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39 Chapter 2 Kahlil Gibran: the development of the Romantic method Introduction Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) was one of the leading members of the Syro- American School, and an organiser, leader and active member of the Pen League. 1 Lebanese by birth, Christian by creed, he was the inheritor and bearer of two cultures: Western and Arab. A man of many gifts, both refined and emotional, a painter and a musician, he was, however, most famed as a major figure of literature. He penned short stories, parabl\ es, prose poems, essays, fables, poetry and criticism. His first publications were the book al- Musiqa (Music , 1905), and two collections of stories, ¡Ara¤is al- Muruj (Nymphs of the Valley, 1907) and al- Arwah al- Mutamarrida (Spirits Rebellious , 1908). His only further large- scale works in Arabic were the story al- Ajniha al- Mutakassira (Broken Wings, 1912), the poetical diwan al- Mawakib (The Processions, 1919), the collection of articles and prose poems Dam¡a wa ibtisama (A Tear and a Smile , 1914), al-¡Awasif (The Tempests , 1920) and al- Bada¤i¡ wa al- Tara¤if (The New and the Marvellous, 1923). The re- mainder of his output was written in English: The Madman (1918), The Forerunner (1920), The Prophet (1923), Sand and Foam (1926), Jesus the Son of Man (1928), The Earth Gods (1931), The Wanderer (1932), The Garden of the Prophet (1933) and others. All these works were translated into Arabic and published in various editions in the Middle East. Notwithstanding his sharply expressed individuality, Gibran’s fate and his world- view bear the characteristic marks of the Arab creative intelligentsia in exile. He is filled with democratic aspirations, he is troubled about the destiny of the ordinary working man, the situation of Arab women (e.g.

“Marta al- Baniyah”, “The Cry of the Graves”, “The Bride’s Bed”, Broken Wings) and social injustice in Lebanese life (e.g. “The Cry of the Graves”, “The Palace and the Hut”, “A Tear and a Smile”). He realises that society is divided into the haves and have- nots, and that the latter toil by the sweat of their brow yet live in poverty, subjected to exploitation not only by the rich but also by the ministers of religion (e.g. “John [Yuhanna] the Madman”, “Khalil the Heretic”). Some Arab scholars, including Yamni al- Ida, consider that “Gibran was unable to go deeply into the existing social and economic situation, and\ paid no attention to the working class”. 2 It should be remembered, however, that Gibran’s works only describe life in Lebanon, where capitalism had not yet become fully formed. Recognising the liberation movement of the \ Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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40 kahlil gibran peasants as a significant force, the writer became a kind of apologist\ for a “peasant revolution” (“Khalil the Heretic”). Gibran was su\ re that a better future can only be had by struggle, that freedom is obtained by fighti\ ng, not by dreaming: They tell me: If you see a slave sleeping, do not wake him lest he be dr\ eaming of freedom.

I tell them: If you see a slave sleeping, wake him and explain to him fr\ eedom. “Handful of Beach Sand” 3 A man must not be satisfied with the mere present; he must strive for \ a better future, because – in the author’s deep conviction – “\ only the coward tarries, and it is folly to look back on the City of the Past”. 4 In tracing the development of Gibran’s work, we shall try to show tha\ t as he progressed towards artistic maturity his creative method underwent\ significant changes. For this it is necessary to examine his relations\ hip to the English Lake School and the American Transcendentalists, and to trace the evolution of his outlook and poetic language and the changes in the image of the Romantic hero in his works. To examine the artistic develop- ment and legacy of Gibran it would seem expedient to single out his most\ characteristic works. Sentimentalism in Gibran’s early works Gibran’s creative method underwent significant changes as he progressed towards artistic maturity. The evolution in his comprehension of the world is reflected in the transition from the Sentimentalism of his early prose, which was then the natural stage of his artistry, to Romanticism. Sentimentalism as a literary tendency was a reaction to Enlightenment Rationalism. Belinsky paid tribute to the role of Sentimentalism in the de- velopment of Russian literature thus: “The purpose of Sentimentalism, which was introduced to Russian literature by Karamzin, was to arouse society and prepare it for a life of the heart and of feeling.” 5 In Arabic literature, as also in that of Western Europe and Russia, Sentimentalism was closely connected to Enlightenment Classicism. It was a transitional period between Enlightenment and Romanticism, and represented a step forward in the development of the new Arabic literatu\ re.

The work of a number of Arab writers developed along the Sentimental - ist path, among them Mustafa Lutfi al- Manfaluti and Muhammad Husayn Haykal. 6 Naimy gives an original and poetic description of how Sentimentalism came to Arabic literature: Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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41 sentimentalism in gibran’s early works As a tendency, Sentimentalism acted out its role on the boards of the theatre of Western literature and then disappeared behind the curtain; not one of th\ e spectators applauded with so much as a clap of the hands ... One gains t\ he impression that having thus failed in the West, Sentimentalism then set out in search of pastures new, and by chance stumbled upon the little East. Finding here many tearful eyes, and still more who suffered the pains of the hea\ rt, it pitched its pavilions in Egypt and Syria and became with its retinue and servants a dear and esteemed guest. 7 Of course, one should not agree completely with Naimy’s simplistic, half- jesting appraisal, in which the attributes of Sentimentalism are merely excessive sensitivity, tearfulness and artificiality. In turn, Belinsky also wrote with irony about these attributes of Senti - mentalism: “Sensitive souls went in crowds to stroll at Liza’s pon\ d: Erasts, Leons, Leonids, Melodors, Filarets, Ninas, Lizas, Emilies and Julias, mu\ l- tiplied to extremes. Their sighs made the calmest of days windy, and their tears flowed in rivers.” 8 Sentimentalism was also a natural stage in the development of Gibran’\ s artistic method. Dolinina writes: “Gibran’s early works ... are permeated with sentimental motifs, with searches for harmony in the world, whose origin are necessarily love and beauty, poured into nature; they are full of sadness for the lot of the ‘humble and insulted’.” 9 Some Arab and Western scholars of Gibran have claimed that the writer was influenced by Rousseau through certain works of his that he knew. 10 We can concur with this opinion, while not forgetting that Gibran’s Sentimentalist style is l\ ikely to owe more to the storytelling tradition of his upbringing in classical Arabic literature. Krachkovsky considers that the excessive sensitivity and high- flown tone, which sounds deliberate and affected, is not in fact merely the style of\ a few Arab writers but rather characteristic of the general psychology and beh\ av- iour of the Arabs as a nation: And if we compare the style of Gibran with the style of, say, contemporary Arab life, we will no longer see that artificiality that struck us at first sight. That is the way life is, and not just the literature that reflects it. The roo\ ts of this style are to be found in the spiritual nature itself, not only of the individu\ al writer but of the entire life out of which he grew. 11 In Gibran’s works the qualities of Sentimentalism and Romanticism co- existed, as it were, in parallel for a considerable time. The works cont\ ained in the collection A Tear and a Smile (1914), written in the period 1903–08, the collections Nymphs of the Valley (1907) and Spirits Rebellious (1908), and in particular the story Broken Wings (1912), are evidence of a particular national variety of early Romanticism, in which traits that are intrinsi\ c to Arabic literature, such as a disposition towards sensitivity and a quali\ ty of moralising, can be seen. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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42 kahlil gibran In a number of short stories, for example “Marta al- Baniyah”, 12 “Warda al- Hani” 13 and the longer story Broken Wings, 14 the characteristics of Senti- mentalism are predominant. Significantly, in all these works the author addresses the topic of the emancipation of the Oriental woman, regarding it not from a social per - spective but rather in terms of defending the feelings of women and thei\ r rights within the sphere of the family. Such an approach to women’s eman- cipation was characteristic of Arab Enlighteners, in particular Qasim Amin, who believed that the rebirth of a nation and the struggle for progress \ must begin with changes in the conditions of women’s lives and a reorganis\ ation of the family. 15 The theme of woman particularly occupied Gibran. In one of his letters to the Syrian writer Maryam Ziyada (“Mayy”) he wrote:

I am indebted for all that I call “I” to women ever since I was an\ infant. Women opened the windows of my eyes and the doors of my spirit. Had it not bee\ n for the woman- mother, the woman- sister and the woman- friend, I would have been sleeping among those who disturb the serenity of the world with their sn\ ores. 16 Gibran’s approach to women in the stories “Warda al- Hani” and “Marta al- Baniyah”, like that of many other Arab writers and Enlighteners, emph\ a - sises the subject of love. In the Arab East in those years the women’\ s ques- tion was not yet one of political rights as in Europe, but a question of family and love, of the right of women to love and happiness. It was necessary \ for literature to show that women were also “capable of love”.’ 17 Both stories are highly melodramatic and the author’s entire atten - tion is concentrated on the tortuous inner life of the heroes. Almost al\ l of the substance boils down to the sensitive monologues of the heroines, in\ which they speak of their unhappy lives, while the author listens and sh\ ows sympathy with them. “Marta al- Baniyah” is the story of a young village girl tempted by a rich city- dweller who is passing through. Having enjoyed himself with her for a certain time, he drops her and her young child. To avoid starvation, Marta is forced to sell her body. Exhausted both morally and physically, she soon dies, leaving her young son to the will of fate. The stylistic mode of the story betrays its tendency to Sentimentalism.

