the fairy tales we really live by. If we set out upon a journey, the more wonderful the treasure, the greater the temptations and perils to be overcome. And if someone rebels and says, Life isn’t good enough on those terms, one can only say: ‘It is!’ Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean a ‘thorn in the flesh’ — it’s a million times more mysterious. It has taken me three years to understand this — to come to see this. We resist, we are terribly frightened. The little boat enters the dark fearful gulf and our only cry is to escape— ‘put me on land again.’ But it’s useless. Nobody listens. The shadowy figure rows on. One ought to sit still and uncover one’s eyes.
“I believe the greatest failing of all is to be frightened. Perfect Love casteth out Fear. When I look back on my life all my mistakes have been because I was afraid. … Was that why I had to look on death? Would nothing less cure me? You know, one can’t help wondering, sometimes. … No, not a personal God or any such nonsense. Much more likely — the soul’s desperate choice.”
“The soul’s desperate choice.” Those final words are profound indeed. The secret of all living religion is in them. Yet, if we say that God is “the soul’s desperate choice,” who will understand us? Who will understand that what is said is not that the desperate soul chooses God, but the desperate soul in the act of choosing is God?
That is what Katherine Mansfield was saying. And if she had said that one thing alone, written only that one letter I have quoted, she would have been immortal in those minds in which immortality is real. For this, to those who understand, is Truth — Truth naked, pure, imperishable — the very voice of Life.
It includes everything. It explains, because it is, the mystery of the Incarnation. The desperate soul of Jesus, in the act of choosing — soul’s life and body’s death — was God. The little boat that enters the dark fearful gulf — is God. And how it recalls her friend Lawrence’s last small ship of death!
“Now launch the small ship, now as the body dies
And life departs, launch out, the fragile soul
In the fragile ship of courage, the ark of faith
With its store of food and little cooking pans
And change of clothes,
Upon the flood’s black waste
Upon the waters of the end
Upon the sea of death, where still we sail
Darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.”
Katherine’s little boat, Lawrence’s small ship — fraught with the essential soul in its act of desperate choice — these, this (for it is one single thing, one single power, frail as a thread, yet of force to bind the universe and move the world) — this is God.
God is many things besides this; but this above all others — the courageous, isolated soul— “the fragile soul in the fragile ship of courage” — launching upon the unknown:
“Upon the sea of death, where still we sail Darkly, for we cannot steer, and have no port.”
The death may be the death that ends life (as men believe) or the death that leads from an old life into a new. But always it is a death. If it is only the death of the soul, that ‘dying into life’ which is the experience of the chosen ones, it is an anticipation of the death of the body. No man who has ‘died 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