a forest,’ it may be answered that the materials are certainly not equal, but that the artist who has rendered the game of cards poetical is by far the greater of the two.  But all this ‘ordering’ of poets is purely arbitrary on the part of Mr. Bowles.  There may or may not be, in fact, different ‘orders’ of poetry, but the poet is always ranked according to his execution, and not according to his branch of the art.”  Byron also contended, like Campbell, that art is just as poetical as nature, and that it was not the water that gave interest to the ship but the ship to the water.  “What was it attracted the thousands to the launch?  They might have seen the poetical ‘calm water’ at Wapping or in the London lock or in the Paddington Canal or in a horse-pond or in a slop-basin.”  Without natural accessories—­the sun, the sky, the sea, the wind—­Bowles had said, the ship’s properties are only blue bunting, coarse canvas, and tall poles.  “So they are,” admits Byron, “and porcelain is clay, and man is dust, and flesh is grass; and yet the two latter at least are the subjects of much poesy. . . .  Ask the traveller what strikes him as most poetical, the Parthenon or the rock on which it stands. . . .  Take away Stonehenge from Salisbury plain and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath or any other unenclosed down. . . .  There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect than the city of Venice; does this depend upon the sea or the canals? . . .  Is it the Canal Grande or the Rialto which arches it, the churches which tower over it, the palaces which line and the gondolas which glide over the waters, that render this city more poetical than Rome itself? . . .  Without these the water would be nothing but a clay-coloured ditch. . . .  There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington.”

There was something futile about this whole discussion.  It was marked with that fatally superficial and mechanical character which distinguished all literary criticism in Europe before the time of Lessing in Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge in England.  In particular, the cardinal point on which Pope’s rank as a poet was made to turn was really beside the question.  There is no such essential distinction as was attempted to be drawn between “natural objects” and “objects of artificial life,” as material for poetry.  In a higher synthesis, man and all his works are but a part of nature, as Shakspere discerned: 

  “Nature is made better by no mean
  But nature makes that mean:  so over that art
  Which you say adds to nature, is an art
  That nature made:  the art itself is nature.”

Shakspere, as well as Pope, dealt with artificial life, i.e., with the life of man in society, but how differently!  The reason why Pope’s poetry fails to satisfy the heart and the imagination resides not in his subjects—­so far Campbell and Byron were right—­but in his mood; in his imperfect sense of beauty and his deficiency in the highest qualities of the poet’s soul.  I may illustrate this by an arrow from Byron’s own quiver.  To prove how much poetry may be associated with “a simple, household, ‘indoor,’ artificial, and ordinary image,” he cites the famous stanza in Cowper’s poem to Mrs. Unwin: