Introduction
J. Lawrence Mitchell
In his novel Mansfield (2004), C. K. Stead sends his protagonist out from a party in Hammersmith into the night in pursuit of T. S. Eliot – a ploy that permits him to allude to Mansfield’s celebrated reading of the newly published ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to assembled guests on the lawn at Garsington in June 1917.1 And while Mansfield embraced Prufrock as ‘by far and away the most interesting and the best modern poem’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 256), she also insisted to Virginia Woolf that Prufrock was really a short story (O’Sullivan and Scott 1987: 318).2 Part of what drew her to Eliot’s work – and implicitly to Eliot himself in Stead’s novel – is that she sensed that they were working along similar lines, instinctive modernists both. Prufrock was, in more ways than one, her kind of story. For his part, in After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot placed Mansfield in the vanguard of experimental writers, citing three stories ‘that turn on the same theme of disillusion’ and that are ‘all of very great merit’ (1934: 35): ‘Bliss’, Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, and D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Shadow in the Rose Garden’. So why was it, asks Sydney Janet Kaplan in Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (1991), that Mansfield’s rightful place among modernists had been forgotten or – perhaps worse – so taken for granted that it provoked little or no discussion among critics? On the whole, critics had been unable to contemplate anything but a narrowly masculine modernism, ignoring evidence that ‘the original impetus for modernism came in fact from women writers’, as Clare Hanson bluntly puts it in her contribution to The Gender of Modernism (in Scott 1990: 303). Unfortunately, Kaplan suggests, feminist critics largely ignored Mansfield in their concern to ensure a place at the modernist table for Virginia Woolf, unaware that ‘her innovations in the short-fiction genre (especially the “plot-less” story, the incorporation of the “stream of consciousness” into the content of fiction, and the emphasis on the psychological “moment”) preceded Virginia Woolf’s use of them’ (Kaplan 1991: 3). Moreover, because Mansfield had never been completely lost to the literary world over the years – she was widely anthologized – it was assumed that she simply did not need to be rediscovered. But now, some 20 years later, Kaplan’s seminal book has helped reshape the critical landscape so that Mansfield’s work can no longer be ignored, marginalized or patronized. Bonnie Kime Scott argues, in Refiguring Modernism: Women of 1928, that Virginia Woolf ‘envied Mansfield as much as James Joyce as a model of what she was trying to do’ (Scott 1995: 65). And in a recent Hesperus edition
of Prelude , William Boyd epitomizes something of that changed perspective with his unequivocal statement: ‘What we regard as quintessential Virginia Woolf was there in Katherine Mansfield avant la lettre. As Chekhov gave life to Mansfield, so Mansfield gave life to Woolf’s mature style’ (in Mansfield 2005: ix). Now, too, there is an increasing number of studies that recognize the value of linking Mansfield and Woolf as complementary exponents of modernism. The most substantial of these, Angela Smith’s Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (1999), explores at length ‘the strange and, in many ways, unlikely affinity between them’ (1999: 5) and, in a series of close readings of, for example, ‘Prelude’ and To the Lighthouse, shows how ‘the formal and thematic preoccupations of their fiction intersect’ (p. 7).
In Chapter 11 in this volume, Gerardo Rodríguez Salas and Isabel María Andrés Cuevas want to get past the ‘impassioned debate about who was the true modernist innovator’ and focus instead upon shared grotesque elements in the work of Mansfi eld and Woolf. In light of the miscarriage she suffered in Bavaria, there is good reason to classify ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’, which was written shortly after Mansfield’s return to London, as ‘a repudiation of maternity’. The porcine allusions (‘swine’s life’ and ‘piggy clothes’) and the baby that seems to have ‘two heads, and then no head’, are disconcerting images and suggest a deeply disturbed mind – that of the child-maid who smothers the baby. Fertility is, of course, one of the targets for Woolf in The Years, where we find an image as grotesque as anything in Mansfield: ‘the women broke off into innumerable babies’. This description accords with her mindset at the time. According to her diary entry for 20 January 1931, the original idea had been a book ‘about the sexual life of women’ and she compared the drawn-out project, from which first came The Pargiters, as ‘like a long childbirth’ (cited in Johnson 1994: 305).
It is ironic that John Middleton Murry, who worked so hard to maintain and enhance his wife’s reputation after her death, unwittingly managed to mask her status as a modernist by insisting so frequently, as in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, on ‘her rightful place as the most wonderful writer and most beautiful spirit of our time’.3 While his claims won some readers and helped boost sales of Mansfield’s work, they alienated friends and acquaintances, provoked unflattering fictional cameos of the couple, and cannot be dissociated from later critical ambivalence about and devaluation of her work. Dismissive labels such as D. H. Lawrence’s ‘not great’ (Roberts et al. 1987: 521), and Wyndham Lewis’s ‘mag.-story writer’ (cited in Alpers 1980: 372) are arguably by-products of Murry’s misguided efforts. Frank O’Connor admits as much at the beginning of his chapter on Mansfield in The Lonely Voice: ‘It may be that for me and people of my own generation her work has been obscured by her legend, as the work of Rupert Brooke has been’ (O’Connor 1963: 128–9). Yet when he discusses such stories as ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, the names he invokes by way of comparison are James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Not bad company.
So the stage is set for the latest contributions to Mansfield’s burgeoning reputation as a major modernist. What is most striking is the sheer range of countries from which the contributors hail – Australia, England, France, Ireland, Japan,
New Zealand, Poland, Slovakia, Spain and the United States. That Mansfield’s stories have proven so widely appealing should no longer be surprising. In 1937, when Guy Morris, an Auckland magistrate and Mansfield enthusiast, received an article about her in La Nación of Buenos Aires from Pat Lawlor, his friend and fellow collector, he determined to make a systematic search for translations. By the time he delivered his findings in 1944 he had located ‘Katherine Mansfield in ten languages’ (Morris 1944: 24). That number had grown to 28 in B. J. Kirkpatrick’s (1989) authoritative bibliography; and recent years have seen publication of Shifen Gong’s A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield (2001), Joanna Wood’s Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (2001) and Gerri Kimber’s Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008). Katherine Mansfield now belongs to the world.
The cheap jibe by Wyndham Lewis – calling Mansfi eld ‘the famous New Zealand mag.-story writer’ (cited in Alpers 1980: 372), as though her stories featured regularly in popular magazines – is patently false. From the time of her return to London in 1908, most of her work appeared in serious, usually literary, journals, although she did publish four stories in J. C. Squire’s The London Mercury and seven in Clement Shorter’s The Sphere . But three of The Sphere stories appeared in August 1921, just a month before Lewis met Mansfield, and the illustrations as much as the stories may have prompted his reaction. The haughty elitism of the ‘new men’ is reflected in the intellectual snobbery of T. S. Eliot, who became founding editor of The Criterion in 1922. He had little time even for the middlebrow London Mercury, complaining that it ‘suffers from the mediocrity of the minds most consistently employed upon it’ (Eliot 1921: 689). Oddly enough he also had little patience with Lady Rothermere whose money was behind The Criterion; so he must have been chagrined to hear that she deemed Katherine Mansfield ‘the most intelligent woman I have ever met’ (Eliot 1988: 588).4 In Chapter 3 of this volume, Jenny McDonnell takes up the challenge of Lewis’s dismissive characterization of Mansfi eld and provides a necessary corrective to the still prevalent belief that literary modernism and popular taste were irreconcilable. She traces the process by which Mansfield’s ‘prolonged association with the worlds of British periodical publishing’ led her to understand that ‘the categories of the “literary” and the “popular” need not be mutually exclusive’. Her initial ‘anti-commercial and elitist ideals’ were soon tempered by the real-world struggle to keep Rhythm afloat, as evidenced by the need to solicit advertisements (a task at which she was far superior to the hapless editor, Murry).