Marta’s life in the village of her birth had been difficult: From her mother she inherited only tears of grief and her orphan state. \ ... Each morning she walked barefooted in a tattered dress behind a milch cow to \ a part of the valley where the pasture was rich, and sat in the shade of a tree\ . She sang with the birds and wept with the brook while she envied the cow its abun\ dance of food. She looked at the flowers and watched the fluttering butter\ flies. 18 Here, it would seem, are all the accessories of Sentimentalism. The mass\ of “sensitive” collisions continues throughout the story: the unbeara\ ble suf - fering of rejection, the painful illness, her passionate awaiting of dea\ th and Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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43 sentimentalism in gibran’s early works so on. Here is the last supplication as she dies: “O Justice who are hidden, concealed behind these terrifying images, you, and you alone, hear the c\ ry of my departing spirit and the call of my neglected heart.” 19 These words naturally do not come across as the speech of an illiterate village girl\ forced to become a prostitute; they contain too much of the voice of the author, filled with sentimental sadness for the fallen woman. Traces of Sentimentalism can also be found in the story “Warda al- Hani” (“Madame Rose Hanie”). The subject here is remarkable: a young woman, realising that she does not love her distinguished and wealthy husband, leaves him for a poor youth she does love. The step she thus takes, with\ out fearing the blame placed on her by society, is practically unheard of for an Arab woman. In this story Gibran tells of the extremely common situ - ation in the East in which girls are married for reasons other than love\ .

Warda recounts to the narrator a series of distressing stories of women w\ ho were married at the will of their parents. With these specific examples the heroine underlines the naturalness of her brave deed, which yet appears \ to those around her to be so immoral and shameful. The story contains many high- flown images, expressions and turns of speech. It is not only in the long monologues of Warda, or her husband Rashid Bey, in which they speak of their feelings and intimate experiences, that the signs of Sentimentalism appear, but also in the speech of the narrator himself. Here is how the teller describes his state on hearing the sorrowful complaints of the abandoned husband: “I rose with tears in \ my eyes and mercy in my heart, and silently bade him [my friend] goodbye; m\ y words had no power to console his wounded heart, and my knowledge had no torch to illuminate his gloomy self.” “Marta al- Baniyah” and “Warda al- Hani” are generally artistically poor.

There is little lyrical digression by the author and the images of Marta\ and Warda are simplistic: the characters are revealed only to the degree nece\ s- sary to expose the ideas contained in them. Gibran’s Sentimentalism finds its fullest expression in Broken Wings, the story of the tragic fate of a woman forced to marry a man she does not l\ ove.

(It is to a certain extent autobiographical: as confirmed by various biog - raphers, Gibran suffered a tragic love affair in his youth, which ended \ in the death of his beloved, who had been promised to another man.) 20 It is a typically melodramatic story, narrated by the person of the author. The plot is limited to revealing the internal world of the heroes and their elevated feelings and experiences. The outline of the story is as follows: the narrator, himself a character in the work, goes to visit a friend whose father has died. There he meet\ s the daughter of the household, Selma. Love between the two young people \ flourishes instantly, but is short- lived and ends unhappily. It emerges that Selma has been promised to the nephew of the archbishop, and owing to the latter’s high position her father does not dare to refuse him. Th\ e end of the story is tragic: the father dies of grief, realising that he has \ made his Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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44 kahlil gibran daughter unhappy, and in giving birth to the archbishop’s child, both Selma and the newborn die.The tale consists of a lyrical prologue and ten short chapters, each of which has a title corresponding to its position in the development of th\ e plot. This indicates the author’s attempt to mark out a chain of even\ ts. The events themselves – acquaintance, rendezvous, marriage, separation an\ d so on – are what effectively move the story forward. Many events appear\ to take place, yet these are merely starting points, a kind of code that al\ lows the author to begin and continue an uninterrupted lyrical monologue in which he reveals the world of his feelings and emotional experiences. Th\ ere is no real action in the detailed development of the work. The sequence \ of events indicated in the chapter headings serves merely as a framework fo\ r extended discourses by the heroes and the author, and not for developing the action of the narrative. No sooner has the first meeting with Selm\ a at the opening of the story been mentioned than there follows a whole strea\ m of reasoning and declarations – of beauty and its essence, of love, of Selma’s interior world, of the sublimity and refinement of her form, of the so\ ul seized by grief, of the charm of her silent sorrow: Selma sat by the window, looking on with sorrowful eyes and not speaking, al- though beauty has its own heavenly language, loftier than the voices of \ tongues and lips. It is a timeless language, common to all humanity, a calm lake that attracts the singing rivulets to its depth and makes them silent.

Only our spirits can understand beauty, or live and grow with it. It puzzles our minds; we are unable to describe it in words; it is a sensation that\ our eyes cannot see, derived from both the one who observes and the one who is lo\ oked upon. Real beauty is a ray which emanates from the holy of holies of the\ spirit, and illuminates the body, as life comes from the depths of the earth and gives colour and scent to a flower. Real beauty lies in the spiritual accord that is called love which can e\ xist between a man and a woman. Broken Wings 21 Other chapters also contain little by way of narrative. Despite the fact\ that the story involves various characters, in essence the entire piece \ is solely a monologue by the author. In these outpourings, moreover, the nar - rator barely touches on social or public questions. For the most part he\ is occupied with ethical questions, philosophy and the life of the heart an\ d the soul. The exception to this is his reflection on the theme of the cler\ gy and on the role of the woman in the family. A further characteristic of the story is the inertness of its heroes and\ their submissiveness to circumstances. There is not the slightest protest:

no murmur, no attempt to change their lot, no hint of a struggle. The substance of the story amounts to a description of sensations and emo - tions: comparison clings to comparison, metaphor to metaphor, image to image. The melodramatic outcome in the destinies of the heroes – sadn\ ess, Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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45 sentimentalism in gibran’s early works dejection, submissiveness to fate and bitter disappointment, with no sto\ rms of despair, cursing or anger – are explicit signs of the Sentimentalist method.\ The mood of the heroes is characterised by a sensitiveness that constant\ ly borders on tears. There are also scenes of great contrast: the jolly fea\ st held by Selma’s husband, the death of the child, the sobbing of the doctor\ and Selma’s cries of despair, all of which are portrayed on this single canvas.A feature of Sentimentalism in both Western European and Russian lit- erature – for example in the works of Samuel Richardson, Laurence Stern, Jean- Jacques Rousseau and Nikolay Karamzin – is an interest in everyday life, the world of things and the details of daily living. Here for example is Karamzin’s description of Liza’s actions when Erast asks her fo\ r a glass of milk: “She ran to the cellar, brought a clean earthenware pot covered with a clean wooden disc, took a glass, washed it and wiped it with a wh\ ite towel, filled it and served it at the window.” 22 In Gibran’s Broken Wings the tokens of everyday life are reduced solely to the statement of individua\ l specific facts. The author is almost never distracted into describing \ any kind of realia such as situations, portraits or the setting. The details\ of the portrait, given in the form of brief epithets – “slender”, “\ slim”, “golden hair”, “sorrowful look” – descend into lengthy, verbose digressions. Here is an example: Selma Karamy had bodily and spiritual beauty, but how can I describe her to one who never knew her? Can a dead man remember the singing of a nightin\ - gale and the fragrance of a rose and the sigh of a brook? Can a prisoner\ who is heavily loaded with shackles follow the breeze of the dawn? Is not silen\ ce more painful than death? Does pride prevent me from describing Selma in plain\ words since I cannot draw her truthfully with luminous colors? A hungry \ man in a desert will not refuse to eat dry bread if Heaven does not shower h\ im with manna and quails.

The beauty of Selma’s face was not classic; it was like a dream of re\ vela - tion which cannot be measured or bound or copied by the brush of a paint\ er or the chisel of a sculptor. Selma’s beauty was not in her golden hair, but in the virtue of purity which surrounded it; not in her large eyes, but in \ the light which emanated from them; not in her red lips, but in the sweetness of h\ er words; not in her ivory neck, but in its slight bow to the front. Nor wa\ s it in her perfect figure, but in the nobility of her spirit, burning like a \ white torch between earth and sky. Her beauty was like a gift of poetry. But poets are unhappy people, for, no matter how high their spirits reach, they will still be enclosed in an envelope of tears. 23 And so on. The dialogue, which usually helps to move a plot forward, is \ also weak in this story. The attention given to landscape description is also fitting to the Se\ nti- mentalist method, whereby the natural setting reflects the psychologic\ al and emotional state of the heroes and underlines the soft lyricism of the wo\ rk: Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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46 kahlil gibran The scent of flowers mingled with the breeze as we came into the garden and sat silently on a bench near a jasmine tree, listening to the breathing \ of sleeping nature, while in the blue sky the eyes of heaven witnessed our drama.The moon came out from behind Mount Sannin and shone over the coast, hills, and mountains; and we could see the villages fringing the valley \ like ap- paritions which have suddenly been conjured from nothing. We could see the beauty of Lebanon under the silver rays of the moon. Broken Wings 24 This entire extract is characterised by the special selection of words a\ nd expressions that bring into the world an exalted ideal beauty. The land - scape sketch could not be better suited to the forthcoming event – th\ e first meeting of the lovers. A moralising tendency can be seen in the style of the story. At every op- portunity the author draws on a supply of morality elements. In speaking\ , for example, of the hypocrisy and predatoriness of the clergy and the ev\ il that they bring upon the people, the author-narrator resorts to an adage:

