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.