Among the writers of the Arab East there is none for whom circumstances so smoothed the way to attain the fame that Gibran attained, in his lifetime and after his death.

Yet Gibran's works have not received from writers and scholars an attention commensurate with their author's fame. His English books have not yet been favored with anyone to translate them into Arabic correctly. Nor has it been granted Gibran that anyone should study his works in a deep critical study worthy of publication.

It has been said that Gibran modeled himself on the Englishman William Blake in his poetry and his drawings; and no one has undertaken to debate this claim, showing it true or false. And I once heard the man of letters Bishr Fares mention the book The Prophet in a lecture of his, saying that it would place its author in the ranks of the world's men of letters were it not for a manifest imitation in it of Nietzsche's book entitled Thus Spake Zarathustra.

The lecturer pointed to this imitation as a thing taken for granted. Did he, one wonders, go back to the two books of Nietzsche and Gibran, and was the second's imitation of the first made plain to him — or did he rely on what he had heard on the matter from some of those who have not studied it?

This is what I shall try to answer in the following inquiry:

Nietzsche is a link in the chain of philosophers and thinkers who appeared in western Europe during the nineteenth century. He was born in Germany and moved from there to Italy and Switzerland. From his tenderest years he began to dream of the theories on which he later built his writings — the most important of them, indeed the summation of them all, being the theory of the Superman.

The pivot of this theory is that nations become great through their individuals, not through their mass. For this reason the Greek people is counted the greatest people of history, because it was able to beget the largest number of geniuses. The duty of mankind, then, is to strive to create surpassing geniuses.

"I would have you bridges over which one crosses to the Superman. The Superman — the surpassing man — is the goal of humanity. Man must surpass man. What have you done in the cause of surpassing yourselves?"

Nietzsche looked at the people around him and saw them all alike in weakness and paltriness, resembling

one another like grains of sand; he condemned their stagnation and cried out at them: All beings have cre-ated things higher than themselves — and you, will you go against the current and carry life backward? What is the ape in the eyes of man? An object of mockery and contempt. So is present-day man, beside the Superman, an object of mockery and contempt.

But how is the creation of the Superman to be accomplished?

The means, in Nietzsche's view, is clear and possible: that men cast off their present standards and traditions; that they repudiate the doctrines that have bequeathed them weakness, abjection, and paltriness; and that they adopt new standards of living and of thinking.

They preach mercy and pity. But Nietzsche proves to them that pity is barren and charity a humiliation, and the seekers of mercy a weak, loitering folk. He would have them strong, too proud to solicit pity.

They preach the equality of men. But Nietzsche denies equality, and proclaims that men differ in their worth — and that they must differ, so that from among them may come forth the surpassing one who has no peer.

They live a life of artifice and sham — far from nature, far from the earth, despising the body, gazing toward what lies beyond life. And he would have them return to the earth and be faithful to it; love life, and nature, and strength: "I conjure you, my brothers, be faithful to the earth, and believe not those who teach you of heavenly joys."

Nor is he content with demolishing the old; he enumerates the virtues that must be formed in the people that strives toward the highest goal.

The general mark of the Superman's forebears is, first, overflowing health — health of soul and body, an extraordinary strength, bodily and mental — accompanied by a marvelous strength of will that enables its possessor to create and to accomplish the greatest deeds; that enables him to defy death itself.

Says Zarathustra: "I hate the death that comes like a thief. The death I want is the one that comes when I want it."

The will to power is the pivot of the Superman doctrine, and on it rest all the distinguished qualities with which the surpassing ones are adorned.

This is a fleeting glance into the book Thus Spake Zarathustra, which runs to some four hundred close-printed pages. Where, then, does Gibran stand in relation to this book?

Gibran's circumstances differ manifestly from Nietzsche's circumstances. He did not live in a philosophical milieu like the one that surrounded his German colleague. But he passed in his life through sufferings and experiences that produced a continu-ous evolution in his temper and in his writings.

He began his writing career a lyric poet, addressing the night and the wind and the soul, and singing of