Although a truly comprehensive study of the short-lived Rhythm: A Quarterly of Modern Literature and Art remains to be written, Gerri Kimber’s essay in Chapter 1 provides a useful guide to those unfamiliar with this now scarce journal and the cultural dynamics represented therein. In her systematic survey of the contributors and contents she shows that while ‘the artistic heart of the magazine was firmly in Paris’, the transnational ambitions of the journal were signalled by the list of international ‘correspondents’ – notably Floryan Sobienowski (Poland), Francis Carco (France), Julian Park (America), and Michael Lykiardopoulos
(Russia). The contributors were an equally cosmopolitan group and included an impressive array of writers and artists. The artists – among them the ill-fated Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and a youthful Pablo Picasso – were recruited by Murry’s friend, the Fauvist painter John Duncan Fergusson. Fergusson famously provided a line-block for the wrappers of Prelude of which Virginia Woolf did not approve.5 He would later marry the dancer Margaret Morris who sometimes performed at the Cave of the Golden Calf, the legendary pre-World War One nightclub run by Strindberg’s wife, where Mansfield, Pound and the Rhythm artist Jessica Dismorr might sometimes be seen too.
Strictly in terms of technique, Mansfield’s own evolving modernist style had not yet developed in her first story for Rhythm. ‘The Woman at the Store’ is very far from being a Chekhovian plot-less story, but it does reveal a whole new landscape of manuka bushes and tussock grass, as well as Mansfield’s already well-developed talent for the vernacular. But for an editor such as Murry whose manifesto railed against ‘narrow aestheticism’ and insisted that, ‘“before Art can be human again it must learn to be brutal”’ (Murry et al. 1911, 1 (1): 36), this grim story of domestic violence had irresistible appeal. And the idea of the avant-garde, of an emerging ‘modernism’, is pervasive, as in Murry’s polemical editorial ‘Art and Philosophy’ in the first issue of Rhythm: ‘Modernism is not the capricious outburst of intellectual dipsomania. It penetrates beneath the outward surface of the world, and disengages the rhythms that lie at the heart of things’ (1911, 1 (1): 12). On the evidence of Mansfield’s subsequent artistic growth, we can be confident that she read and absorbed this message and that she would always be interested in ‘what lies beneath these strange rich surfaces’.6 Many years later, soon after she had finished ‘At the Bay’ and ‘The Garden Party’, two of her best stories, Arthur Waugh of publishers Chapman and Hall approached her for a contribution to the first collection of Georgian Stories. She reported indignantly to Dorothy Brett: ‘he said the more “plotty” a story I could give him the better. What about that for a word? It made my hair stand up in prongs’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 311). Here, a decade after ‘The Woman at the Store’ and enjoying a surge of creativity, she could hardly have been further removed from such ‘plotty’ stories. McDonnell cites this scornful reaction as evidence of her unwillingness to compromise; so it is likely that it fell to her newly-appointed agent, J. B. Pinker, to select ‘Pictures’, the story of the desperate film extra, Miss Ada Moss, as closer to Waugh’s ‘preference for the old-fashioned story with a dramatic plot [. . .] rather than the modern subtle and psychological study of emotions’ (Waugh 1922: xii). Thus did the ‘literary’ lion make peace with the ‘popular’ lamb.
In Between Two Worlds (1935), Murry recounts how he had gone to Paris afire with enthusiasm for the philosophy of Henri Bergson. One day he fell into conversation with the ‘Scottish philosopher-painter’ Fergusson, who invited Murry to ‘call at his studio and see his painting, which he believed to be somehow related to Bergson’s philosophy’ (1935: 135). From their subsequent discussions, Murry came to believe that ‘rhythm was the distinctive element in all the arts’ (p.156) and that he should start a literary magazine entitled ‘Rhythm’
with a version of Fergusson’s painting by that name on the cover. In Chapter 2, Eiko Nakano focuses specifically on Rhythm as a ‘Bergsonian magazine’ and its inevitable impact upon Mansfield’s early stories, although she further argues that ‘the influence of Bergson’s theory was crucial throughout Mansfield’s writing career’. Perhaps, then, the strikingly Bergsonian character of ‘Prufrock’ was one of the features to which Mansfield responded – that admixture of clock time and personal time or durée.
Mansfi eld was a ‘born actress and mimic’ Anne Besnault-Levita reminds us in Chapter 7 (on the authority of Ida Baker); so we hear, or seem to hear, many voices in her stories – yet, along with the narrator in ‘The Canary’, we are unsure and are obliged to ask ‘–Ah, what is it? – that I heard’. Following Merleau-Ponty, Besnault-Levita takes a phenomenological approach to ‘voice’ in Mansfield’s work, and productively hones in on the ways emotions manifest themselves – their affects. Thus in a Mansfieldian text our attention is drawn to ‘sighs, silences, dashes, exclamation and question marks, repetitions’ – all the modernist manifestations of a ‘dramaturgy of voice’. Sometimes the listening self is self-congratulatory (Raoul Duquette in ‘Je ne parle pas français’) and sometimes self-doubting (Beryl Fairfield in ‘Prelude’), but it is the whole range of possible selves – the ‘hundreds of selves’ that Mansfield famously embraced –that interest Valérie Baisnée in Chapter 14. She takes a fresh look at Mansfield’s so-called ‘journal’, now that Margaret Scott has given us the real thing. The three volumes edited by Murry between 1927 and 1954 are confirmed as ‘autobiographical fictions’, though they decisively shaped the Mansfield legend. Scott offers instead the materiality of 53 meticulously edited ‘notebooks’ and 24 sets of ‘unbound papers’ (Scott 1997). Furthermore she is generous about Murry in her introduction – praising his ‘courage and honesty’, his ‘quiet dogged hard labour’, and concluding that ‘he commands a respect and admiration that no amount of disapproval of his editorial methods can diminish’ (1997: xvii). At the same time, she acknowledges that there are simply too many differences between her interpretation of Mansfield’s difficult handwriting and Murry’s for her to list. Baisnée’s approach is ‘to attempt a reassessment of Mansfield’s Journal within the tradition of diary-writing’ and she shows that, though it fails to meet many of the traditional criteria of the genre, it is intimately connected with Mansfield’s productivity as a writer, for ‘creativity and diary-keeping coincide’. Mansfield evidently destroyed her ‘huge complaining diaries’; furthermore, she also voiced her determination to ‘leave no sign’ and added, in one enigmatic entry, ‘I keep silence as Mother kept silence’. Baisnée cites this passage as evidence of Mansfield’s growing distrust of ‘self-disclosure’. Yet the instructions to her husband to ‘leave all fair’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 2008: 235), still left to him the final decision about what to destroy and what to publish.
