the bards if they have only the art of enamelling. We want an architect and they bring us an upholsterer."[1]
It is this demand that makes the poet shy of proffering his fragment of pure gold, and eggs him on to work it into a statue by adding clay, iron, or anything else which he has handy.
That ode on Dion, which Emerson mentions, set out to be the finest ode in our language, and though less complete, less successful than several of Keats's, it still retains some superiority over them. As a magical treatment of the tragedy of heroism, it stands beside Milton's Samson Agonistes, and the scene of the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius in Julius Cæsar. That scene Nietzsche considered the grandest in all Shakespeare, on account of the importance and dignity of its theme; and the ode on Dion may claim a similar advantage among other odes.
Wordsworth's subject was not Dion's tragedy, as told by Plutarch, but his own sense of its import: yet he seems to have felt uneasy at not telling the story, and breaks off to paint a preliminary scene; then the might of his true subject seizes him again, and he rushes on to his goal, the events that carry the moral. Now this moral is the most important inference to be drawn from experience, and raises the question about which men will contend longest.
The facts necessary for the comprehension of the poem, but not easily to be deduced from reading it, are that Dion was a finely gifted man and Plato's disciple; had been unjustly exiled, and on his return, coming to the head of affairs, intended to use power ideally, yet permitted the opponent of his government to be illegally put to death; was reproached for this in a vision, and soon after fell a victim to an assassin's knife.
- ↑ Letters and Social Aims, "Poetry and Imagination," p. 153.
