THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY
"The primal and danger-breeding gift of ecstasy," says Huneker in his
essay "Anarchs and Ecstasy" in _Bedouins_, "is bestowed upon few. Keats
had it, and Shelley; despite his passion, Byron 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. Like the cold devils of Felicien Rops, coiled in
frozen ecstasy, the winds of hell booming about them, the poetry of
Charles Baudelaire is ecstatic. Poe and Heine knew ecstasy. . . .
William Blake and his figures, rushing down the secret pathway of the
mystic, which zigzags from the Fourth Dimension to the bottomless pit of
materialism, was a creator of the darker nuances of pain and ecstasy."
Ecstasy is derived from the Greek word which means _to make stand out_;
the mind makes sensible things stand out because it is concentrated on
particular emotions, and on the ideas associated with and springing from
these emotions. We must not make the mistake of thinking that ecstasy
has nothing to do with thought. On the contrary, it is too much occupied
with thought. It in fact represents a form of monomania connected with a
certain idea. 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 understood by ecstasy the poetic emotion
primarily. In fact, any emotion that grips a man strongly may be called
ecstasy. Great grief or joy, pleasure or pain, passion or tragedy,
enthusiasm for an idea or a cause, are all ecstatic conditions. The
passion for social justice, an intense love for humanity, devotion to
art, beauty, knowledge, the emotions of a happy or an unhappy lover, all
constitute important subjects in the literature of ecstasy.
But the ecstasy must be a universal and secular ecstasy. There are two
kinds of ecstasies which though universal may manifest themselves in
such primitive forms as to appear only to limited circles. I refer to
the ecstasy of chauvinism, or fanatical, local, unjust patriotism, and
to the ecstasy of the pathologically religious victim whose views border
on hallucination. 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 literary product to appeal
to other people than his own. Again, if we hear or read the outburst of
a devotee of a particular religious sect, and we find that we can agree
with him in none of the views or dogmas he entertains; if, moreover, we
observe there is something also anti-human in the attitude that he takes
towards life, we are revolted by his passionate outpourings.
Though every nation and every religion is and should be to some extent
clannish and sectarian, still no literature that is purely so can have a
universal appeal. Hence, morbidly mystical poems, celebrating union with
an anthropomorphic God, poems chanting the praises of conquest and
imperialism, poems seething with hatred for people of other races or
religions, poems poisoned by hatred for humanity, are all examples of
the literature of ecstasy of a low order.
On the contrary, however, the literature of ecstasy may be both
religious and patriotic, and still appeal to the world at large. I
suppose the best illustration of such kind of literature is the psalms
in the Old Testament. They strike 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 emotional appeal of
the poet touches even those who are not deists. There are also fine
touches and poignant prayers here and there that move even the
non-Christian in some of the works of St. Augustine, Thomas à Kempis,
Pascal and Bunyan.
We are not concerned here with the idea of ecstasy as a state that is
supposed to give us glimpses of the deity, nor with any attempt to
purify us by divesting our soul from the imperfect body and liberating
it from the frailties of the flesh. On the 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 shuns, those residing in the body as a medium. Ecstasy employs
the mind, and thus depends on the brain, the nerves, the physical
senses, which are unconsciously active even in a trance, and speak out
of the past. Ecstasy is the voice of the body.[21:A]
Generally speaking the ecstasy we mean in speaking of poetry is not the
same as that known to mysticism. However, the ecstasy in both springs
from the unconscious and is the fruit of an emotional soul because of
inherited memories of past emotions. In the ecstasy of the mystic, which
is usually what is called "religious experience," there is really little
application of the reason. It is even often pathological and is both the
product and the cause of a belief in absurd dogmas. It is often merely a
sublimated 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 an anthropomorphic God or to the
mystics' particular religions can have little of the mystics' feelings.
He does not enter into sympathy with their ideas, and this militates
against the university of mystic poetry. The ecstasy does not "catch."
