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 the 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.

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