The Literature of Ecstasy

yron missed it, as did the austere Wordsworth[18-A]-who had, perhaps, loftier compensations. Swinburne had it from the first. Not Tennyson and Browning, only in occasional exaltation.

ystic, which zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of

a. It is a rapturous state in which the person is governed by preoccupation with a definite viewpoint. The poetic condition of ecstasy to which I refer is that mentioned by the poet Gray, in his famous Elegy, when he speaks of one of the dead who might have "waked to ecstasy the living lyre." He again uses the word in his Progress of Poesie, when he speaks of Milton, who rode "upon the seraph wings of ecstasy." Undoubtedly Gray understoo

For example, if a man goes into extreme rhapsodies about his particular race or country, and vituperates the people of other races or countries, and justifies tyrannical measures towards them; if, furthermore, he writes under the assumption that all the intellectual and moral virtues reside in his people,-in short, if he is purely clannish one can scarcely expect his li

appeal. Hence, morbidly mystical poems, celebrating union with an anthropomorphic God, poems chanting the praises of conquest and imperialism, poems seeth

a universal note and move Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, free thinkers alike. The ecstasy here does not depend upon the author's attachment to a dogma, but springs most frequently from a love of righteousness and humanity; hence the emo

e contrary, ecstasy is nothing more than accumulated ordinary emotions and it speaks not only with the body, but with all the memories of the body. It makes use in its communications to us of those very physical infirmities that mystics assume it sh

ed passion for morality, or the result, as Freudians have shown, of a hysterical attachment to parents, or the idealization of a father. It is often a sublimated sex love due to repression. Every one has been struck with the sensuous images in the conceptions of the mystics. Broadly speaking, mysticism seeks a condition of being united to a personal God who is supposed to exist outside of nature; it craves to partake of His holiness, and to cultivate purity and be rid of the earthy. He who rejects belief in

mself with nature by love and admiration for her, by a passion for a life that is in accordance with her commands, his poetry embodying such ecstasy is universal and is lifted into a high plane. It becomes a

re, God. It had its roots however in physical love, and a story is told of a man who, wanting to become a Sufi, was told first to love some woman. Some critics even decla

act anti-Mohammedan, and yet by a curious paradox they

Upanishads, and in some Buddhistic works, because of the panthei

ntheistic in character and shows the poet's desire for union not with an anthropomorphic God, but with nature whom he recognizes as his God. The best illustration of it is the famous passage in Wordsworth's lines com

helley's Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Browning's Rabbi Ben Ezra, Whitman's Chanting the Square Deific and Swinburne's Hertha are great

d to life. He was also thinking too exclusively of that religious ecstasy that is found in the Catholic Church only. He also took as his model for an example of ecstasy, Pickwick Papers, where there is really little ecstasy, but he found none in Vanity Fair where there is much

od generally as referring to any condition where man is overpowered by his feelings. It is this condition which makes the poet write, and the reader is brought into a similar state with the poet by reading the poems

ary production should be a protr

ed in the poet's creation. In Greek literature we have a blending of reason and ecstasy. Professor Butcher has pointed out in his excellent essay on "Art and Inspiration," in his Harvard Lectures on Greek Subjects, the potency o

ic's ecstasy where irrational conclusions were arrived at because of some abnormality in the seer. The poet was always a critic and a philosopher who tamed his wildest thoughts. "Moderns are prone," says Butcher, "to believe that the action o

was the outpouring of the personality of the poet made up of his intellect and passions. It represented

by this term we mean that rationalized emotions have so accumulated as suddenly to seek expression. Every poet, in prose or verse, writes from the unconscious and he usually gets lost in his own characters or speaks directly in his own person. The writer,

e Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus, but not when they are in possession of their mind. And the soul of the lyric poets does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from the honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the

eing out of the mind and sense

dea of madness is merely the concentratio

ke. "He who having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul comes to the door and thinks th