Most of the mystic poetry of the world, especially that centering around
asceticism and dogma, has importance only for the believer in the
mystic's philosophy. Very little of it has literary value, although it
often is presented in an emotional and effective manner.
But there is a form of ecstasy in a species of mysticism that is
universal and modern, and will appeal to all in spite of their religious
beliefs. When the poet recognizing God in nature seeks to identify
himself 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 sort
of ecstatic statement of pantheistic philosophy that even the believer
may accept. That is why the Persian poet, Jalalu 'l-Din Rumi, for
example, appeals to us and why his works are of such high order.
Sufism or Persian mysticism began in asceticism and ended in pantheism.
It became a desire of a union with nature. In fact, it was an ecstatic
state of love for man, nature, 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 declare that many of
the Persian love poems are really mystical poems, and though this is
only partly true, it is certain that the Persian mystical poems are
really love poems.
The mystic poems of the later Mohammedan Sufis are in fact
anti-Mohammedan, and yet by a curious paradox they become after much
controversy acceptable to the Church.
There is also much that is modern in the Pre-buddhistic _Vedas_ and
_Upanishads_, and in some Buddhistic works, because of the pantheistic
character of the ideas and the universality of the emotions.
The ecstasy of the pantheistic mystic is a secular feeling that we all
experience, and is the substance of literature in prose and verse. We
have much modern mystical poetry that has a universal appeal; it is also
pantheistic 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
composed above Tintern Abbey, in which he tells us he hears in nature
"the still, sad music of humanity." The entire passage is great poetry,
not because of the blank verse but because of the mystical pantheistic
ecstasy.
Sane mystical poetry may then be of a very high order. You will find
examples of it in Blake, Emerson, Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold.
Shelley's _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, Browning's _Rabbi Ben Ezra_,
Whitman's _Chanting the Square Deific_ and Swinburne's _Hertha_ are
great mystical poems. These and others will be found in the _Oxford Book
of Mystical Verse_, collected by D. H. S. Nicholson and A. H. E. Lee.
Some years ago Arthur Machen produced a curious and illogical book,
_Hieroglyphics_, where he touched the borders of the truth of the
distinction between the literature of ecstasy and general literature,
but he introduced too many unbalanced views about literature being
unrelated 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. He also, strange to relate, found no ecstasy in Meredith
or the later Hardy novels, and in no intellectual productions marked
with liberal thought except those of Rabelais. He showed no insight into
the real greatness of literature, because of his narrow conception of
ecstasy.
Ecstasy in the broad sense is any excited condition of the emotions.
Besides the meaning the word has in a narrow mystic and a medical sense,
with neither of which significances are we here concerned, it is
understood 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. Hence when the prose writer describes his ecstatic
state, or draws people into such a state, he is also a poet. The
critical or philosophical essay, the novel and short story when
ecstatical, are therefore poetry.
It is not necessary that a literary production should be a protracted
piece of ecstatical writing.
Many people are under the impression that when we speak of ecstasy we
mean a state where reason is utterly dethroned. Yet the Greeks, who make
inspiration the source of art, never let the passions so rule that utter
chaos resulted 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 of reason in Greek poetry. The ideas of the
Greek writers were emotionalized, and there were ideas in their
emotional products. Demosthenes was like Plato, a passionate thinker;
Pindar, Æschylus and Sophocles were reasoning poets.
The Greeks used the word ecstasy in a modern secular sense rather than
in a spiritual or pathological one. It was the unconscious memory of the
poet coming to the fore and utilizing the intellect to pour light on the
soul. It was not the mystic'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 of poetic genius
abdicates its rights and descends to the lower level of talent when it
begins to reason. Greek literature decisively refutes such a notion. It
exhibits the critical faculty as a great underlying element in the
creative faculty."
Greek poetry then is the portrayal of reasoning passion, using at the
same time a conscious technique. It was the outpouring of the
personality of the poet made up of his intellect and passions. It
represented the breaking forth of the unconscious into expression,
controlled by a censorship on the part of the poet.
