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KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND LITERARY MODERNISM
Continuum Studies in Historicizing Modernism

Series Editors: Matthew Feldman, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History,

University of Northampton, UK; and Erik Tonning, Senior Researcher, University
of Bergen, Norway

Associate Editor: Paul Jackson, Lecturer in History, Open University, UK

Editorial Board: Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of

Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of Oxford,
UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Reader in 20th Century Literature, Royal Holloway, UK;
Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, Oxford Brookes University,
UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Director, Beckett International Foundation, University of
Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Department of Comparative Literature,
University of Kent, UK; Professor Janet Wilson, Division of Media, English and
Culture, University of Northampton, UK.

Continuum Studies in Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary

interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct
response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade.
Informed by archival approaches to literature, and working beyond the usual
European/American avant-garde 1900–1945 parameters, this series reassesses
established views of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual
backgrounds, working methods and manuscript research.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber
and Susan Reid

Reframing Yeats: Genre and History in the Poems, Prose and Plays, Charles Ivan
Armstrong

Samuel Beckett’s ‘German Diaries 1936–37’, Mark Nixon

Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling

Katherine Mansfield and
Literary Modernism
Historicizing Modernism

Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and

Susan Reid
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London New York
SE1 7NX NY 10038

www.continuumbooks.com

© Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber, Susan Reid and contributors 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978–1-441–111302 (hardcover)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand

Printed and bound in Great Britain
 Contents

Series Editors’ Preface vii

Preface viii
Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid
Notes on Contributors x

Introduction 1
J. Lawrence Mitchell

Mansfield and Modernism I: Philosophy and Fiction

1 Mansfield, Rhythm and the Émigré Connection 13

Gerri Kimber

2 Katherine Mansfield, Rhythm and Henri Bergson 30

Eiko Nakano

3 ‘The Famous New Zealand Mag.-Story Writer’: Katherine

Mansfield, Periodical Publishing and the Short Story 42
Jenny McDonnell

4 Authentic Existence and the Characters of Katherine Mansfield 53

Miroslawa Kubasiewizc

Mansfield and Modernism II: Self, Voice and Other

5 The Elusiveness of Reality: The Limits of Cognition in Katherine

Mansfield’s Short Stories 67
Joanna Kokot

6 Un-Defining the Self in the Stories of Katherine Mansfield 78

Nancy Gray

7 ‘–Ah, what is it? – that I heard’: Voice and Affect in Katherine

Mansfield’s Short Fictions 89
Anne Besnault-Levita
vi Contents

8 Kezia in Wonderland 101

Delphine Soulhat

Mansfield: Class and Gender

9 ‘The Women in the Stor(y)’: Disjunctive Vision in Mansfield’s

‘The Aloe’ 115
Bruce Harding

10 ‘A City of One’s Own’: Women, Social Class and London in

Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories 128
Ana Belén López Pérez

11 ‘My Insides Are All Twisted Up’: When Distortion and the
Grotesque became ‘the Same Job’ in Katherine Mansfield and
Virginia Woolf 139
Gerardo Rodríguez Salas with Isabel María Andrés Cuevas

12 ‘On the Subject of Maleness’: The Different Worlds of Katherine

Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence 149
Susan Reid

Mansfield: Biography/Autobiography

13 The Mansfield Legacy 165

Kathleen Jones

14 ‘My Many Selves’: A Reassessment of Katherine Mansfield’s

Journal 178
Valérie Baisnée

15 ‘Blue with Cold’: Coldness in the Works of Katherine Mansfield 188

Janka Kaščáková

16 Katherine Mansfield’s Menagerie 202

Melinda Harvey

Index 211
 Series Editors’ Preface

This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth- to twentieth-century

literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus
stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters,
diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing mono-
graphs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors and their
texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated
volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of inter-
related historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this
interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly,
one burgeoning sub-discipline of Modernism, Beckett Studies, features heavily
here as a metonymy for the opportunities presented by manuscript research
more widely. While an additional range of ‘canonical’ authors will be covered
here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly ‘minor’ or occluded
figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of
Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the
English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone Modernists whose writings
are ripe for archivally-based exploration shall also be included here.
A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of
intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many Modernists and their
critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be
historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual
literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of Modernist
writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the
boundaries delimiting the concept ‘Modernism’ itself. Similarly, the very notion
of ‘historicizing’ Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means
discourages more theoretically-informed approaches. On the contrary, the edi-
tors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism
may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way.
Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning
 Preface

This volume offers new interpretations of Katherine Mansfield’s work by bringing

together recent auto/biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her
life and art. It arises out of an international three-day conference held at the
former Centre for New Zealand Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, in
September 2008, co-organised by Ian Conrich, Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson,
which focused on the centenary of Mansfield’s arrival in London in 1908 and
the start of her professional career as a writer. It features reinterpretations of
Mansfield’s fiction in relation to her life, historical and aesthetic studies of her
literary modernism, and readings of her work which focus on philosophy and
fiction, class and gender, biography/autobiography, all within a framework of
literary and political modernism.
The latter years of this decade have witnessed a resurgence of interest in
Mansfield, invigorated by the publication in June 2008 of the long-awaited
fifth and final volume of Mansfield’s Collected Letters, edited by Vincent
O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott. The creation of the international Katherine
Mansfield Society in 2009, of which the present editors are all Board mem-
bers, has extended this interest in new and dynamic ways, as has the Society’s
new scholarly journal, Katherine Mansfield Studies. Other recent landmarks
in Mansfield scholarship and criticism included the announcement of the
Katherine Mansfield Annual Essay Prize, which commenced in 2010. The
Katherine Mansfield Society colloquium, held on 25 September 2009 in Menton
(co-organized by the present editors), was the culmination of a week’s celebra-
tions of 40 years of the Winn-Manson Mansfield Menton Fellowship, offered
annually to a New Zealand writer.
The editors hope the new interpretations of Mansfield’s work offered in this
volume will expand understanding of her place in modernism for scholars,
students and the general reader alike, interested in new interpretations of her
work, reinterpretations of her life and times, and diverse literary contexts and
readings. We anticipate that these essays will extend the flow of scholarship
and criticism of Mansfield by forging links between current research and earlier
and canonical interpretations of her writing and that of her modernist contem-
poraries, in a specifically twenty-first-century reinterpretation and reaffirmation
of her expanding literary legacy.
The editors would like to thank Matthew Feldman and Colleen Coalter, in
particular, for their invaluable support and assistance in bringing this volume
 Preface ix

to fruition, members of the Katherine Mansfield Society, who have contributed

to the enthusiasm and scholarship that inspired this collection, and the former
Centre for New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, the School of
Arts at the University of Northampton and The Open University for supporting
this renewed scholarly activity on Mansfield.
Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid
 Notes on Contributors

Valérie Baisnée is a Lecturer in English at the University of Paris 11. Her research
interests include the personal writings and poetry of twentieth-century women,
with a particular focus on New Zealand writers. She has published articles on
women’s autobiographies and diaries, and is the author of Gendered Resistance:
The Autobiographies of Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou, Janet Frame and Marguerite
Duras (1997).

Isabel María Andrés Cuevas teaches several courses on English and English
Literature at the University of Granada, Spain. Her interests are modernist and
contemporary women writers, including Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes and Sylvia
Plath. She completed her thesis on Virginia Woolf in 2006.

