32]"/>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