Ever since Mansfield’s death, of course, there has been extensive controversy about Murry’s behaviour, especially concerning his critical role in the posthumous publication of her work. Most commentators have been unsympathetic, at least with his modus operandi, and Rayner Heppenstall once dubbed him ‘the best-hated man of letters in the country’ (cited in Lea 1959: 213). Kathleen
Jones takes a decidedly different tack in ‘The Mansfield Legacy’ in Chapter 13. While she grants that he ‘often behaved badly and failed to meet Mansfield’s needs on many occasions’, she points out that he was ‘a much more vulnerable individual than is usually portrayed’ and, drawing upon manuscript materials hitherto rarely consulted, makes a refreshing attempt at presenting Murry’s side of the story. Alas, the appalling facts of his later life in particular – the various indiscretions and untimely confessions, the treatment of his children and much more – do little to engender sympathy. Jones admits that he was ‘emotionally illiterate’, and notes, with a hint of resignation, that his ‘diary entries concentrate mainly on his own sufferings’. And yet this was Mansfield’s man, to the despair of Frederick Goodyear, the ‘neo-barbarian’ who would happily have taken her hand in search of the ‘New Thelema’.
Although their friendship was never entirely untroubled, D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield had much in common. But were they really on different sides in the modernist battle of the sexes? Susan Reid examines one vexing aspect of their relationship in Chapter 12 – their seemingly rather different views ‘on the subject of maleness’. Lawrence was drawn, almost nostalgically, to ‘the old hardy indomitable male’ (Lawrence 1921: 114); these people, after all, were his miner-father’s kind of people. But Mansfield was made distinctly uncomfortable by his fixation with the male body; and, when the Lawrences and the Murrys briefly and disastrously tried living together in Cornwall, she complained to her friend Beatrice Campbell: ‘I shall never see sex [. . .] in everything’ (O’Sullivan and Scott 1984: 261). Mansfield’s own male ideal, Reid suggests, may have been Jonathan Trout, the rather feckless and unthreatening dreamer of ‘At the Bay’. However she finds plenty of evidence that ‘would also seem to position Mansfield closer to Lawrence than is usually acknowledged’ – for example, Bertha Young’s yearning to rediscover her body in ‘Bliss’, and the common interest in, and use of, the Sleeping Beauty myth. Intriguingly, she hints that ‘some of the difficulty’ between Mansfield and Lawrence on the subject of maleness may have been Murry’s fault – and that was why Lawrence once invited her to join him in Rananim without her husband. It is unlikely that Mansfield, who had fought so fiercely to return to London in 1908, would ever have agreed to anyone’s Thelema or Rananim. It was the city that ‘the little colonial’ yearned for – ‘the space of modernism’, as Ana Belén López Pérez terms it in her essay (see Chapter 10). Yet life was not easy for the kind of ‘new woman’ that Mansfield aspired to be and López Pérez shows how her love–hate relationship plays out in an early London story (‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’) and in a late one (‘A Cup of Tea’).
Janka Kašcˇáková has marshalled a good deal of evidence to argue for ‘the important role played by the physical coldness of weather, body, rooms’ in many of Mansfield’s stories (see Chapter 15). Poor Ada Moss, another denizen of London, is out of work and is tormented by the ‘high, cold wind’ as she wanders the streets in search of a job. Indeed ‘coldness’, it seems, becomes a leitmotif for Mansfield – the ‘cold breath’ that chilled Linda Burnell’s love; the imaginary snowflakes that fall on Constantia and Josephine and prevent them from escaping the cold dead hand of their father; the ‘cold strange wind’ that disturbs the
little governess. References to the cold recur in Mansfield’s notebooks and in her letters too, and suggest a state of mind as much as anything. In her June 1909 letter to Garnet Trowell, for instance, written while she sat alone in a Bavarian pension awaiting the birth of the son she would never have, she feels ‘heart coldness – hand coldness – soul coldness’. Yet when the solicitous little corporal sees his lover trembling in ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ and asks her if she is cold, she says no. Perhaps, then, we are to believe that love is the remedy; for coldness also signals ‘loneliness, abandonment, hostility, [and] alienation’.
Mansfield’s intense interest in the world at large sometimes takes the form of a kind of sympathetic magic in which she identifies wholly with an object or animal or gives life to the inanimate. In Chapter 16, Melinda Harvey draws our attention to Mansfield’s letter to her painter friend, Dorothy Brett, in which she avers, ‘When I write about ducks I swear I am a white duck’. Harvey is nothing, if not ambitious in her aims: she views Mansfield’s work as ‘as contributing to an invisible, haphazard and often unnoticed undercurrent in literature [. . .]: the critique of anthropocentrism and the pursuit of an animal-centred discourse’. While acknowledging that writers like Melville have long ‘unsettled philosophy’s apparently clear-cut division between the human and the animal’, she sees an intensifying interest in ‘the animal’ in modernist circles, specifying Kafka, Lawrence, Hemingway – and Mansfield. Other examples come easily to mind –David Garnett’s Lady into Fox (1922), John Collier’s His Monkey Wife: or Married to a Chimp (1930) and even Virginia Woolf’s Flush (1933). Harvey insists that Mansfield’s attention to animals makes sense in the context of ‘her oft-noted interest in alterity’ and offers other similarly thought-provoking aperçus in her stimulating essay. It seems that the two tigers (‘Tig’ and ‘Wig’) who lived in ‘The Elephant’ and dreamed of ‘The Heron’ are just a small portion of Katherine Mansfield’s menagerie. Other contributors have something relevant to say on the subject. Joanna Kokot’s primary focus in Chapter 5 is the elusiveness of reality and the limits of cognition in the stories. Thus she alludes to the blurring of fantasy and reality apparent in Kezia’s perception of her new home in ‘Prelude’, wherein the parrots on the wallpaper ‘persisted in flying past Kezia with her lamp’ while outside her bedroom window ‘hundreds of black cats with yellow eyes sat in the sky watching her’. And in the aptly titled ‘Kezia in Wonderland’ (see Chapter 8), Delphine Soulhat points to the zoomorphism so prominent in ‘Sun and Moon’ and in ‘At the Bay’. The quasi-philosophical discussion about the ontological status of animals and insects in the Burnell washhouse (‘“You can’t be a bee, Kezia. A bee’s not an animal. It’s a ninseck”’) is wonderfully realized – and takes us into distinctly new modernist territory. Soulhat observes of the various identities adopted by the children (bull, rooster, donkey, sheep and bee): ‘this is no mere disguise – it is role play, the closest stage to transformation’. With this insight, it becomes hard to read Kezia’s desperate plea to Pat in ‘Prelude’ – ‘“Put head back!”’ – as anything but a heartfelt ‘cry against corruption’.
