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.
What is Edgar’s answer?—
What! In ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither,
Ripeness is all: come on!
If, at such a moment, and in the very darkest hour of disaster, Shakespeare puts such language into the mouth of Edgar, is it wonderful that he should, in less gloomy moments, take so cheerful a view of life, that Milton can only describe his utterances by calling them “woodnotes wild”?
And Milton himself? Milton almost as grave as Spenser and certainly more austere. Yet I do not think that Pessimism, that the advocates of universal suicide, since life is not worth living, will be able to get much help or sanction for their doleful gospel from the poet who wrote Paradise Lost expressly to
... assert Eternal Providence
And justify the ways of God to man.
Milton has given us, in two of the loveliest lyrics in the language, his conception of Melancholy and of Joy. Of his L’Allegro I need not speak. But in Il Penseroso, if anywhere in Milton, we must look for some utterance akin to the desolation and the despair of modern pessimistic poets. We may look, but assuredly we shall not find it.