lly _Sohrab and Rustum_, directly and intentionally
illustrate the: poet's theories, but those theories themselves were
definitely put in a _Preface_, which is the most important
critical document issued in England for something like a generation,
and which, as prefixed by a poet to his poetry, admits no competitors
in English, except some work of Dryden's and some of Wordsworth's.

Beginning with his reasons for discarding _Empedocles_, reasons
which he sums up in a sentence, famous, but too important not to
require citation at least in a note,[5] he passes suddenly to the
reasons which were _not_ his, and of which he makes a good
rhetorical starting-point for his main course. The bad critics of that
day had promulgated the doctrine, which they maintained till a time
within the memory of most men who have reached middle life, though the
error has since in the usual course given way to others--that "the
Poet must leave the exhausted past and draw his subjects from matters
of present import." This was the genuine
"_Times_-_v._-all-the-works-of-Thucydides" fallacy of the
mid-nineteenth century, the fine flower of Cobdenism, the heartfelt
motto of Philistia--as Philistia then was. For other times other
Philistines, and Ekron we have always with us, ready, as it was once
said, "to bestow its freedom in pinchbeck boxes" on its elect.

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