“However, the people of Oriental nations place trust in such as they – wolves and butchers who ruin their country through covetousness and crus\ h their neighbors with an iron hand.” 25 Or on wealth, “In some countries, the parent’s wealth is a source of misery for the children ... The Almigh\ ty Dinar which the people worship becomes a demon which punishes the spirit and deadens the heart”, 26 or “our days are perishing like the leaves of autumn”, “The mother is everything – she is our consolation in sorrow, our hope in misery, and our strength in weakness”, 27 and so on. Sometimes these adages acquire the character of aphorisms: “Will a hungry man give his bread to another hungry man?”, 28 “A bird with broken wings cannot fly in the spa- cious sky”, 29 “The cup does not entice our lips unless the wine’s color is seen through the transparent crystal”, 30 for example. The entire story is filled with these aphorisms, adages, moralising generalisations and brief philo\ - sophical conclusions. The lyricism and confessional nature of Broken Wings and its mono - logue quality demand a constant appeal to the personal experience of the\ author-narrator. Even when the subject is the thoughts and feelings of other people, such as Selma and her father, it is as though the narrator steps out from behind their names in order to complete the story in his individual\ way. Here, in essence, we encounter one of the basic principles of Romanti - cism: the investing of the entire surrounding world with one’s own hu\ man passions. The confessional-lyrical, exclusively monological style of Broken Wings is also evidence of early shoots of a Romantic outlook within this work, whose basic method is still Sentimentalist. Dolinina comments on these characteristics and defines the style of th\ e story as “Romantic Sentimentalism”, 31 and in fact the traits of Romanti- cism can already be seen in it. Particularly Romantic is the heroine Sel\ ma, with her exceptional nature that strives towards her wishes and freedom.\ Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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47 sentimentalism in gibran’s early works Elements of Romanticism appear in the hyperbolising of feelings and de- scriptions and in the landscape sketches that are sometimes secret and s\ ym- bolic. Nevertheless, Broken Wings remains an example of a Sentimentalist work. It contains no challenge to fate, to people or to God; no rebellio\ n or proud solitude, such as is so manifest in Gibran’s subsequent work\ s.

However, Broken Wings set the tone, to a certain extent, for the way in which Romanticism started to emerge in the new Arabic literature, where \ restlessness or hints of active protest against contemporary social norm\ s were still alien, but interest in the psychology of the characters began\ to appear. “Romanticism”, wrote Belinsky, “is the interior world of man, the world of the soul and heart, a world of sensations and beliefs, a world of impulses toward the infinite, a world of secret visions and contemplation, a world of divine ideals”. 32 Apart from the fact that in Broken Wings Gibran anticipated the develop- ment of the Romantic method in Arabic literature, he secured for it two im - portant topics: the theme of women and that of anticlericalism. The ques\ - tion of women’s freedom is given a wider treatment in the story than \ merely the personal drama of one woman: “Thus destiny seized Selma and led her like a humiliated slave in the procession of miserable oriental woman.”\ 33 Nonetheless, the writer examines the lot of women not in terms of rights\ and society, but only in the sphere of family and conjugal relations. Gibran believes that in future women will have a full place in society, but does not give so much as a hint as to when or under what circumstances this might\ happen: “Will the day ever come when beauty and knowledge, ingenuity and virtue, and weakness of body and strength of spirit will be united i\ n a woman? I am one of those who believe that spiritual progress is a rule of human life, but the approach to perfection is slow and painful” (“\ Before the Throne of Death”). 34 On the problem of marriage, Gibran writes: “Marriage these days is a mockery whose management is in the hands of young men and parents. In most countries the young men win while the parents lose. The woman is looked upon as a commodity, purchased and delivered from one house to another.” 35 He equates the oppressed woman to an oppressed nation, so that her suf - fering, lack of rights and ignominy become the suffering, lack of rights\ and indignity of the whole nation: “But my dear readers, don’t you think that such a woman is like a nation that is oppressed by priests and rulers? D\ on’t you believe that thwarted love which leads a woman to the grave is like \ the despair which pervades the people of the earth?” 36 Anticlerical motifs are also prominent in the story. On learning that the archbishop has promised his dissolute nephew to Selma, the narrator give\ s himself up to extensive reflections:

The heads of religion in the East are not satisfied with their own mun\ ificence, but they must strive to make all members of their families superiors and opp\ ressors. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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48 kahlil gibran The glory of a prince goes to his eldest son by inheritance, but the exaltation of a religious head is contagious among his brothers and nephews. Thus t\ he Christian bishop and the Moslem imam and the Brahman priest become like \ sea reptiles who clutch their prey with many tentacles and suck their bl\ ood with numerous mouths. “Lake of Fire” 37 The author’s criticism of the dependent position of Eastern women and\ his exposure of clericalism and the dissolute life of members of the ari\ stoc- racy, together with other topical issues of his day, lend the story a certain social sharpness and reveal the author’s relationship to contemporary\ life.

Nonetheless, these moments of revelation in the story are not emphasised\ or highlighted, nor are they commented on by the heroes or the author. To summarise, Broken Wings is a Sentimentalist work that contains certain Romantic elements. Its content and purpose are confined solely\ to revealing the interior world of the heroes and their elevated feelings a\ nd experiences. Naturally, this arrangement leads the author to a large stock of moral generalisations and lends the work a philosophical character. The very landscape is in sympathy with the moods of the characters. Yet with Broken Wings Gibran broke out of the conventions of Sentimentalism. The entire spirit of the story and the development of its plot are subordinated to its principal function: that of the author–narrator’s self- expression, which takes the form of an unbroken interior confessional monologue that also includes a story about the feelings and experiences of the other charact\ ers.

The whole story is cemented by the personality of the author, and this is the realisation of one of the basic principles of the Romantic form. Broken Wings thus combines motifs of Enlightenment Humanism and Sentimentalism. At the same time, Gibran’s Sentimentalism shows a cle\ ar development towards Romanticism. The formation of Gibran’s Romantic world-view and his assimilation of English and American methods If there was a predominance of Sentimentalism in Gibran’s narrative p\ rose, then the genres included in the collection A Tear and a Smile 38 – essays and prose poems – could not hint more distinctly at Romantic stylistics. A Tear and a Smile shows the way in which Gibran began to master Romanticism.

It contains works published over several years (1903–08) in émig\ ré publica- tions, particularly in the newspaper al- Muhajir ( The Émigré). Gibran had now taken up the genre of prose poetry, short essays that capture assorted impressions and thoughts of the author and his philosophical reflectio\ ns.

They are elegant and musical, their language refined and often aphoris\ tic. The range of topics touched by Gibran in his book is broad: the posi - tion of the individual in society, his relationship to nature, the meaning of Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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49 the formation of gibran’s romantic world-view human existence, the poet and poetry, love and beauty. Many of the pieces in the collection are imbued with Sentimentalist motifs and regarded wit\ h extreme sensitivity, intense lyricism and a tendency towards moralising and homily. The style of the work is expressive, and in Gibran a special role is played by rhetorical questions and exclamations (“A Visit from Wisdom”, “O Wind”, “The Secret Conversation” and others): Who am I, Wisdom, and how came I to this frightening place? What manner of things are these mighty hopes and these many books and strange patter\ ns?

What are these thoughts that pass as doves in flight? And these words composed by desire and sung by delight, what are they? What are these conclusions\ , griev- ous and joyous, that embrace my spirit and envelop my heart? And those e\ yes which look at me seeing into my depths and fleeing from my sorrows? ..\ . What is this world that leads me whither I know not, standing with me in despising?

... O Wisdom, what manner of things are these? “A Visit from Wisdom” 39 The poems are filled with such perplexity and with tragic exclamations\ that reflect the complex and poignant interior world of the poet.Regarding A Tear and a Smile, I.Yu. Krachkovsky wrote that Gibran’s Sentimentalism does not bring a smile, because it meets with an echo in the soul of eve\ ry Arab, whether he live in New York or be still in his Lebanese village beside the hills of cedars. Those same speeches that seem to us to be unnatural and stilt\ ed will be heard at any gathering where only an Arab feels at home and among his\ own kind, although the reason that caused them will also seem to us to be st\ rangely unfitting to the extremely elevated and passionate tone of the words. 40 The recognition of the human dignity of the poor and sympathy towards them, contrasted with censure of the moral deafness and iniquitous way o\ f life of the wealthy, is a typical theme in Sentimentalism and strongly evident in this book. However, Gibran does not emphasise the social demarcation of the problem of wealth and poverty. His protest is a protest by humanity “in general” against injustice “in general”. Examples include his p\ rose poems “The Palace and the Hut”, “The Criminal”, “The Dumb Beast” and “A Tear and a Smile”. The first of these 41 is a highly contrasted picture of the lives of the wealthy and the labourers: Night was falling and the lights in the mansion of the rich man shone br\ ightly.

