Khalil Saleeby: A Leader of Lebanon's Artistic Renaissance

Khalil Saleeby was born in Btalloun. His artistic gifts appeared from his childhood. It was granted him in his youth to go to England, America, and Paris, where he studied and practiced the art of painting. Then he returned to Beirut with his American wife at the beginning of this century and settled there, practicing his art. At times he was obliged to take up work outside his art in order to provide for the needs of his life. He used to go back to his village and spend the summers there. Then there was a period shortly before the First World War which he spent in England and Europe. He exhibited his paintings at the Paris international exhibition at the beginning of this century, and then at the general exhibition held by the Residence of the French High Commissioner some twenty years ago. Each time he won the distinguished honorary award (Hors concours), which is given only to eminent artists of world rank. He had in his homeland a minority of admirers who appreciated the value of art in the life of individuals and peoples. But many times he criticized his countrymen for falling short of the Western nations in their understanding and appreciation of art and artists. After the First World War a dispute arose between him and the people of his village over a water spring, which led to a bitter enmity, and then to the murder of him and his wife in Beirut in the summer of 1928. He had a strong, sharp personality that left its mark on the circles of the people with whom he came in contact. His legacy was not confined to the pictures he painted — which still adorn the walls of many houses in Beirut and elsewhere — but extended beyond them to what settled in the souls of those who knew him, whose minds were enlightened with something of the artistic taste and artistic knowledge that he diffused in his conversation. He had pupils who learned from him, and they are still among us, prominent artists in the Lebanese capital.

"The Woman's Voice" saw fit to ask one of his intimate friends, Mr. Emile Doumit, to write a word about him. We thank him for granting this wish of ours, as we thank Dr. Shaheen Saleeby for permitting us to copy some of the late artist's paintings that adorn his flourishing home; we may publish them in a coming issue.

I met Khalil Saleeby shortly before his death in Beirut, where he spent the summer season contrary to his custom, for he always summered at al-Shqif, above Btalloun, in the house he loved and beautified with the flowers of which he was so fond, and in whose planting and cultivation he was expert. He used to promise himself that he would carve a tomb for himself in the rocks of the cliff on which his house was built. His summering in Beirut was due to the intensifying of the enmity between him and the people of his village. When I greeted him he said, his eyes brimming with melancholy and a lump in his throat that almost choked him: "My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." I said to him: Why this melancholy, when you are famed for your courage and your strength? He said: "I feel lonely and forlorn. And beyond that, they are trying to assassinate me." We parted with a promise that he and his wife would come to Souk el-Gharb and pass a few days at my house. I, and others who loved him, thought that he was exaggerating his fear of assassination, for we thought it most unlikely that the people of his village were such as would go so far as that hideous deed. How many an appointed meeting has no meeting after it in this world.

A few months after his death it fell to me to settle on the ninth floor of one of the buildings of New York, in a room overlooking the Hudson River and the gardens of the riverside, where I felt some measure of independence from the din and clamor of the great city. One night there appeared to me in a dream a halo of light, and at its center an old man so great that he filled it; and he was revealed — and there was Khalil Saleeby, looking at me and saying: "It is true that they killed me, but what were they able to do to me, or gain over me? Or what did they profit?" There was in his voice nothing of the tone of anger or rancor, nor in his gaze anything of the melancholy that had been upon him in his last days, or of the piercing sharpness to which those who knew him were accustomed. It was as though continual contemplation had removed from him the melancholy, the sharpness, and the anger. Hardly had he finished the sentence he spoke when his apparition drew back and vanished into the center of the halo. Then I felt a powerful impulse rousing me to consciousness against a force that resisted me and held me in a space in which there were no worlds. But after a hard struggle I returned to wakefulness, and I felt the beats of my heart in my fingertips and the stream of my blood in the capillary arteries of the envelope of my body, as though I had been breathing hydrogen or helium gas; and I remained for a while not knowing whether I was awake or dreaming, until I returned to a normal state of mind. And behold, after that experience I too had lost the feeling of vengefulness against the murderers that had been in my soul, and I came to feel that pity for the killer, as for the killed, comes before vengeance.