Anne Besnault-Levita is Senior Lecturer at the University of Rouen (France)

where she teaches English literature. She is the author of a thesis on ‘Ellipsis in
the short stories by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen’
and of Katherine Mansfield: La Voix du moment (1997). Her current fields of
research are short story theories, modernist fiction and criticism, genre and
gender studies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature.

Nancy Gray is an Associate Professor in English and Women’s Studies at The

College of William and Mary, where she also twice served as Director of Women’s
Studies. She is the author of Language Unbound: On Experimental Writing by Women
(1992), and various articles and reviews on women writers and feminist theory.

Bruce Harding researched the life of New Zealand detective novelist, Dame
Ngaio Marsh, before embarking on a PhD on the figuration of criminality and
deviance in Australian and New Zealand literature. He is Curator of the Ngaio
Marsh House (Christchurch, NZ), a Research Fellow of the Ngai Tahu Research
Centre, and an Associate of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies
(University of Canterbury, NZ).

Melinda Harvey is Lecturer in Literary Studies at RMIT University, Melbourne.

One of her research interests is animals in modernist literature and film. She
is currently working on a paper about dogs in screwball comedy. Apart from
animals, her work on Katherine Mansfield (and John Middleton Murry) centres
 Notes on Contributors xi

on their fascination with Russian literature and their work as literary critics. She
is reviews editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies.

Kathleen Jones is the author of seven biographies, and her subjects include
women writers such as the seventeenth-century Duchess of Newcastle, Christina
Rossetti and Catherine Cookson. Her new biography of Mansfield – Katherine
Mansfield: The Storyteller – is published by Penguin NZ. She tutors creative writing
for the Open University and is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.

Janka Kaščáková is Assistant Professor at the Department of English Language

and Literature at Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia. She received
her PhD in English literature from Comenius University in Bratislava in 2007.
Her research interests include nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English
literature, especially the works of Katherine Mansfield.

Gerri Kimber is an Associate Lecturer at The Open University. She is Chair of

the Katherine Mansfield Society and co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. She
is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), and A Literary
Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2008). She is the
co-editor of Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (2011).

Joanna Kokot is Professor of English Literature at Warmia and Mazury University

in Olsztyn, Poland. Her field of research comprises English literature at the turn
of the nineteenth century. Publications include Plays with the Reader in Rudyard
Kipling’s Short Stories (1993), The Baker Street Chronicler. Narrative Strategies in the
Sherlock Holmes Tales by Arthur Conan Doyle (1999) and ‘This Rough Magic’: Studies
in Popular Literature (2004).

Miroslawa Kubasiewicz teaches English literature at the University of Zielona

Góra, Poland. She is currently completing her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Towards
Authenticity of Existence: A Heideggerian Perspective on the Literary Works of
Katherine Mansfield’.

Ana Belén López Pérez is currently working on her PhD dissertation on Katherine
Mansfield and female identity at the University of Santiago de Compostela,
Spain. She has presented several papers and essays on Katherine Mansfield and
on the short story genre at conferences, and has published translations from
English into Galician of some stories by Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

Jenny McDonnell teaches in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. She
is the author of Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace: At the Mercy of
the Public (2010) and has published essays on Mansfield and on Robert Louis
Stevenson. She is co-editor of the Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter and film
reviews editor of the Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies.
xii Notes on Contributors

J. Lawrence Mitchell is Professor of English and Interim Head of the Department

of Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University. His biographical study, T. F. Powys:
Aspects of a Life (Brynmill) appeared in 2005, and he is currently working on a
book about boxing in literature and art. He has built a comprehensive collection
of Mansfield’s work in British and American editions including copies of four
numbers of the Queen’s College Magazine while Mansfield was there (one with her
cousin Evelyn Payne’s signature), copies of Rhythm, two variants of the 1911 In
a German Pension, the rare Cosmic Anatomy, and Murry’s Still Life inscribed ‘To
Chaddie with love from Jack Murry’, December 1916.

Eiko Nakano is Lecturer in the Faculty of Cultural Studies at Kyoto Sangyo

University in Japan. She received a PhD from the University of Stirling, Scotland,
in 2005. She has published several articles on Mansfield, including ‘Katherine
Mansfield and French Philosophy: A Bergsonian Reading of Maata’ in Katherine
Mansfield Studies, vol. 1 (2009).

Susan Reid is a founding member of the Katherine Mansfield Society, guest

editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies (vol. 2, 2010), editor of the online ‘Katherine
Mansfield Blog’, and reviews editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her
published work includes articles on Mansfield, Lawrence and Woolf, with a par-
ticular focus on masculinity, but also engaging with broader questions of gender
and identity, such as Englishness, the pastoral, and the utopian.

Gerardo Rodríguez Salas is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Granada, Spain,

where he teaches English Literature. His research interests cover modernist and
contemporary women writers (Jean Rhys, Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter and
Carmel Bird) and he has published extensively on Katherine Mansfield after
completing his PhD on her works in 2003.

Delphine Soulhat teaches at University Lyon Lumière while currently completing

a PhD at University Paris 10. Her interests include modernist literature, and
more specifically female modernist writers. Her research work is devoted to an
analysis of Mansfield’s stylistic and narrative approach to the encounter with
sexual, cultural and artistic otherness.

Janet Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of

Northampton. Her research interests are in the white settler society, Australian
and New Zealand literature and film, postcolonial and diasporic writing more
generally. She has most recently co-edited Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions
for the New Millennium (2010) and Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary
Volume of Essays (2011). She is the editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing,
current vice-chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society, and chair of EACLALS. In
2010–11 she is Research Fellow in New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, University
of London.
 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, marginal-
ized 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
2 Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism

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 modern-
ist innovator’ and focus instead upon shared grotesque elements in the work
of Mansfield 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 beauti-
ful 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 repu-
tation as a major modernist. What is most striking is the sheer range of countries
from which the contributors hail – Australia, England, France, Ireland, Japan,
 Introduction 3

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 transla-
tions. 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 Mansfield ‘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 lit-
tle 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 Mansfield 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 contribu-
tors 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
4 Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism

(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 polemi-
cal 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 con-
versation 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 discus-
sions, 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’
 Introduction 5

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.
Mansfield 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 some-
times 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 ‘auto-
biographical 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 posthu-
mous 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
6 Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism

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 dif-
ficulty’ 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 Kašč áková 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 escap-
ing the cold dead hand of their father; the ‘cold strange wind’ that disturbs the
 Introduction 7

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 blur-
ring 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
8 Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism

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 ‘reduc-
ing 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 Mansfield’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 Mansfield – 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 worry-
ing 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 existen-
tial 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.
 Introduction 9

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 valu-
able 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.
10 Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism

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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 Chapter 1

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 sig-
nificant – 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 hith-
erto 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.
14 Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism

The two French Post-Impressionist Exhibitions of 1910 and 1912 in London

had an unprecedented impact on both English artists and writers alike, includ-
ing 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 prolific 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 sim-
plifying 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)
 Mansfield, Rhythm and the Émigré Connection 15

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 met-
ropolitan 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 contribu-
tors to Rhythm were women; they included Mansfield herself, Fergusson’s then
partner, the American artist Anne Estelle Rice, Jessica Dismorr and Dorothy
16 Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism

