Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles). Katherine Mansfield
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of a debate in February, 1904, where Kathleen and Ida were directly opposed to one another, has an interest beyond that of her arguments, though these for the first time have a recognisable touch of her own courage and individuality. The motion which Kathleen proposed — derived apparently from The Times — was this :
“That pastors and masters, parents and guardians, commentators and cranks have done their best to spoil the taste of Shakespeare for us by making it a duty instead of a pleasure.”
When we remember the passionate delight of Katherine Mansfield’s rediscovery of Shakespeare in after-years, the report of her speech takes life. She was speaking of her own experience; and we can recapture something of her girlish vehemence. She is already the rebel against the decorous curriculum of the College.
“K. M. B., proposing said : ‘When the average boy goes to school, he is plunged into the most magnificent of Shakespeare’s works. If a person has a tendency early in life to be literary, the very idea of being forced to learn Shakespeare deadens the sense of the appreciation of the beautiful — a true schoolboy never appreciated the beautiful at all, so he considers Shakespeare in the same way as anything else that is forced upon him. The most glorious pieces in Shakespeare have been read and re-read, quoted and misquoted by cranks and commentators till they have lost all true significance. There is so short a step from the sublime to the ridiculous!’”
“A foreigner said to me,’ Nearly all foreigners love and appreciate Shakespeare as much as you English.’
“‘Why is this?’ I asked.
“‘Oh, of course we do not read Shakespeare till we have had some experience of life — Shakespeare is not for a child.’ I felt a little crushed!
“It is impossible for a student to form an original opinion for himself, for he is always more or less biassed by what he has been forced to learn in his youth. Why should Shakespeare be employed in schools as a spelling book or reading book? Of a surety this is what happens when we come to consider how we are recommended to the Clarendon Press as an authority to find the correct spelling of the word ‘cousin’ in 1680. After laborious references to other plays of Shakespeare we have to take recourse to the researches of a certain Dr. Faulkner, folio ix, end of sect. v! The predominating element in a teacher is duty. The satisfaction of finding that a pupil can quote 50 lines of Shakespeare without faltering is to them far greater than finding that a pupil appreciates the intrinsic value of the speech. Even the divine Shakespeare himself, would writhe in his grave should he hear a fat, podgy little boy roll off a long farewell (with appropriate or seemingly appropriate gesticulations). Why should Shakespeare be made the bogey of the schoolroom?”
“Ida Baker, opposing the motion said : ‘At home you are first of all given a story book with several tales from Shakespeare, perhaps illustrated and so you learn the story of the plays. Later, when you are older, you discover that Shakespeare made the people talk and to gratify your curiosity to know how they talked — what sort of things your favourite hero or heroine said, you read the plays, and with a certain amount of extra pleasure (though of course you didn’t realise it then) in watching the developments. That is the result of forcing at home. At school it is stronger. If a play is chosen for that term, you know you are doomed to learn by heart at least five or six long speeches. But when you are older, it is wonderful what pleasure you get in finding how immense, how vast, is the meaning which you failed to appreciate when you first read it. You may suggest that however good it may be to force children to read Shakespeare, yet it would be better to leave them alone. But, I say, if that were so, half, if not more of the children would never open a Shakespeare at all! Finally, I offer my deepest gratitude to all or any who taught me to read Shakespeare.’
“K. M. B. summing up, said : ‘In reply … unless we followed the advice of others, we should choose by covers and gilt edges. If you have a boy to stay in the holidays he would choose to go to see “The Orchard” sooner than a play of Shakespeare — and why? Because at school they have made it a duty instead of a pleasure!’”
The voting is eloquent. For Kathleen’s motion there was cast one solitary vote. For Ida’s opposition there were twenty-one.
It is an index of her isolation. During the remaining year and a half which she spent at Queen’s, she never again took an official part in a debate.
The “big lovely building” which she remembered so glowingly in Carnation meant much to “the little Colonial.” The architecture of Harley Street was not a thing to be taken for granted by one from a country where the oldest houses belonged to the 1850’s. It was the tradition which half-consciously she reabsorbed, and in which she found her own peculiar delight. Her native delicacy and fastidiousness, the natural and exquisite grace which in later life quietly set her apart, found sustenance in the spacious Waiting Room with its beautiful ceiling; the Library, with the familiar portrait of Frederick Maurice, the Founder, hanging above the fireplace; the carved Library table with the Chaucer inscription along its edge; the great lower stairway with its graceful fluted balustrade. She drank it in.
Even the vista down the Giraffe Hole belonged to an earlier age. Perhaps its potentialities were half-realised on the nights of the innumerable school dances in the Pfeiffer Hall. These consumed a surprising amount of emotion and surplus energy, considering that they were merely school affairs. Except on rare occasions, the girls had only each other to dance with; but the lights, the dresses, the fires flaring on either side of the Hall, the bonbons thrown down the Giraffe Hole by special friends to special friends — all made an exciting, a thrilling ball.
2
The girls’ special precinct at College was the Bun Shop, down below, where administrators seldom intruded. It was a cosy cave, dark, warm from the built-in stove, with square wooden tables, carved by passing generations, and a notice board for messages. Friendly old Mrs. Brown, with her bun-counter across one end, presided unobtrusively.
Here Kathleen might meet her best friend of the moment, or go with one of the boarders — Ruth Herrick, another New Zealander, a fiery, long-limbed girl, with a mane of fair hair flung back with quick impatience as she charged about. Ruth Herrick was a pianist, too, and they often practised together, and went to recitals at Queen’s Hall.
For a while, Kathleen’s best friend was Vere Bartrick-Baker,”Mimi,” with her cool little voice, and her detached way of speaking. Both Ruth and “Mimi” seemed to her so much more awakened, more sophisticated than most of the girls at Queen’s.”Mimi” was one of the three girls (the others being Ida Baker, and Gwen Rouse, a girl from Lancashire — with whom Kathleen felt she “could be herself”). She remembers Kathleen as “definitely most enthusiastic in temperament, even to the extent of stammering very slightly from sheer excitement when much roused; and, of course,” she adds,”the’cello was the great thing. She was to play in London and appear as a’cellist. She gave me a solo performance on the landing outside the ‘Giraffe Hole.’ … I thought it extremely good, but should have done the same, no doubt, if it had been extremely bad.”
Except for practising music, there was not much for the girls to do together except sit and talk; yet when the mothers heard that some of them sat in the dark shadowy niches of the Hall, holding hands, they were indignant.”Of course,” writes “Mimi,” “K. M. and I had long discussions over Tolstoi, Maeterlinck, Ibsen in the lower corridor. We came an hour early for them, and were suspected of immorality. Miss Croudace was stupefied when, asking what we talked about, I told her.”
Girls under eighteen were not allowed out of College bounds. When they went to the Gardens near Regent’s Park occasionally, for tennis (which was their one game), they marched in a “crocodile,” led by Miss Hatch.
Kathleen’s real escape from this confined and decorous life was through her music; and the escape was not merely spiritual, but physical.”Guardy” (short for Guardian) — De Monk Beauchamp, their second cousin, whom the father had deputed to keep an eye on the girls in London — was the Secretary of the London Academy of Music; and Kathleen persuaded him to recommend that she should be allowed to take extra lessons there. Manifestly