Plato's idea about poetry being a form of madness may, however, still be
accepted, when we understand by madness the being imbued with one's
emotions in a manner not depriving the poet of his intellectual powers.
Poetry is only the result of inspiration, if 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, however, is not mad, nor is his art allied to
madness. He is usually too sane, using his judgment at the same time
that his emotions are aroused. So we can still subscribe to Plato's idea
of unconscious art, put in the mouth of Socrates in the dialogue _Ion_:
All good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful
poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed;
like the Corybantian revellers in their dances, who are not in
their right mind when they are composing their beautiful
strains, yet who, when falling under the power of music and
metre are inspired and possessed; like 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 Muses; they are like bees, winging their way
from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a
light winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him
until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the
mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this
state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.
* * * * *
The expressions referring to being out of the mind and senses
must not be taken literally.
As long as we bear in mind that Plato's idea of madness is merely the
concentration on one topic, his idea of poetry is true.
A remark of Socrates in the _Phaedrus_ should be well pondered by
disciples of art for art's sake. "He who having no touch of the Muses'
madness in his soul comes to the door and thinks that he will get into
the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not
admitted."
Plato himself was one of the finest of ancient poets, in spite of the
fact that he wanted to exclude poets from his ideal commonwealth. Some
of the 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 need no mention. When Plato speaks of love, he does so
as a poet, and the passages on the subject in the last two named
dialogues are full of poetry.
I wish to give, besides the above passage, as an illustration of Plato's
own prose poetry, part of a speech by Alcibiades. It is at the
conclusion of the _Symposium_, and is part of Alcibiades'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 ruined also by a reference at length to a
phase of Greek life which is repulsive to us. After likening Socrates to
Silenus and to Marsyas, Alcibiades continues in the following prose
poem:
For my heart leaps within me fore than that of any Corybantian
reveller, and my eyes rain tears when I hear them. And I
observe that many others are affected in the same manner. I
have heard Pericles and other great orators, and I thought
that they spoke well, but I never had any similar feeling; my
soul was not stirred by them, nor was I angry at the thought
of my own slavish state. But this Marsyas has often brought me
to such a pass that I have felt as if I could hardly endure
the life which I 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 ashamed, which you might think not to
be in my nature, and there is no one else who does the same.
For I know that I cannot answer him or say that I ought not to
do as he bids, but when I leave his presence the love of
popularity gets the better of me. And therefore I run away and
fly from him, and when I see him I am ashamed of what I have
confessed to him. Many a time have I wished that he were dead,
and yet I know that I should be more sorry than glad, if he
were to die; so that I am at my wit's end.
Symonds tells us that Æschylus was the great example of unconscious art
among Greek playwrights, and that he exemplifies Plato's theory of
poetry.
Æschylus's creation Cassandra is a good illustration of a character in
an ecstatic state. Cassandra is both prophetess and poetess, and her
cries move us to this day, when much of Æschylus's moral and religious
philosophy bores and irritates us. She is the incarnation of woman
suffering. She was ravished at Troy by Ajax and 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 prophecies would not be heeded. She is partly mad,
but hers is the poetic frenzy, tempered by logic. Her most meaningless
ravings are full of meaning. They are poetry not because of the metre in
which they are rendered, but because of the rational ecstasy. This
ecstasy remains intact even in the English prose translation.
Nietzsche divided art into Apollonian and Dionysian. He found that the
Dionysian state depended on emotional or orgiastic intoxication. He
perceived that the ecstasy in this state was largely of a sexual
character. As he boldly put it, "The desire for art and beauty is an
indirect longing for the ecstasy of sexual desire, which gets
communicated to the 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 sexual neurosis. "By elaborating his impressions," says
Croce, "man frees himself from them. By objectifying them, he removes
them from him and makes himself their superior. The liberating and
purifying function of art is another aspect and another formula of its
character and activity. Activity is the deliverer, just because it
drives away passivity."