‘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, pro-
moting 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 flabby 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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giuochi scenici degli Etruschi, e delle rozze farse Atellane degli Osci,
come già sa il lettore per quel che ne ho discorso, trattando de’
Teatri.
In quanto ad Ennio, non pago egli della buona riuscita che
ottenevano simili imitazioni, volle riportare un nuovo trionfo, mercè
una traduzione dell’istoria sacra di Evemero, di quell’Evemero che fu
il primo a pretendere che i numi della Grecia non fossero che uomini
divinizzati, nati come noi e come ogni ordinario mortale anche
defunti. Appresso qualunque altro popolo, un gran passo sarebbe
stato codesto nel filosofico agone, e forse tale era l’intendimento del
latino autore; ma sembra che i Romani non abbian veduto di primo
slancio delle ipotesi di Evemero che un frivolo argomento di
curiosità. Meno sospettosi degli Ateniesi eran dessi, perchè nessuna
esperienza ancora gli avvertiva delle conseguenze della filosofia
sopra la falsa lor religione. Lo stesso avvenne rispetto alla
esposizione del sistema di Epicuro fatta da Lucrezio. Queste due
opere erano germi gettati sopra un terreno non ancor disposto a
riceverli.
De’ libri avevasi quindi sospetto, quasi intaccassero le istituzioni e la
religione patria; epperò essendosi, durante il consolato di Cetego e
Bebbio, dissotterrati alcuni libri di filosofia, Plinio scrisse essersi poi
ordinato dal console Petilio di abbruciarli: combustos, quia
philosophiæ scripta essent [227].
È nondimeno nel senso che la coltura si venisse più generalizzando
e perfezionando per i Greci ed importando nuove forme nella
drammatica, che si dovrebbero intendere i versi di Orazio, che altre
volte appuntai in addietro:

Græcia copia, victorem cœpit et artes

Intulit agresti Latio [228];

non già per dire che veramente l’importazione prima della letteratura
venisse proprio di là. Notai come anzi gli incunaboli della poesia
drammatica avessero avuto nelle sature e nelle atellane origine
assai prima tra noi, e le Muse sicelides e i vari poeti e vati della
Magna Grecia fossero stati nostri.
A questi Greci, schiavi o liberti, che popolavan Roma, dispensandovi
la scienza, dai patriotti guardavansi in cagnesco, e si giungeva
perfino a trattarli da ladri e peggio, e si poneva in canzone il loro
grave sussiego assai volentieri, e ridevasi di cuore alle tirate contro
essi in teatro, e il popolo tutto applaudiva. Così fu all’entrar in iscena
di Curculione in Plauto al declamar di que’ versi:

Tum isti Græci palliati, capite operto qui ambulant,

Qui incedunt suffarcinati cum libris, cum sportulis,
Constant, conferunt sermones inter se drapetæ:
Obstant, obsistunt, incedunt cum suis sententiis
Quos semper videas bibentes esse in thermopolio:
Ubi quid surripuere, operto capituto, calidum bibunt
Tristes atque ebrioli incedunt.... [229]

Marco Tullio, nel libro II de Oratore, c. LXVI, rammenta del proprio

avo, Marco Cicerone, come avesse a dire: nostros homines similes
esse Syrorum venalium; ut quisque optimi græce sciret, ita esse
nequissimum [231]: lo che dimostra come non fosse disapprovata
questa grecomania dal volgo soltanto, ma ben anco da uomini
austeri e di autorità; perocchè quel vecchio uomo dovesse nel suo
municipio aver avuto considerazione e voce, se aveva potuto con
frutto farsi oppositore a M. Gratidio, che proponeva la legge
tabellaria.
Ma quantunque si affettasse questo publico sprezzo per cotesti
schiavi o liberti greci, nè si volesse far credere che alle lettere
nazionali si anteponesse la stima e lo studio di quelle di Grecia;
quantunque si armasse perfino l’autorità del governo con editti e
leggi contro l’irruenza della straniera dottrina; pur nondimeno
accadde che gli uomini illuminati di un’età più matura, astretti ad
eleggere tra l’abbandono di ogni filosofica speculazione, e la
disobbedienza al governo, furono condotti ad attenersi a quest’ultimo
partito dall’amore delle lettere, il quale allorchè ha posto radice,
cresce ogni giorno, perchè ha in sè stesso la sua fruizione. Nè ciò fu
tutto; avvegnacchè tutti i patrizi non solo e i più facoltosi, ma
eziandio tutti quelli che appena l’avessero potuto, dopo i primi studj
in patria compiti, mandassero per ciò i loro figli a perfezionarsi in
Grecia. Era una vera colonia di distinta gioventù romana, che si
trovava per conseguenza in Apollonia, in Rodi, in Mitilene ed in
Atene, eclettica e nella sua filosofia, come ne’ suoi costumi; e sotto
le ombre severe dell’Accademia e nei giardini d’Epicuro si informava
essa a giganti progetti di guerra, egualmente che alle severe
discipline della vera eloquenza e della poesia.
Orazio medesimo, sebben figlio di liberto, si trovò alla sua volta
condiscepolo di Marco Bruto alla scuola di Teonesto e di Cratippo; e
fu colà per avventura, che stringendosi in amicizia con quel fiero
repubblicano, potè per di lui mezzo ottenere dipoi il comando d’una
di quelle legioni, che soccombettero nei campi di Filippi, e dove ei,
gittando lo scudo, certo non fe’ prova di molto valore.
Buon per lui nondimeno che nella Grecia aveva potuto il suo genio
spaziare più libero, aggraziarsi, profumarsi e così preparare lo spirito
a quelle innovazioni nella poesia, da poter esser detto il primo de’
lirici latini, anzi quello che creò la lirica latina. Inceppata per lui, come
per gli altri, era stata la educazione della mente in Roma: essa erasi
voluto costringere a limitarsi alla sola conoscenza e studio delle cose
antiche e già troppo viete; ma con Livio Andronico, con Ennio, con
Nevio, Pacuvio, Accio ed Afranio soltanto non s’andava innanzi. Va
bene, dice Orazio, che sian codesti altrettanti modelli; va bene che
Roma tragga a’ teatri ad applaudirli: il popolo talvolta vede giusto,
ma talvolta anche s’inganna. S’egli ammira gli antichi autori, s’ei gli
esalta al punto di nulla trovare che li sorpassi, niente che loro regga
a petto, s’inganna a partito; ma s’egli ammette che ad ogni tratto si
incespichi con essi in termini che han fatto il loro tempo, e in uno
stile bislacco, è nel vero, e la pensa come noi. Io non l’ho contro a
Livio, nè penso che sieno da annientare i suoi versi che mi dettava
fanciullo Orbilio di piagosa memoria; ma è egli poi giusto che per
qualche concetto, qui e qua brillante, per un paio di versi un po’
meglio scorrevoli de’ restanti, abbiasi ad andare in visibilio?...
Jam Saliare Numæ carmen qui laudat, et illud,
Quod mecum ignorat, solus vult scire videri:
Ingeniis non ille favet plauditque sepultis;
Nostra, sed impugnat, nos, nostraque lividus odit.
Quod si tam Graiis novitas invisa fuisset,
Quam nobis; quid nunc esset vetus? aut quid haberet
Quod legeret, tereretque viritim publicus usus? [232]