It is widely agreed that ‘Prelude’ is a modernist masterpiece; and most critics see ‘The Aloe’ more or less as the rough diamond from which the true gem was
carved. In Chapter 9, Bruce Harding begs to differ; for he explores a ‘hypothesis that in many important ways “Prelude” represents a diminishment of the raw energy and challenging vision of “The Aloe”’. He argues that ‘Mansfield wrote “The Aloe” in almost the same polemical spirit in which Woolf, decades later, penned Three Guineas (1938)’ and that the subsequent changes entailed ‘reducing the much stronger feminist dynamic [. . .] while also purging much that was psychically revelatory’. If his arguments are accepted – and they are very cogently presented – we must ask whether Mansfield was aware of the trade-off in sacrificing sociopolitical polemics for modernist compression.
A good number of Mansfi eld’s stories have endings that are disputed or enigmatic in some way; so there has never been a shortage of ingenious critical ‘solutions’ or putatively authoritative interpretations. Nancy Gray wants no part of them. In Chapter 6 she points out that, although Mansfi eld – along with Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf – discounted ‘a self which is continuous and permanent’, we, the common reader, would like to ‘count on’ the promise of a ‘singular self’, as indeed do Mansfield’s characters, who are always worrying about the ‘real self’ and the ‘false self’. This insistence on trying to resolve inconsistencies and contradictions is misguided because ‘the notion of self that we encounter on Mansfield’s pages comes to us in forms persistently impervious to definition’. The secrets of ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘Bliss’, for example, simply are not there to be uncovered.
Vincent O’Sullivan’s characterization of Mansfield’s life as of ‘a vivid existential shaping’ prompts Miroslawa Kubasiewicz ‘to analyze some of Mansfield’s stories to show that the concept of authenticity [. . .] also finds expression in her work’ (see Chapter 4). For the most part, we are confronted with negative exempla – poor unmarried Beryl Fairfield, for instance, smiling coyly over her cup at Stanley or the ‘aspiring writer’ Raoul Duquette, forever loitering with intent. But for Kubasiewicz only those individuals such as Mrs Fairfield who accept that ‘death belongs to the human condition’ can be said to have achieved an ‘authentic existence’. Kezia, of course, has witnessed death, but not yet come to terms with it. Apart from Kezia, Raoul Duquette, ‘the little perfumed fox-terrier of a Frenchman’, is arguably Mansfield’s most memorable creation. His story, ‘Je ne parle pas français’, was written during the first two months of 1918 while Mansfield was staying once again at the Hotel Beau Rivage, Bandol. It suffered at the hands of Michael Sadleir, Murry’s old friend and Constable editor, who insisted on the excision of ‘objectionable’ material so that the ‘sharp lines’ she intended for the story were inevitably blurred.
The unexpurgated Heron Press edition – perhaps no more than 60 copies –might as well not have existed, from the point of view of the story’s impact. So not enough attention has been given to the provocative claim by Antony Alpers –albeit buried in a footnote – that this story, which he labels ‘in a limited sense, her Waste Land’ was ‘before its time’. Had it appeared in its original form in Bliss (1920), Alpers suggests, she ‘would sooner have been recognized as the serious writer she was’ (Alpers 1984: 560–1). This fine collection of critical essays leaves no doubt about her seriousness.
Overall, then, this volume offers a rich and wonderful array of essays from many critical perspectives. There are some that entice us with refreshingly new approaches to familiar texts – as do Besnault-Levita, Harvey, and Soulhat – and others that work against the critical grain – Harding and Jones in particular. But all the contributors stimulate the discerning reader with new and valuable insights into the work of Katherine Mansfield, a writer who was a ruthless critic of her own work and whose artistic legacy as a modernist is surely now unassailable.
Notes
1 It was Clive Bell who recalled this reading in his memoir, Old Friends , (1956: 122).
2 See also Alpers (1980: 239 and 441).
3 J. M. Murry to Ottoline Morrell, ‘Monday’ [January 1923] Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.
4 Vivienne Eliot to Ezra Pound, 4 November 1922.
5 See further Brooker (2004), chapter 4.
6 Cited from Athenaeum (13 June 1919), review of Joseph Hergesheimer’s Java Head by Mansfield in O’Sullivan (1997: 4).
Bibliography
Alpers, A. (1980), The Life of Katherine Mansfield. London: The Viking Press. –(1984), The Stories of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Bell, C. (1956), Old Friends: Personal Recollections. London: Chatto & Windus. Brooker, P. (2004), Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Eliot, T. S. (1917), Prufrock and Other Observations. London: Egoist Press. –(1921), ‘London letter’, The Dial, New York, 70, (6), (June): 686–91. –(1934), After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber & Faber. Eliot, V. (ed.) (1988), The Letters of T. S. Eliot, 2 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, vol. 1.
Gong, S. (2001), A Fine Pen: The Chinese View of Katherine Mansfield. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Heppenstall, R. (1934), John Middleton Murry: A Study in Excellent Normality. London: Jonathan Cape.
Johnson, J. (1994), ‘The years’, in Julia Briggs (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Introductions to the Major Works. London: Virago.
Kaplan, S. J. (1991), Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
Kimber, G. (2008), Katherine Mansfield: The View from France. Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang.
Kirkpatrick, B. J. (1989), A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lawrence, D. H. (1921), Sea and Sardinia. New York: Thomas Selzer.
Lea, F. A. (1959), The Life of John Middleton Murry. London: Methuen. Mansfield, K. (2005), Prelude. London: Hesperus Press.
Morris, G. (1944), ‘Katherine Mansfield – In Ten Languages’, NZ Magazine, 23 (3) May-June, 23–5.
Murry, J. M. (1911), ‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm, 1 (1), 9–12.
–(1935), Between Two Worlds: The Autobiography of John Middleton Murry. New York: Julian Messner.
Murry, J. M., Sadler, M. and Fergusson, J. D. (1911), ‘Aims and Ideals’, Rhythm, 1 (1), 36.
O’Connor, F. (1963), The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing.
O’Sullivan, V. (ed.) (1997), Katherine Mansfield: New Zealand Stories. Auckland: Oxford University Press.
O’Sullivan, V. and Scott, M. (eds) (1984–2008), The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vol. 1 (1984), vol. 2 (1987), vol. 4 (1996), vol. 5 (2008).
Roberts, W., Boulton, J. and Mansfield, E. (eds) (1987), The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 4, 1921–1924. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Scott, B. K. (ed.) (1990), The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
–(1995), Refiguring Modernism: Women of 1928. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Scott, M. (ed.) (1997), The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks, 2 vols. Canterbury, New Zealand: Lincoln University Press and Daphne Brasell Associates.
Smith, A. (1999), Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Stead, C. K. (2004), Mansfield: A Novel. London: Vintage.
Waugh, A. (ed.) (1922), Georgian Stories. London: Chapman & Hall, and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Woods, J. (2001), Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield. Auckland: Penguin Books.
Mansfield and Modernism I: Philosophy and Fiction
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Mansfield, Rhythm and the Émigré Connection
Gerri Kimber Introduction1
From May 1911 to March 1913, Katherine Mansfield contributed to, and eventually helped to edit with John Middleton Murry, a short-lived little magazine entitled Rhythm, with a bias towards the arts and post-impressionism, and the philosophy of Bergson. It is now widely regarded as one of the earliest – and one of the most significant – modernist magazines. Indeed, it advertised itself elsewhere as ‘Rhythm: The Unique Magazine of Modernist Art’ (Brooker 2009: 263n). Its experimental modernism was closely connected to the visual arts, especially Fauvism.
