SOURCE: “Katherine Mansfield's Encounter with Theocritus,” in English, Vol. XXIII, No. 115, Spring, 1974, pp. 13-19.

[In the following essay, Beachcroft considers the impact that the “XV Idyll” (known as the “Adoniazusae”) had on Katherine Mansfield's short stories.]

That Katherine Mansfield had at one time read a translation of the “XVth Idyll” of Theocritus and had given it considerable thought may not at first glance seem a very important piece of information. Yet it has a remarkable interest in the development of her own art and thus of the modern short story; and when Antony Alpers, author of Katherine Mansfield (1954), wrote to tell me that in the course of writing a new biography dealing with Katherine Mansfield and her circle he had discovered evidence of this encounter between Katherine Mansfield and Theocritus, it had the same effect as the discovery of an important piece that had been missing from the middle of a puzzle. It is the object of this article to explain why.

At the outset a brief definition is needed of the elusive phrase ‘the modern short story’. Without making a lengthy analysis, may I say that by the modern short story I mean the story that has been developed especially since the work of Chekhov and that has often been thought of as the ‘Chekhov kind’ of story.

Many critics have adopted this as a standpoint—Austin McGiffert Wright, for instance, in The American Short Story in the Twenties (1961) asks why it is that the stories of Sherwood Anderson, published over forty years ago, still do not seem dated in the manner of Garland's Main Travelled Roads; and he refers especially to the kind of story that ‘can be called modern’, and is to be found in Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, or Katherine Anne Porter. In the view of Austin Wright the explanation lies in the contrast of the modern or ‘dramatic’ technique with the older or ‘narrative’. In the modern form the story is revealed rather than narrated. Comment is eliminated. The method has often been described as ‘epiphanic’. Austin Wright among other critics holds the view that the difference is not merely one of technique, but is concerned fundamentally with the kind of story that can be told and the kind of truth that it reveals.

For centuries before the days of print, the short story was dominated by the presence of the story teller. This living narrator was essential: he could moralize, explain, cover years in a moment. He was not so much the author as the man who vouched for the authenticity of his story, sometimes saying it was all fact, and he had seen it happen.

Long after short stories were being printed, the idea of the ‘I’, the personal narrator lingered on, with many of the tricks of his trade. Somerset Maugham, for instance, liked to portray himself as a skilled raconteur who could capture an audience in a ship's smoking-room. Often he appears as the ‘I’ who has seen the story happen.

However, throughout the long development of the short story there existed in the “XVth Idyll” of Theocritus an almost perfect model of the short realistic story that is intended for reading and reveals itself without a personal narrator. At the time of the Renaissance, translations from Greek Romances influenced the authors of longer Elizabethan fiction; Cassaubon's version of Theophrastus in 1592 inaugurated the whole movement of ‘character-writing’: yet the “XVth Idyll” of Theocritus remained more or less unnoticed.

Theocritus was, of course, not unknown, and there is a mention of him as early as 1523 in Skelton's Garland of Laurell. There were, however, only a few scattered translations, and he was not thought of as a writer of stories. His influence was felt in the moods of pastoral poetry, developing later into the formalized graces of the eighteenth century, the Dresden Shepherd and Shepherdess rather than the natural truths of the Idylls of Theocritus. A similar and sometimes increasingly sugary interpretation continued in the nineteenth century, and in Macmillan's Magazine in 1887 an anonymous reviewer complains that the ‘simplicity’ and ‘wholesomeness’ of Theocritus himself emerges all the more clearly through each ‘renewed travesty’ of imitation ‘amid the din of Pastorals and Bucolics’. Evidently there was some reason for putting into the mouth of Bunthorne the words

High diddle diddle
Will rank as an idyll
If I pronounce it chaste!

Let us by way of contrast look at the Adoniazusae or “XVth Idyll” itself. It simply tells—or rather presents to us in dramatic form two young married women who leave their daily household chores to visit the crowded festival of Adonis. Praxinoa calls for Gorgo at her house. They discuss their husbands with gossip that is dateless yet wonderfully modern. They set off through the streets, talking volubly to each other and to people in the crowd.

Then the mood becomes more serious. The two young women reach the scene of the performance and listen to the incantation of a richly beautiful and allusive poem about the rites of Adonis. They are deeply moved yet their comments are foolish and remain on their own level of everyday banality. ‘The woman's a marvel’, they say of the actress. ‘Fancy knowing all that. Still, it's time for home’, and we leave them talking about their husbands' dinners and bad tempers. Throughout this brief episode the two young women are vividly alive; they are silly yet endearing and they are put before us in all their human frailty and their vaguely stirring insights with loving care.

