Woman in the Eyes of the Artist

It is not easy to analyze the elements of art. But those who have attempted it trace it back to various sources, among them the fine sensibility that makes the artist's soul something like a polished mirror in which the subtlest movements and forms are reflected, and which responds easily to every stimulus. Yet keenness of feeling — for all its importance — is only a secondary condition of the artistic nature; some have gone so far as to deny it — these are the extremists — even claiming that art accords better with cold temperaments; whence women were, in Rousseau's claim, "an inartistic sex, not being marked by quickness of impression and intensity of temperament."

But there is a difference between the agitated, nervous, tumultuous nature and that quickness of response which makes its possessor, for all his calm, keen of sense and penetrating of sight, feeling what others do not feel and seeing what is not seen. This feeling stirs in him impressions and dreams and novel fancies, and the strong, creative imagination becomes a fundamental factor in the genesis of art. This no one has ventured to deny.

The psychologists have views worthy of attention in analyzing the factors of art. They trace it back to psychic disturbances which the person was forced to suppress or subdue, because circumstances prevented him from expressing them in a natural way; so they sank into the depths of his unconscious and remained there in a state of withdrawal and concealment, until something happened to awaken them, and they reappeared in the form of artistic material. In other words, art is in their view a diversion of the instincts into a new channel, and a turning away from reality toward imagination. The suppressed inclinations may be love, or pain, or envy, or hatred, or deprivation, or a violent attachment, or a latent enmity toward a friend or relative — inclinations their possessor is compelled to subdue or suppress because they run counter to convention, or for other reasons; so they remain in his unconscious in the form of latent complexes, and if they meet in him the artistic nature, they find themselves an outlet in art — that is, in a new garb and a veiled form.

On this basis they analyze Rousseau's novel "La Nouvelle Héloïse" as an outlet for inclinations latent in his soul: revolt against the barriers standing between the classes, and the desire to marry into the aristocracy. That is why he made the girl Julie, of noble origin, fall passionately in love with her tutor of lowly origin, who was a symbol of the writer himself; and thereby Rousseau substituted imagination for reality, and crossed, in his story, the bounds of convention and tradition where he could not do so in tangible reality.

This interpretation does not seem strange when we review the lives of certain poets and artists and observe that art was a vent for their subdued feelings and pains. Al-Mutanabbi's rancor against people in his poetry is the result of the failure and deprivation he suffered in his struggle. Ibn al-Rumi's masked satire is an outlet for his psychic upheavals, which would have threatened him with madness had he not found a vent for them in poetry. Hence too we see the legends of the ancients teeming with stories of poor men who suddenly became kings or possessors of vast fortunes — pointing to hidden inclinations in the depths of the storyteller's soul, which he expressed through the imagination he substituted for saddening reality, thereby satisfying himself and satisfying his hearers, who concealed the same inclinations and dreams in their hearts.

Nor are the artist's feelings and experiences alone the source of his art; he finds rich nourishment for it in folk tales and the legends of the past. It is as if the artist, in certain circumstances of his life, lives through phases of the people's primitive life, re-enacting the past in his stories and his representations, guarding among his people the old memories, awakening the racial inclinations, and clothing the old in an elegant robe of splendor and majesty. In this, art is a powerful factor in the continuance of the past, the nourishing of national feelings, and the kindling of souls with the fire of fidelity to the ancestors, the worship of traditions, and the sanctification of memories. This reminds us of the poet d'Annunzio's mania and his national ardor when he set out at the head of an Italian detachment and occupied the city of Fiume. It likewise brings back to our minds the picture of the pre-Islamic poets and the storytellers and reciters who were, among their people, the keepers of the past, reviving it in bright colors, or who stood at the head of tribal revolts and wars, kindling the fires of heroism and desperate valor in the breasts of the warriors.

Imitation, too, plays its part in the creation of art. However much the artist inclines toward individuality and originality in his style, he can free himself only in rare instances from the influence of the ancients and the authority of their styles. This factor has had its far-reaching effect on Arabic literature, most of which was founded on imitating the ancients and following in their tracks. Nor are the men of letters of the Arabs alone in this; the classicists, and those who followed their course in the lands of the West, share it with them.

