drawn?
A — The play is one of the kinds of narrative art, and it must have a narrative basis. Hence it may be drawn from a tale or from a short story; but casting the story in dramatic form requires a special skill and a sound feeling for dialogue.
Q — And what is the measure by which we judge whether a play is good or not?
A — The only measure is testing and trial. Just as a song's worth cannot be examined unless it is tried, so a play must be tested with children before it is published; then one observes what should be cut or added, and what can be staged and what cannot.
Q — And now, Miss Ghorayeb, are there difficulties that stand in your way in writing for children?
A — The difficulties are many; the chief of them are lack of time, and the fact that I do not gain my experience of children directly, but by visiting their classes and observing them. Were I a children's teacher, I could observe them continuously, work together with them, and draw from teaching them material for instruction and for composition. The children's teacher, in my view, is the one who ought to write for them.
Q — I believe we have covered our subject comprehensively. A new question: I know that 'Aesthetic Criticism and Its Influence on Arabic Criticism' is the subject of the thesis that earned you the master's degree in Arabic literature; what has delayed its publication until today?
A — Various reasons, the chief of them my desire to enlarge it and to obtain a greater number of the sources on which I built my study; and then the lack of the time needed for revision and for copying.
Q — Another question: what suggested to you the subject
of 'Aesthetic Criticism and Its Influence on Arabic Criticism'?
A — My abundant reading of books in childhood gained me something of what they call literary taste, which is the first step of criticism. And I was tempted to study the subject by my sense of its difficulty and my ignorance of its principles as they appear in the books of modern Western literature; then by my need to master it through personal study, when I practiced teaching in French schools, in whose curricula this subject holds a special place. Criticism has received great attention in the modern press and magazines, and in one of those magazines I once came upon this sentence of Ahmad Amin's: 'Why do we not study literature as one of the fine arts?' So I said to myself: 'I must study criticism from this side,' and from that time I began reading diligently in aesthetics, or the science of beauty.
Q — What do you mean by saying that literature is one of the fine arts?
A — I mean that literature, poetry and prose alike, is an art that shares in its principles with the rest of the fine arts, because it has an intrinsic value separate from practical value; it conveys to the reader, or to the man of taste, some idea in a pleasing mold that stirs the mind and moves the feelings. Hence the critic, and the student of letters, must needs study the general principles of art which are contained in the science of aesthetics, or of beauty.
Q — Was this science found among the Arab critics?
A — Fragments of it were found, and general principles, not worked out in detail, in their books of criticism. What we can verify in Arabic literature is that its men of letters were infatuated with beauty of form and eloquence of expression, and made it binding upon themselves to put everything
they said into a beautiful shape, until this infatuation led them into various faults — among them affectation, excess of ornament, putting the word before the meaning, and using the elegant phrase out of its place — for instance, in scientific writing.
Q — And finally, if I may intrude upon your private life, may I ask you the reason for your choosing a life of seclusion and your avoidance of social life?
A — First, because of the press of my work; and second, because I incline only to gatherings that have cultural or athletic aims. As for gatherings whose only aim is greetings and talk, I see no meaning in their existence. And experience has shown me that many of our women waste a great deal of precious time in gatherings from which no benefit comes — indeed, very often they bring them harm.
Q — I wish your words might reach the ears of those women. Even so, and though I agree with your view in principle, I still believe that your going out into society and your contact with people would be a necessary variety, with its effect on the excellence and the realism of your literary production.