The servants, clad in velvet, with buttons gleaming on their breasts, st\ ood awaiting the guests. Music played and the lords and ladies descended on \ that palace from all parts, drawn in their carriages by fine horses. There \ they entered, dressed in gorgeous raiment and decorated with jewels. Then the men rose from their places and took the ladies to dance. And th\ at hall became a garden through which the breezes of melody passed, and its flowers inclined in awe and wonder. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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50 kahlil gibran Soon midnight approached and the table was laid with the choicest of fru\ its and the finest of foods. Cups were passed from one to another and wine\ played with the senses of all those there until they in turn took to play. And when morning was near they dispersed, for they were tired with merrymaking an\ d bemused by wine and wearied of dancing and revelry. And everyone betook himself to his bed. “The Palace and the Hut” 42 And here is the picture for the poor:

As the sun sank low beyond the horizon, a man dressed in the garb of a l\ abourer stood at the door of a mean house and knocked thereon. It opened to him \ and he entered, greeting those within with a cheerful countenance, and sat d\ own in the midst of his children by the fire. [...]At dawn’s approach that poor man rose from his bed and partook of a l\ ittle bread and milk with his wife and little ones. Then he kissed them and we\ nt away with a heavy spade over his shoulder to the field, to water it with hi\ s sweat and make it fruitful that it might feed those mighty ones who yestereve made\ merry. “The Palace and the Hut” 43 The work ends with an adage characteristic of the Sentimentalists: “S\ o is man’s burden: a tragedy played on the stage of time. Many are the spe\ cta- tors that applaud; few are they that comprehend and know.” 44 The ending is typically calm, as though merely stating a fact. The pictu\ re that the poem has painted seems too abstract and non- specific. This is not Lebanon, nor Egypt, nor any other country in particular. It is simply the eternal and natural order of things, which causes the author a feeling of sadness, but one to which he seems to submit. The method of contrast noted in “The Palace and the Hut” appears most distinctly in the prose poem “A Smile and a Tear”, 45 in which it is less concerned with revealing social contrasts than in contrasting experi - ences and feelings: happiness and calmness are juxtaposed with tragedy and hopelessness. The story “The Criminal” 46 also treats the social theme in an abstract manner. A hungry youth, unable to find work, begs for charity. But his ap- pearance does not arouse compassion and, to avoid dying of starvation, h\ e is forced to turn to crime: “Many years passed and that youth severed\ necks for the sake of their adornment, and destroyed bodies to satisfy his app\ etite.

He increased in riches and was renowned for his strength and violence.

He was beloved among the plunderers of the people and feared by the law- abiding.” 47 The prose poem ends with the following adage: “Thus do men in their greed make of the wretched criminals, and with their harshn\ ess drive the child of peace to kill.” 48 Gibran does not so much as hint at any kind of class patterns in this story. A poor man, it turns out, became a crimi - nal because of the miserliness and hard- heartedness of the people around him. In the end, however, the former pauper grows rich by plundering and Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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51 the formation of gibran’s romantic world-view becomes the ruler. Gibran condemns the nature of the man who is cruel to good, but poor and needy, people but who fawns on unjustly obtained wealth. “The Dumb Beast” 49 is the tale of a pitiful homeless dog. In effect the author recreates its thoughts and feelings and its fear of existence, wh\ ich is so joyless and difficult for it. This little story has much tendern\ ess and sympathy, but far more tragedy, as the parallel theme arises of the fate of many people whose lot is similar to the dog’s: “I, human being, am a helpless animal, but I find a like thing between me and many of your\ brothers in kind when they are no longer strong enough to gain their sustenance”. 50 The examples given above are characteristic of the Sentimentalist depic- tion of reality, in which society is forever divided into rich and poor. The author relates to the former with condescending admonition and to the latter with profound pity and sympathy. In essence, however, human rela- tions, like those of society, do not interest Gibran. People are understood as being either good or bad, righteous or evil, etc. There is [thus] much t\ hat is highly sensitised, and sometimes also dramatic, since the author, in analys- ing reality, sees no alternative and points only to evil. The same works also reveal another of the traits of Sentimentalism: the special role of the landscape. Gibran’s landscapes frequently depict \ concili- ation and radiant beauty, be it the hot rays of the sun or the soft light of the moon, aromatic flowers, the peaceful blue sky, the charming song of the birds, the gentle wafts of the breeze and so forth. Generally the landsc\ ape evokes a description of equally serene feelings: the reconciliation and \ grati- tude of life for the fact of its being as it is:

The sun gathered up its garments from over those verdant gardens, and the moon rose from beyond the horizon and spilled its soft light over all. I\ sat there beneath the tree watching the changing shades of everything. I looked be\ yond the boughs to the stars scattered like coins upon a carpet of blue colour, and I heard from afar the gentle murmur of streams in the valley.

“A Smile and a Tear” 51 In A Tear and a Smile a number of typically Romantic themes can be traced that had not been articulated so distinctly in Arabic literature \ prior to Gibran: the poet and his role in society, the grandeur and omnipotence of the human self, love and beauty, nature and its close relationship to man.

Gibran’s experience of the English and American Romantics can be dis - cerned in both the theme and the stylistic aspects of many of his works.\ V. Markov is entirely correct in remarking that the book “represents to a certain degree the sum of Gibran’s searching in his early years, wh\ en the themes begin to appear that will occupy a pre- eminent position in the outlook of his mature period.” 52 One of the most important themes in the collection is that of the poet (“The Poet’s Death is his Life”, “The Poet”, “Night”, “A Poet’s Voice” Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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52 kahlil gibran and others), and this is clear evidence of the influence of the Western Romantics on Gibran. Many English and American Romantics associate the artistic realisation of this theme with problems of the self and of \ the intuitive knowledge of its truth. The essence of the heavenly and earthl\ y soul is incomprehensible to the rational mind and is not subject to ever\ yday experience. Emerson, therefore, considers that the principal instrument of cognition must be the imagination and insight of which only the poet is capable. It follows that the destiny of the poet is the mission of the v\ isionary, the announcer of truth, the prophet. Coleridge considered the poet to be a chosen one of God. Whitman called him a “prophet”. Wordsworth remarked that “the Poet binds to - gether by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society”. 53 For Emerson, the poet is greater than the theologian, and “stands among partial man for the complete man ... who sees and handles that which others drea\ m of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is representative of ma\ n, in virtue of being the largest power to receive and impart.” 54 An analogous understanding of the poet’s function, summoned into the \ world to bring love, truth and beauty into the life of mankind, is also \ found in Gibran. The poet, by his definition, is “a noble soul, sent by t\ he Goddess of Understanding”. 55 Further, A Link between this world and the hereafter; a pool of sweet water for the thirsty; [...] An angel Sent by the gods to teach man the ways of gods.

A shining light unconquered by the dark, Unhidden by the bushel Astarte did fill with oil; And lighted by Apollo. [...] Alone, He is closed in simplicity And nourished by tenderness; He sits in Nature’s lap learning to create, And is awake in the stillness of night In wait of the spirit’s descent.

A husbandman who sows the seeds of his heart in the garden of feeling, Where they bring forth yield To sustain those that garner. [...] And you, O Poets, Life of this life:

You have conquered the ages Despite their tyranny, Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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53 the formation of gibran’s romantic world-view And gained for you a laurel crown In the face of delusion’s thorns.

You are sovereign over hearts, And your kingdom is without end. (“The Poet” 56) It is difficult to deny that Gibran’s understanding of the poet’\ s calling is largely in agreement with the ideas of the Western Romantics. In Shelley’s view, poets see clearly not only the present, but also the future in the present. The same definition of the poet can be found in\ Gibran’s words: “That which alone I do today shall be proclaimed before the people in days to come. And what I now say with one tongue, tomorrow\ will say with many.” 57 The theme of the poet continues without significant changes throughout\ Gibran’s works. Sometimes the image of the poet takes on cosmic dimen\ - sions and the microcosm of the self becomes proportioned to the cosmos and harmonised to it. In the poem Night the poet writes of himself: I too am a night, vast and calm, yet fettered and rebellious.

There is no beginning to my darkness and no end to my depths ... 58 The poet does not set out as an artisan, working with the medieval yards\ tick and the ordinary tools of his trade (the lafz and the ma¡na, the word and the poetic motif), but rather as poetry itself in the flesh. There is\ no need to separate the poet’s works from the person himself, or to distingui\ sh the form and content in his poetry: Poetry is not an opinion expressed. It is a song that rises from a bleed\ ing wound or a smiling mouth. 59 A poet is a dethroned king Yet here the poet’s greatness is the greatness of the fallen angel, th\ at of the sovereign stripped of power. The origins of these images in the Satanism of Romantic poetry are hardly characteristic of the traditional concept of creativity in classical Arabic literature. Poetry is wisdom that enchants the heart.

Wisdom is poetry that sings in the mind.

A great singer is he who sings our silences. (“Sand and Foam” 60) These and other utterances highlight the special attribute of poetry as \ a mediatrix between two worlds – the secret and the evident, the ineffa\ ble and the commonplace. If the influence of Emerson’s Transcendentalist philosophy led Gibran to seek a divine origin in the poet, then thanks to Walt Whitman he learned also to see in the poet an earthly person who reflects upon the good o\ f humanity and strives for its future. Maurice Mendelson remarks that, for Whitman, the poet “is not only a composer of verse but also a prophet\ , Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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54 kahlil gibran paving the ways to the future”. 61 Whitman himself speaks of this more than once in his works, in particular in his “Song of Myself”: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume ... 62 It is true that for Gibran the poet remains primarily the high priest of\ beauty and truth (see below), but it is the poet, in his view, who is chosen to give people a guiding thread in everyday life and to maintain the ide\ al of harmonious existence. In his prose poem “A Poet’s Voice” 63 he writes: Strength sows within the depths of my heart and I harvest and gather ears of corn and give it in sheaves to the hungry.

The spirit revives this small vine and I press its grapes and give the thirsty to drink.

Heaven fills this lamp with oil and I kindle it and place it by the wi\ ndow of my house for those that pass by night. 64 However, the poet’s life only becomes meaningful when he feels himself un - derstood, loved and valued. “The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it”, 65 wrote Whitman in his preface to Leaves of Grass in 1855. He also expresses this in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”: I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of myself, Rejecting none, permitting all. 66 Gibran shows a view in common with Whitman in the following: Would that I were a well, dry and parched, and men throwing stones into me; For this were better and easier to be borne than to be a spring of living water When men pass by and will not drink.

