"I tell them there's something lacking in them," snapped Miss Mallowcoid, looking as unlike a poetical muse as it was possible to be.

Lord Henry turned to Denis. "You hear what they have said?" he enquired.

"Yes, they've been repeating that the whole morning," Denis rejoined.

"Their voices are at least those of sincerity," said Lord Henry.

"Neither can you say they are exceptionally ill-favoured human beings.

Without wishing to cast any aspersions on you, Miss Mallowcoid, Leonetta, and Guy, I think an impartial judge might be excused if he regarded your opponents as at least as intelligent as yourselves."

"Unquestionably," Denis admitted.

"Of course!" cried Guy.

Miss Mallowcoid and Leonetta, however, who were not at all persuaded that they could excuse such a judge, looked stonily unconvinced.

"Well, then," said Lord Henry, "that shows we must seek the cause of this modern indifference to poetry elsewhere than in the inferiority of those who refuse to read it."

"Good!" cried the baronet, and Agatha, Vanessa, and Stephen cheered.

"The question is," Lord Henry continued, "why is poetry not read to-day?"

"What is poetry, to begin with?" Vanessa demanded.

Everybody agreed that this was obviously the first thing to decide, and various definitions were given, none of which proved satisfactory. Denis Malster's definition which was: "Fine thoughts expressed in rhythmic order, and sometimes rhymed," was rejected by Lord Henry.

"You must get out of your mind altogether, the idea that poetry is all exalted vapourings, and high-browed sublime blue steam!" he said. "Its most important characteristic is that it adopts a mnemonic form,--that is to say, the form you would instinctively cast words into if you wished to remember them."

This was generally agreed to.

"But what is it that can justly claim the right of a mnemonic form?"

Lord Henry exclaimed. "Clearly only those things that are worth remembering,--important, vital things!"

Vanessa who was the only person present whose nimble mind foresaw Lord Henry's conclusion, cheered at this point.

"Very well, then," he continued. "A man who casts his thought or his emotion into a poetical or mnemonic form, implies that he is dealing with thoughts or emotions that are important or vital enough to be remembered. If they fall short of this standard, he is dressing asses in lions' skins!"

Stephen and Vanessa looked at each other and smiled approvingly.

"The disappointment felt is then all the greater," Lord Henry added, "seeing that the form leads us to anticipate important things and we do not get them. In fact," he said, withdrawing a note-book from his breast pocket, "I made a note the other day of the poet's duty. It is to prepare for mankind memorisable formulas in universal terms of important thoughts or emotions."

"But that's almost what I said," Denis protested.

"Yes, almost," Lord Henry replied, with just that restraint in scorn which makes scorn most scathing.

"The consequence is," Lord Henry concluded, "that according to this view of poetry, which I believe is the right view, and the view unconsciously taken by the masses, more than three quarters of Victorian Verse is simply so much superior drivel."

The baronet's party clapped their hands.

"The works of your Wordsworths, your Tennysons, your Brownings, your Matthew Arnolds," cried Lord Henry above the noise, "might be distilled down to one quarter of their bulk and nothing would be lost."

Sir Joseph laughed. "Now I know, now I know!" he ejaculated.

"And as for your very modern poets, they are even worse than the Victorians. Masefield, for instance, is jejuneness enthroned. How can you expect the bulk of sane mankind to read poetry, when they repeatedly encounter this vacuity, this unimportance of thought and emotion, presented with all the pomp and circumstance of a memorisable form?"

"Bravo, Lord Henry!" Stephen cried.

"But have you read Wordsworth's _Ode on Immortality_?" objected Miss Mallowcoid, with mantling cheeks and indignant glare. She belonged to the class of persons who always fancy they have thought of an objection to a generalisation which the man who made it must have overlooked.

"Yes, of course," replied Lord Henry. "It is a preposterously false and therefore dangerous thought; but I admit it is magnificently expressed.

A much more sensible and profound view of childhood is given by Browning at the end of _A Soul's Tragedy_; but unfortunately it is expressed in Browning's usual turbid and muddled way, without Wordsworth's art."

Denis Malster and Guy Tyrrell were shrewd enough to see that Lord Henry knew his subject, and had at least endeavoured to understand what poets should aspire to; Denis, however, felt that at all costs he must enter the lists against the young nobleman. He knew the women would be quick to account for his silence in a manner not too complimentary either to his courage or his ability, and he felt that his very prestige demanded at least a demonstration of some kind on his part. Leonetta, too, was beginning to look at him with a suggestion of enquiry in her eyes, and then ultimately Agatha made it impossible for him to desist any longer.

"Come on now," she said, "you two champions of Victorian verse,--aren't you going to defend it?"

"Lord Henry has admitted all we claim," he observed lamely. "No one would dream of saying that all Wordsworth or all Tennyson or all Browning was worth reading."

"Yes, but I claim that fully three quarters of it was not worth printing," said Lord Henry.

"I think that's a gross exaggeration," Miss Mallowcoid averred.

"Still at it?" enquired Mrs. Tribe, who accompanied by her husband now joined the party. "I agree with Lord Henry whatever he has said."

"Ah, you know a thing or two!" cried Vanessa.

At a signal from Sir Joseph, Lord Henry now rose, and the two strolled off together in the direction of the house.

"Have you seen Cleopatra?" the baronet asked as soon as they were out of earshot.

Lord Henry told him briefly what had happened.

"How strange!" Sir Joseph exclaimed.

"It is all the result of our detestable English system of leaving it to our daughters to dress their own shop window, so to speak," Lord Henry remarked, "so that at a given moment they each enter business on their own account, make the best possible show, and of course become the most bitter rivals. It is as cruel as it is stupid. It is the old Manchester School, the commercial idea of unrestricted competition, invading even the family."

Sir Joseph who imagined that the young nobleman was trying to be humorous, laughed at this.

"Ye-es, yes, I see!" he exclaimed chuckling.

Lord Henry groaned.

"But it is a most impossible situation," he said sternly. "Don't you understand? In the case of women of deep passions, like these beautiful Delarayne girls, it is a harrowing drama."

Sir Joseph looked up. Lord Henry's words had sobered him.

"You don't say so!" he muttered.

"I do, most emphatically," the young man continued "All our plan of life in England, you see, is founded on the assumption that only people of mediocre and diluted passion will hold the stage. We allow our girls to go about freely with young men, for instance. Why?"