finest prose poems and allegories of ancient literature are found in his Republic, the Phaedrus and Symposium. Most of these are known to us, and

iades's tribute to Socrates and his speeches. Socrates, himself, thinks the speech is delivered to create trouble between him and Agathon, of whom Alcibiades is jealous. The speech is r

am leading (this, Socrates, you will admit); and I am conscious that if I did not shut my ears against him and fly as from the voice of the siren my fate would be like that of others-he would transfix me, and I should grow old sitting at his feet. For he makes me confess that I ought not to live as I do, neglecting the wants of my own soul, and busying myself with the concerns of the Athenians; therefore I hold my ears and tear myself away from him. And he is the only person who ever made me asham

mple of unconscious art among Greek playwrights,

d was given to Agamemnon as prisoner of war, she the princess, daughter of Priam and Hecuba. She had lost most of the members of her family and now anticipated great trouble for Agamemnon whose wife Claetemnestrae was unfaithful to him. She also foresaw her own death at the queen's hands, but it was her punishment that her

he brain." This is the thesis that Freud developed. Croce, who has, however, something of the metaphysician and mystic in him, is not in sympathy with this view, for he ridicules the idea that the genesis of aesthetism lies in the desire of the male for the female. Yet he agrees with Freud in the conception that art is a means of curing oneself of se

esthetic activity or perception whatsoever, a preliminary psychological condition is indispensable, namely ecstasy. Ec

possess this power; above all the ecstasy of sexual ex

c rites. Bacchus himself is the hero of the play. As the chorus says, Bacchus is innately modest and modest women will not be corrupted at the revels. Who is not moved by the song of the Chorus? "Would that I could go to Cyprus, the island of Venus, where the lovers dwell, soothing the minds of mortals, and to Paphos, which the waters o

acchus, aside from being god of wine, was the symbol of productiveness and was accompanied by Priapus, and the phallus was carried about. He was youthful and his symbol

sung by them. The point is that love frenzy leads to poetry, and we have an illustration of it in the connection between

sche, Pater and Freud solved by seeking liberties for the instinct. Pentheus, who represents reason, is the enemy of Bacchus, but fascinated by him, loses his life; reason leads to death when it makes no concession to the instincts. The play was a protest by Euripides

epentance for his liberal views and to signify his return to the conservatism of the Greek religion, is no lo

for in the relations of the sexes we have the source of most of the pleasurable and painful emotions of humanity. Sexual love even when most hid

other poets like Shelley and Swinburne have written besides love poetry, passionate defences of liberty and rep

ell as in verse. Many of our modern poets in their love poetry have not

t literature that deals with it, and we like love poetry whether in the prose letters of Keats, the Carlyles, the Brownings and Madame

g." When we think of the great figures in fiction who are to us the most poetic, we think of Oedipus, Orestes, Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Goriot, Grandet, Arthur Dimmesdale, Jean Valjean, Anna Karenina, Oswald Alving. Passion is the element that makes a character poetic. But any emotion in whi

ed by the work. Such a work is poetry to me and like minded readers. Further, differences of intellectual outlook on the part of the readers count in determining poetry. Socrates, Buddha, Bruno and Galileo are poetic figures to us to-day; they hav

rtain sadness or melancholy in the poetry of the nineteenth century but he might have said this was true of the poetry of any century. Most poetry is sad, for life often is, and the poet is naturally interested in and pays most

ad by us because they voice the sorrows that are universal to man. Grief is the substance of poetry and in the public mind there has

and among the Romans and the Orientals who never embraced Christianity. Poetry is sad because it is intertwined

ltivation of an emotion for the sake of the thrill. Most certainly there can be no great poetry where the sentimentalism is forced, where it becomes ridiculous, where it bubbles over and becomes monotonous. Sentimentalism often charact

use he must wear his heart on his sleeve. No one need be ash

of actual feelings characteristic of sentimental peoples; to be sure, such expressed emotions may appear as sentimental to the rest of the world. Many think tha