This article seeks to highlight Mansfield’s editorial – and financial – influence through her close association with Murry, together with her literary contributions to the magazine, focusing less on the short stories (which have been examined elsewhere), than specifically on a relatively unknown poem, ‘To God the Father’, for which I will offer a reading with biographical implications, and suggest a hitherto unnoticed visual source. In addition, the article will evaluate the impact of the unusual number of foreign and émigré correspondents and contributors, by way of a chronological overview of the magazine’s contents over its entire run of 14 issues. Mansfield herself was a colonial immigrant – a New Zealander – living in London. Indeed, Peter Brooker confirms that ‘[t]he modernists were [. . .] frequently émigrés and immigrants, displaced persons in an antagonistic relation to the features of metropolitan modernity in their host cultures’ (2009: 336); this was certainly the case with many of Rhythm’s contributors and is one reason for the magazine’s emphasis on radical experimentation in art.
Beginnings
In the decades straddling the turn of the twentieth century, Paris was considered a literary and artistic Mecca. It was so for Mansfield and Murry, as it had been for hundreds of writers before them. By the end of the nineteenth century, Paris had become the literary, artistic and musical world’s most important city, disseminating its movements and influence internationally.2 In addition, writers and artists from all over the world sought refuge and artistic inspiration in France, and this state of affairs continued up to the outbreak of the Second World War.
The two French Post-Impressionist Exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 in London had an unprecedented impact on both English artists and writers alike, including Mansfield, by introducing new modes of French aesthetic perception, and engendered the following hysterical response in the popular press: ‘[This is] a widespread plot to destroy the whole fabric of European painting’ (Morning Post editorial, quoted in Smith 2000: 77). Eleven years after viewing the first of these exhibitions, Mansfield wrote to her friend Dorothy Brett, discussing the effect upon her of Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’:
That picture seemed to reveal something that I hadn’t realised before I saw it. It lived with me afterwards. It still does. That and another of a sea-captain in a flat cap. They taught me something about writing which was queer, a kind of freedom – or rather, a shaking free.
(O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 333)
It was therefore within this era of prolifi c cultural interchange that Murry, together with his Oxford friend Michael Sadler (who eventually became Mansfield’s publisher at Constable’s), and J. D. Fergusson (the Scottish artist whom Murry had met in Paris earlier in 1911) as co-editors, produced the first issue of Rhythm in the summer of 1911.
From the very outset, Rhythm’s editorial slant was towards ‘the ideal of a new art’. As the editors famously stated in the first issue:
‘Before art can be human it must learn to be brutal’. Our intention is to provide art, be it drawing, literature or criticism, which shall be vigorous, determined, which shall have its roots below the surface, and be the rhythmical echo of the life with which it is in touch.
(1911, 1 (1): 36)3
Angela Smith explains how Murry and the other ‘Rhythmists’, notably Fergusson, ‘found Paris stimulating because there, the return to the barbaric, with its simplifying of line and its emphasis on rhythm, was happening in a wide variety of art forms and in philosophy simultaneously’ (Smith 2000: 77). In the first issue, Murry himself attempts to clarify the editors’ ideals with one of the very first printed references to the word ‘modernism’:
The artist attains to the pure form, refining and intensifying his vision till all that is unessential dissolves away [. . .]. He must return to the moment of pure perception to see the essential forms, the essential harmonies of line and colour, the essential music of the world. Modernism [. . .] penetrates beneath the outward surface of the world, and disengages the rhythms that lie at the heart of things, rhythms strange to the eye, unaccustomed to the ear, primitive harmonies of the world that is and lives.
(1911, 1 (1): 12)
Discernible in this early statement of belief from June 1911 is an uncanny resemblance to Mansfield’s own later artistic philosophy. Her memory of seeing a Van Gogh painting, quoted above, inspiring the notion of ‘shaking free’, reveals those ‘moments of pure perception’ expounded here by Murry. As Mansfield wrote in a letter on 2 May 1920:
Delicate perception is not enough; one must find the exact way in which to convey the delicate perception. One must inhabit the other mind and know more of the other mind and your secret knowledge is the light in which all is steeped.
(O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 4)
On 3 February 1921, she moved further towards defining her artistic aesthetic:
Here is painting, and here is life. We can’t separate them. [. . .] I believe the only way to live as artists under these new conditions in art and life is to put everything to the test for ourselves [. . .] to be thorough, to be honest [. . .] Your generation & mine too has been ‘put off’ with imitations of the real thing and we’re bound to react violently if we’re sincere. [. . .] I too have a passion for technique. I have a passion for making the thing into a whole if you know what I mean. Out of technique is born real style, I believe. There are no shortcuts.
(O’Sullivan and Scott 1996: 173)
As Sydney Janet Kaplan observes, Mansfield imitated many different literary styles during her years of apprenticeship as a writer, and she was constantly and profoundly influenced by her interest in painting, reinforced by her many close friendships and connections with working artists. She also benefited from Murry’s involvement with avant-garde artists through his editorship of Rhythm and his knowledge of their work (Kaplan 1991: 204).
The émigré status of many contributors to the new magazine, coupled with the plethora of international correspondents publicizing the new avant-garde movement, meant that Rhythm possessed a transnational identity from the outset. Many of the contributors, alive and dead – such as Picasso, Goncharova, Wyspianski, Carco, Derain, Sobienowski, Van Gogh – went on to become establishment names. Smith notes how many ‘Rhythmists’ displayed a sense of exuberance in their work, partly attributable to their discovery of a more metropolitan milieu in which to develop experimentation and their ‘voluntary exile from their own national, social, and familial constraints’ (Smith 2000: 78). As far as the established art world was concerned, as exiles they were also outlaws ‘occupying a position at odds with or opposed to a received mainstream, [. . .] out of a conviction that they stood for something better or more modern. This placed them in an alternative or counter public sphere of cultural formation’ (Brooker and Thacker 2009: 29). Moreover, roughly half of the regular contributors to Rhythm were women; they included Mansfield herself, Fergusson’s then partner, the American artist Anne Estelle Rice, Jessica Dismorr and Dorothy
‘Georges’ Banks. As Brooker notes, discussing ‘this woven cultured alliance’ in Paris between 1907 and 1914, ‘one senses [. . .] the rare existence of a mixed and congenial, relatively democratically organized, male and female artistic community’ (Brooker 2009: 334–5).
Rhythm before Mansfield
Murry claimed that by the autumn of 1911:
Rhythm had become at last a succès d’estime. Gradually, most of the prominent writers of the younger generation had gathered round it: Gilbert Cannan, Hugh Walpole, Frank Swinnerton [. . .] Walter de la Mare, Rupert Brooke [. . .] and finally D. H. Lawrence.