The Adoniazusae reads almost as if it had been written by Katherine Mansfield two thousand and three hundred years ago, and it has been repeatedly praised by scholars and professors of Greek literature in exactly the same terms as many critics have used about modern short stories.

Professor Hadas (A History of Greek Literature, 1950) calls it ‘a masterpiece in a humble style … so vivid a picture is given not only of the characters of the ladies but the gay turbulence of the streets, and the emotional excitement of the service that one is amazed on turning back to find that the whole thing is done in less than six pages’. The Adoniazusae is in its way unique. The other idylls of Theocritus do not approach the story form so nearly. Other mimes from the ancient world, those of Herodas for instance, lack the intensity and the poetry. They are closer to ‘scripts’, waiting to be brought to life by actors.

Some mimes were little more than farce and knockabout, and the whole form seems to have had its origin in gesture and dancing as much as in words. The mime was by origin a spectacle, a happening; and it is precisely in this form that suddenly in the hands of a poet it comes close to the modern idea of the short story. At one stroke the mime presentation disposes of the narrator; it gets rid of moralizing and explanation; it moves at once into dialogue; scenes from everyday life fall naturally within its scope, while large-scale events and long periods of time do not. Its brevity is that of a flash, not of a condensed narrative. …

Mention of Theocritus as a story writer is scarcely heard of in England before the twentieth century; and this gives the final point of interest in learning that the Adoniazusae of all ancient poems was known to Katherine Mansfield of all writers, became known to her at a particular point in her development, and continued for years as a creative influence in her mind.

In Antony Alpers's letter referring to my book The Modest Art (1968) he said:

‘I delight to find you speaking of the Adoniazusae for an interesting reason. My old book (p. 14) speaking of the Coronation in June 1911 asserts that Harold Beauchamp's “ungrateful daughter who probably had a route-side seat at his expense derided the whole occasion in a feebly satirical skit for the next New Age”.’

Katherine in fact wrote for The New Age a conversation between two young women who wander about the streets of London on the day of the Coronation. This brief sketch, however, never appeared in a book. On referring back to it, Mr. Alpers has recalled the line of acknowledgement that he had not recorded in his 1954 book. Katherine Mansfield's skit is in fact called ‘The Festival of the Coronation—With apologies to Theocritus’.

In replying to Antony Alpers, I said:

‘I have been interested for many years in analysing the difference between the kind of things an artist of the short story can do with the personally narrated technique and the technique of lifting the curtain, and letting the scene act itself out. All of which makes your discovery of the Katherine Mansfield/ Theocritus sketch extremely interesting. Had she seen her sketch of the “Festival of the Coronation” as one of her own flashes, one of these stories she simply had to write, she would have given it the poetic life it lacks.’

‘The Festival of the Coronation’ is certainly not conceived on one of her deeper levels. It is no more than an amusing conversation between two bored young women, intended to give an unexpected view of the general jubilation. Unlike Praxinoa and Gorgo, Gwennie and Tilly never catch any sparks of fire and they merely linger at the back of the crowd, but the two young women who struggle and push their way into the Adonis Festival are animated, colourful and in the end swept into the community of feeling in which they participate very deeply; their response to what is natural, desirable, even sensual, becomes, thanks to Theocritus, numinous; sacred as well as profane. This is just what the mature stories of Katherine Mansfield also achieve at times.

Antony Alpers suggests in his letter ‘She had absolutely no Classics in her education. My guess is that Orage (or possibly J. M. Kennedy) put Andrew Lang's translation (1892) into her hands and said, ‘Here, you could make something of this for next week”.’ Alpers's conjecture may well be right. The Loeb edition by J. M. Edmonds did not appear till the next year. By this time or soon after the editors of The Masterpiece Library of Short Stories were also probably already at work. Their aim was to collect ‘The Thousand Best Complete Tales of all Times and all Countries’, and the editorial panel included some of the best-known names among literary critics and Professors of English Literature. Andrew Lang, for instance, and Q, were among them, as well as the American Professor Brander Matthews and Carl Van Doren. The Adoniazusae is among their choices and is recognized as having ‘the best qualities of the modern French conte’. Their twenty volumes were published in 1920.