Finely put, indeed, are the words of Nietzsche's views on ecstasy. "To
the existence of art, to the existence of any aesthetic activity or
perception whatsoever, a preliminary psychological condition is
indispensable, namely ecstasy. Ecstasy must first have intensified the
sensitiveness of the whole mechanism; until this takes place art is not
realized.
"All kinds of ecstasy, however differently conditioned, possess this
power; above all the ecstasy of sexual excitement, the oldest and most
primitive form of ecstasy."
Plato, it will be recalled, compared the state of the poet to that of
the reveller in the Bacchanalian rites. The favorable side of the
worship of Dionysius or the Bacchic revels has been shown by Euripides
in his play the _Bacchae_. He shows how King Pentheus was torn to pieces
in mistake by his own mother for his hostility to the bacchic 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 of a foreign river flowing
with an hundred mouths fertilize without rain--and to the land of
Pieria, where is the beautiful seat of the Muses, the holy hill of
Olympus. Lead me thither, O Bromius, Bromius, O master thou of
Bacchanals. There are the Graces and there is Love and there is it
lawful for the Bacchae to celebrate their orgies."
The ecstasy of the revellers at the rites was poetic ecstasy, for it was
an unconscious or conscious erotic nature manifesting itself in the form
of a religious rite. Bacchus, 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 symbols were animals like the
goat, ass, bull, tiger, lion, all of which had erotic significance. The
ecstatic rites with which he was worshipped were introduced from Thrace.
Aristotle attributes the origin of tragedy to the use of the dithyramb
of the revellers, and comedy to the phallic songs sung by them. The
point is that love frenzy leads to poetry, and we have an illustration
of it in the connection between the Bacchic rites and poetry, between
love and art. The rites degenerated under the Romans and were soon
suppressed by law.
Nietzsche gives us a profound interpretation of Euripides's play in the
twelfth section of _The Birth of Tragedy_. It is the old story of the
battle between the emotions and reason, the instinct and the intellect,
problems which men as different as Hearn, Bergson, Nietzsche, 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 against his own
moralizing tendencies. The lesson of the sages Cadmus and Tiresius is,
in the words of Nietzsche, that we must display a diplomatically
cautious concern in the presence of the emotional forces. Don't trifle
with poetry and the ecstasies that produce it.
The older interpretation, which even Pater adopted in his _Greek
Studies_, that Euripides wrote the play as a repentance for his liberal
views and to signify his return to the conservatism of the Greek
religion, is no longer held. Gilbert Murray and others have also shown
the fallacy of this view, but Nietzsche anticipated them.
The most primitive and universal ecstasy is that which is concerned with
the attraction of the sexes. Poetry after all deals chiefly with love,
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
hidden is at the root of all love between the sexes. It is for this
reason that we can still appreciate the oldest lyric poetry of different
nations.
True, two of our greatest of modern poets, Wordsworth and Whitman,
dealt hardly at all with romantic love, and other poets like Shelley and
Swinburne have written besides love poetry, passionate defences of
liberty and republicanism. But still it is the relations of the sexes
which most interests people in a play, a novel or a poem.
And the love poetry of the world is naturally to be found in prose as
well as in verse. Many of our modern poets in their love poetry have not
given us any better poetry than some of Heloise's love letters in prose.
Love is the foundation of poetry and for this reason poetry always will
be with us, and probably more so in prose than in verse. We want
literature that deals with it, and we like love poetry whether in the
prose letters of Keats, the Carlyles, the Brownings and Madame
Lespinasse, or in the novels of Hardy, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Balzac, or in
the verse of Hafiz, Burns, Shelley, Browning, Heine or Verlaine.