Del resto, come già notai, Plauto e Terenzio, che pur formavano la
delizia de’ romani teatri, avevano dedotto le loro commedie dal
greco; più liberamente Plauto, che le ama almeno adattate a foggia
nazionale; meno invece Terenzio, ch’ei medesimo proclama d’aver
fedelmente tradotto Menandro e se ne reca a vanto.
Ritemprata così la letteratura latina nella greca, si preparò quello che
si disse il secolo d’oro della latinità. Tito Livio, Crispo Sallustio, Giulio
Cesare, Tacito e Cornelio Nipote nella storia; Cicerone, Ortensio,
Crasso, Cornelio Rufo, Licinio Calvo ed altri molti nell’eloquenza, la
quale però coll’avvenir dell’impero perdette di sua libertà e di molta
parte di suo splendore; Catullo, Tibullo, Virgilio, Orazio, Properzio,
Ovidio, Cornelio Gallo nella poesia, chiamano ancora la nostra
ammirazione e formano tuttavia l’oggetto de’ nostri studi: essi poi
capitanavano una schiera di molti altri ingegni minori.
Coll’eloquenza, di cui ho ricordato i campioni, pur la giurisprudenza
offrì le egregie sue prove e i suoi valorosi cultori. Sesto Elio Peto
(184 anni av. G. C.) publicò l’Jus Civile Elianum e furono celebri
giureconsulti M. Porcio Catone, P. Mucio e Quinto Mucio Scevola,
che indagarono primi i veri principj del diritto ed applicarono alla
giurisprudenza la dottrina morale degli stoici. Quando poi il potere
supremo si accolse nelle mani di un solo, i rescritti, i decreti, gli editti
e le costituzioni degli imperatori dischiusero nuova fonte alla scienza
del diritto, che si vide collegata alla filosofia. I più rinomati
giureconsulti del tempo di Cicerone furono L. Elio, Servio Sulpizio
Rufo e A. Ofilio; sotto Augusto C. Trebazio Testa, P. Alfeno Varo,
autore de’ Digestorum, Libri XL, che si conservarono nel Digesto. M.
Antistio Labeone e C. Ateio Capitone originarono due sette, che
discordavano tra loro ne’ principj da seguire nelle consulte: il primo
inclinando al rigoroso diritto; il secondo all’equità. I loro discepoli
Masurio Sabino (20 anni dopo C.) e Sempronio Proculo (69 anni
dopo C.) diedero a tali sette estensione maggiore, i primi attenendosi
alle sentenze degli antichi giureconsulti; i secondi ai principj generali
del diritto.
Più sopra accennai come nei primi cinque secoli Roma si trovasse
sprovveduta affatto d’ogni nozione di matematica: essa quindi le
attinse, come per gli altri rami dello scibile, a fonti greche, piuttosto
occupati della pratica applicazione nello scompartimento dei terreni,
nella disposizione degli accampamenti e nella costruzione dei grandi
e sontuosi edifizi. Tra gli scrittori che si distinsero in siffatta materia,
primeggia Marco Vitruvio Pollione, coll’opera sua De Architectura in
dieci libri, a lui commessa da Augusto ed alla quale ho tante volte in
questa mia ricorso, perocchè sia utilissima per la storia e la
letteratura dell’arte presso gli antichi e contenga viste elevate e
filosofiche, comunque talvolta pecchi di oscurità, e di disordine.
Lo studio della natura vantò a suo principale cultore Cajo Plinio
Secondo Maggiore o il Vecchio (23-79 anni dopo G. C.) del quale ho
già a lungo parlato nel dire del cataclisma pompejano; l’Economia
rurale mette innanzi L. Giunio Moderato Columella, che scrisse
dodici libri De Re Rustica; e la Geografia Pomponio Mela che ne
dettò, circa al tempo di Nerone, un compendio in tre libri: De situ
Orbis, tratto in gran parte dalle opere greche, ma con molta
accuratezza, giudizio e critica.
E così fiorirono parimenti le scienze. Ho già notato le cause per le
quali il nascimento e lo sviluppo d’una filosofia nazionale in Roma,
fosse pressochè impossibile, giacchè il genio speculativo dovesse
necessariamente essere alieno dallo spirito pratico politico e
guerriero dei Romani. Essi infatti non entrarono mai nella sfera dei
problemi filosofici per esercitarvi la loro attività individuale. Si
accontentarono di scegliere e di adattare fra i sistemi della greca
filosofia quelli che lor parvero più acconci alla vita politica ed alle
abitudini private e solo a quando a quando si risvegliò tra essi
qualche interessamento e di gusto per la filosofia quando fu creduta
mezzo di sviluppamento intellettuale o di progresso. La filosofia
stoica era la più consentanea all’indole romana e in tempi di
corruzione e di despotismo essa fu il rifugio delle anime temprate a
robusto sentire, ch’ebbero forza di levarsi al disopra del
depravamento del proprio secolo. Negli ultimi anni della Republica la
filosofia platonica vi fu favorevolmente accolta, perocchè offerisse
all’oratore negli ajuti della sua dialettica e dottrina di verisimiglianza
alcuni reali vantaggi; ma poi quando i costumi degenerarono, i
Romani divennero seguaci per lo più della filosofia di Epicuro, come
quella che porgesse ad essi ciò che ad essi abbisognava, un codice,
cioè, di prudenza e le norme del piacere; finchè più tardi, sotto
l’imperio di Marco Aurelio per breve momento sfolgoreggiò una più
vera filosofia. Quella di Aristotele, che in Grecia aveva trovato sì
gran numero di proseliti, in Roma parve oscura, nè ebbe attrattive
per menti straniere alle astratte speculazioni e più curiose che
meditabonde; e non fu quindi che più secoli dopo che invadesse le
scuole in Italia e che, puossi dire, essere stata regolatrice delle
medesime infine al chiudersi del medio evo; onde fosse nel vero
l’Allighieri, quando di questo sommo ebbe a dire:

Vidi il Maestro di color che sanno

Seder tra filosofica famiglia:
Tutti l’ammiran, tutti onor gli fanno [233].