(Murry 1935: 238)
In the first issue (Summer 1911 – it was initially published as a quarterly), no editors’ names are specified or foreign ‘correspondents’ mentioned. Francis Carco contributes two short pieces of creative prose in French: ‘Aix en Provence’ and ‘Les Huit Danseuses’ (1 (1): 20–21). There is an artistic study by a 30-year-old Pablo Picasso, already becoming a highly regarded artist, who in 1907 had exhibited with others in Paris at the recently-opened gallery run by Daniel-Heinrich Kahnweiler. A German art historian and collector, Kahnweiler became one of the leading Parisian art dealers of the twentieth century, promoting as well as Picasso, Georges Braque, André Derain and others who had arrived from far-flung parts to live and work in Montparnasse. He marketed their work not just in Paris but also through Europe and the Americas. As Picasso famously remarked: ‘What would have become of us if Kahnweiler hadn’t had a business sense?’ (in Cowen 1998: 118).4 This first issue also contains a picture by Anne Estelle Rice. Another initial contributor, who became a regular until the magazine’s demise, was Dorothy ‘Georges’ Banks, whom Antony Alpers describes thus:
A big heavy woman with a fl abby face like Oscar Wilde’s, she wore men’s clothes and was always weeping. In her chaotic flat [in Paris, Murry] got square meals, and he picked up her enthusiasm for a wild young Spanish painter named Picasso.
(Alpers 1980: 132)
From the outset Rhythm had a particularly strong French literary bias; throughout its short life both Tristan Derème and Francis Carco were regular correspondents and contributors, writing articles in French.5 In the second issue of Autumn 1911, there is a poem by an American, Julian Park, subsequently named in Issue 5 as Rhythm’s ‘American correspondent’. Park (1885–1965) was the first dean of Arts and Sciences (1919–1954) of the
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instructors among, 150
Perturbations of the soul, the true Gnostic free from, ii. 344–348.
Peter, the Preaching of, quoted, i. 470; ii. 326, 379, 380.
Peter, the story of his wife’s martyrdom, ii. 451, 452.
Petulantia, i. 247.
Phalloi, i. 41.
Phanothea, i. 404.
Phemonoe, i. 424.
Pherecrates, the comic poet, quoted, ii. 427.
Pherecydes quoted, i. 392; ii. 247
Pherephatta, i. 29.
Phidias, i. 58.
Philanthropy, ii. 26.
Philanthropy, the, of our Instructor, i. 118.
Philemon, the comic poet, quoted, i. 269, 324; ii. 294, 423.
Philip of Pella, i. 59.
Philo, his interpretation of Sarah and Hagar, i. 368.
Philolaus quoted, ii. 91.
Philosopher, the, to what he applies himself, ii. 29, 30.
Philosophers, the variety of, respecting God, i. 66–68; by divine inspiration, sometimes hit on the truth, 69; objections to extracts from the writings of, answered, 360, 361; a succession of, in Greece, 391, etc.; their philosophy Hebraic, 392; the first so called, ibid.; thieves and robbers—how? 406; attained to some truth, 413, ii. 396; varieties of opinions among, respecting the chief good, 71–74.
Philosophical inquiry, its object, ii. 490.
Philosophy, i. 361; the handmaid of theology, 366; what it is, 368, 369; the eclectic, paves the way to virtue, 374; that which the apostle bids us shun, 384; all sections of, contain a germ of truth, 389; schools of, 392;
the Grecian, derived in great part from the Barbarian, 395; prepares the way for higher teaching, 405; a true spark of divine fire in, 409; how it contributes to the comprehension of divine truth, 418; the Jewish laws of higher antiquity than, 421, etc.; given by God, ii. 339–344; the study of, 366; an imperfect knowledge of God conveyed by, 395, etc.; absurdity of those who say it is not from God, 397–399; given to the Greeks as the law was to the Jews, 399; use of, to the Gnostic, 402, etc.
Philosophy, the Barbarian, followed by Christians, perfect, ii. 3.
Philosophy, the true, ii. 335–339.
Philydeus, the comic poet, quoted, ii. 248, 249.
Phocylides quoted, ii. 294.
Phœbus, i. 149.
Phœnix, i. 150.
Phoronis, The, quoted, i. 458.
Φῶς and φώς, i. 133.
Φρένωσις, i. 168.
Phryne, the courtesan, i. 58.
Piety, i. 185.
Pigeons to be offered to God, i. 124.
Pilferers, the Greeks, of the Barbarian philosophy, ii. 1; and of each other, 304, etc.
Pillar of fire, the, i. 458.
Pindar quoted, i. 37, 323, 383, 420, 424, 470; ii. 162, 282, 295, 299.
Pit, opening a, ii. 253.
Pitch plasters to eradicate hair, censured, ii. 284, 285, 287.
Pittacus, king of Miletus, i. 311.
Plagiarisms, the, of the Greeks, from the Hebrews, ii. 274, etc.; from one another, 304, etc.
Plants and animals, ii. 497.
Plasters of pitch to eradicate hair, i. 284, 285, 287.
Plato an imitator of Moses, i. 459.
Plato, his view of the chief good, ii. 74–78;
respecting marriage, 89–94; variously quoted or referred to, i. 69, 70, 71, 198, 248, 254, 314, 378, 382, 385, 395, 396, 397, 414, 443, 469; ii. 13, 14, 58, 91, 92, 93, 147, 151, 163, 226, 230, 231, 252, 260, 266, 267, 271, 275, 276, 279, 282, 283, 284, 285, 297, 299.
Plato, the comic poet, quoted, ii. 429.
Pleasure, ii. 61, 62, 63; not a necessity, 67, 68.
Plutus, i. 280
Poets, the, their testimony to the truth, i. 73–75; their employment of the symbolic style, ii. 247.
Polemo, the disciple of Xenocrates, cited, i. 76.
Poseidon, i. 66.
Pot, the mark of, not to be left on the ashes, according to Pythagoras, ii. 237.
Praise to God, ii. 216, 217; and prayer, 426.
Praise and blame, i. 177.
Prayer to the Pædagogus, i. 342.
Prayer, such as employed by the Gnostic, and how it is heard by God, ii. 431, etc.; the right sort of, 434; hours of, 435; the false doctrine of certain heretics respecting, ibid.
Prayer and praise the best sacrifices, ii. 426, etc.
Praxiphanes, i. 404.
Praxiteles, i. 50.
Preaching, the, of Peter, referred to or quoted, i. 470; ii. 326, 379, 380.
Presbyter, who is a true? ii. 365.
Procreatione liberorum, de, i. 244, etc.
Prodicus, the Ceian sophist, his delineation of vice and virtue, i. 260.
Prophecy, ii. 34; is full knowledge, 343; why it employs figurative forms of expression, 380.
Prophet, the, like unto Moses, i. 35
Prophets, the, the truth to be found in, i. 76–79; their knowledge, 380; the antiquity of, 425, 435, 439.
Propriety of conduct, i. 293.
Proserpine, i. 27.
Prosymnus, i. 41.
Proteus, i. 273.
Pruning-hook, the, ii. 341.
Ptolemy Philadelphus, i. 448
Ptolemy, the priest, referred to, i. 421.
Punishment, the reason and end of divine, ii. 210, 211.
Punishment after death, ii. 275.
Punishment and love reconciled, i. 156, 157; aims at the good of men, 464.
Punishments and threatenings, i. 306, 307.
Πῦρ, i. 443.
Pure in heart, the, ii. 157.
Purification, i. 91, ii. 263; a sufficient, 205.