Professor Woodberry has made a special plea in his _Inspiration of
Poetry_ for a return of poetry to poetic madness. Emotion is the chief
and most important element of poetry. "Emotion" as Woodberry says, "is
the condition of their (the poets') existence; passion is the element of
their being." 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 which the poet steeps his poems, interests us. We read Heine,
Byron, Burns, Verlaine, because we wish to find our own emotions
expressed. But not every petty feeling, like the shades and nuances we
find in much verse, is great poetry, nor is the record of every trivial
event important poetry.
But emotions described by the poet affect people differently. I may
find great emotion in reading about a man who sacrifices himself for a
great and unpopular idea, but others may not be interested in that man
or his idea and hence will not be moved 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 have been enshrined in poetry and history and we accept
many of their ideas. But to their contemporaries who rejected them they
were not poetic figures. Who knows but that there are figures to-day we
scoff at who may have a halo of poetry in history?
A distinct but by no means essential quality of the literature of
ecstasy is that of pain. There is more pain depicted in the world's
literature than pleasure. In his _The Nature of Poetry_, Edmund Clarence
Stedman speaks of a certain 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 attention to the painful emotions
that trouble him. Tragedy and elegy (and the term elegy was used by the
Romans not only to bemoan the dead, but to deplore sad love affairs) are
predominant in all literature, prose and verse.
We always find a poet's outburst of sorrow interesting. The poems of the
Hebrews, Persians, Arabians, Chinese and Japanese may be read 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 always been an
association between poetry and sadness; as Shelley said--"our sweetest
songs are those that told the saddest thought."
It is assumed that Christianity made poetry sad but this is not so, for
there is sad poetry in the Old Testament and among the Romans and the
Orientals who never embraced Christianity. Poetry is sad because it is
intertwined with human nerves. The most frequent note in poetry is
wailing and lamentation, self-pity and passionate rebuke.
In Professor William A. Neilson's _Essentials of Poetry_, there is an
interesting chapter on sentimentalism in poetry, in which the author
dwells on the sentimentalism in the poetry of the English Romantic
School. He defines it as the cultivation 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 characterizes popular
poetry and if the public is likely to err in judging poetry it is
particularly likely to confuse sentimentalism with normal human
emotions. Yet it is hard often to draw the line between sham emotions
and genuine sentiment.
The poet is bound to be always sentimental to an extent because he must
wear his heart on his sleeve. No one need be ashamed of unadulterated
emotions, for life is made up of them.
Besides, nationalities differ. The Irish, the Jews and the Russians, for
example, do not consider their own poems sentimental because these are
genuine records 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 that the emotion of pity, and also
sympathy for the criminal that we find in Russian novels is rather
sentimental and nauseating, but it is genuine Russian emotion.
We should be on our guard, however, in regarding sentimentalism as
poetry. The public loves cheap popular songs and mushy lachrymose
verses. The many poems, stories and plays about "mother," "baby," "the
flag," "home," "our country," etc., are often drivelling sentimentalism
and not poetry.
Ecstasy was the keynote of Oriental poetry. We are fortunate in having a
translation in the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_ for 1901 and
1902 by Duncan B. Macdonald, of a book on the laws of music and singing
of ecstasy from Al Ghazzali's work on the _Re-vivifying of the Sciences
of the Faith_. Ghazzali (1060-1111) was the greatest apologist for Islam
and is known as "The Proof of Islam." He was held to be the only man who
was worthy of being a prophet, next to Mohammed himself. He
unfortunately dealt the death blow to Mohammedan 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 of fanciful desires makes us more moved by poets than
by the word of God. He finds various reasons for the power of poetry
over us, the principal one being its quality of ecstasy. He sees that
poetry has a mission in conveying ecstasy; that one of its uses is to
arouse us to lamentation, to joy, to love, to courage and to religion.
He analyzes the tender longing caused by love poetry, though, good
Moslem that he was, he is always discriminating between poetry that
arouses a lawful love, and that which has mere lust as its object.