Having made the link with Theocritus, we can consider more closely how it affected Katherine Mansfield's thoughts and then her work. To say that once she had seen the Adoniazusae her own art moved nearer to the mime form and to the especial character of Theocritus, would be a great over-simplification. The first use she made of it was a slight affair, yet she plainly pondered on it at length, because she returned to it with far greater effect a few years later. It was a question rather of absorbing an influence with which she was already sympathetic. Antony Alpers has pointed out that whatever influences helped Katherine Mansfield in forming her mature art, signs of it can be seen in flashes long before its full realization. He says, for instance, that in ‘The Tiredness of Rosabel’, written in 1908, when she was only nineteen, she suddenly hits on something very like her fully developed technique. However, she takes years to recapture it, and in the meantime she tries various styles and methods.

Meanwhile the influence of Theocritus was at work. In February 1914 she was in Paris and wrote to Middleton Murry, ‘I spent a great part of the day reading Theocritus and late last night happening upon our only Sainte-Beuve I found the first essay was all about him [i.e. Theocritus]’ (Katherine Mansfield's Letters to John Middleton Murry, 1951).

Sainte-Beuve has a number of references to Theocritus, but Katherine is presumably referring to the full-scale appreciative article which she could have found in various collected editions.

Sainte-Beuve's article may well have given her an insight into sympathetic elements in Theocritus: his feeling for poetry in everyday scenes; his linking of complex feelings with simple expression and clear imagery; a sensation of sadness that comes with joy itself. However he says very little about the “XVth Idyll” and does not discuss it as a story.

Nevertheless her reading of Theocritus and particularly of the “XVth Idyll” continued to dwell in her mind and to influence her. Eighteen months later in November 1915 she contributed a second story in mime form, ‘Stay-Laces’, to The New Age; and eighteen months later again, in May and June of 1917, a whole group of stories which are completely in dialogue or monologue appeared in The New Age.

On 3 May came ‘Two Tuppenny Ones, Please’, and on the 17th ‘The Black Cap’: both were collected later in Something Childish but Very Natural. In the intervening week, 10 May, ‘Late at Night’ appeared, which was also printed in the same book. This, though not a dialogue, is in the form of dramatic monologue without any narrative. It can be compared with the far more telling ‘The Lady's Maid’ which was printed in The Garden Party. Then next week, on 24 May, came ‘In Confidence’; this is a series of conversations at a house party which was probably based on impressions of Garsington and Lady Ottoline Morrell. This was never used in a book. On 31 May ‘The Common Round’ appeared, and Katherine thought this good enough to reprint in Bliss with the changed title of ‘Pictures’. It is interesting to see how this story was slightly altered by converting the theatrical form, complete with stage directions, in which it was originally printed, into a brief narrative, giving the page the normal appearance of fiction. This was followed by ‘A Pic-nic’, which appeared in The New Age on 7 June, but was never collected. She was also about this time trying her hand at a play about her own family. Then strikingly on 14 June came the well-known ‘Mr. Reginald Peacock's Day’, which was also included in Bliss and has a very close relation to dialogue form without keeping to it completely. Throughout these months, then, the influence of mine can be seen at work, and it was about this time also, Mr. Alpers tells me, that she drew up a list of the eight dialogue stories that she had by now contributed to The New Age. This certainly suggests a conscious realization of this particular form.

However, before looking at the technique of these stories more closely, it is worth recalling that in her Journal and letters Katherine Mansfield never says much that is consciously explicit about narrative method. She does refer to problems of time-levels and ‘the need for a very subtle variation of tense from the present to the past, and back to the present’ (Journal, 21 November 1921). But her main conscious consideration is given to the truth of her vision and the sincerity with which she can capture it. Incidentally, Katherine Mansfield was something of a mimic herself, and could do amusing dramatic monologues of a more or less professional standard; and while her Journal shows that she was apt to see her stories as pictures, she must in working them out have had a great faculty for imagining tones of voice.

‘Stay Laces’ is not very noticeable except for its method. A chattering woman takes a bus and goes shopping in Oxford Street; she is talking to a friend whose voice is not heard. ‘Two Tuppenny Ones, Please’, which is the first of the 1917 group, also does not go very deep. This time the voluble woman argues about the fare with the bus conductor, complains unpleasantly about maid-servants: this time the answering voices of her friend and of the bus conductor are heard. Neither of these two stories are very different from her original Coronation sketch. ‘The Black Cap’ is far more dramatic, more far-fetched and in a way absurd; it has several very brief scenes and tells the story of a wife who left her husband; and then in great haste left her lover to rejoin her husband. Even if not very deeply conceived, its heroine is, or could become, a typical Katherine Mansfield character.