Si è voluto rinfacciare alla filosofia d’Epicuro, anzi alla filosofia in

genere, la cagione della caduta della libertà, e si è accusata
leggieramente di secolo in secolo con una maravigliosa facilità,
come quella che avesse condotto la rovina di Roma: ma tale accusa
fu ingiusta. Tutti gli uomini che difesero la republica furon filosofi.
Varrone meritò di essere proscritto dai Triumviri, e scampandone
appena dalle persecuzioni, perdè la biblioteca e i suoi scritti: Bruto
amava siffattamente le greche dottrine, che non eravi al suo tempo,
come ci narra Plutarco [234], setta alcuna che da lui conosciuta non
fosse. Catone morì leggendo Platone. Cicerone, durante il corso
della sua operosa e gloriosa carriera di tanto vantaggio al libero
reggimento di Roma sì che la salvasse dalla cospirazione di Catilina,
mai non cessò di consacrare alla filosofia tutti i momenti che potè
ritogliere a’ suoi doveri di oratore, di soldato e di cittadino. Fin dalla
sua infanzia intimo amico di Diodoto, poi discepolo di Possidonio e
protettor di Cratippo, egli aveva caro di ripetere che andava tenuto
della sua dottrina e della sua eloquenza molto più alla filosofia, che
non alla retorica propriamente detta, e mostrò saperla mettere in
pratica, quando seppe ricevere il mortal colpo senza dar segno di
debolezza, castigandosi per tal modo d’avere sperato in Ottaviano.
La storia pel contrario non ci trasmise che i distruttori della romana
libertà nutrissero per la meditazione un pari amore.
Non ci vien narrato che Catilina fosse filosofo; Cesare, al principio di
sua funesta carriera, professò in senato principj di triviale irreligione
e grossolani assiomi, cui probabilmente questo giovane cospiratore
aveva raccolti ne’ suoi intervalli delle sue dissolutezze e delle sue
trame. Il voluttuoso Marc’Antonio, l’imbecille e codardo Lepido e tutti
quelli avviliti senatori e que’ centurioni feroci, di cui gli uni tradirono,
gli altri dilaniarono Roma spirante, non si erano, a quanto si sappia,
formati a nessuna scuola di filosofia.
Tutto questo movimento letterario e scientifico in Roma per altro non
era che un possente riflesso della greca letteratura e dottrina, e della
quale fu anzi tanta l’influenza che, se il latino idioma doveva
necessariamente essere il linguaggio della magistratura, il greco
divenne quello della coltura e dell’eleganza. Questo si parlò nella
conversazione, nella famiglia e perfin nell’amore, dove trovasi più
soave appellar l’amica, come notò con derisione Marziale, dicendola
ζωή, ψυχὴ, cioè vita e anima; e Orazio raccomandò nell’Arte
Poetica, a’ Pisoni il continuo studio dei greci esemplari:

vos exemplaria græca

Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna [235].

Già qualche cosa, parlando della lingua usata in Pompei, trattai della
coltura in questa città: ora con quanto ho testè detto di Roma,
rimane completato per riguardo a Pompei; perocchè ripeto le
provincie e più ancora le colonie seguissero in tutto l’andamento
della capitale.
Gli schiavi poi applicati a copiar manoscritti provvidero i privati di
buone biblioteche. Già Paolo Emilio aveva dato l’esempio di
cosiffatta raccolta, trasportando a Roma quella di Perseo re di
Macedonia da lui vinto: Silla aveva fatto altrettanto trasportando da
Atene quella di Apellicone Tejo; e più ricca l’ebbe il fastosissimo
Lucullo: Cicerone aveva di libri fatto egli pure incetta; ma tutte
finallora erano state proprietà private. Chi pensava a dotarne di una
il publico, quale era stata a Pergamo ed Alessandria, incaricandone
Varrone, reputato il più dotto de’ suoi tempi, fu Cesare, ajutato poi in
questo suo egregio pensiero da Asinio Pollione, dopo che Cesare
era stato da morte impedito di condurlo ad effetto. P. Vittore conta
ventinove biblioteche in Roma, ultima fra le quali quella di Marziale,
che ne’ suoi epigrammi non può resistere all’amor proprio di
ricordarla.
Pompei non aveva biblioteche pubbliche, nè forse l’ebbe pur
Ercolano: almeno traccia di esse non presentarono finora gli scavi;
ma e di una città e dell’altra ho già a suo luogo nondimeno osservato
quanti papiri siansi raccolti mezzo arsi e con sommo artificio svolti e
interpretati; quantunque finora non si possa dire d’essersi vindicato
dall’azione distruggitrice del tempo un’opera qualunque che fosse di
una grande importanza.
Volendo or qui toccare alcun che del modo tenuto nello scrivere,
poichè altrove ho già detto delle tavolette cerate, e pur altrove ed
anche adesso de’ papiri e delle pergamene, accennerò come su
queste ultime scrivessero in fogli non ritagliati e quadrati, nè da
ambe le facciate, come usiamo noi; ma per il lungo, e da una sola
parte, ed acciò la grandezza non cagionasse impedimento nello
scrivere, per fissarla, usavano d’una bacchettina di cedro o d’ebano,
con capi d’oro o di gemma, indi piegassero la carta arrotolandola, e
per questo rivolgimento avesse a nascere il vocabolo di volume,
volumen.
La gente d’umile condizione scriveva pel contrario d’ambe le
facciate; lo che venne mano mano in uso anche degli scienziati;
onde Cicerone scrivendo ad un suo famigliare, avesse a dire d’aver
sentito gran dispiacere nel leggere la prima facciata della lettera di
lui e grande contentezza nel voltar l’altra [236]; Giovenale parlasse di
una certa tragedia scritta in questa foggia [237]; Marziale ad
accennare del proprio libro stesso così scritto [238]; e Plinio il
Giovane, finalmente, scrivendo a Marco, dandogli conto d’alcune
opere eredate dallo zio, l’illustre naturalista, in ispecie gli narrasse di
censessanta commentarii scritti da una facciata e dall’altra [239].
Le iscrizioni e titoli delle opere, secondo ne fa fede Vitruvio [240],
venivano ornate con minio, e le carte stropicciate sottilmente con olio
di cedro, proveniente dal Libano, non tanto per conservarle dal tarlo,
quanto per renderle odorose; onde Orazio, nell’Arte Poetica, a
significare opera meritevole d’immortalità, in quel modo che si
credevano durar le cose unte coll’olio di cedro, usò di questo
concetto:

. . . . . cedro digna locutus;

e Ovidio non meno vi fece allusione nel primo libro Dei tristi, in quel
verso:

Nec titulus minio, nec cedro charta notetur.

Detto di queste particolarità, progredendo nel mio tema, eran pure

per la più parte fra gli schiavi, od erano stranieri coloro che si
applicavano alle discipline mediche e chirurgiche: la prima però
affidata più all’empirismo che alla vera scienza.
Valga il seguente aneddoto:
Il figlio di Marc’Antonio, dando una cena a’ suoi amici, vi convitava
altresì Filota medico d’Amfrisso. Tra le argomentazioni ch’era in uso
a que’ tempi di proporsi a tavola, Filota uscì in questa: V’è una certa
febbre che si vince coll’acqua fredda; chiunque ha la febbre, ha una
certa febbre; dunque l’acqua fredda è buona per chiunque abbia la
febbre.
L’insulso paralogismo, degno d’un puerile scolasticismo, si meritò
dallo spensierato Anfitrione i più ricchi donativi.
E valga pure il notare il passaggio, che fu anche satireggiato da
Marziale, di un medico alla vile condizione del gladiatore:

Oplomacus nunc es, fueras ophthalmicus ante:

Fecisti medicus, quod facis oplomacus [241].