popular songs and mushy lachrymose verses. The many poems, stories and plays about "mother," "ba

edan philosophy and Averroes wrote against him. But no one among Arabs had as grand a conception of ecstasy in connection with poetry as he did. He was influenced by the Persian Sufis and defined ecstasy in a very modern manner. We may dispense with his mystic conception of it and pay attention only to his definition of it in its relation to poetry. Great admirer as he was of the Koran he recognized that poetry is more in accord with human nature than that work, and he quotes an authority to the effect that our being constituted

or emotion, and the condition is varied. The following passage is especially worthy of quotation: "As for the states, how many a man gets so far as to perceive in his heart, on some occasion which may appear in it, a contraction or an expansion, yet he does not know its cause! And a man sometimes thinks about a thing, and it makes an impression on his soul. Then he forgets the cause, but the impression remains upon his soul, and he feels it

youth in puberty who is in a state unexplained to him. Al Ghazzali is one of the first of modern critics to formulate the theory of ecstasy as the end of poetry, and his argument explains the vogue of love and mystic poetry. He recurs, it is true, to the influence of

to do as they did. We recall how Saul stripped himself naked. The Hebrew word prophecy means utterance and the idea of foretelling the future was incidental to it. If the idea of futurity emanated from prophets, it was such insight as any gifted person may experience when he notes certain facts from which he can predict inevitable results. But the ecstatic state was always associated with the idea of prophecy, the only person, according to the account of the Bible, exempt from this state being Moses. The prophetic state was not allied to divination but resulted from moral and aesthetic inspiration such as we find in modern poets. W

ct development of the imaginative faculty; the logical and imaginative faculties had to be balanced in the prophet; he overflowed with the frenzy of ecstasy

critics of the Bible. One of the best books on the subject is The Psychology of P

used for bringing about this state, but the subdued elevated ecstasy due to religious temperament and patriotic fervor, due to constant and profound

justice. The prophet of that day fulminated against the economic evils of society. He was possessed of an exalted type of aesthetic soul, the ecstasy to social justice. No literature gives us such types of men who rebuke unjust kings as we find in the stories of Nathan and David, Elijah and Ahab, Jeremiah and Hezekiah. No literature shows us such courageous types as Amos and Isaiah. They were not flatterers, these men who risked their lives in sho

the revolutions of opinions and changes in religious beliefs have made them obsolete. Shaw once said,

the form of a high social ideal, to-day is still making prophets. Shelley, Ibsen and Ruskin have done work that is akin to the prophets of old; they have given us works of art inspired by a state o

m. They did not count their syllables and give us metre, though t

n in prose with a social ideal behind it. Ecstasy was the first condition of their poetry but it wa

h a highly developed sense of social justice, who is making sacrifices because he observes the misery of many due to the privileged few. Don Quixote is one o

wer he included also that which taught by means of passions, desires and emotions and that which had its field of action in relation to the great moral capacities of man. The literature of power, according to De Quincey, includes that which appeals to the reason and u

ance, belongs only in parts to the literature of ecstasy, noticeably in the dream phantasies. By the literature of power De Quincey meant all literature except science. The only illustration of the literature of knowledge he gives is Newton's Principia, and the marked characteristics he finds

on poetry, or in which the poetry is diffused so that we call it prose literature. The literature of ecstasy then is the more emotional literature of po

cognized the importance of the rational and the mor

literature of power. He does not contend that the emotion should be concentrated and hold complete sway over the author. His literature of power would include, for example, all

power is not, being rather the equivalent of belles

of ecstasy and ecstasy is that possessive faculty of the imagination capable "of projecting itself into the very consciousness of its object, and again of being so wholly possessed by the

TNO

h Huneker that Byron or W

helps in the preface to his The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Cen

9-

ew po

rt of heightene

asy a

expediency dete

oore in Ot