"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."