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CONVIVIUM POETICUM.—No. I.

Scene-Williams's Rooms, Fitzroy Square, W.; Time—10 P.M.; Present-WILLIAMS, RICHARDS, and OLDKNOW: Tobacco,

Beer, and Manuscripts.

Williams (laying down a MS.) How do you like that? Richards. Pretty well, as a short poem; some lines in it are very good indeed. But I think you might have made more of it. You have not developed the story at all.

Will. I only meant it to be a sketch; it is only to be judged as such.

Rich. Well, as such I like it; but I wish you would write a real story in verse. I think that to tell a story in verse is a thorough test of a man's powers.

Will. Well, certainly, some who have been decent creatures hitherto, have failed wonderfully when they have tried to do that.

Rich. Yes, that is a proof of what I say. But though the faculty of telling a story seems to have faded out in the most modern poetry, I do not see why it should not be revived. For just consider how splendidly it was manifested in the last generation.

Will. You mean in Scott and Byron.

Rich. Yes, and in Wordsworth, Moore, and above all in Keats.

Oldknow. Of course, Moore was a fine poet; but I never before heard that Wordsworth was particularly good at narrative poetry.

Rich. Then read Dion and Laodamia.

Old. Still less should I have thought of Keats.

Will. Then read Lamia; and if you don't like it, read Isabella; and if you don't like it, read the Eve of St. Agnes. Rich. Read all that Keats ever wrote, except the Odes and Sonnets.

Will. And then we were not speaking of narrative poetry, but of tales in verse.

Rich. Just so.

Will. But, Richards, when you want me to write a story in verse, do you mean that I should make my own story, or get it from some one else, and only put it into metre? You know Shakespeare took his plots from all kinds of people.

Rich. Yes, and Chaucer his stories from Ovid. Now, Chaucer I take to be the greatest story-teller in the language; and after him that grand old fellow, Dryden. Perhaps, in vigour, in condensation, and in point, Dryden is the greater master of the two; and all his stories were stolen ready-made from Ovid and Boccacio, and Geoffrey himself. There does not seem to be a distinct rule; but I am sure of one thing, the power of making a story is distinct from the power of telling one. You often find novels with very complicated plots deficient in language and pathos.

Old. True, a mere assemblage of incidents like the old Mort d'Arthur.

Will. The Mort d'Arthur?

Rich. The Mort d'Arthur? Why it's the most splendid book in the world.

Old. I don't agree with you.

Rich. Very well; but we won't go into that now, unless you like. I think, Williams, that not only is the story-telling faculty separate from the story-making faculty, but that poets have often seemed to be without the latter, and very great poets particularly.

Will. Well, I don't know about that: a poet might have the faculty without caring to use it so long as he had stories ready to his hand. He might think it a waste of time. But surely a man like Shakespeare, who could invent and group scenes and incidents so splendidly, could have invented stories if he had liked.

Rich. But don't you see that scenes and incidents are included in the telling of a story, not the making.

Will. Yes, but the same invention could have been used in the other way.

Rich. Well, have it so if you like; and I think yours is the better way of putting it. Still

Will. There is a splendid instance in Edgar Poe. None of

his poems, I think, contain anything of a story; but what magnificent invention there is in his tales!

Rich. Yes, very true. Still, I was going to say, it holds good that poets, as a rule, prefer to have the story readymade, and with reason. For why is a story ever put into

verse?

Will. To improve it, I suppose.

Rich. Not that the verse may lose by the story, but that the story may gain by the verse.

Will. Well? Just so.

Rich. Then if the story be already framed, and the imagination is not chilled by plot-making, there is the greater likelihood that the poet may be enabled to concentrate his attention on the versification, the incidents-in one word, the treatment of the story, or the manner of telling it; and on this it is that his whole success, and the value of his undertaking depends. For if he does not tell it better by versifying it, he had better let it stand in prose.

Old. There's something questionable then. I don't think that some stories would be much improved by versification. What should you think of David Copperfield in verse?