Would that I were a reed trodden underfoot, For that were better than to be a lyre of silvery strings In a house whose lord has no fingers And whose children are deaf. “My soul is heavy laden with its fruits” 67 One may also agree with the American scholar Joseph Ghougassian, who found a consonance between the views of Gibran and William Blake as regards the mission of the poet: “The poet – considered Blake and Gibran – is a man who ... has a messianic mission in leading the people back\ to Truth.” 68 For Gibran the theme of the poet is indissolubly related to the feeling of loneliness. He repeatedly comments on the contrast between the poet and the reality that surrounds him. In his play Sulban he writes: “The artist Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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55 the formation of gibran’s romantic world-view – I mean a creative person who makes new forms for the expression of \ his thoughts and feelings – is always a stranger to his family and friend\ s, a stranger in his homeland and generally a stranger in this world.” 69 The same idea is also clearly sketched in his prose poem “The poet’s death is his life”. 70 A young and talented poet lives alone in a pitiful hovel, dying of hunger, for, as he says, “men have rejected me and cast me into the corners of forgetfulness”. The ages passed, and the people of that city remained in the stupor of i\ gnor - ance and folly. When they awoke therefrom and their eyes beheld the dawn of knowledge, they set up in the centre of the town a great statue of the p\ oet, and at an appointed time each year they held a festival in his honour. How foolish are men!

In Gibran the theme of the poet is always accompanied by a disclosure of the author’s ethical and moral principles and his views on the wor\ ld, humanity and society. To a large extent these views overlap with the views and convictions of the Romantics. The theme of love and beauty, which occupies an important place in A Tear and a Smile (for example, in the poems “The Life of Love”, “Before the Throne of Beauty”, “The Queen of Fantasy”, “Secrets of the Heart” and “Song of Beauty”), is closely connected to the theme of the poet,\ and the two complement each other. The ideal of beauty and humaneness was always also the ideal of the Romantic artist. The English Romantic poet John Keats (1795–1821) s\ aid in his “Ode to a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 71 For the Romantics, art and beauty are synonyms. Art is counterposed to evil, deception and baseness. Shelley writes of this in his “Hymn to Apollo”: The sunbeams are my shafts, with which I kill Deceit, that loves the night and fears the day; All men who do or even imagine ill Fly me, and from the glory of my ray Good minds and open actions take new might, Until diminished by the reign of Night.

[...] I am the eye with which the Universe Beholds itself, and knows it is divine; All harmony of instrument or verse, All prophecy, all medicine, is mine. 72 In contradistinction to the Enlighteners, the Romantic poet links reason with intuition and feeling, that is, he copes with the world “artisti\ cally”, by means of inspiration, and breaks away from the commonplace outward appearance of existence, beneath which beauty hides. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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56 kahlil gibran Like the English Romantics, Gibran considered beauty as something general and ideal; like nature, so man is also suffused with beauty. Beauty is not the privilege of the noble or the wealthy, but “the sacred property of all humanity”. In “Song of Beauty” he writes: I am the abode of happiness And the source of joy.

I am the beginning of repose.

[...] I am the poet’s imagination And the artist’s guide.

I am teacher to the music- maker.

I am the glance in the eye of a child Beheld by a tender mother.

[...] I am a Truth, O people, yea, a Truth. 73 The poem “Beauty” is also devoted to this idea:

O you, who perish in the night of contradictions and drown in the depths\ of conjecture! For in beauty is truth, which denounces suspicion, drives aw\ ay doubt and shines with a light that protects you from the darkness of unt\ ruth. 74 For Gibran beauty is the kernel, the essence of living, a high and etern\ al truth. He considers nature to be the embodiment and symbol of beauty:

“Beauty is all of nature”. The appreciation of beauty is as natura\ l as is the charm of nature. “Watch for the awakening of spring and the breaking of the morning, for beauty is the destiny of those who watch! Listen for th\ e song of birds, the rustle of branches and the murmur of streams, for bea\ uty is the portion of those who listen.” 75 Beauty is inseparable from the moral understandings of love and kindness: “Dedicate your body, like a temple, to beauty and dedicate your heart, like the altar, to love, for beauty is the worshippers’ reward.” 76 The perception of beauty elevates and ennobles the man and brings him to goodness and unselfishness. For the Romantics, love and beauty are that light of spirituality that il - luminates the heart and imagination of the poet. Emerson writes that the poet is an Aeolian harp that “trembles to the cosmic breath”, 77 that gives things their names and acts as beauty’s representative. People who are dis- tracted by everyday concerns frequently pass beauty by. The task of the poet is to halt their attention in front of it, for it is the prototype of tr\ uth (“The Queen of Fantasy”). 78 Accordingly, beauty is allotted a high position in the system of spiritual values. A further aspect of the theme of the poet in Gibran’s poetry is the exhortation of the Romantic self on Earth, its purpose in life and belie\ f in it. Ivan Fyodorovich Volkov writes: “It was Romanticism that opened for literature the self as such – intrinsic in value not only in the \ sense of the uniqueness of its individual characteristics, but also in the profou\ nd Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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57 the formation of gibran’s romantic world-view content of his character, and this brought art considerably closer to real human life.” 79 Gibran makes reference to the self with its Romantic understanding of the world in various prose poems, among them these from A Tear and a Smile: “The City of the Past”, “The Blind Force”, “Under the Sun”, “Song of Happiness” and “The Hymn of Man”. In “The Blind Force” the elements of nature break free and descend on mankind, which is helpless in the face of it, wantonly destroying everyt\ hing man had made with his own hands.

And so it was, the while the grieving spirit looked on from afar, sorrowing and reflecting. It pondered upon the limited night of men before unseen forces, and sorrowed with the fleeing victims of fire and ruin. [...] Yet did I find among these wrongs and misfortunes the divinity of man s\ tand - ing upright as a giant mocking earth’s foolishness and the anger of t\ he elements.

And ... it sang a hymn of immortality, saying: “Let the Earth then take what is to it; for I am without end.” 80 The poet proudly acknowledges the strength of man, the invincible streng\ th of his spirit that defies all the elements. This resonates with exampl\ es from Blake, Shelley and Whitman, such as this extract from Whitman’s “S\ ong of Myself”: This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look’d at the crowded heav\ en, And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?

And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond. 81 In the prose poem “Under the Sun” 82 Gibran takes for an epigraph the biblical saying “all is vanity”. The words of King Solomon, “I \ have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit” 83 seem to him to be “born of weakness and despair”, for life has a purpose, while impassivity is akin to indifference. But people un- derstand beauty in the beautiful, wisdom in the wise and virtue in the j\ ust, and the poet considers that Solomon should repent of his efforts to depr\ ive people of belief in their own power. The Romantic belief that all in nature is in steady forward progress towards truth and beauty is expressed in the argument between the lyrica\ l subject of the poem and the wise man of the Bible: Now it is known to you that life is not as a vexation of spirit, nor tha\ t all under the sun is in vain; but rather that all things were and are ever marching towards truth.

[...] Well do you know that the spirit is going toward the light in face of the obstacles of life ... 84 Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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58 kahlil gibran The forward movement of man is a path of unending learning, struggles and victories. And this requires that man overcome his past experience, which in Gibran is symbolised by the remains of a ruined city: “The City of the Past”. In this city the poet sees places of work sitting like great giants beneath the wings of slumber. And sanc- tuaries of words around which hovered souls crying out in despair – and singing in hope. I beheld temples of religion set up by faith and destroyed by d\ oubting, ... meeting- places of knowledge illumined by wisdom and darkened by folly.The sight of the ruined city brings the poet to despair, but Life tells him he must depart and look instead for the City of the Future: Come, for only \ the coward tarries, and it is folly to look back on the City of the Past. 85 The image of man stubbornly moving forward towards unending know - ledge and to the “City of the Future” and the “Society of the Future”, and the theme of his eternal striving for physical and moral perfection, acc\ ord with the poetry of the Western Romantics, in particular of Blake and Whitman. Blake’s “The Everlasting Gospel” includes these lines: God wants not Man to humble himself: [...] If thou humblest thyself, thou humblest me; Thou also dwell’st in eternity.

Thou art a Man, God is no more, Thy own humanity learn to adore ... 86 The same proud idea of the essence of Man can be found in Whitman: Long I was hugg’d close – long and long.

Immense have been the preparations for me, Faithful and friendly the arms that have help’d me.

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen, For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, They sent influences to look after what was to hold me. 87 In speaking about this trait in Romanticism, Oleg Rossianov remarks that\ seeing man as the crown of creation and art and literature as the highes\ t form of activity, the Romantics divined and affirmed the participation of the self and\ of literature in the great macrocosm and the small creative universe –\ and in the universe of the entire soul of man and of very being. It was the aesthet\ ic experi- ence of this co- belonging and co- involvement in society that was the source of the particular intensity of the Romantic perception of the world. 88 This statement may be fairly applied to the work of all Romantics, and t\ o Gibran in particular. His “Hymn of Man” opens and closes with the lines: I was, And I am. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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59 the formation of gibran’s romantic world-view So shall I be to the end of time, For I am without end. 89 The notion of the value of human existence – in unending striving “forward and upward” – is constant in Gibran’s work. Even ma\ ny years later, in his book Sand and Foam (1926), it can be found in the form of aphorisms: The significance of man is not in what he attains, but rather in what \ he longs to attain. 90 Humanity is a river of light running from ex- eternity to eternity. 91 In his poem “Gods” Whitman names Man as God directly: Thou, thou, the Ideal Man, Fair, able, beautiful, content, and loving, Complete in body and dilate in spirit, Be thou my God. 92 For Gibran also, Man is the “cornerstone of creation”, despite the\ tragic loneliness and misunderstanding he constantly feels. His lyrical hero pa\ s - sionately loves people, grieves over their fates and feels himself joine\ d to them by blood. In My Birthday: “I have loved all people – much I have loved them. In my sight people are of three kinds. One curses life; one blesse\ s it; one observes it. I have loved the first for his despair; the secon\ d for his tolerance; the third for his understanding.” 93 A sincere hymn of love for mankind can also be found in several pieces i\ n his later book The Forerunner (1920):

My friends and my neighbours and you who daily pass my gate, I would spe\ ak to you in your sleep ...

