You Too?...

To their mother

So you too are among the advocates of the old legend — the legend of the Middle Ages — which calls for deifying woman and considering her a source of enchantment for man and a mere instrument of inspiration?

I hold you above looking at woman with this narrow view — you, the gifted poet — just as I hold inspiration above being confined to the circle they allege.

Why do you find the wellspring of inspiration in the beautiful woman alone, and not find it in the athletic boy bounding with youth, in the child of angelic sweetness, in the young man of firm-knit muscles, and in the old man on whose face the gray hairs have traced the meanings of stillness and majesty?

Do you claim that I deny woman her beauty, and her power to nourish this beauty and turn it to account to the utmost degree? God forbid — I am among the admirers of the enchantresses who inspired Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci to their immortal canvases.

But I see in woman one kind of beauty and in man another kind — both are part of the absolute beauty that floods the universe — and it is one, however the kinds may differ. And I should count myself the most wretched of mortals if I confined my gaze to a single kind of it and saw all inspiration in that kind.

Nor do I suppose you forget Schopenhauer's campaign against feminine beauty, when he found fault with woman for her narrow shoulders and her short legs. Certain aestheticians shared his view, deciding that man's body comes closer to proportion in its lines than woman's body, while she is distinguished from him by the roundness of her lines rather than their proportion.

You see inspiration in the beautiful woman; I see it in the colors of the blossom and the smile of the dawn, in the stillness of nature, the flutter of wings, the rustle of leaves, the bending of the mountain and the outstretching of the sea.

You see it in a new Eve, all coquetry and charm. I see it in the strong woman who bears children sound of body, and in the industrious woman whose hands have grown rough with excess of work in the house or in the field or in the factory.

And in the student who bends long hours over the piano or over the laboratory table and does not lift her head until she has mastered her lesson to perfection.

And in the old woman stooped over her spindle or over her needle despite the weight of the years.

What? Would you have woman a doll in the salon, distributing her smiles to naive admirers? Or stretched out on a soft couch — after the fashion of the Sultan's harem — amusing herself chewing mastic and looking

into her mirror while she waits for the maid to dress her hair and tint her nails?

Or would you have her after the fashion of the slave-girls of al-Rashid and al-Ma'mun — an instrument of amusement and pleasure, living in an atmosphere of intrigues and seductions, perfecting the art of adornment and the ways of coquetry, skilled at moving her limbs in effeminate dance and languid song, to please her master and toy with his emotions?

As for me, I see all inspiration in the nurse who does her duty well at the sick man's bedside. In the mother who gives of herself for the rearing of her children. In the teacher who spends of her own rest to gladden children and make them happy.

And I do not admire the smile of “La Gioconda” so much as I admire the “withered woman” who inspired Rodin, and the dust-stained women in the field who inspired Millet.

You see beauty in the tender, bashful young female whom the Arab poets sang and described all in one manner, from Imru' al-Qays and Omar down to the author of the Orphan Ode. I see it in everything around me. In ugliness as in beauty. Indeed, ugliness may be a stronger inspiration than beauty. Do you not see that the great novelists have drawn their most magnificent stories from the grim faces of criminals, from the houses of poverty and misery, from the scenes of destitution and vagrancy, and from the calamities of injustice, ignorance, recklessness, betrayal, and tyranny?

But where is the eye that sees, beside the one that does not?

It is not the beautiful woman alone who is a source of enchantment — indeed I deny her the enchantment altogether when it is joined to ignorance and shallowness. But every woman is a source of enchantment and inspiration when she performs a useful or noble work, and plays her part well, as a human being, on the stage of existence. Nay, everything around us of nature's wonders and of life's comedies and tragedies stirs the mind and moves the imagination.

And the artist who draws all his inspiration from a fair woman's face is either a poor imitator, or a man of meager gift and limited means.

Likewise the man who sees in woman nothing but the suppleness of her form and the radiance of her bosom is a short-sighted person of limited personality.

February 1951