Purple colour in dress forbidden, i. 262.
Pyrrhonism, its self-contradictions, ii. 500.
Pythagoras, his symbols, ii. 236.
Pythagoras referred to or quoted, i. 393, 394, 395, 397; ii. 54.
Pythagoreans, the, i. 72, 177, 383.
Pythic grasshopper, the, i. 17.
Reason to rule at feasts, i. 204.
Rebecca and Isaac, i. 128, 129
Redemption through the Word, i. 100–105.
Religion in ordinary life, i. 327.
Repentance, an earnest exhortation to, i. 87, etc.; the nature of, ii. 17; first and second, 35–37.
Reproach, i. 157.
Reproof, i. 157, 158, 166, 169.
Reprover, the, i. 172.
Respect of persons, none with God, ii. 340
Responsibility, the, i. 92.
Revelling, i. 215.
Revenge, i. 160.
Rhetoric, i. 376.
Rich, the believer alone is, i. 298; ii. 13.
Rich man, the, and Lazarus, i. 15.
Riches, i. 212–214, 298.
Righteous man, the, ii. 285, 331.
Righteousness, true riches, i. 299
Righteousness, the Sun of, i. 102.
Ring, a, engraven with the images of the gods, prohibited by Pythagoras, ii. 237.
Rings, on the wearing of, i. 315–317.
Robe of the high priests, its symbolic import, ii. 243, 244, 245.
Roman emperors, the, i. 444.
Ῥόμβος, i. 30, note.
Royalty, different kinds of, i. 455, 456.
Sabazian mysteries, the, i. 29
Sacrifices, the, of the law, ii. 429.
Sacrifices, the, of the heathen to their gods, the absurdity of, ii. 427, etc.
Sacrifices, the cruelty of some of the heathen, i. 48, etc.
Sailing on land forbidden by Pythagoras, ii. 237.
Salvation, i. 82, 132, 382; one unchangeable gift of, ii. 366.
Sambuca, the, i. 402, and note.
Samson, i. 321
Samuel sent to anoint David, i. 281.
Sappho, i. 237.
Sarah, i. 368, 369; her laughter, ii. 262.
Sardanapalus, i. 322, 323; ii. 67.
Sarmanæ, i. 399.
Sauromatæ, the, i. 67.
Saved, something greater than being, ii. 367.
Saviour, the, i. 98; His supreme dignity, ii. 13; free from human affections, 344; the Son of God, 410.
Scents, i. 234.
Scripture, the criterion for distinguishing between truth and heresy, ii. 476, etc.
Scriptures, the, i. 82; the Hebrew, translated into Greek, 375; human knowledge necessary to the understanding of, 379
Scythians, the, i. 290.
Seal-rings, i. 315–317.
Sects or schools of philosophy, i. 392.
Seducer, the, i. 23.
Seeing double, an effect of much wine, i. 203.
Seeing God, i. 25, 415.
Self-conceit, the cure of, ii. 480.
Self-restraint or self-control, ii. 48, 61, 454.
Self-sufficiency, Christian, i. 182.
Selling and buying, i. 328.
Sepulchres of the gods, i. 50, 51.
Serapis, i. 54, 424.
Serpent, the, that deceived Eve, i. 23, 100; why called wise, ii. 396.
Servants, the numerous, pandering to luxury, i. 292.
Sesostris orders a statue of Serapis to be made, i. 54.
Seven, the number, ii. 388–390.
Seventh day, the, ii. 386, 390; testimonies from heathen authors to, 284, 285.
Shaving, ignoble, i. 285, 317.
Shades and demons, i. 50.
Shechemites, the, i. 283.
Shepherd, Jesus the, i. 149; the good, 462.
Shoes, what sort to be worn, i. 264, 265.
Sibyl, the, quoted, i. 36, 55, 64, 72, 76, 284, 425; ii. 90, 285, 288;
her power of divination, i. 398; others of the name, 425.
Silk and the silk-worm, i. 258.
Similitudes an important part of instruction, i. 304.
Simmias of Rhodes quoted, ii. 249.
Simonides, i. 232.
Simplicity of dress recommended, i. 271.
Sin, irrational, i. 184; condemned by the Gnostic, ii. 360; the source of, 482
Sins, how the Instructor treats our, i. 115; resulting from voluntary action, ii. 38, etc.
Six, the number, ii. 388.
Sleep, the regulation of, i. 240, etc.; Christians not to indulge in, as others, 241–243.
Smiling, i. 220.
Sneezing at banquets, i. 229.
Socrates quoted or referred to, i. 393, 414; ii. 68, 175.
Sodomites, the, i. 306.
Solomon, i. 427, 436.
Solon quoted, i. 49, 50, 362; ii. 269, 389, 390.
Son, the, the Ruler and Saviour of all, ii. 409, etc.
Son of God, the Instructor, i. 114.
Songs, amatory, prohibited, i. 218.
Songs of praise to God, i. 216.
Sophistical arts useless, i. 376.
Sophistry, i. 376.
Sophists, the, condemned, i. 362, 363.
Sophocles quoted, i. 73, 86, 203, 313; ii. 141, 234, 286, 287, 291, 294.
Soul, the, the threefold division of, i. 273.
Soul, the pure, an image of God, ii. 417; of a most excellent temper, 427
Sow, the, forbidden to be eaten, ii. 251.
Speaking, filthy, i. 222–224.
Spectacles, public, to be discountenanced, i. 326, 327.
Speech, the regulation of, at banquets, i. 228.
Speech and writing compared, i. 351, etc.
Speech, good, inferior to good action, i. 381–383.
Speusippus quoted, ii. 12.
Sphynxes, the Egyptian, their symbolic import, ii. 239, 249.
Sports, divine, i. 128, 129.
Stoics, the, i. 385; ii. 59.
Stones, the, in the robe of the high priest, ii. 243, 244.
Stones and stocks, silly people, i. 19.
Stromata, the, of Clement, i. 361; meaning of the word, ii. 140, etc.
Sun, the, and stars, given to the Gentiles to worship, ii. 368.
Superstition, i. 50, 57, 58, ii. 25; the source of, 421.
Superstitious man, the, described, ii. 422, 423.
Susanna, i. 194.
Swallow, the, of Pythagoras, ii. 236.
Swearing avoided by the Gnostic, ii. 442–444.
Swine, the flesh of, forbidden to the Jews, i. 326, ii. 429.
Swine, casting one’s pearls before, i. 388.
Syllogism and demonstration, ii. 493.
Symbolic style, the, employed by poets and philosophers, ii. 247.
Symbols, the reasons for veiling the truth in, ii. 254.
Symbols, the, of the Egyptians, of sacred things, ii. 245, etc.
Symbols, the, of Pythagoras, ii. 236.
Syrens, the, i. 383.
Tabernacle, the, and its furniture, the mystical meaning of, ii. 240; and its geometrical proportions, 354.
Table of shew-bread, the, ii. 42; its geometrical proportions, meaning of, 354.
Tables, the two, of the law, their mystical significance, ii. 383, 385.
Tact, the importance of, in king or general, i. 456, 457.
Tatian referred to, i. 355.
Taxes, ii. 342.
