"...and she scattered verse in prose as a masterly artist does, and her style came out more poetic than poetry, more delicate in cadence and loftier in meaning."
...they find her a bright, deep-rooted hope, toward which she lifts her head, proud without vanity, while a world of hopes, laughing by nature, marches in her train, smoothing the road before her, unafraid and undaunted; then she gazes toward the destined future with two eyes over whose beauty a captivating radiance of intelligence has spread — in confidence, and what confidence!
That is "May" in the briefest fleeting picture of her, at the very opening of her acquaintance with literary life. But has May any epoch at which her literature begins or ends, that I should start from it or halt at its bound?
Literature captivated May from the time she was a young girl who understood of literature nothing except that it is an image of the absolute beauty she sensed in everything. Rather, it was she who captivated literature, by what God had granted her of delicacy of feeling, inventiveness of expression, and soundness of thought, and by the splendid fluency of opening, weaving, and resolution that was born in her — all of it accompanied by beauty of form and of character.
Yes, May captivated literature, and it bowed its head to her, humbled and surrendering, and — after the fashion of the imperious lover — it willed her to be the first woman of letters of her kind in the Arab East, generous of soul and generous of pen. And so she was, devoting herself to it with all her strength and beyond that strength — for she is the victim of this devotion, which branded her with the brand of genius, unto immortality.
I said that "May" loved literature while still small, and it was as if this love had taken hold of her thinking; she began to drink deep of it without ever quenching her thirst, until, under the sway of her noble virgin intoxication, she took to setting down what would give vent to a soul overflowing with the goodness and beauty that soul bore and the virtues that filled it — and behold her diwan ("Flowers of
a Dream") in the French language — to write in Arabic; but she did not compose verse in it: she scattered it in prose as a masterly artist does, and her style came out more poetic than poetry, more delicate in cadence and loftier in meaning, choosing for it the most splendid openings and lavishing every care upon it. Yet all of this could in no way touch her governing idea — that dominant idea, charged with fervor and feeling — rather it made it more splendid still, and made the reader more drawn to her and more confident in her.
And so her lofty style began to take its place at the head of the known styles of distinctive stamp.
May's literature first shone out under the sky of Lebanon, her first homeland, and her literary name spread so far that a distinguished elite of those who bore the banner of the renaissance of literature in Lebanon gathered round her and fêted her — so much so that when they wished to honor the Lebanese young woman, they honored her in the person of May: hence the celebration of the "Green Hut," at which May gave a talk, and of May the people made many talks.
May afterward removed to Egypt, and there she came to know a great company of the giants among the modern writers and poets — such as Wali al-Din Yakan, Taha Husayn, Gemayel, Ismail Sabri, Abd al-Raziq, Khalil Mutran, al-Aqqad, Mansur Fahmi, Shibli Shumayyil, Yaacoub Sarruf, and many others.
They would gather in her salon every Tuesday, as though a single family bond united them for all the difference of their tempers and the variety of their leanings; they would discuss matters of literature and thought and whatever touches them, hold debates, recite poems, and trade charming, delightful stories, while May amid all this
steered the conversation with the tact of a woman of high breeding and wide culture, versed in the ways of true Lebanese hospitality — and it was as though a gentle radiance of femininity's soft magic flooded that poetic air. No wonder, then, if inspiration settled upon those hearts, whose possessors had scarcely brought a thing to light before hands were passing it about, admiring it with every admiration.
I am not here to speak of her works, so as to present these books in full — I speak only, in a hurried glance, of the literary woman in May — of the living, beating heart filled with the manifold arts of love and peace, and of the intelligence surging with kinds of noble feeling, of vitality, and of modesty.
And as I speak of May the woman, I find myself proud indeed to offer this touching talk to the readers. For May the woman is not George Sand the woman. George Sand is of a common type from which sound womanly character recoils, and which it touches — if it touches at all — only with distaste or with dread. May is of another type, an ideal type, holding much of woman's reserve and her pride, and still more of her fidelity to her own nature — a fidelity whose burden was among what drove her all too soon to the appointed end.
Scarcely had May's French diwan appeared, and won the admiration of those leaders of the literary renaissance in the Arab world who read it, than she changed her course and began to write in Arabic as the finest of writers might. I know not whether it was longing for her original tongue that made her come back to it, the return of the yearning lover; or whether it was the easiness of the French she had learned at Antoura — more than she had learned her own language — that had tempted her to write in it; or whether there was One who grudged living literature immortality in any tongue but its author's own, and so inspired her to be true to her real Eastern self, which she loved with all love, and which afterward filled the world with pride in her — and she obeyed. I know not; only that she returned