His main contribution, however, to the philosophy of ecstasy is his
recognition of its identity with the unconscious. He quotes some one to
the effect that music and singing do not produce in the heart what is
not in it but stir up what exists there. Ecstasy to him is the result of
hearing and of understanding what is heard and applying it to an idea
which occurs to the hearer. It is a condition produced in the hearer's
soul due to knowledge 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. And, sometimes, the condition
which he feels is a joy which arose in his soul on his thinking about a
cause which produces joy; or it may have been a sorrow; then he who was
thinking about it forgets it, but feels in the impression its
consequence. And sometimes that condition is a strong condition which a
word expressing joy or sorrow does not indicate clearly and for which he
cannot come upon a suitable expression for what was intended."
Al Ghazzali gives then, as the essence of ecstasy, its unconscious
nature. Ecstasy is related to longing for something unknown. All people
experience in their hearts states demanding things unknown to them. He
compares the situation to that of the innocent and ignorant 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 metre in poetry in inducing
ecstasy, but he is always thinking of the ecstasy of love of man and
God as the element of poetry, and in this he is a predecessor of
Tolstoy. He also gives rules as to one's behavior in the ecstatic state
and does not sanction undue madness.
A much higher form of the literature of ecstasy than the product of the
immoral rites of Dionysus or the mystic poetry of Persia is the prophecy
as it was known and delivered among the ancient Hebrews. Indeed,
prophecy is the ideal form of the literature of ecstasy and represents
the zenith of its achievement. It is the emotional verbal utterance of
the unconscious of the poet, who is usually in a state of ecstasy, and
who, as passages in the Bible testify, receives his message in a vision
or dream. The act of prophesying was even contagious. The early prophets
were like dancing dervishes in their prophesying and influenced others
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.
When the Bible says, God spoke to the prophet, or the hand of God
touched him, it means that the prophet was in a state of ecstasy due to
a highly developed moral and social viewpoint. The true prophet's
ecstasy was not accompanied by immorality or superduced by drugs or
physical abuse. Music, however, was at one time used to produce the
prophetic state. The aesthetic mechanism of the ancient prophets was no
different from that of any great poet with a message of modern times.
Moses Maimonides in his _Guide to the Perplexed_ analyzes the ecstatic
state of prophecy and his analysis may be applied to any high form of
poetic inspiration.
Prophecy was, according to Maimonides, an emanation sent forth to man's
rational faculty and then to his imaginative faculty; it consisted in
the most perfect development of the imaginative faculty; the logical and
imaginative faculties had to be balanced in the prophet; he overflowed
with the frenzy of ecstasy to help his fellow-men and could not rest
even at risk of personal suffering; he had courage and intuition; he
reserved his message in a dream or a vision.
The psychology of the prophetic inspiration has been studied by many of
the higher critics of the Bible. One of the best books on the subject is
_The Psychology of Prophecy_ by Dr. Jacob H. Kaplan, Philadelphia 1908,
(Julius H. Greenstone) who says:
The ecstasy of the wild and mad kind was seen only in the
early days of Hebrew prophecy, when wine and dance and music
and other external means were used for bringing about this
state, but the subdued elevated ecstasy due to religious
temperament and patriotic fervor, due to constant and profound
contemplation, was certainly the characteristic of the later
prophets. . . . Ecstasy is usually the spring whence all the
other prophetic streams flow.
While the Greeks mingled reason with inspiration to produce poetry, the
prophets went further, and interpenetrated their ecstasy with a high
sense of social justice. An ecstatic state, with a keen intellect, a
high moral outlook, and a noble social ideal characterized the prophet.
His state of ecstasy was due to this highly developed social
conscience. He was not so much concerned with religious rites as with
the decline of the nation's ideals of 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
shouting back to eastern autocratic monarchs their iniquities. They did
not say what society or public opinion wanted them to say but what they
felt was their duty. They overflowed not with the immoral and insane
ecstasy of the rites of Dionysius, but the ecstasy of the man who loves
his neighbor as himself, of the man who would not have the rich crush
the poor, of the man who sought kindness for the stranger, the
oppressed, the widow, the fatherless.