All through these years Katherine was not only writing stories quickly for immediate publication, but she was experimenting with form as she did so. An earlier story, ‘Spring Pictures’, written in 1915, had been conceived almost entirely as visual description and bears some resemblance to the scenario of a brief silent film. She was seeking in various ways to combine the animation of the mime with a story intended for reading, and this, it may well be argued, is exactly what the Adoniazusae succeeds in doing. Theocritus must have traversed similar paths of artistic experience, and it can be argued that he faced the same problems quite consciously, as another French critic, P. E. Legrand, has shown.

M. Legrand makes a point of considering in detail the precise genre in which Theocritus was writing. In Étude sur Théocrite (1898), he points out that while the “XVth Idyll” is written as a dramatic mime, strictly speaking it diverges from the tue mime form; it would be difficult to act it on a small stage. The two main figures wander about, jostle with crowds and several voices are given lines besides those of Gorgo and Praxinoa. M. Legrand feels that all this is beyond the scope of dramatic presentation on a small scale; on the other hand, it could hardly be given to a single actress, reciting all the parts in turn, which was also an accepted way of presenting a mime. He writes in his chapter ‘Le caractère livresque du recueil—La Confusion des genres’ that the Adoniazusae is in fact more suitable to be read silently and alone; and is not in the full sense a mime designed for acting:

‘Impropre à la représentation, impropre au monologue, le texte des Syracusaines ne se prête qu'à la lecture silencieuse; un lecteur, à qui l'écriture manuscrite, comme aujourd'hui la typographie, signalait les changements de rôles, à qui, en cas de besoin, il était loisible de revenir en arrière, de revoir un détail d'abord inaperçu pour se faire une idée de décors imaginaires, est le seul qui, du temps de Théocrite comme de notre temps, ait pu goûter pleinement dans la “quinzième idylle” la prestesse de l'action, l'exactitude des mœurs, les nuances fines des caractères; le seul, n'en doutons pas, pour qui le poète ait entendu écrire sa petite pièce.’

(pp. 417-18).

Perhaps M. Legrand takes this too far, and two skilled actresses could have given the impression of bustle and movement around them and of other voices breaking in, but he argues further that the brilliant characterization of Gorgo and Praxinoa is in itself the best way of conveying the entire scene to the mind's eye; and it is all done, he says, with such poetic skill that there is no need to put narrative remarks into the mouths of the actors describing the scene of which they are part, which would really come from the author and would spoil the effect—‘viole la vraisemblance’ (p. 432).

M. Legrand's analysis is written without any conscious eye on the development of the modern short story, and we have no evidence that Katherine Mansfield ever saw it, but it comes remarkably close to many modern contrasts between ‘author-narrative’ and ‘dramatic technique’. M. Legrand goes on to develop the thought that Theocritus is inventing a new poetic form, and this he maintains can be seen especially in the Adoniazusae. In fact he places far more emphasis on the Adoniazusae than Sainte-Beuve does.

It is interesting after reading M. Legrand's analysis to see again how the original typographical setting of one of Katherine Mansfield's stories, such as ‘Pictures’, which was first of all presented in the form of a playlet, is turned by slight touches into the more normal appearance of narrative, when reprinted in a book. In ‘A Pic-nic’, the movement and variety of scene is taken further than in ‘Pictures’. It includes a boat trip, a picnic, rough weather as the ferry crosses the harbour mouth, touches of description, even thoughts in people's minds, all given in the form of stage directions, and yet plainly intended for reading. This story, however, was never altered for inclusion in a book.

Some time after 1917, when she was using the mime with increasing effect, Katherine Mansfield wrote two other stories, both reprinted in Something Childish, in which the form of the mime has been developed with touches of vivid description and begins to look far more like her finished art—the mime and the narrative truly combined.

These are ‘Carnation’ and ‘See-Saw’. ‘Carnation’ is, again, a single scene. We see a number of adolescent girls at a French class. They whisper, pass remarks to each other, smile. One draws pictures on her own arm; another plays with a carnation. In the end the elderly Frenchman who is their teacher agrees that it is too hot for a lesson, and he will simply read them some poetry. And here the story enters a different level and the mime technique takes a new turn. While remaining vivid and picturesque, it becomes interior. It begins to turn into a mime of thoughts and feelings.

