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The Letters of Katherine Mansfield: Volume II

March 9, 1922

To the Hon. Dorothy Brett

As to my being humble. Oh dear ! That's between me and my God. I should retire behind 500 fans if any one told me to be humble ! You don't imagine that reviews and letters and requests for photographs and so on make me proud, do you? It's a deep joy to know one gives pleasure to others, but to be told that increases192 page 193 one's store of love not pride. Also what has it got to do with one's work? I know what I have done and what I must do; nothing and nobody can change that

A whiff of London came from the last pages of your letter, a whiff of years and years ago, a kind of ashy feeling. Oh, I shall never go back to England again except en passant. Anywhere, anywhere but England! As I write there's a sound of sweet scolding from the pigeons outside. Now it rains, now it's sunny. The March lion is chasing the March lamb, but not very seriously. The lamb does not mind much. They have an understanding. I was reading La Fontaine's Fables in bed early. Do you know them? They are fearfully nice—too nice for words. What a character the ant is, a little drop of bitterness and fury and slamming her door in everybody's face; and the frog. I am so sorry for him. He had a sister, too. She should have warned him. Instead she stood by and gloated. La Fontaine must have been an adorable man—a kind of Fabre. Very distrait, very amorous. He didn't even know his own children. He forgot their faces and passed them by in the street. I don't expect they cared.

France is a remarkable country. It is I suppose the most civilised country in the world. Bookshops swarm in Paris and the newspapers are written in a way that English people would not stand for one moment. There's practically no police news. True, they did write about Landru's execution, but so well it might have been de Maupassant! They are corrupt and rotten politically, that's true. But oh, how they know how to live ! And there is always the feeling that Art has its place … is accepted by everybody, by the servants, by the rubbish man as well as by all others as something important, necessary, to be proud of. That's what makes living in France such a rest. If you stop your taxi to look at a tree the driver says, “En effect c't'arbre est bien jolie,” and ten to one moves his arms like branches. I learnt more about France from my servant at Mentone than anywhere page 194 She was pure French, highly highly civilized, nervous, eager, and she would have understood anything on earth you wished to explain to her, in the artistic sense. The fact is they are always alive, never indifferent as the English are. England has political freedom (a terrific great thing) and poetry and lovely careless lavish green country. But I'd much rather admire it from afar. English people are I think superior Germans. (10 years hard labour for that remark.) But it's true. They are the German ideal. I was reading Goethe on the subject the other day. He had a tremendous admiration for them. But all through it one feels “so might we Germans be if we only knocked the heads of our police off.”

It's fascinating to think about nations and their ‘significance’ in the history of the world. I mean in the spiritual history. Which reminds me I've read lately 2 amazing books about present-day Russia. One by Merejkovski and Zinaida Hippius and the other by Bunin. It is a very extraordinary thing that Russia can be there at our back door at furthest, and we know nothing, pay no attention, hear nothing in English. These books were in French. Both were full of threats. “You may think you have escaped. But you have not escaped. What has happened to us will happen to you. And worse. Because you have not heard our prayers.” The ghastly horror and terror of that life in Petrograd is impossible to imagine. One must read it to know about it. But English people, people like us, would never survive as some of these Russian intellectuals have survived. We would die of so many things, vermin, fright, cold, hunger, even if we were not assassinated. At this present moment life in Russia is rather like it was four centuries ago. It has simply gone back four centuries. And anyone who sympathizes with Bolshevism has much to answer for. Don't you think that the head of Lenin is terrifying? Whenever I see his picture it comes over me it is the head of something between an awful serpent and a gigantic bug. Russia is at present like an enormous hole in the page 195 wall letting in Asia. I wonder what will happen, even in our little time.

But do you really feel all beauty is marred by ugliness and the lovely woman has bad teeth? I don't feel quite that. For it seems to me if Beauty were Absolute it would no longer be the kind of Beauty it is. Beauty triumphs over ugliness in Life. That's what I feel. And that marvellous triumph is what I long to express. The poor man lives and the tears glitter in his beard and that is so beautiful one could bow down. Why? Nobody can say. I sit in a waiting-room where all is ugly, where it's dirty, dull, dreadful, where sick people waiting with me to see the doctor are all marked by suffering and sorrow. And a very poor workman comes in, takes off his cap humbly, beautifully, walks on tiptoe, has a look as though he were in Church, has a look as though he believed that behind that doctor's door there shone the miracle of healing. And all is changed, all is marvellous. It's only then that one sees for the first time what is happening. No, I don't believe in your frowsty housemaids, really. Life is, all at one and the same time, far more mysterious and far simpler than we know. It's like religion in that. If we want to have faith, and without faith we die, we must learn to accept. That's how it seems to me.