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