Teaching, motives in, to be examined, i. 352
Teacher, the, intimations of the advent of, ii. 404.
Teachers of others ought to excel in virtue, ii. 444–446.
Teaching, the, of our Lord, its duration, ii. 486.
Temperance, i. 193, 201, 202, 242; ii. 248.
Temples, the Egyptian, what they illustrate, i. 276.
Temptation, the, of our Lord, i. 380.
Ten, the number, ii. 383, 384.
Terrors of the law, the, ii. 21.
Thales, i. 394, 395; ii. 278
Thamar, i. 369.
Thanksgiving, ii. 436.
Theano referred to or quoted, i. 404; ii. 159, 195.
Thearidas’ book On Nature quoted, ii. 296, 297.
Theft and falsehood, i. 420.
Theocritus quoted, i. 90.
Theognis quoted, ii. 252.
Theological inquiry, its object, ii. 490.
Theology, philosophy the handmaid to, i. 366.
Theophrastus, i. 68; quoted, ii. 6.
Thersites, i. 228, 237, 294.
Thespes quoted, i. 404; ii. 250.
Thrasubulus, i. 457.
Threatening, i. 174.
Thieves and robbers, all who came before Christ were—how? i. 406, etc.
Timæus the Locrian, ii. 288.
Timocles, the poet, quoted, ii. 141, 142.
Timon of Phlius quoted, ii. 227.
Timotheus, i. 403.
Titans, the, and Dionysius, i. 30.
Tombs of the gods, the, i. 50, 51
Tradition of the church, the, prior to heresies, ii. 485.
Tragedy, its inventors, i. 404.
Training, i. 182, 371.
Translation, the, of the Old Testament out of Hebrew into Greek, i. 448.
Trojan war, the, how caused, i. 282.
Troy, when taken, i. 421.
Truth, i. 18; poets bear witness to, 73; found in the prophets, 76, etc.; and custom contrasted, 98; a germ of, found in all sects of philosophy, 389; how philosophy contributes to its comprehension, 418; is one, ibid.; four things in which it resides, ii. 8; the Scripture the criterion for distinguishing between heresy and, 476, etc.
Truth, reasons for veiling the, in symbols, ii. 254, etc., 257.
Truth, the true searcher after, i. 379.
Two tables, the, of the law, the mystical significance of, ii. 283, 285.
Υβρις, i. 247
Ulysses, i. 241.
Unbelief, i. 462.
Understanding, the human, ii. 340. Unicorn, the, i. 25.
Unnatural lusts forbidden, i. 248.
Upbraiding, i. 165.
Usury, ii. 50.
Valentinus, quoted, ii. 65; his vagaries about the abolition of death refuted, 179, etc.; his work, On the Intercourse of Friends, quoted, 334; the time of, 486.
Vaphres, i. 436.
Veiling the truth in symbols, reasons for, ii. 254–256; opinion of the apostles respecting, 257–261.
Veiling the meaning of Scripture, reasons for, ii. 378–382.
Veils, the, of the tabernacle, ii. 240, 244.
Vessels of gold and silver, i. 211; to be rejected, 302.
Vice and virtue, as delineated by Prodicus, i. 260.
Vine, the, i. 158; its symbolical character, 200.
Vipers, i. 19.
Virtue, rational, i. 184; and vice, as delineated by Prodicus, 260; one, 418.
Virtues, the Christian, their connection, ii. 26–29
Visitation, i. 167.
Voice from heaven, the, at the baptism of Christ, i. 131.
Voices, the, of birds, i. 244.
Voluntary actions, of different kinds, ii. 38, etc.
Waggery censured, i. 219.
Walking, i. 324.
Washing, the, of the soul, i. 309.
Watching, i. 241.
Water, the natural beverage for the thirsty, i. 200
Water, the, of the Word, i. 91; and milk, 147; regeneration by, 181.
“Way of sinners,” the, ii. 41.
Wealth, i. 212–214, 298; the love of, 301.
Well trained, the, ii. 262.
White dress recommended, i. 259, 264.
Wife, a, ii. 80
Wife and husband, both to be equipped for heaven, i. 302; how to live with each other, 304; the kiss between, 382.
Wife, a thrifty, i. 321; a good, ii. 196.
Wills, observances of the Romans respecting, ii. 254.
Wine, to be avoided by boys and girls, i. 201; when and by whom to be used, 202;
to be taken moderately, 203; the ill effects of much, 203, 204; excessive drinking of, condemned, 204–206; various kinds of, 207; how Jesus drank, 208.
Wine and milk, i. 147.
Wine-bibber, the, i. 205.
Wisdom, i. 97, 203, 242; the queen of philosophy, 368; of the wise to be destroyed, 410; its nature, ii. 15, 453; the panacea, 262; different forms of, 397; and knowledge, 446.
Wisdom, the, of God, magnified, i. 365.
Wise, the, i. 365.
Wise man, the, ii. 12, 13, 14, 15.
Wolves in sheeps’ clothing, i. 20.
Woman, the thrifty and virtuous, i. 321; the foolish, 323; the wise, ii. 196.
Woman’s clothing, men forbidden to wear—why? ii. 49.
Women, married and unmarried, the duty of, in relation to banquets, i. 266; in regard to dress, 260; ornaments worn by, described, 269, 270; externally adorned only, compared to Egyptian temples, 276; some, fond of dress and extravagance, 277–279; improper behaviour of, condemned, 293, 294; employments of, 310; permitted to adorn themselves to please their husbands, 315, 316; the Instructor’s orders to, 320; should clothe themselves with their homemade work, 321; voluptuous movements of some, 221, 222; lascivious tricks of, 323; how they should go to church, 328;
refutation of Carpocrates’ and Epiphanes’ doctrine of a community of, ii. 86–89; candidates for the martyr’s crown, 165–170; capable of perfection, illustrious examples of, 193–196.
Women, holy, among the Germans, i. 399.
Word, the, various references to, i. 21, 22, 24, 98, 100, 101, 104, 108, 109, 113, 114, 116, 145, 147, 151, 152, 157, 162, 179, 180, 274, 299, 380, 385.
Word, the, our instructor, i. 113.
Word, water of the, i. 91
World, the, Moses teaches, was created, ii. 275.
World, the, of thought and of sense, ii. 276.
Written compositions, the value of, i. 349; and spoken, compared, 351–359.
Xenocrates quoted, ii. 14.
Xenophanes cited, i. 394; ii. 285, 286.
Xenophon quoted, i. 71; ii. 62, 285.
Χόρτασμα, i. 179.
Yoking the ox and the ass forbidden, ii. 55, 56. Young people should absent themselves from banquets, i. 225, 226.
Zacharias, his dumbness, i. 25.
Zaleucus, i. 404
Zaps, ii. 249.
Zeus, the Stoic, i. 393; quoted, 69, 75, ii. 266.
Zeus, various stories of, i. 28, 29, 30; the amours of, 39, etc.; human, 43; vile, ibid.; worshipped under various names and forms, 44, 45.
Zopyrus, i. 150
Zoroaster, i. 397; ii. 282.
END OF VOL. II.
MURRAY AND GIBB, EDINBURGH, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY’S STATIONERY OFFICE.
