Before getting to work with the reviewer's knife upon this volume one hesitates,
remembering the phrase with which the Victorian novelists tantalized us when
they dangled their heroines' unopened love-letters before our eyes, "But they
were meant for the eyes of one person alone." The eyes now in question being
those of the fortunate subscribers to the Nation in the year 1919-1920, when
Katherine Mansfield's reviews of fiction appeared. Surely such ephemeral
confidences, rages and appraisals ought not to be submitted so long after their
occasion to the curious stare of the book-borrowing public. And what business
has an interloping reviewer in reviewing a reviewer's reviews? Is this not the
inmost circle of perversion?

One is, however obliged to put these austere feelings aside, because the
persistent interest of anything Katherine Mansfield wrote, easily masters them.
Her book disposes once more of the gibe that critics are artists who have failed.
In criticism, indeed, she was an artist, never dully making a balance sheet of a
book's virtues and defects or a Baedeker to its story; but, with much cunning,
creating an appropriate atmosphere and letting the story rise or fall in it like a toy
balloon. And this atmosphere had a peculiar quality of spiritual fineness, in
which certain authors - Mr Walpole, and Mr. Galsworthy, for example,--sank
with an ugly thump while, to one's immense surprise, a Blasco Ibañez, no doubt
secretly importing the influence of exotic Spanish ether, sailed in the majesty of
commendation. Mrs. Virginia Woolf went up gay and high, indeed, almost out of
sight, carrying the reviewer away with her. Conrad and Tomlinson had a steady
place in the heavens. But there was a host of novels which never went very far.
They maintained an unsteady, wobbling existence until her sharp, amusing claws
pricked them and slowly they shrivelled up, sank to limbo and expired. It was all
done very prettily, intimately, and, in spite of the claws and gambols, was rarely
kittenish. This weekly despatch of coloured balloons was a delight to the
intelligence.

Like many sensitive artists who turn to criticism and whose judgments are
intuitive, Katherine Mansfield demanded above all in her fellow-artists an intense
spiritual austerity, a fastidiousness in feeling. To those who preserved other
virtues and neglected this, she was uncertain. This inevitably alienated her
sympathy from a moralist like Mr. Galsworthy, whom she seemed
contemptuously to regard as a man who had got art "into trouble" and was
worried about it. Craftsmanship was not enough for her, though she was more
than generous to the fine craftsmanship of H.M. Tomlinson. One must have seen
the vision and felt the initial passion, and because this initial passion seemed to
her to be lacking, Esther Waters, for all its perfection of detail, was not a great
novel.

"All is as cold and toneless as if it were being read out of that detective's notebook.
It is supremely good evidence . . . but we forget it as soon as it is read for we have
been given nothing to remember."

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