I wish to arrive, from this introduction to the analysis of the elements of art, at the statement that art, in its general origins, is a backward-looking phenomenon that feeds on the old and lives by it. Its substance is feeling and instinct, which count as humanity's oldest characteristics — indeed its distinguishing mark in the periods of its childhood and in its primitive states, since man shares them with the dumb beast. That is why instinct is the mainstay of the child's life, ruling him before the growth of his mental faculties. Hence the scholars' saying that poetry is older than prose, because the former is the work of feeling, imagination, and the unconscious, while the latter is the work of reason and conscious thought. The scholar Croce said: "The world of poetry is free of the thought and criticism that turn the world of imagination into the world of reality." Philosophy — daughter of reason — sentences poetry to death as soon as poetry approaches her; and often the poet kills his own poetry when he makes it an instrument of thought and philosophy — as al-Ma'arri did in the Luzumiyyat — or destroys himself when he turns from art to criticism, analysis, and philosophizing, and changes from a poet of images and colors into a crazed philosopher and a prose writer of disordered thought; or when he writes prose in the language of poetry and tries to think in the language of feeling.

Art and literature — in most of their states — are two backward-looking forces, because for the most part they bring back to us the same old thing in new forms — as the poets have described spring in a thousand images, and as the designers of fashions create shapes and forms of dresses that appear new while in truth they are drawn from the old by combining various parts.

And since the artist is by nature attached to the old, we find that his view of woman is generally marked by backwardness. It is the view of primitive man, who saw in her a beautiful body; or the view of the painter, who saw in her lines and colors; or of Ibn al-Rumi, who saw in her a garden of flowers and fruits; or of Qays ibn al-Mulawwah and Dik al-Jinn and the other love-maddened men, moved by selfishness and by the love of sole possession of those they loved, so that they were jealous of the very water she drank and the air she breathed. Or he looks at her with the view of the knights of the Middle Ages, who made her an object of deification and worship, and took her as a symbol of their dreams, or a goddess whose favor they vied to win, submitting to her and defending her. Or with the eye of the Platonists, who saw in her a symbol of the loftiest beauty and of divine perfection, and drew from her strength to ascend the heights of philosophy and contemplation — of this kind is Dante's relation to the princess of his dreams, Beatrice.

One of these poets once said to me:

"I hold woman above descending from her ancient throne and disowning her traditional function, which is to be for man a wellspring of inspiration and a source of beauty, delight, and joy. I want her to remain for man the like of da Vinci's Mona Lisa. I want her a mistress of the house who keeps to her home and manages it like a queen, moving about in it like a warbling bird, pouring out ease and life upon those around her — and I am too jealous of her soft hands to let them be soiled with the dust of the factories, and of her delicate ears to let them hear the roar of the machines..."

So I said, contemplating this blind selfishness: You look at woman from the angle of your imagination, and want her an instrument harnessed to your art, and you suppose all people to be artists and all women to be warbling birds and princesses swaying about in palaces. What say you of the woman who works to earn her living, or the living of her family — and they are many among women? Do you cast her out of your book of verse because she has not managed to inspire another da Vinci, and has not had the fortune to be, herself, a second Mona Lisa whose beauty inspires the artists scattered in every corner of Lebanon?

I do not blame the artist for his backwardness — I have shown its causes. But I blame him when he takes up matters outside his competence and sets himself up as a preacher and missionary, or a social leader, spreading narrow, limited views among people, and plunging into subjects he should have left to the thinkers and the scholars of society. And I blame also those who blunder in their thinking, failing to distinguish between a poet and a scholar, and supposing that anyone who has composed verse or delivered a speech can be among the leaders of thought in his society.

Yet in this study I have treated only the ordinary run of poets and artists, in whom imitation and the conserving of the old prevail. And I must except from their class the geniuses of art — those who penetrate with their insight into the future and pierce its veils; for they are, to my understanding, of the class of the prophets, who were able to stretch forward and carry in their hands the torches of liberation and renewal, and to utter lofty wisdom by the power of their inspiration, without the aid of the scientist's analysis or the philosopher's thought. And I see their like in the company of humanist writers and poets who outstripped their ages in intellectual level, and who looked at woman neither with the look of master upon subject, nor with the look of a humble worshipper upon a goddess in the clouds, but with a human, unselfish look whose substance is justice, equality, and fairness.