And the prophets, in spite of their virulency, produced the highest
forms of artistic beauty. Not all the revolutions of opinions and
changes in religious beliefs have made them obsolete. Shaw once said,
substitute the word ideals for the word idols, in the Bible, and you
have messages that are still true.
So the prophets instead of being miracle performers, foretellers of the
future, preachers of theology, are really poets of ecstasy, with a
social message revealed in a dream. The old word of God, in 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 of ecstasy springing from the
possession of social ideals. Santayana rightly regards the prophet, one
who portrays the ideals of experience and destiny, as the greatest
poet. (See _Poetry and Religion._)
Nor did the prophets of old sing their messages in artificial form. They
did not count their syllables and give us metre, though they indulged in
parallelisms. They wrote in rhythmical prose.[39:A]
The prophets had a true conception of what constituted a high form of
poetry, an ecstatic production in prose with a social ideal behind it.
Ecstasy was the first condition of their poetry but it was not
pathological as with monks who tortured their bodies, or decadent poets
who resorted to drugs.
If there is a high form of the literature of ecstasy it surely is that
in which the ecstasy of humanitarianism is described. It is that which
shows a man with 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 of the greatest poems because the
knight wants to help mankind, even though he is insane and never recks
his own bruises, but persists and is laughed at by all.
In speaking of the literature of ecstasy, something should be said about
De Quincey's famous distinction of the literature of knowledge and the
literature of power. He defined the former as that which teaches and the
latter as that which moves. In the literature of power 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 understanding through the affections.
It restores "to man's mind the ideals of justice, of hope, of truth, of
mercy, of retribution." De Quincey included under the literature of
power, prose as well as verse, fairy tales and romances as well as
tragedies and epic poems.
The question is, what relation is there between De Quincey's idea of the
literature of power and that of the literature of ecstasy. Of course he
included under the literature of power his masterly prose poems; also
all his imaginative writings. Now, the _Confessions of an Opium Eater_,
for instance, 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 in this as in all literature of
knowledge is that it may be and usually is superseded by later
discoveries. The literature of power in his opinion is permanent; this
statement is not true when we think of the many imaginative works of the
past that have no longer any message or appeal to us.
The point is that De Quincey's literature of power includes not only
poetry in verse and prose, but the entire field of general literature
which hovers 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 power, that section of it where the ecstasy is
concentrated. It would include chiefly the impassioned prose and prose
phantasies of De Quincey's own work.
De Quincey was no art-for-art's-sake man, and he recognized the
importance of the rational and the moral element in the sphere of the
literature of power.
There remains a distinction between power and ecstasy. De Quincey does
not identify power with ecstasy (a term he does not even use) even
though he demands a moving effect in the 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 good novels or histories in their entirety. To us only
those portions of such novels and histories where the passion is
concentrated belong to the literature of ecstasy or poetry.
Literature of ecstasy is always poetry, literature of power is not,
being rather the equivalent of _belles lettres_, reaching the heights of
poetry only at times.
The literature of ecstasy is all writing, in verse or prose, wherever an
emotional atmosphere hovers, where a feeling is concentrated, and hence
it is really poetry. Poetry is the language 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 emotion of its object that in expression it takes
unconsciously the tone, the color and the temperature thereof." (James
Russell Lowell: _The Function of the Poet._ "The Imagination." P. 70.)
FOOTNOTES:
[18:A] I do not agree with Huneker that Byron or Wordsworth missed
ecstasy.
[21:A] This is the idea in Donne's poem, _The Ecstasy_. Professor
William Lyon Phelps in the preface to his _The Advance of English Poetry
in the Twentieth Century_ claims that the influence of Donne has never
been greater than at present.
[39:A]
"Hebrew poetry is
Prose with a sort of heightened consciousness.
'Ecstasy affords
The occasion and expediency determines the form.'"
MARIANNE MOORE in _Others_ (1916).