There is also in ‘Carnation’ and several other stories more than a surface resemblance to the Adoniazusae. There is an underlying resemblance of theme and feeling, and in ‘Carnation’ we find something of that inexplicable poetry that plays over the surface of Theocritus. We see emerging, also, the ecstatic, hysterical, vulnerable young woman, who knows joy and suffering in the same instant; who struggles to find and understand her sincere inward self amid the kaleidoscope of impressions and emotions. In some of her finest and bestknown stories, with Bertha in ‘Bliss’, for instance, or with Beryl Fairfield in ‘Prelude’, this theme is pursued and concentrated from the attempts of her earlier days. It is significant that it was about this time that she was re-casting ‘The Aloe’ into its later version as ‘Prelude’.

Of course there were other influences. The influence of Chekhov has been much discussed, and at times considerably overstated. It is well known that Katherine Mansfield collaborated with Koteliansky in translating Chekhov's letters, that she felt an admiration and personal regard for him, as she tells us in her Journal. It is plain, however, that there is much about her art, and especially about her technique, that she did not learn from Chekhov. In lightness of movement, in swiftly changing time-levels, in the art of revealing a human situation rather than telling us about it, she does not follow Chekhov, she develops her own method. In any case Katherine Mansfield's final and finished art is not an amalgam of influences. It is her own unique vision.

While Chekhov tells us a story with his own deep sympathy and compassion, Katherine Mansfield becomes the people, becomes the scene itself.

‘I've been this man, been this woman’, she writes to Murry on 3 November 1920. ‘I've been out in the stream waiting to be berthed. I've been a seagull hovering at the stern … It is not as if one sits and watches the spectacle. That would be thrilling enough God knows. But one is the spectacle, for the time being.’

One is the spectacle: one is the story; and one is not the narrator. And it is at this point that the mime form, if it is not seen as a mere technique, becomes a vital help.

We see increasingly in her Journal in later years, hopes and even prayers that she may be made ‘crystal-clear’, or simply that she may be made good. In her Journal from July to November 1921 phrase after phrase suggests that the creation of her stories was becoming almost a religious experience. She becomes acutely aware that the truth she seeks in her art is dependent on an inner realization and control of her wayward self. How can she be the scene if at the same time she clouds it? ‘I have a sense of guilt … Marks of earthly degradation still pursue me … I try to pray and I think of something clever.’ She fears her writing will still be ‘full of sediment’. ‘Lord, make me crystal clear for thy light to shine through.’ As the years of the First World War dragged on, with the loss of her brother, with her long absences from Middleton Murry, and her increasing illness, her volatile personality is profoundly saddened and moved, yet still apprehends experience with an extraordinary brilliance and sensitivity.

This steady deepening of self-knowledge could be accounted for and described in terms of religious experience. Yet to Katherine herself it is a process of her art. She prays in order that she may be her stories with perfect truth. ‘And the passion I feel,’ she writes, ‘it takes the place of religion. It is my religion of people.’

Middleton Murry, moved by his own loss and love for Katherine, thought that these religious moods would lead on to some finer achievement; but many people would agree with Katherine Anne Porter's comment that Middleton Murry was confusing religious longings with artistic performance. Katherine Anne Porter thinks that Katherine Mansfield was in danger of moving away from an art that she had already mastered; and that her aspirations and her association with Gurdjieff would have clouded her artistic achievement.

Whatever she might have done in the future, her true admirers will always be fascinated and moved by those few outstanding stories of her finest level. In them we see the poetic vision, the intensity of the prayer, and the mastery of the technique all fused together. Her genius gives the insight. Mime gives the diamond-pointed cutting edge, helps to transfer to the printed page the flash that moves as quickly as a glimpse of the eye and heart at life itself.

If I may be allowed to quote from my own book, The Modest Art, this was how I expressed it before I knew that Katherine Mansfield had ever seen the Adoniazusae of Theocritus:

‘It is in this mood that she becomes the most intense practitioner of the technique by which the short story reveals itself—the mime form: but a mime in which the characters are suffused with light from within. All the information, the narrative flow is contained in the words spoken and the scene as it appears in the eyes of the characters. The use of interior vision is brilliantly externalised in imagery, so that when we enter into somebody's thoughts and feelings we do not leave the world of sensation. In this way she accomplished what Virginia Woolf accomplished later, but she does it in far less space.’

She has, in fact, created not the interior monologue but the interior mime.