I love the one among you as though he were all, and all as if you were one.

And in the spring of my heart I sang in your gardens, and in the summer \ of my heart I watched at your threshing- floors. Yea, I love you all, the giant and the pygmy, the leper and the anointed, and him who gropes in the dark even as him who dances his days upon the moun\ tains. “The Last Watch” 94 All Romantics are united in the struggle for the violated dignity of the human, for his spiritual and social freedom. “As if organically, Blake’s entire work is permeated by the tragic theme of the physical and spiritual en - slavement of the person”, 95 writes N.Ya. D’yakonova. The same may be said of Shelley, although there are exceptions, such as his poem Prometheus Unbound, the principal theme of which is protest, defying all the dark forces that seek to belittle the free human spirit that will not be subordinate\ d. The Romantics saw the future as a society of free, happy people with equal rights. This is a characteristic and enduring theme in their poetr\ y.

One gains the impression that Gibran is in agreement with their poetry, Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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60 kahlil gibran and in particular with Whitman’s “The Song of the Broadaxe”. In the great city of the future “where the slave ceases and the master of slaves c\ eases”, women have equal rights to men; those who are active in politics are the servants of the people. This is the city of “the faithfulest friends”. Here a world of natural citizens prevails, “where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority”. In his utopia “A Glimps\ e into the Future” 96 Gibran also depicts an ideal world where equality, brotherhood, friendship and justice prevail; a society in which man attains his digni\ ty. He has been “lifted above smallness and raised above little things”. \ A similar happy future for mankind appears in Shelley’s poem “Queen Mab”.\ This golden age of a happy, free and harmoniously developed state of man is also described by other Romantics. There is not one work by Gibran that is not also a hymn to nature. In his approach to nature Gibran appears as an innovator. Nature does not serve in his works as a mere background but rather is invested with a persona \ of its own, as if to see, hear and comprehend all things by itself. The the\ me of nature is one of the fundamental elements in A Tear and a Smile. The collection includes a cycle of songs about nature – the song of the w\ ind, of the wave, of the rain, of the flower and of the seasons – in which \ the phe- nomenon of nature becomes animated and speaks. The wave sings a song: I and the shore are lovers:

the wind unites us and separates us.

I come from beyond the twilight to merge the silver of my foam with the gold of its sand; and I cool its burning heart with my moisture.

Comes the ebb and I embrace my love; It flows, and I am fallen at his feet.

“Song of the\ Wave” 97 The song is echoed by the torrents of rain: I am the silver threads The gods cast down from the heights, And Nature takes me to adorn the valleys.

I am the precious pearls Scattered from Astarte’s crown, And the daughter of morning stole me to beautify the fields.

I weep and the hillocks smile; I am abased and the flowers are lifted.

I rise from the lake’s heart And glide upon wings of air Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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61 the formation of gibran’s romantic world-view Until I am a verdant garden.

Thereon I descend And kiss the lips of its flowers And embrace its boughs.

In the stillness, with my gentle fingers, I tap upon window panes:

The sound thereof is a song known to feeling spirits.

I am the sigh of the ocean And heaven’s tear And the smile of the field. (“Song of the Rain” 98) For Gibran nature is a sanctuary for lovers, a world of desired being, where the treasure house of the human spirit may be disclosed. Close to nature, man feels a kinship or oneness with it and finds gratificati\ on for his restless and lonely soul, and nature resonates to his interior world:

One heavy day I ran away from the grim face of society and the dizzying cla- mour of the city and directed my weary steps to the spacious valley. I pursued the beckoning course of the rivulet and the musical sounds of the birds,\ until I reached a lonely spot where the flowing branches of the trees prevente\ d the sun from touching the earth. I stood there, and it was entertaining to my so\ ul – my thirsty soul who had seen naught but the mirage of life instead if its s\ weetness.

“Before the Throne of Beauty” 99 For Gibran the sky is the “source of spiritual peace”, and all nat\ ure is the “haven of rest and tranquillity”. Here he is close to Emerson. “\ Where do we find ourselves?”, asks the American poet in his essay “Experi\ ence”, and answers: “Nature causes each man’s peculiarity to abound”. 100 Gibran does not oppose “high nature to miserable humanity”, but ra\ ther sings the idea of a harmonious union of nature and man. The Arab scholar\ Ashtar writes: “In their works they [Gibran and Rihani] ... brought u\ s closer to nature, to the point of merging with it.” 101 Gibran strove, as it were, to plunge into the secret of nature and to me\ rge with it in a single impulse. Like many Romantics he was a pantheist and considered man to be an organic part of nature; nature was the pledge fo\ r the eternal life of the spirit. Together with Emerson, Shelley and Coleridge, he highlights the kinship of the rule of nature and that of mankind and their common basis. The closeness and indivisibility of the ideas of “natur\ e” and “man” is particularly revealed in Gibran’s poem “O Earth”\ : Who are you, O Earth, and what are you?

You are “I”, O Earth!

You are my sight and my discernment.

You are my knowledge and dream.

You are my hunger and my thirst. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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62 kahlil gibran You are my sorrow and my joy.

You are my inadvertence and my wakefulness.

You are the beauty that lives in my eyes, the longing in my heart, the everlasting life in my soul.

You are “I”, O Earth.

Had it not been for my being, you would not have been. 102 A similar understanding of the unity of nature and human spirit is inher\ - ent in the English Romantics. Irina Neupokoeva writes: “The pantheistic world perception which is characteristic of all Shelley’s work is lin\ ked to the poet’s striving to overcome the rupture between philosophical mate - rialism and idealistic dialectics. It is from pantheism that Shelley’\ s attempt to animate matter and to see enclosed in it some kind of special ‘living’, ‘acting’ force arises”. 103 In his poem “Song of Prosperine” Shelley emphasises the kinship of\ the dominion of nature and that of man with their common basis – Mother Earth: Sacred Goddess, Mother Earth, Thou from whose immortal bosom Gods and men and beasts have birth, Leaf and blade, and bud and blossom ... 104 A similar idea appears in Coleridge’s “Hymn to the Earth”: Earth! thou mother of numberless children, the nurse and the mother, Hail! O Goddess, thrice hail! Blest be thou! and, blessing, I hymn thee!\ 105 For Whitman, man also merges with nature and plunges into its secrets: We are Nature – long have we been absent, but now we return; We become plants, leaves, foliage, roots, bark; We are bedded in the ground – we are rocks; We are oaks – we grow in the openings side by side...

“We two – how long we were fooled” 106 Gibran’s poem “O Wind” 107 is permeated with belief in the inevitability and necessity of the unceasing renewal of life: Now singing and rejoicing, now weeping and lamenting.

We hear, but behold you not; we feel your presence yet do not see you.

You were as a sea of love submerging our spirits, yet not drowning us ...\ You bear the breath of illness from city streets, and from the heights th\ e spirit of a flower; ...

Here do you tarry; there do you hasten. Thither you run, but you abide not. ... Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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63 the formation of gibran’s romantic world-view Are you fickle as the ages ...?

You pass in anger across deserts and trample underfoot the caravans and bury them in graves of sand. ...

You fall upon the seas in assault and disturb the peace of their depths .\ .. 108 “O Wind”, in its mood, thematic content and even to a degree its compo- sitional form, is reminiscent of the well- known “Ode to the West Wind” 109 by Shelley, in which the poet emphasises the dialectic of destruction and creation. For both poets the symbol of this is the wind: O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being, Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence- stricken multitudes: O thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill (Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear! The idea of the unending and incessant renewal of life in nature can als\ o be seen in “The Life of Love”, a prose poem in which Gibran describes the changes of the seasons and likens them to the poet’s love. Spring mar\ ks the flowering of love, summer the ripeness of nature and the maturing of l\ ove, and autumn the presentiment of silence and the end of happiness: ... for the leaves of the trees are become yellow ...

... for the birds have taken flight to the seashore ...

... for the brooks have ceased their flowing and the springs are no mo\ re, for the tears of their joy are dried up; and the hillocks have cast aside their fine garments.

... For nature is overcome by sleep ... 110 Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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64 kahlil gibran The arrival of winter and the spectacle of nature cheerless saddens the \ heart of the poet and he addresses his beloved with the words: Ah, my beloved one, how deep is the ocean of sleep! How distant the morning ... in this night! 111 The sad tone of this work distinguishes it from Shelley’s “Dirge f\ or the Year”; it lacks the feeling of bright hope that runs through the latte\ r: January gray is here, Like a sexton by her grave; February bears the bier, March with grief doth howl and rave, And April weeps – but, O ye Hours!

Follow with May’s fairest flowers. 112 While singing the beauty and greatness of nature, the Romantics were the first to touch on the negative role of urbanism and bourgeois civi\ lisa- tion in human life. Dmitry Urnov writes: “The Romantics were the first to discern, and highly perspicaciously, the disfigurement of the rapidly growing cities and the cost of bourgeois progress. Everything that has come to be a problem in the contemporary era was first pointed out by \ the Romantics.” 113 Of course these characteristics appeared uniquely and individually for each Romantic poet or writer. If Shelley and Byron ignored the patriarchal idyll, then for Wordsworth Romanticism was rural peace and quiet, a par - ticularly joyful and quiet love of nature and an unhurried reflection \ on it.

