lem when she makes the husband say "Tell me! Tell me! Why is it so difficult to write simply—and not only simply but sotto voce, if you know what I mean? That is how I long to write. No fine effects—no bravura. . . ."
The most accomplished of these stories is The Fly. Here we see Miss Mansfield at her best, her percipient eye undiverted gazing through without prejudice to the secret sources of action of "the boss" and exposing them with a few brilliant objective strokes. There is here no suggestion of that exiguous world, a world somehow softened and diminished, though so dazzlingly extended, which many of her stories reveal; none of those clever strokes which she herself deplored, but which her artistic prescience was not robust enough to circumvent; none of those chance banal similes about "ultimate porters" and "ultimate trains" which one could not be altogether sure received her own condonation until one finds them corroborated in the following manner—"Perhaps it is the way God opens houses at dead of night when he is taking a quiet turn with an angel," or "They refused to realize that conversation is like a dear little baby that is brought in to be handed round."
To know Katherine Mansfield at her best one must really, then, return to her earlier stories, to Prelude, to At the Bay, to Bliss, so subtle in possibilities that one wonders if she herself caught at more than the floating straw of her own intuition, to The Stranger, and to Escape. Whether her work will live beyond our own generation or not is difficult to foretell, but it is perhaps not too much to say that, in those exceptional instances where her own sensitive psychology corresponded most exactly with that of the character she portrayed, she could hardly have failed to please even that great master of intricate thought whose four requisites of good literature remained, "intensity, lucidity, brevity and beauty."
