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and the marked characteristics he finds in this as in all literature of knowledge is that it may be and usually is superseded by later discoveries.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 opinon 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.)

CHAPTER III

ECSTASY, NOT RHYTHM, ESSENTIAL TO POETRY

ARISTOTLE was the first critic who placed little stress on the importance of metre in poetry. If the critics had followed him, instead of merely referring to his Poetics and trying to discover the "borderland between prose and poetry," there probably would have been little confusion as to what is poetry. He saw there was poetry in the prose mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and in the dialogues of Socrates, though these were not classified as poetry. Incidentally he found little poetry in Empedocles, who in spite of his metre was primarily a physicist. The passage from the Poetics is worth quoting entire for it contains the nucleus of all arguments for prose poetry. I quote from S. H. Butcher's translation:

For there is no common term we could apply to the mimes of Sophron and Xenarchus and the Socratic dialogues on the one hand; and, on the other, to poetic imitations in iambic, elegaic, or any similar metre. People, do, indeed, add the word "make" or "poet" to the name of the metre, and speak of elegaic poets, or epic (that is, hexameter) poets, as if it were not the imitation that makes the poet, but the verse that entitles them all indiscriminately to the name.* Even when a treatise on medicine or natural science is brought out in verse, the name of poet is by custom given to the author; and yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common but the metre, so that it would be right to call the one poet, the other physicist rather than poet. On the same principle, even if a writer in his poetic imitation were to combine all metres, as

*The italics are mine.

Chaeremon did in his Centaur, which is a medley composed of metres of all kinds, we should bring him too under the general term poet.

He also says: "The Poet or maker should be the maker of plots rather than of verse; since he is a poet because he imitates, and what he imitates is actions."

Aristotle's idea that metre is an unessential element in determining poetry has never really taken root in literary criticism. It was voiced by men like Erasmus and Savonarola, and was again restated by the Italian critic Castelevetro, who in his commentary on Aristotle's Poetics (1570) said that verse is not the essence of poetry, that it does not distinguish it but clothes it, and that therefore matter and not metre is the test of poetry. He believes like Aristotle, that metre aids poetry, but that the imitation or creation itself determines it.

George Saintsbury in his scholarly and fascinating History of Criticism in Europe cannot forgive Aristotle for this "pestilent heresy," as he calls it. He severely berates Wordsworth and Coleridge for having supported it. He attacks all the critics who countenance it. He adulates Dante's treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia as an antidote to the heresy, because Dante wants the rhythm (as well as the diction) of poetry to be different from that of prose.

But we are learning to-day that metre is not only an unnecessary element in poetry, but often an artificial, hampering encumbrance, frequently vitiating the poetical quality of a poem.

Yet Professor Saintsbury has given us in his History of English Prose Rhythm some of the finest emotional and rhythmical passages from English prose writers. He chose the selections primarily for their rhythm and not for their emotional qualities, yet most of the passages are

poems. His book practically convinces one that nearly all the great English writers of prose wrote not only rhythmical prose, but emotional or ecstatic prose, or poetry. Professor Saintsbury finds the essence of prose rhythm, in variety and divergence, and he divides prose into three kinds, according to the rhythm. These are hybrid verseprose, pure highly rhythmed prose, and prose in general. In the first class he includes much of the Bible, especially where the parallelisms are present, Anglo Saxon poetry, Ossian, Blake's Prophetic Books and Walt Whitman. He no doubt would include free verse here. But this socalled "hybrid verse prose" is really highly rhythmed prose generally arranged in verse form. There is no real distinction between the two forms.

Poetry in prose, however, does not depend on the rhythm. The only effect on the reader of reading the chapter on "Rhythm as the Essential Fact of Poetry” in Professor Gummere's book The Beginnings of Poetry is to convince him that the learning amassed there does not prove the professor's thesis. For example Gummere cites Bagehot's statement, "the exact line which separates grave novels in verse like Aylmer's Field or Enoch Arden from grave novels not in verse like Silas Marner and Adam Bede, we own we cannot draw with any confidence," and thus comments: "Adam Bede remains prose, and Enoch Arden is commonly set down as poetry and there an end." This impatient remark does not do away with the fact that the story of Hetty's troubles after she had met Arthur Dimmesdale, and the scene of the interview with her in prison by Dinah Morris are two examples that fulfill every definition of poetry, even to irregular rhythm. Some of the free verse poets have given us compositions made up of the outbursts of people in distress, with their story in simple language like Hetty Sorrel's tale.