Will. That only says that there are some stories which no poet would ever dream of undertaking; in that I quite agree.

Rich. If a story is poetical, of course it ought to gain by being put into metre.

Will. Certainly; and I agree with you on the whole. There is another reason, too, I think, why a poet would naturally rather have his story ready-made than invent it himself. It is more in accordance with the general poetical character: the poet always tells of what he has already seen, or heard from others. "No great man," Ruskin says, for what he has not seen himself.”

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Old. But that precludes imagination, does it not? Rich. Oh dear, no: you see with the imagination—what is the passage in Ruskin?-more vividly than you can see the bodily form with the eye; or rather, not more vividly, but more really.

Will. Well, it certainly is remarkable, however you

account for it, that great poets are so fond of repeating other people's stories.

Rich. Why, the reason is evident, not only from the poetical temperament, but from the constitution of things. There cannot probably be more than a limited number of beautiful stories in the world. You may vary them in a great many ways, but the number of really, fundamentally beautiful stories is very small.

Will. I am inclined to agree with you.

Rich. Hence it arises that there are certain cycles of poetic legend which the poets are never weary of repeating, nor the world of hearing.

Will. You mean when different poets have taken up the same subject, or parts of it, like the Homerides.

Rich. Yes, and as Chaucer did with Ovid and Statius. Will. I see exactly what you mean. But how wonderfully all the great men preserve their own individuality. How wonderfully different is Chaucer from Ovid!

Rich. Oh, of course; or Chaucer from Shakespeare, in their several ways of telling the story of Troilus and Cressida, for instance.

Will. I never read Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida, so I cannot say.

Rich. Well, I have; and I think it finer, perhaps, than the play of Shakespeare.

Will. I cannot think that possible: some of the finest speeches in Shakespeare are in Troilus and Cressida.

Old. It might be a curious question what relation a play bears to a story in verse.

Will. I suppose a play is the most perfect form of telling a story in poetry.

Rich. Yes; a good play must necessarily be a greater work than a good story in verse.

Will. Then Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida must necessarily be better than Chaucer's.

Rich. Well, I'm not going to dispute about that; I've too much love for the swan to exalt even the morning star against him.

Old. Well, I must go. Adieu.

VOL. I. NO. III.

[Exit.

Rich and Will. Adieu.

Will. What an ass that is!

Rich. Ass?

My sacrilegious friend, he is an eminent reviewer and critic.

Will. He is an ass for all that, or perhaps in consequence of it.

Rich. My dear Sir, for aught you know, he may lump up your book with half-a-dozen other poets in Parker's Pudding, next month, and mash you all together.

Will. Very likely; the apes and spaniels who do the critical now-a-days, are quite above giving a poet a separate notice, even a separate kick. They squash us all up together, and

Rich. Ah, you're sore on the subject of Parker's Pudding. Never mind, old fellow; the man who wrote that article must be an absolute fool.

Will. How cheesey Oldknow is become, since we knew him at Oxford.

Rich. He's got that, as Legree did the cuticle on his knuckles, with 'knocking down niggers.'

Will. What a horrible thing it seems that a conceited ass like that should have the power to stand between us and reputation! Take my own case, for want of a better. Do you consider that justice has been done me by the periodicals? Rich. Of course not; but what does it matter? • What porridge had John Keats ?'

Will. Yes; but I regard it as an abomination, that after devoting my time, and a considerable sum of money, to the highest and least remunerative of human pursuits, poetry, I should be simply insulted by a set of anonymous cowards. If it was their conscientious conviction that I had failed, they might at least say so in a gentlemanly way.

Rich. Why, supposing you have failed, if they had had insight enough to detect the real causes of your failure, they would then have had feeling enough to treat you decently. Will. Do you think I have failed?

Rich. I? Well, I think your book wants weeding.

Will. Well, let us cut all this. I like your idea about writing a story; and I think it true that poets like best to