ARTIST OR NUN
The Dove's Nest. By Katherine Mansfield. 12mo. 250 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50.
ONE wonders if Mr Middleton Murry is wholly aware of the injury he is doing his wife's reputation by treating as sacred every chance scrap of paper on which she recorded her most denuded and transient moods. Like a somnambulent acolyte with bowed head and reverential step he bears the chalice of her fame unconscious that in replenishing it with ever thinner and thinner dilutions he is imperilling the clear wine with which he began his pilgrimage. Certainly, in Miss Mansfield's earlier books, Bliss and The Garden Party, one could delight in so original and potential a talent, while reserving judgement as to certain suggested limitations. Like a cutter racing lightly over tossing waves her style carried her mobile perceptions and if one waited somewhat anxiously for the craft to turn full-blown for port one remained at least in doubt as to just what port it was to be, after all, headed toward. Now with the poems and excerpts from her journal appearing in consecutive numbers of The Adelphi, together with the introductory notes to The Dove's Nest, one sees Katherine Mansfield either as a supplicating girl plundered pitifully of her dignity, her grief mounting in distorted curves of rationalization, or as one reduced by sheer thinness of inspiration into startling lapses of literary taste. Both she and Mr Murry seem to discuss the art of writing as if it were only to be attained through some mysterious purification of one's inner being. "She purged the last vestige of rebellion from herself . . . she was preparing to write stories of a new kind with the whole truth in them," he records in an article telling of her death. Or, she herself cries out, "I haven't felt pure in heart, not humble, not good . . . Lord make me crystal pure for thy light to shine through." Is this, one asks oneself, an unhappy novitiate for some strange religious order? For surely such rapt supplications in the interests of "goodness" and "purity" are more in keeping with the attitude of a nun than with the free and fearless pursuit of an artist who follows ever more attentively the dan-
