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 they were _also_ the
unapproachable masters of "the grand style." These positions, which,
to do Mr Arnold justice, he maintained unflinchingly to his dying day,
are supported, not exactly by argument, but by a great deal of
ingenious and audacious illustration and variation of statement, even
Shakespeare, even Keats, being arraigned for their wicked refusal to
subordinate "expression" to choice and conception of subject. The
merely Philistine modernism is cleverly set up again that it may be
easily smitten down; the necessity of Criticism, and of the