This error Mr Arnold has no difficulty in laying low at once; but unluckily his swashing blow carries him with it, and he falls headlong into fresh error himself.  “What,” he asks very well, “are the eternal objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all times?” And he answers—­equally well, though not perhaps with impregnable logical completeness and accuracy—­“They are actions, human actions; possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the Poet.”  Here he tells the truth, but not the whole truth; he should have added “thoughts and feelings” to “actions,” or he deprives Poetry of half her realm.  But he is so far sufficient against his Harapha (for at that date there were no critical Goliaths about).  Human action does possess an “inherent,” an “eternal,” poetical interest and capacity in itself.  That interest, that capacity, is incapable of “exhaustion”—­nay (as Mr Arnold, though with bad arguments as well as good, urges later), it is, on the whole, a likelier subject for the poet when it is old, because it is capable of being grasped and presented more certainly.  But the defender hastens to indulge in more than one of those dangerous sallies from his trenches which have been fatal to so many heroes.  He proclaims that the poet cannot “make an intrinsically inferior action equally delightful with a more excellent one by his treatment of it,” forgetting that, until the action is presented, we do not know whether it is “inferior” or not.  He asks, “What modern poem presents personages as interesting as Achilles, Prometheus, Clytemnestra, Dido?” unsuspicious, or perhaps reckless, of the fact that not a few men, who admire and know the classics quite as well as he does, will cheerfully take up his challenge at any weapons he likes to name, and with a score of instances for his quartette.  It is true that, thanks to the ineptitude of his immediate antagonists, he recovers himself not ill by cleverly selecting the respectable Hermann and Dorothea, the stagy-romantic Childe Harold, the creature called “Jocelyn,” and the shadowy or scrappy personages of the Excursion, to match against his four.  But this is manifestly unfair.  To bring Lamartine and Wordsworth in as personage-makers is only honest rhetorically (a kind of honesty on which Wamba or Launcelot Gobbo shall put the gloss for us).  Nay, even those to whom Goethe and Byron are not the ideal of modern poetry may retort that Mephistopheles—­that even Faust himself—­is a much more “interesting” person than the sulky invulnerable son of Thetis, while Gulnare, Parisina, and others are not much worse than Dido.  But these are mere details.  The main purpose of the Preface is to assert in the most emphatic manner the Aristotelian (or partly Aristotelian) doctrine that “All depends on the subject,” and to connect the assertion with a further one, of which even less proof is offered, that “the Greeks understood this far better than we do,” and that