“Nobody from among his contemporaries ... advocated so insistently and passionately ... that poetical union with nature that elevates and ennob\ les the soul.” 114 Wordsworth contrasted the capitalistic and industrialising world to the peasants with their naturalness and morals. He wrote of how to ennoble the soul in a letter to John Wilson in 1802: “by stripping our hearts naked and looking out of ourselves to men who lead the simplest lives and most\ according to nature, who have never known the false refinements, waywa\ rd and artificial desires, false criticisms, effeminate habits of thinkin\ g and feeling, or who, having known these things, have outgrown them”. 115 As a matter of fact, the aesthetic of city life was alien to all Romanti\ cs, and they contrasted it with the lives of simple people close to nature. Gibr\ an’s anti- urbanism also carries an expression of characteristically Romantic dis- satisfaction with the changes in human life that accompanied industrial \ de- velopment. Even in his early works Gibran hints at the idea of returning to nature. For example, in the story “Marta al- Baniyah” discussed above, the city represents the source of evil temptation and the false values of cu\ lture and civilisation, opposed to which is the village, embodying the natural\ ness of being: Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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65 the formation of gibran’s romantic world-view Those of us who have spent the greater part of our existence in crowded \ cities know little of the life of the inhabitants of the villages and hamlets t\ ucked away in Lebanon. We are carried along on the current of modern civilisation. We have forgotten – or so we tell ourselves – the philosophy of that \ beautiful and simple life of purity and spiritual cleanliness. If we turned and looked\ we would see it smiling in the spring; drowsing with the summer sun; harvesting i\ n the autumn, and in the winter at rest; like our mother Nature in all her moo\ ds. We are richer in material wealth than those villagers; but their spirit is \ a nobler spirit than ours. We sow much but reap nothing. But what they sow they also reap.

We are the slaves of our appetites; they, the children of their contentment. We drink the cup of life, a liquid clouded with bitterness, despair, fear, weariness.

They drink of it clear. 116 Other works devoted to this theme include “History and the Nation”, “Lament of the Field” and “The Abode of Happiness”. In the allegori - cal prose poem “History and the Nation” 117 the incursions of Western civilisation in the East are associated with the ruin of nature and mise\ ry for the labourers. A shepherdess (a metaphor for one of the Eastern countri\ es) addresses History, an old wandering man who represents progress in the Western sense: “What do you wish of me, History?” Then she pointed to her sheep.\ “This is the remnant of a healthy flock that once filled this valley. This is all that your covetousness has left me. Have you come now to sate your greed on that? \ These plains that were once so fertile have been trodden to barren dust by you\ r tram- pling feet. My cattle that once grazed upon flowers and produced rich \ milk, now gnaw thistles that leave them gaunt and dry.” 118 In A Tear and a Smile nature is almost always soft, tender and kind to ordinary people, who in turn love her and live in harmony with her. For Gibran nature symbolises the wholeness of the world, the meaning of life\ and the path to beauty, love and physical and moral perfection. In this his work resonates with that of the Western Romantics. We have already noted that individual depictions of nature in A Tear and a Smile are Romantic, with shades of Sentimentalism. Nevertheless, certain landscape sketches in the book reveal accuracy and rigour of vis\ ion.

A similar co- existence of elements from different methods was also encoun - tered in considering other themes in the collection. The works included in A Tear and a Smile reveal the closeness of the Sentimentalist and Romantic principles in Gibran’s work, along with t\ he Romantic world outlook of the writer. An analysis of the book reveals his familiarity with the works of English and American Romantics, which is reflected in both the style and subject matter of his works. The glori\ fication of mankind, the exaltation and pantheistic view of nature, the admiratio\ n of beauty and the recognition of the special function of the poet and his r\ ole in society are all typical Romantic themes. There is, however, no distinct expression of social orientation; there is no passionate call to arms to\ change Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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66 kahlil gibran the social ills that are described, or the radical resolution of them, t\ hat is so characteristic of the English Romantics. Gibran, as a true Arab writer, is mostly concerned with spiritual problems.

Romanticism as the fundamental method in Gibran’s work Towards the end of the 1920s and in the early part of the 1930s, Romanti- cism was established as the principal method in Gibran’s work. This p\ hase of his creative life is represented in his book al-¡Awasif (The Tempests, 1920).

Two more of his works from this period, The Madman (1918) and The Fore- runner (1920), both written in English, are similar in subject matter and style to the first; we have nevertheless selected The Tempests because it most clearly demonstrates the signs of Romanticism, and because it became the\ best- known of the three among Arab readers. Almost all the pieces in this collection are adorned with Romantic sen- timents: motifs of rebellion, disdain for the world, a thirst for solitu\ de, a deep disappointment in the life of civilised society, a passionate hunger for nature, the rejection of the Church and its rites, a proud challenge to \ God and so on. The book also contains a variety of genres – essays, stori\ es and prose poems – in which some items are more extended in length. The id\ eas in this collection and the motifs of most of its works make it clear tha\ t not only did Gibran know the works of the English Romantics well but that he was also imbued with their ideas and attitudes. Most representative of the collection as a whole is the story “The Storm”, 119 whose basis is the characteristically Romantic problem of the re- lationship between the self and society, the conflict of the freedom- loving hero with the surrounding world that he finds unsatisfactory. “At the centre of Romantic art is the lonely individual who finds himself in confli\ ct with his environment” (A. Anikst); 120 “the Romantic hero is always alone” (B.

Suchkov). 121 The intrinsic value of the self is what sets Romanticism apart from other world- views. This distinction is confirmed by other scholars, in particular A. Izergina: “This was the first artistic movement of the nine - teenth century in which the creative individual appeared distinctly as t\ he subject. In this sense Romanticism contradicts not only Classicism but a\ lso every preceding Western European movement. This is the first feature of Romanticism, its authentic and principal innovation.” 122 Furthermore, “in addressing the problem of the self and society the Romantics shif\ ted the emphasis onto the first component of this correlation, believing t\ hat the disclosure and affirmation of the human self and its perfection in\ all aspects will lead ultimately to the strengthening of the highest social \ and civic ideals.” 123 It should be noted that in “The Storm” and a number of other works, Gibran’s Romantic hero appears as a dreamer who has withdrawn into his Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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67 romanticism as gibran’s fundamental method interior world, and not as a fighter who dedicates himself to great de\ eds.

His individualism does not take the form of rebellion; secluded in digni\ fied solitude, he opposes reality.The story is extended in length, which affects its form: the author himself divides it into small chapters. Only one image is given: that of\ Yusuf al- Fakhri, a rejectionist who has run away from people, the city and civili\ sa - tion to the bosom of wild nature. This immediately summons analogies with the character images of Romantic heroes who, rejecting the reality that \ sur - rounds them, strive to escape from it. These would include Byron’s Childe Harold and characters created by Victor Hugo, wrenched and outcast from their homeland, those heroes of Chateaubriand that cannot find their p\ lace in life, and indeed those of Shelley, thrown into worlds that are foreign to them. Such heroes either remain tragically lonely dreamers, or else thei\ r individualism takes the form of rebelliousness. The latter is particularly characteristic of Byron’s heroes: He did not follow what they all pursued, With hope still baffled, still to be renew’d; Nor shadowy honour, nor substantial gain, Nor beauty’s preference, and the rival’s pain:

Around him some mysterious circle thrown Repell’d approach, and showed him still alone... (“Lara” 124) The main hero in “The Storm” rejects the reality around him, the society and the people and their morals: “In the thirtieth year of his life Yusuf al- Fakhri abandoned the world and all that is in it to live as a silent, as\ cetic hermit in that solitary cell at the edge of the Qadisha Valley on the north side of Mount Lebanon.” 125 Yusuf is entirely unknown to his neighbours, who do not know who he is, where he is from or why he lives in seclusion. His life is enveloped in mys- teries and riddles as befits a Romantic hero. One inclement, rainy aut\ umn day the narrator succeeds in meeting Yusuf. Despite the evident resistance and lack of hospitality on the part of Yusuf, the narrator succeeds in enter - ing his hovel. In his first sentences the hermit convinces his guest t\ o follow his example: “Now if you believe in the truth of what you say, abandon men with their corrupt customs and their worthless laws. Live in a remote pl\ ace and follow no law but the law of earth and sky!” 126 Yusuf then expresses his deep disappointment in people and their lives, and launches into a diatribe against them: “I fled from men because my char - acter was not compatible with their characters, my dreams did not agree \ with their dreams. I abandoned men because I found myself a wheel turning to the right among many wheels turning to the left.” 127 He left the city, the sight of which appeared to him hopeless and monstrous: “I left the city because I found it a diseased tree, ancient and strong, with roots deep in the dar\ kness of the earth and branches rising beyond the clouds, but whose flowers \ were ambition, evil and crime, whose fruits were care, affliction and woe.”\ 128 Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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68 kahlil gibran These words of Yusuf express practically the entire substance of the anti- urbanist theory of the Romantics. Yusuf seeks solitude not out of as - ceticism, not in service to God or by way of prayer. Rather, he is repulsed by a human society dominated by hypocrisy, sanctimony and ignorance, where arrogant rich men and politicians “play games with the hopes of natio\ ns and leave gold dust in their eyes and fill their ears with the echoes of w\ ords”, and where the clergy “exhorted men with counsels that they themselves did not follow, asking others what they did not expect of themselves”. He has therefore chosen to leave “that great and awful palace called civilis\ ation, that building with its fine architecture standing upon a hill of human\ skulls”. In his striving to escape to nature, to be far from people, in whose sou\ ls he sees only the darkest features, Gibran’s Romantic hero is close to\ the heroes of Byron – Lara, the Corsair and especially Childe Harold, who\ said: To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell, To slowly trace the forest shady scene, Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell, And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been; To climb the trackless mountain all unseen, With the wild flock that never needs a fold; Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean, This is not solitude; ’tis but to hold Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unroll’d. “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage” 129 It is true that the English poet was expressing another transitional per\ iod, in which the dream of a future era of freedom and equality, which had been nurtured by the best minds of humanity, was discarded for a long time to come. Immense was the heat of Byronic disappointment in that age, in the\ impressions and experiences of being, as the poet writes: Kingdoms and empires in my little day I have outlived, and yet I am not old; And when I look on this, the petty spray Of my own years of trouble, which have rolled Like a wild bay of breakers, melts away.

