in a desire for emotional discharge. Man resorts to every measure to give his emotions play. He reads newspapers and trashy magazines, he likes to hear melodramas and ranting orators, often because he has a love for emotional excitement which he cannot satisfy by literature of the best kind. He cannot concentrate, he cannot think clearly, he is ignorant of the simplest principles of literary art; he cannot read poetry, yet he hungers for it. His dormant instincts will even seek satisfaction in condemnation and persecution to satisfy such emotions which he cannot express by reading.

The creation and reading of poetry in prose or verse is an achievement common to man alone of the animals. He is not separated from them by moral or intellectual faculties, for animals have these, but by his faculty to create art and make others share enjoyment of them. It may be that the spider and the bee derive aesthetic satisfaction from contemplating the web or the hive they build, or the bird gets artistic pleasure from the song it sings or hears, or any animal may win sympathy from another by some mute act, but man alone puts his emotions and ideas in words in an endurable work of art so as to relieve himself and move others. What separates man from animals is not then religion-is not the religion of a dog centered in his master as Anatole France has so quaintly shown-but the ability to create and enjoy poetry, by which I mean literature in its highest prose or verse form, music, painting and sculpture.

And a life devoted to poetry is the best life we can seek. Let a man have his necessities satisfied, and there is no higher form of life than to enjoy and if possible to create poetry. Poetry makes us want to live and gives us zest in life. Life exists for sensations and we get our sensations out of poetry. Life exists for the enjoyment

and creation of poetry. The unlettered savage has his craving for poetry satisfied in his dancing, and war cries, in religion and tribal customs. The child has it satisfied in his toys and games. Adult man appeases his hunger for poetry in diverse ways. Literature, art and music are so far the highest forms of poetry we know, and in literature I include philosophy or thought, in prose as well as verse. Poetry acts as a necessary relief to us for emotions and ideas that seek expression, and is hence more real than any other form of life.

Our views of poetry from a psychoanalytic point of view finds confirmation even in the Bible. One of the leading prophets and the leading psalmists has each told us in scorching words how he felt before he created. Jeremiah says of God, "His word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay," Ch. 20, v. 9. David also said, "My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue," Psalms, Ch. 39, v. 3. Both of these poets had made resolutions to keep silent, but could not; their choked emotions burned like fire. Their disturbed souls sought relief by expression. Thus the great prophecies and psalms had a subjective origin and a homeopathic effect upon their authors, and they have this effect on us to-day.

CHAPTER XI

LOVE ECSTASY IN ARABIAN POETRY

ORIENTAL poetry, especially that of the Arabs and the Persians, is notable for its interpenetration with ecstasy couched in intricate conventional forms. The Oriental poems abound numerously in far-fetched figures of speech, and are written in metres following definite laws and are subject to difficult and uniform rhymes continued in every line in poems of great length. In fact the greatest historian of the Mohammedans, Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), defined poetry as effective discourse based on metaphor and descriptions, divided into verses agreeing with one another in metre and rhyme, each verse having a separate idea, and the whole conforming to old Arab models. A poet was supposed to get many thousands of verses by heart before practicing his art. One of the chapters in Ibn Khaldun's famous Prolegomena * or introduction to his history, Book of Examples, has a title stating that the art of composing is concerned with words and not ideas.

But in spite of slavish adherence to technique it was taken for granted that ecstasy was the main object of poetry. There is probably more ecstasy in the poetry of the Arabs and Persians than in that of most other nations, and it is an ecstasy that breaks through the molds of form. It is a matter of astonishment that the artificial forms did not utterly choke out the ecstasy. Professor Edgar G. Browne in his scholarly Literary History of *There is a French translation of the Prolegomena by Mac Guckin de Slane.

Persia has devoted the first chapter of the second volume to Persian metres and he calls attention to the conventional metaphors, bombast and inflation of the Arabic poets who were not without influence upon the Persians. We to-day may accept the definition of poetry given in the Four Discourses* (1162) of Nidhami I Arudi, for though he also believed in the importance of the trappings of verse, he had ecstasy primarily in mind. He defined poetry thus:

Poetry is that art whereby the poet arranges imaginary propositions, and adopts the deductions, with the result that he can make a little thing appear great and a great thing small, or cause good to appear in the garb of evil and evil in the garb of good. By acting on the imagination, he excites the faculties of anger and concupiscence in such a way that by his suggestion men's temperaments become affected with exaltation or depression; whereby he conduces to the accomplishment of great things in the order of the world.

What more effective definition could there be of the utilitarian power of art to take man out of himself and exalt him into a state of beneficial ecstasy?

Ibn Khaldun said:

Poetry is, of all the forms of discourses, that which the Arabs regarded as the noblest; they also made it the depository of their knowledge and their history, the testimony which would attest their virtues and faults, the store-house in which were found the greater part of their scientific views and their maxims of wisdom. The poetic faculty was as much deeply rooted in them as in all the other faculties they possessed.

He continues, that they have handled poetry so well, that one could deceive oneself and believe that this gift,

*Translated by Prof. Browne in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1899.

which is really an acquired art, was with them an innate

one.

These remarkable words of Ibn Khaldun will help us to understand the famous saying that poetry was the register of the Arabs. Never before nor since has poetry been SO interwoven with a nation's life. The stories of the competitions for prizes for composing poetry, of the happiness when a poet was born, of the importance assumed by the discussion and recitation of poetry among all classes, read to us like myths. Yet the fact that poetry should be part of the life of a passionate people who lived in the desert, free and untrammeled, is not strange. The Arabs themselves attribute also their great superiority in poetry to the beauty of their language, especially as spoken by the Bedouins in the desert. The great Arabian poet Abu Nuwas completed his education by sojourning a year among the Bedouins.

Another factor enhancing their poetry and one not to be ignored is that after 622 A.D. in Post-islamic times, poetry was rewarded by gifts. Hence the eulogy grew into prominence and the poets were fabulously rewarded for their poems. This, of course, led to fulsome and cringing eulogies. The caliph was the patron. When Mohammed appeared it seemed that poetry would die out, but it flourished more than ever. It was only after the Abbasid caliphate was exterminated by the Mongol invasion (1258 A.D.) that poetry declined in Arabia to such an extent that, as Ibn Khaldun says, no prominent man would deign to devote himself to it.

Although the Arabs excelled in various kinds of poetry, we think of them primarily as love poets.

The Arabs, as we gather from The Arabian Nights,