Led with _delight_, they thus beguile the way.
There is no buffoonery, as in the _Canterbury Tales_, but a wise equable
serenity that contemplates man and woman, beauty, temptation, danger,
sorrow, struggle, honour, this world and the next, with a Knightly
equanimity that nothing can disturb. But why should I dwell on the point,
when Spenser himself has written one line which I may call his confession
of faith on the subject?--
The noblest mind the best contentment has.
What a noble line! the noblest, I think, in all literature. Let us commit
it to heart, repeat it morning, noon, and night, and it will cast out for
us all the devils, aye, all the swine of Pessimism. What does this grave,
this serious, this dignified English poet say of the Muses themselves?--
The Sisters Nine, which dwell on Parnass' height,
Do make them music for their more delight!
That is Spenser's conception of the mission of poetry, and of the function
of the poet--to make them music for their more delight--I acknowledge it
is mine. I earnestly trust it is that of many.
There is no passion of the human heart, no speculation of the human mind,
to which Shakespeare has not, in some passage or another, given expressive
utterance; and since in life there is much sorrow, no little suffering,
and ample sadness, chapter and verse can readily be found in his universal
pages for any mood or any state of feeling. But what is the one, broad,
final impression we receive of the gaze with which Shakespeare looked on
life? A complete answer to that question would furnish matter for a long
paper. But one brief passage must here suffice. In the most terrible and
tragic of all his tragedies, _King Lear_, and in the most terrible and
tragic of all its appalling incidents, the following brief colloquy takes
place between Edgar and his now sightless father:
Away, old man; give me thy hand; away!
King Lear hath lost, he and his daughter ta'en:
Give me thy hand, come on.
No farther, sir,
replies Gloster in despair,
No farther, sir! A man may rot even here.