KATHERINE MANSFIELD

As usual, I find with Katherine what I don’t find with the other clever women a sense of ease & interest, which is, I suppose, due to her caring so genuinely if so differently from the way I care, about our precious art.

Reality cannot become the ideal, the dream, and it is not the business of the artist to grind an axe, to try and impose his vision of Life upon the existing world. Art is not an attempt to reconcile existence with his vision: it is an attempt to create his own world in this world. That which suggests the subject to the artist is the unlikeness of it to what we accept as reality. We single out, we bring into the light, we put up higher.

But what I do believe with my whole soul is that one’s outlook is the climate in which ones art either thrives or doesn’t grow. I am dead certain that there is no separating Art & Life. And no artist can afford to leave out Life. If we mean to work we must go straight to Life for our nourishment. There’s no substitute.