Let each interpret dreams according to what has been given him. For dreams are but experiences among the experiences of life; they have their meaning and their import, and they are no less important than the experiences of waking; in them lies a deep secret among the secrets of life!

Khalil Saleeby was intoxicated and enchanted by the beauty of Lebanon. So too were his colleagues and the pupils who learned from him and who are still among us, trying to open the eyes of their countrymen to the perception of beauty, especially as it is manifested in the beauty of their homeland. And many of us who are in love with the beauty of their country share this with them. He strove to teach schoolchildren to paint directly from nature, so that they might be trained in observation and their eyes be opened, and they might see much of what they pass by with eyes blind to it. And as their sight opens, they perceive the beauty that is in nature. He criticized sharply and severely the prevailing method of teaching drawing, a parrot-like teaching — the copying of lines from a picture set before the pupils.

The first step in art, and in science as well, is the refinement of the senses and the removal of barriers and curtains, in order to experience things as they are. The scientist and the artist are not content with disguise and distortion; frankness and the acceptance of things in their reality are among their salient qualities. And in most cases their frankness remains with them outside their specialty in science and art, while most people consider concealment, disguise, and equivocation to be tact and good policy — were it not so, the proverb would not have spread among them that the truth is spoken only by children and madmen. They brand the frankness of the scientist and the artist, claiming it is a defect in their flexibility, their tact, and their good policy with people. Beyond that, they accuse artists of representing things otherwise than as they are. They level the same accusation at the philosophers too, claiming that what these men say of the ideal life is contrary to reality. And that is only because they themselves are neither refined of sense nor opened of eye and insight, so as to see what the artist sees and behold what the philosopher beholds. Often they criticize a splendid portrait, claiming that the artist has failed to represent the person's aspect as it is. And that is only because they are accustomed to seeing the person in his prevailing state of mind and in his habitual attitude. The artist, however, sometimes sees in a person what others do not see and what the photographic camera does not bring out, and he chooses an attitude and a look that bring forward the meanings the artist wishes to establish; so the portrait comes out unlike the aspect in which the subject's friends and acquaintances are used to seeing him, and they criticize the portrait, claiming that it does not resemble its subject. Criticism of this kind used to be visited upon Khalil Saleeby. And his answer to it was a heavy measure of blunt description of the newly rich and the dim of understanding. In his personal relations with people he expected them to meet him with the same frankness with which he met them. If there appeared in them any equivocation, or cunning, or evasion of the truth, he dealt them criticism and rebuke in sharp words. This brought upon him enmity with many people. And though those who loved and admired him honored and cherished him, the aversion and enmity engendered between him and many people by the severity of his tone in criticism made him feel more and more the loneliness and forlornness among men.

Holding fast to the truth is one thing, and holding fast to the personal rights which the law sanctions is another. People do not distinguish between the two, and so they take personal rights for truth. This illusion is fixed in them by the convention of expressing both by a single word. And most of the sons of humanity have not reached the degree of readiness sufficient to understand the higher teaching which says: "... and if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain..."

The clinging of both parties — Khalil Saleeby and the people of his village — to rights over the trickle of water from the spring of Ain al-Jurn in Btalloun led first to the murder of him and his wife, and then to the killing of the killers by "public justice." This is not the place, in this brief word, for a legal inquiry to show where the error lay that led to that lamentable end. But that chain of events has a meaning and an import for everyone who took part in it or heard of it; and whoever understands has grasped enough to turn aside from the road that leads to the shedding of blood. And what price could a man pay that is dearer than blood? And if the price of our learning has been paid by another with his blood, what feeling befits us toward both the slain and the slayer? And if we do not understand the meaning of what happened, our steps will lead us to fall once again into another such chain of painful events. The world wars in whose labor humanity travails are but an enlarged, world-scale picture of what happened through the clinging to personal rights over the water of the spring of Ain al-Jurn.