of grammar and writing. But the project, for all its gravity, requires wider efforts.
A mission must be sent to Europe whose members would specialize in the branches of philology and the comparative study of the Semitic and Latin languages and the ways in which they have evolved. That would take no more than a few years, after which the members of the mission would return to work on this vital project, thereby rendering the Arab cause the noblest of services. I do not know why the Lebanese hang back from taking such a step, when among them appeared the leaders of renewal who dared to revolt in an age of rigidity — the like of Zaydan, who drew the literary and colloquial languages closer together and simplified prose style; and Gibran, who invented a new style in prose; then Naimy, who revolted against the literature of the word; and Said Akl, who carried the banner of renewal in poetry; and Nasri Khattar, who devised a method for simplifying Arabic writing; and that scholar (1) who sent to the Cultural Congress a paper on the simplification of grammar which was scattered to the winds. Perhaps I shall return to this subject on another occasion.
2 — Lebanon and Popular Art
Art in the Arab countries is poor at the present time, but in the past it passed through ages of flowering, as witness the magnificent antiquities that fill the museums of the Westerners, of which our own museums have kept but little.
Some time ago a Russian lady told me that she had sent to her daughter, who is studying drawing and advertising art in America, samples of Eastern ornament to profit from in devising the designs she creates there. I said to myself: here are the Westerners drawing inspiration from our antiquities in their artistic creations, while we turn away from them. Here is the Lebanese House of Crafts (the Artisanat) imitating Western drawings and models only, when it might have exploited the numerous antiquities, manifold in shape and figure, with which the Museum and the other houses of antiquities abound. Had it done so, the value of its production would have risen in the eyes of the people of art; it would have shown the Easterners glimpses of their own past, and rendered industry a service worth remembering.
In Lebanon there is a blessed movement to encourage zajal, or colloquial poetry, which is one single color among the colors of popular art, and one not lacking in strains of pure poetry. But there are other colors deserving of revival, for they have their importance in the world of culture. There are the old Lebanese costumes, which ought to be studied from the historical point of view; and the popular dances and the kinds of dabkeh, which ought to be sought out in the remote mountain villages, that we may perhaps profit from them in forming this popular art so neglected among us.
More important than all this is that we strive to discover and revive the old popular melodies, in which is embodied the influence of the various peoples with whom we have come in contact, and which range from the simple, merry tunes of the villagers around the springs of water to the airs of the townsfolk who lived in the luxury of the Turkish era in the shade of gardens and palaces.
There are varied melodies whose existence is denied by the zealots of Western music. But they do exist, spread through all circles; the souls of the people respond to them; every Lebanese who understands his country and its history takes comfort in them; and everyone deeply cultured in music sees in them a foundation on which to build, and a source from which to borrow modern melodies of Eastern inspiration and Western execution.
Nor do we lack the means to carry out this important work. We have three musical institutes vying with one another in teaching Western music, yet failing to spread musical culture among the classes of the people, because their students are either foreigners or members of the aristocratic class. The teaching of Western music is a duty of real importance in these institutes; but their disgraceful neglect of the heritage we possess — small though it be — and their hanging back from creating a musical foundation of local character which we could use in our schools and our concerts, and by means of which these institutes would be in closer touch with the people — this is a neglect for which we find no justification or cause save ignorance, or indolence, or that aping of the Franks with which personality vanishes.
And if the foreign musical institutes in Lebanon have their excuse for this neglect, what excuse can we find for the Lebanese Conservatory and the Lebanese Academy? Some time ago one of the delegates of UNESCO visited Lebanon, and our government wished to show him a side of Lebanon's culture: so the Academy's ensemble presented before him Beethoven's famous composition, the "Solemn Mass."
I do not know what effect the concert had upon the soul of the Western delegate, or whether he was pleased with it or not. But I do not doubt that he would have preferred with all his heart to hear something he had never heard before, and to listen to music less grand and less famous than Beethoven's, provided there were in it something of the local color, and provided there mingled in it a strain from the heritage of the East with a heartbeat of the soul of a young people in the course of formation and emancipation.
All that the delegate understood from the Beethoven piece was that we are a people skilled in imitation and eager for it; but in our imitation of the West we forget the Western maxim: "One line created by your own inventive imagination is better than a thousand volumes copied from others."
Rose Ghorayeb
(1) Whose name escapes me.