La medicina fu, tra le scienze, quella che a Roma ottenne poco

favore e vi fece minori progressi. Non è già che ivi si mancasse delle
cognizioni ausiliarie su cui poggia la teoria della medicina; ma fino ai
tempi di Plinio il Vecchio venne abbandonata quale occupazione
illiberale, come già dissi, agli schiavi, a’ liberti od a’ forestieri. In
questa, come nelle altre, i Greci la fecero da maestri, e fu Arcagato
(535 di Roma), a quanto ne attesta lo stesso Plinio [242], il primo
medico greco che gli iniziasse alla medicina. Lucullo, Pompeo ed
altri illustri Romani invitarono in Roma parecchi greci di condizione
libera per esercitarvi quest’arte. Sotto Cesare, montarono in grande
stima, che vieppiù s’accrebbe regnante Augusto. Quest’ultimo
accordò loro rilevanti privilegi, i quali allettarono più romani a
dedicarsi, quantunque liberi, allo studio e alla pratica di questa
scienza.
V’ebbero così medici pubblici e privati. Questi ultimi erano per lo più
schiavi o liberti che abitavano col padrone e lui e la famiglia sua
unicamente assistevano, o gli aderenti di casa.
I medici publici, ben lontani dal sentire la dignità degli odierni,
esercitavano il loro mestiere in una bottega, alla quale ricorrevano
coloro che avessero avuto d’uopo di salassi, di operazioni
chirurgiche o di avere strappati i denti; suppergiù come anche
adesso in certi rioni di Napoli vedasi sulla bottega di barbiere
annunciato che si fanno anche salassi.
E si andava a tastone. Una determinata cura non era riuscita a
guarire una malattia, ebbene per essa si ricorreva a farmachi affatto
contrarj. Narrasi di Antonio Musa, liberto di Augusto e amicissimo di
Virgilio, medico di corte e celebratissimo, tal che gli furono eretti, a
cagion di lode, statue e monumenti, che avendo veduto che i bagni
caldi non avevano punto giovato al padrone aggravatissimo, gli
consigliasse i bagni freddi e questi adottati, l’avessero a guarire. E
del chirurgo Arcagato, del quale ho parlato più sopra, come primo
introduttore della medicina in Roma, si racconta essere stato cotanto
sanguinario, che il datogli soprannome di vulnerario gli venisse
presto mutato in quello di carnefice.
Come maravigliare allora di quel che menzionò Plinio il Vecchio
dell’antico Catone avere scritto al figlio: jurarunt inter se Barbaros
necare omnes medicina. Et hoc ipsum mercede faciunt, ut fides iis
sit, et facile disperdant. Nos quoque dictitant Barbaros, et spurcius
nos quam alios Opicos appellatione fœdant. Interdixi de
medicis [243].
Quindi è che ottenne fama e voga Asclepiade di Prusia in Bitinia,
che recatosi a esercitar medicina in Roma un secolo prima di Cristo,
deducendo le differenti malattie da viziosa dilatazione o stringimento
de’ pori, e riducendo la medicina a rimedi che producessero l’effetto
contrario, voleva una cura limitata a dieta, ginnastica, fregagioni,
vino, uso di semplici e divieto d’ogni farmaco violento ed interno. A
lui si attribuisce l’invenzione delle doccie, che si designarono col
nome di balneæ pensiles. Furonvi altri medici che conseguirono
celebrità, come il dottissimo Aulo Cornelio Celso, vissuto a’ tempi
d’Augusto, che nulla per altro innovò, solo spiegando buon criterio
nell’adottare le dottrine de’ suoi predecessori, dettando que’ libri, De
Artibus, de’ quali otto sono ancora superstiti [244]; e come Scribonio
Largo Designaziano, siculo o rodio del tempo di Claudio, che nel
trattato De Compositione Medicamentorum, che sussiste tuttavia, ed
è tenuto in poco conto, cercò combinare le dottrine metodiche
coll’empirismo, insegnando a non levare il dente leso, ma levarne
solo la parte guasta, e suggerendo l’applicazione della elettricità pel
mal di capo, mediante una torpedine viva; ed Erodico da Leonzio,
che trovò la medicina ginnastica, curando con violenti esercizj
susseguiti da bagno, a un di presso come farebbesi oggi a
Grafenberg.
Claudio Galeno di Pergamo, di vastissimo ingegno, studiosissimo
della natura e dell’anatomia, non venne in Roma che più tardi, al
tempo, cioè, di Marco Aurelio imperatore.
Piacemi qui ad ogni modo segnalare come la città di Crotone, la
formidabile rivale di Sibari, nel golfo di Taranto, fosse celebrata fin
dall’antico per l’eccellenza de’ suoi medici e chirurghi.
La professione del medico era lucrosissima. Manlio Cornuto
prometteva duecentomila sesterzj a chi l’avesse guarito dal lichene,
malattia alla faccia; altrettanto si fece pagare Carmide un viaggio in
provincia, egli che tuffava tutta Roma e fino i consoli e i senatori
decrepiti nell’acqua gelata; Alcmeone raggranellò una fortuna di
dieci milioni di sesterzj; Quinto Stertinio riceveva cinquecentomila
sesterzj dagli imperatori, e dalla clientela in Roma seicentomila
all’anno, e congiuntamente a suo fratello, lasciò un patrimonio di
trenta milioni di sesterzj, oltre all’aver dotata Napoli di opere
superbe. Dieci milioni ne lasciò Crinate, dopo di averne consacrati
altri dieci a rialzare le mura di Marsiglia sua patria: e Valente ed
Eudemo, medici e drudi di Messalina e di Livia, disponevano a
capriccio del talamo e del tesoro imperiale.
Tranne questi medici principali e forastieri, per lo più greci, vessati
del resto anch’essi e costretti anzi a partire da Roma, dove non
ritornarono che più tardi, gli altri medici erano per lo più schiavi o
liberti, e quindi i primi esposti in caso di mala riuscita, alla battitura e
alla catena, e i secondi alla condanna da parte della giustizia ad
ammende considerevoli.
Le cortigiane poi che non erano sotto la vigilanza dell’edile,
affidavansi a certe vecchie medichesse, medicæ che non solo erano
levatrici, ma addette eziandio alla magia ed alla medicina empirica.
Trovasi infatti in Grutero, un’iscrizione che ricorda una Seconda
medichessa:
 Secunda L. Livinæ Medica.

Aniano, nelle sue annotazioni al codice teodosiano, ricorda le

medicæ juratæ, le medichesse giurate, che non erano che levatrici
autorizzate a studiare medicina.
A Pompei la medicina doveva trovarsi presumibilmente non impari
ne’ progressi a quella di Roma. Lo si può dedurre almeno dalla
moltiplicità ed esame degli stromenti chirurgici ritrovati negli scavi,
che appunto per essi fu assegnata ad una casa, scoperta nel 1771,
la denominazione di Casa del Chirurgo nella via Domiziana, a fianco
della casa detta delle Vestali.
Questa casa abbastanza grande ha tredici camere, talune adorne di
pitture e con pavimenti in mosaico. Nel fondo, a destra dello xisto, vi
è una camera sulle cui pareti è dipinta la Toeletta di Venere, egual
soggetto trattato così stupendamente dal morbido e grazioso
pennello di Guido Reni. Pur dalle pareti di queste sale furon tolti altri
dipinti rappresentanti un pittore che dipinge un busto, una testa, una
Baccante ed una quaglia, che si depositarono, come tutte le altre
cose pregevoli di Pompei e d’Ercolano, al Museo Nazionale.
Ma all’argomento mio importa tener conto adesso e parola dei
suddetti arnesi chirurgici, che vi si ritrovarono.
Nella più vasta sala dell’abitazione, che verosimilmente doveva
essere la sala anatomica e la scuola di medicina, ben quaranta
stromenti di chirurgia si rinvennero, e quantunque si riconoscano di
piuttosto grossolana fattura, se si paragonano agli odierni, lavorati
con tutta la finitezza e talvolta con eleganza, riescono tuttavia assai
interessanti, riscontrandosene pure taluni che rassomigliano molto ai
moderni, ed altri di diverso disegno e per usi che non si sanno forse
indovinare.
Con siffatta scoperta si è conosciuto che cosa mai fossero le
cucurbitæ o cucurbitulæ, usate in medicina, rammentate pur da
Giovenale in questo verso:

