The Little Girl/Elsie and the Child
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1924. 8vo. viii+243 pp. $2.50.
New York: George H. Doran Company. 1924. 8vo. vi+344 pp. $2.50.
ONE might expect that to read Katherine Mansfield’s The Little Girl would be to watch a rare and beautiful art in the making. As a matter of fact, the experience which the book gives is not exactly this; for though the authoress withheld these early stories, as prentice work, from publication in book form, they show in an astonishing degree the elements of her mature power. In these sketches, some of them so fragmentary, there is already the matchless economy of detail and sharpness of visual images; there is the biting irony, the whimsicality; the unsentimentalized tenderness for children, in all the coil of their small, puzzled existence; the delicacy, the grimness; and sometimes the flash of absolute beauty. There is also the ugliness. For with all the violence of her recoil from ‘the wrong of unshapely things,’ Katherine Mansfield did not, with the poet, feel it ‘a wrong too great to be told’; on the contrary, she depicted the sordid and the repulsive with a singularly complete unreticence.
Immense variety is in these sketches, which range from the brutality of ‘The Woman at the Store’ to the exquisiteness of ‘Childish but Natural,’ which paints the ecstasy, the innocent passion, and the beautiful absurdity of puppy-love. ‘Millie’is a study of the slow, painful awakening of pity in the heart of a stupid and hard woman, and its sudden savage extinction. ‘Sixpence’ depicts the blundering remorse of a father who has whipped his adorable little son, for the first time and quite unjustly, in an explosion of nerves, and who tries to reëstablish with a present of money the child’s trust in his tenderness. '‘The Black Cap’ shows the dire power of the grotesque to wreck romance, if the romance be of a somewhat flimsy nature. Indeed, the irony is never more effective than when it deals with shallowness of feeling.
For all the sardonic tone of the book, a positive and gallant spirit, a fiery sympathy, — mainly limited, as is natural in a young artist, to youth, — is at the core of it.
In Elsie and the Child, Mr. Bennett treads a more level path. Here there are no flashes of beauty, like the sudden soaring of white wings, but neither are there bottomless pits of darkness. There is more belief in the toughness of the human spirit, in its power to worry through somehow. Even the gravest of the stories are lighted with humor, and many are pure comedy. One of these, ‘The Paper Cap,’ which recounts the pursuit and capture of a disillusioned but only halfreluctant male by a resolute woman, contains a notable analysis of the psychology of the man who is kept waiting by the Woman whom he has asked out to dine. In the amazing and admirable tale, ‘During Dinner,’ the tragic and the fantastic are blended, in Mr. Bennett’s peculiar manner, no more daringly than successfully. It is characteristic of the author that the only deeply romantic story is the unrealized romance of the old painter, Raphael Field, ‘the eternal boy,’ whose whole life is built around a memory of briefest but most intense happiness.
The title-story continues the history of Elsie, the heroine of Riceyman Steps. The story smells less of cabbage than the novel, and has at least equal power. Its two themes — Elsie’s love for her husband, shell-shocked, fierce, soft-hearted Joe, and her worship of little Miss Eva, the guiltless but obnoxious victim of her mother’s spoiling — unite in the scene where Joe speaks his mind to Miss Eva, and one beholds the really terrible spectacle of the complacent soul that sees itself at last as its sternest critic sees it. Perhaps even better is the scene where Elsie reconciles Joe, in one of his worst nerve-storms, with the dog which he has savagely beaten, and which has crept back, foolish, forgiving, and inopportune, before the storm has subsided.
On the whole, this book is as entertaining and comfortable as the other is brilliant and disturbing. ETHEL WALLACE HAWKINS