"THE WOMAN WITH THE DEAD SOUL."
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:] SIR,—Many of your readers will no doubt feel indebted to you for publishing in the Spectator of August 21st Mr. Stephen Phillips's fine poem on The Woman with the Dead Soul ; " but may we demur to your description of it as "intensely painful" ? Saddening it is, no doubt, but surely the sadness thus produced is pleasurable, not painful. It is
like the feeling with which one watches the advance of autumn tints among the foliage or listens to the first move- ment of Beethoven's " Moonlight" sonata,—a luxurious
grief, a desirable melancholy. Mr. Phillips might easily have harrowed and lacerated our feelings with vulgar horrors, painting a mass of squalid East-End details like a rhythmic Zola. Instead, he tells, with a classical restraint of tho
toiler's soul, how-
" Life, an eternal want, in sky dead-grey, Denying steadily, starved it away ; London ignoring with deliberate stare, Slowly the delicate thing began to wear."
One can hardly believe that such compositions afford a moral
stimulus equal to that which might be yielded by a cruder, non-poetic realism. They do not sting one into activity, But probably the poet's intention was purely msthetic, and he left it to the social philosopher to say whether the tragedy is inevitable, and to the preacher to enforce upon a reluctant
society such remedial action as may be possible. If so, surely as an artist he is right.—I am, Sir, &c., R. J. FLETCHER.
14 Eton Road, South Hampstead, N.W.
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