Jam pridem caput hoc ventosa cucurbita quærat [245]

e si comprese che se dovevano essere coppette fatte della scorza di
questi frutti, o piccole zucche, potevano essere anche di bronzo,
siccome queste trovate in Pompei. Fu inteso egualmente meglio,
anche il passo di Celso, che allude a ventose di bronzo e di
corno [246]. — Queste ventose pompejane sono a foggia di mezze
ampolle con quattro buchi, che solevansi otturare con creta, che poi
si levava onde distaccarla dalla pelle che il vuoto aveva attratto. Si
riconobbe eziandio lo strumento per saldare le vene, gli scalpelli
escissorii a guisa di picciole punte di lancetta da una parte e
dall’altra aventi il malleo per la frattura delle ossa; le spatule di
diverse forme; gli specilli concavi da un lato e dall’altro a forma
d’oliva; un catetero bucato colla sua guaina mobile; un unco per
estrarre il feto già morto; ami, aghi, forbici dentate a guisa di
tenaglia, circini escissorii, bolselle a denti, sonde urinarie, lancette,
bisturi, siringhe auricolari, seghe, coltelli ecc. tutti del rame più puro,
con manichi di bronzo e riposti in astuccio pur di rame e di bosso. I
soli bottoni per l’applicazione de’ cauterj erano in ferro.
A chi ne voglia sapere di più consiglio ricorrere alla dotta
dissertazione di Louis Choulant: De locis Pompejanis ad rem
medicam facientibus, Leipzig 1823, ed alla descrizione illustrata da
disegni del cav. Leonardo Santoro di Napoli, inserta nelle Memorie
dell’Accademia di Napoli: non che al trattato edito nel 1821 a Parigi
dal dottor Savensko di Pietroburgo, e da cui risulta che già si
conoscessero a’ tempi di Pompei strumenti chirurgici che si credono
invenzione de’ nostri giorni, e che pur allora si possedessero mezzi
dall’arte chirurgica che non son oggi neppur sospettati.
Cesare Cantù poi ricorda [247] che all’accademia di Parigi fossero dal
signor Scouteten presentati i seguenti strumenti, dissotterrati a
Pompei ed Ercolano: una sonda curva, una dritta, pei due sessi e
per bambino; la lima per togliere le asprezze ossee; lo specillo
dell’ano e dell’utero a tre branche; tre modelli di aghi da passar
corde o setoni; la lancetta ed il cucchiajo, di cui i medici si servivano
costantemente per esaminare la natura del sangue dopo il salasso;
uncini ricurvi di varia lunghezza, destinati a sollevar le vene nella
recisione delle varici; una cucchiaja (curette) terminata al lato
opposto da un rigonfiamento a oliva, all’uopo di cauterizzare; tre
ventose di forma e grandezza diversa; la sonda terminata da una
lamina metallica piatta e fessa, per sollevare la lingua nel taglio del
frenulo; molti modelli di spatule; scalpelli a doccia piccolissimi per
legare le ossa; coltelli dritti e convessi; il cauterio nummolare; il
trequarti; la fiamma dei veterinarj per salassare i cavalli; l’elevatore
pel trapanamento; una scatola da chirurgo per contenere trocisci e
diversi medicamenti; pinzette depilatorie, pinzette mordenti a denti di
sorcio, una a becco di grua, una che forma cucchiajo colla riunione
delle branche; molti modelli di martelli taglienti da un lato; tubi
conduttori per dirigere gli stromenti cauterizzanti.
Se la medicina per sì lungo tempo rimase un vero empirismo, nè si
sollevò che più tardi colla coordinazione dei fatti e risultamenti
all’onore di scienza: puossi argomentare facilmente come in
ricambio si dovesse ricorrere a prodotti chimici, ad empiastri, ad
erbe, a beveroni, a dettame di que’ cerretani nelle cui mani trovavasi
l’arte salutare. E v’erano donne altresì che la pretendevano a
sapienza nelle scelte e distillamento delle erbe e componevano filtri,
che la superstizione e i pregiudizi d’ogni maniera facevano credere
atti a dare o togliere l’amore, a portare o distruggere la fortuna e vie
via a secondare ogni sorta di passioni, ma principalmente quella
degli appetiti sfrenati e lussuriosi onde dicevansi afrodisiaci. Ma essi,
grida Ovidio, non recano vantaggio alle fanciulle, ma nuocono alla
ragione contenendo i germi della pazzia furiosa.
Questi empirici, antidotari e farmacisti erano però venuti
nell’universale disprezzo, quantunque i più vi ricorressero: a un
dipresso come vediamo adesso derisi magnetizzatori e sonnambule,
tiratrici di carte e indovini, ma, ciò malgrado, contar numerosa
clientela e raggrannellar ricchezza. Orazio li mise a fascio colle
sgualdrine ambubaje in quel verso che nel capitolo dell’Anfiteatro ho
già citato:

Ambubajarum collegia, farmacopolæ.

Fra questi empirici si distinsero nondimeno molti dotti botanici e
manipolatori ingegnosi. Sotto Tiberio, Menecrate inventor del
diachilo, componeva empiastri, spesso efficaci contro le erpeti, i
tumori e le scrofole; Servilio Democrate fabbricava eccellenti
emollienti.
Pharmacopolæ appellavansi i venditori di farmachi, ma non per
questo si possono dire pari agli odierni farmacisti, perocchè questi or
vendano i semplici e manipolino i medicamenti giusta le prescrizioni
dei medici; mentre quelli fabbricavan rimedj di proprio capo e li
spacciavano, come fanno gli odierni cerretani; onde Catone, presso
Gellio, fosse nella ragione allorchè disse: Itaque auditis, non
auscultatis, tanquam pharmacopolam. Nam ejus verba audiuntur,
verum ei se nemo committit, si æger est [248].
Erano i Seplasarii che vendevano i semplici, e spacciavano pure
profumi, droghe, unguenti ed aromi.
Sotto il nome di sagæ venivano le specie diverse di venditrici
d’unguenti e di filtri, che fabbricavano spesso con magici riti inventati
nella Tessaglia. Ignoranti assai sovente della efficacia delle erbe che
trattavano, non è a dirsi se causassero anche di funeste
conseguenze. Così perirono anzi tempo Licinio Lucullo amico di
Cicerone, il poeta Lucrezio e tanti altri.
Orazio, che era stato amante d’una Gratidia, ch’era una tra le più
celebri sagæ di Roma, stando a quanto ne scrissero i suoi scoliasti,
rimproverò a costei, che raccomandò co’ suoi versi immortali alla
esecrazione dei posteri sotto il nome di Canidia, il funesto potere
delle sue pozioni amorose, che gli tolsero gioventù, forza, illusioni e
salute [249].
In Pompei, sull’angolo d’un viottolo, si credè ravvisare una fabbrica
di prodotti chimici. Sulla sua facciata si lessero diverse iscrizioni, tra
cui l’una che accenna a Gneo Elvio Sabino; un’altra a Cajo
Calvenzio Sellio. La fabbrica consta di due botteghe: a destra
dell’atrio vi è un triplice fornello destinato a tre grandi caldaje
disposte a differenti altezze. Nella casa si conteneva gran quantità di
droghe carbonizzate. Nel 1818, in faccia alla via Domiziana,
sull’angolo d’un’isola triangolare, si sterrò una taberna di seplasarius
o farmacista. Per mostra aveva dipinto un grosso serpente che
morde un pomo di pino. Il serpe era l’attributo di Igea, la dea della
salute, e di Esculapio: esso è ancora l’emblema delle odierne
farmacie. In Pompei, come abbiamo altrove notato, valeva ad altri
scopi eziandio, nè quindi avrebbe certo bastato a fissare la
designazione a questa taberna di officina farmaceutica, dove non si
fossero trovati nell’interno diversi altri medicamenti, preparazioni
chimiche, vasi con farmachi disseccati e pillole, e spatole e una
cassetta in bronzo a comparti contenente droghe, e una lama di
porfido per distendere e stemprare gli empiastri. Questa cassetta
conservasi al Museo in un con un bel candelabro di bronzo.
Dyer poi [250] scrive essersi colà trovato eziandio un gran vaso di
vetro capace di contenere due galloni (9l, 086), nel quale vi era un
gallone e mezzo (6l, 814) d’un liquido rossastro che si pretende
fosse un balsamo. Essendo stato aperto il vaso, il liquido cominciò a
svaporare rapidissimamente, onde si affrettò a chiuderlo di nuovo
ermeticamente.
Questo è quanto pare a me compendj brevissimamente la
condizione dello scibile d’allora e il suo insegnamento.
Finora non si raccolsero dati essere esistite altre scuole in Pompei
fuori di quelle che ricordai nel presente capitolo, nè forse gli Scavi
altre ne metteranno alla luce. Si sa del resto, per gli usi generali in
Roma, e quindi anche nelle colonie, che vi fossero scuole private, in
ciò che per la puerizia delle classi agiate ogni famiglia avesse il suo
schiavo, destinato a dare i primi rudimenti letterarj; poi erano i
grammatici che subentravano ad ammaestrare nello scrivere e nello
studio degli scrittori e nel greco, e dopo avea luogo il
perfezionamento in Grecia nelle discipline della filosofia. Reduci in
patria, o era nell’esercito che eleggevano la carriera e traevano alle
guerre, di cui Roma non aveva penuria mai, o entravano nella
magistratura, o praticavano dagli oratori più rinomati ad apprendere
l’eloquenza del foro; assai sovente poi tutte queste professioni volta
a volta esercitando, cioè passando dal foro alle cariche civili, e da
queste a’ gradi militari, ora magistrati e ora soldati.
Non vi volevano che i vizj e le scelleraggini dell’impero per chiamare
su Roma e l’Italia il torrente barbarico e far iscomparire istituzioni e
civiltà, e quando questa potè far di nuovo capolino e ricomparire
sulle rovine indagate del passato, si è procacciato di ricostruire,
senza che finora si possa dire che da noi siasi fatto meglio de’ nostri
gloriosi maggiori.
Ad ogni modo, anche la sapienza odierna spesso piacesi confortare
sè stessa dell’autorità della sapienza romana, che invoca come
oracolo sacro e senza appello.
 CAPITOLO XVII.
Tabernæ.

Istinti dei Romani — Soldati per forza — Agricoltori —

Poca importanza del commercio coll’estero — Commercio
marittimo di Pompei — Commercio marittimo di Roma —
Ignoranza della nautica — Commercio d’Importazione —
Modo di bilancio — Ragioni di decadimento della
grandezza romana — Industria — Da chi esercitata —
Mensarii ed Argentarii — Usura — Artigiani distinti in
categorie — Commercio al minuto — Commercio delle
botteghe — Commercio della strada — Fori nundinari o
venali — Il Portorium o tassa delle derrate portate al
mercato — Le tabernæ e loro costruzione — Institores —
Mostre o insegne — Popinæ, thermopolia, cauponæ,
œnopolia — Mercanti ambulanti — Cerretani — Grande e
piccolo Commercio in Pompei — Foro nundinario di
Pompei — Tabernæ — Le insegne delle botteghe —
Alberghi di Albino, di Giulio Polibio e Agato Vajo,
dell’Elefante o di Sittio e della Via delle Tombe —
Thermopolia — Pistrini, Pistores, Siliginari — Plauto,
Terenzio, Cleante e Pittaco Re, mugnai — Le mole di
Pompei — Pistrini diversi — Paquio Proculo, fornajo
duumviro di giustizia — Ritratto di lui e di sua moglie —
Venditorio d’olio — Ganeum — Lattivendolo — Fruttajuolo
— Macellai — Myropolium, profumi e profumieri —
Tonstrina, o barbieria — Sarti — Magazzeno di tele e di
stoffe — Lavanderie — La Ninfa Eco — Il Conciapelli —
 Calzoleria e Selleria — Tintori — Arte Fullonica —
Fulloniche di Pompei — Fabbriche di Sapone — Orefici —
Fabbri e falegnami — Profectus fabrorum — Vasaj e vetrai
— Vasi vinarj — Salve Lucru.

Sotto questo nome di tabernæ, chè così i latini chiamavano le

botteghe, il capitolo presente è chiamato a far assistere il lettore al
movimento dell’industria pompejana e del suo commercio. La storia
del commercio romano non corre sempre parallela, come nelle altre
cose che abbiam osservato finora, colla storia del commercio della
piccola città di Pompei: tuttavia essa si comprende nella storia
generale di quello della gran Roma, come la parte nel tutto, che però
dovrò riassumere brevemente, e di tal guisa saran raggiunti i miei
intenti, e il lettore si avrà così anche questa parte importante della
vita di quella repubblica famosa, che compendia tutta l’Italia antica.
Quando si pensa che i Romani fondarono la più vasta e formidabile
monarchia del mondo, parrebbe che si dovesse argomentare che
essi avrebbero dovuto avere una corrispondente ricchezza e
floridezza di commercio; ma non fu veramente così. Come abbiam
veduto delle scienze, che non presero a mostrarsi in Roma che
cinque secoli dopo la sua fondazione; così fu anche del commercio e
dell’industria. Insino alla prima Guerra Punica, i Romani non erano
per anco usciti d’Italia, nè pur potevano avere stabiliti commerci
coll’estero. Poveri e soldati, non ebbero tampoco nozione alcuna di
commercio, e neppure ne sentirono il bisogno. Erasi infatti ai primi
giorni dell’infanzia di un popolo, divenuto poi conquistatore, che era
ai prodromi di quelle convulsioni che l’avrebbero di poi così
violentemente agitato. Fin dalle origini, più che impaziente di gittarsi
alle conquiste, come da non pochi scrittori si volle far credere, ciò
desumendo piuttosto dai moltissimi fatti onde si ordì la sua storia,
che dal più diligente studio del suo primitivo costume e delle sue
abitudini; forzato ad essere soldato per difendersi dagli incessanti
attacchi dei Sabini, degli Etruschi e dei Sanniti; tanto il carattere suo
che le sue leggi naturalmente assumer dovevano una tinta militare; e