“Epistle to Augusta” 130 This explains his rejection of the social milieu that was his birthright\ ; hence also the scepticism of his Romantic heroes and his turning to nature: Fortune! take back these cultured lands, Take back this name of splendid sound!

I hate the touch of servile hands, I hate the slaves that cringe around.

Place me among the rocks I love, Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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69 romanticism as gibran’s fundamental method Which sound to Ocean’s wildest roar; I ask but this – again to rove Through scenes my youth hath known before.“I would I were a careless child” 131 These traits are absent from Gibran. His Romantic hero goes to nature primarily because that is where he finds “a life of spirit and thou\ ght, of heart, of heart and body”, where his soul is revealed with its concea\ led depths; and from this comes knowledge of the world, for that is equiva - lent to self- knowledge. Advocacy of a “life of the spirit” was a typical mark of Transcendentalism. Under the rule of nature Yusuf gives himself up to wakefulness, takes pleasure in reflection and undergoes a spiritual aw\ aken- ing. Yusuf considers the achievements of civilisation to be wholly useless, and calls Western progress yet another “manifestation of empty delusion”.

He asks, “What are these inventions and discoveries except vices by w\ hich the mind distracts itself in moments of boredom and discontent?” 132 We can see that none of the European Romantics opposes the indus - trial achievements of the contemporary world. Even Wordsworth, who leaned towards the idyll of the patriarchal past, never spoke out direct\ ly against the technical progress of his time. And Gibran, unlike his hero,\ takes more realistic positions, closer to the people and their lives. He\ reasons as follows: “Yes, spiritual wakefulness is befitting to man – indeed, it is the goal of being – but is not civilisation, with its obscuriti\ es and am - biguities, one of the causes of spiritual awakening? I wonder how we are\ able to deny an existent thing when its very existence is evidence for t\ he truth of its right?” 133 This reflection indicates that the author is able to reconcile “spiritual awakening” with the acceptance of the achieve\ ments of civilisation. It is nevertheless interesting that Yusuf, while despising and rejecting progress and its achievements, does not deny certain of the benefits a\ nd pleasures that this progress brings. In his wretched hovel can be found \ good wine, fragrant coffee, aromatic cigarettes and delicious victuals. Despi\ te the insistent appeals to his visitor to “follow no law but the law of ear\ th and sky”, his way of life is far from ascetic. Undoubtedly “The Storm” is a Romantic work; the individualism of its hero expresses a rejection of the surrounding world and the denial of accepted norms. The particular relationship of Gibran to his Romantic hero should, however, be noted. Most importantly, the author does not himself intend to fully reject human society and does not express his ev\ ident antipathies to it, as do the Western European Romantics, especially Byron.

Gibran does not reconstruct the Byronic experience in its entirety, with its complete rupturing of the hero from society and his unending disillusion- ment with it. And in solving the problem of the self and society, the Arab writer steps back from the extremes of the subjectivist anthropocentrism\ of the Western European Romantics. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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70 kahlil gibran In comparing Gibran to the English Romantics, we frequently note that his Romantic pathos and the intensity of his feeling, hate and passion appea\ r in a somewhat softened form. One possible exception to this is Gibran’s anticlerical motifs, which appear in his works with great sharpness and emotional charge. In the story “Satan”, 134 which deals with the philosophical problem of the necessary and inevitable eternal coexistence and struggle of the two\ absolute principles of good and evil, the author’s criticism is direc\ ted sharply at the Christian Church. The story goes as follows: out in the fields one day the theologian and clergyman Samaan encounters a crea - ture lying naked, dying of wounds. It turns out to be Satan, who has just been beaten by the archangels. When Satan confesses to Samaan who he is, the latter recoils in revulsion, fearful of defiling himself by to\ uching an unclean spirit. But Satan reminds the clergyman that the prosperity and livelihood of the servants of the Church depend on the existence of an unclean force: As a clergyman, do you not realize that Satan’s existence alone has c\ reated his enemy, the Church? That ancient conflict is the secret hand which removes t\ he gold and silver from the faithful’s pocket and deposits it forever in\ to the pouch of the preacher and the missionary. How can you permit me to die here, when you know it will surely cause you to lose your prestige, your church, yo\ ur home and your livelihood? 135 Satan also opens the clergyman’s eyes to a further truth: that Satan and the force of a struggle against God are necessary to people, since t\ his struggle is that which arouses activity, enterprise and energy – in a word, everything that promotes the development of the material and spiritual l\ ife of the people.

In every city under the sun my name was the axis of the educational circle of religion, arts, and philosophy. Had it not been for me, no temples would have been built, no towers or palaces would have been erected. I am the coura\ ge that creates resolution in man. I am the source that provokes originality of \ thought.

I am the hand that moves man’s hands. 136 The devil goes on to assert that he is necessary “for the preservation of mankind”: “If I cease to exist, fear and enjoyment will be abolish\ ed from the world, and through their disappearance, desires and hopes will cease\ to exist in the human heart. Life will become empty and cold, like a harp w\ ith broken strings. 137 In the subtext of the story is the image of a God estranged from man, wh\ o exists in the form of an indisputable truth and eternal force that requires submission and obedience, and thereby imprisons the freedom- loving and creative spirit of man. All the English Romantics are permeated by this same idea. For them man himself is divine, the centre of the universe; a\ nd all his activity is directed towards the knowledge of the universe and i\ ts Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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71 romanticism as gibran’s fundamental method subjugation. Blake writes of this with particular strength and purpose in his “Everlasting Gospel”: Thou art a Man: God is no more:

Thy own Humanity learn to adore... 138 A.A. Elistratova suggests that “The subtext of his ‘Prophecy’ is the destiny of a humanity humbled, enslaved but yearning for freedom and happiness.” 139 A further observation can be made from this story. In “The Storm” Gibran sharply criticises the rites and ceremonies of the Church. For Gi\ bran the Church is a symbol of weakness in man: it appeared when the world seemed to humanity to be hostile and full of secrets, so that man himsel\ f felt vulnerable. Exploiting the ignorance of the people, the Church set itsel\ f up as mediator between them and the unknown forces of nature. Anticlerical - ism is a distinguishing feature of almost all émigré literature that developed under the influence of the ideas of the Enlightenment and Romanticism.

This characteristic forms the typological kinship of the Syro- American School with the Romantic schools of Western literature, and simultaneously demonstrates the point of contact that existed between them. Neupokoeva comments that Shelley described religion as “a code of absurd superstitions upheld everywhere by the ruling class for the purpo\ ses of maintaining their power”. 140 A similar attitude to religion can also be found in Gibran. Even in his early stories “John the Madman” and “\ Khalil the Heretic” the author angrily refutes the sanctimony and self- interest of religion. John, the hero of the first story, 141 is an honest and devout young man who discovers the greed and hypocrisy of the “servants of God”\ and their flouting of the sacred commandments when he allows his herd of calves accidentally to wander onto monastery land. He tries to explain t\ his to his parents, simple peasants, but they do not believe him and think t\ hat he has gone mad. The young man is put into confinement in the monaster\ y – thus do the clerics make short work of him. John cries out ferventl\ y: “You are numerous and I am alone. You may do unto me what you wish. The wolves prey upon the lamb in the darkness of the night, but the blood st\ ains remain upon the stones in the valley until the dawn comes, and the sun reveals the crime to all.” 142 The word “mad”, applied to John in the story mostly because of his “unusual” desires, can be understood in the \ sense of a synonym for independence from received norms of behaviour. “Khalil the Heretic” 143 continues the theme of “John the Madman”.

The hero, Khalil, is raised from an early age in a monastery. There he is mercilessly exploited, subjected to beating and made to go hungry. Gradu- ally, however, his awareness awakens and he begins to understand that the monks tell lies, that they do not believe in God, that they live by labour and are later made destitute. Once Khalil begins to berate those around him with the truth, he is thrown out of the monastery in the middle of winter, naked and hungry and doomed to certain death. By chance he is Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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72 kahlil gibran found by two poor women, Rachel and Miriam, a mother and daughter. In the village where they live, the priest and the shaykh have deprived the\ m of their human dignity. Khalil, who remains in the village, then makes an inflammatory speech in front of the inhabitants, calling on them to ri\ se up against the shaykh and the priest and to gain a new life for themselves.\ Do you realize that this land you are working like slaves was taken from\ your fathers when the law was written on the sharp edge of the sword? That th\ e monks deceived your ancestors and took all their fields and vineyards \ when the religious rules were written on the lips of the priests? Which man or wo\ man is not influenced by the lord of the fields to do according to the will\ of the priests? 144 The peasants rise up and drive the shaykh and the priest out of the vill\ age.

We have to assume that afterwards the land that had been taken away by th\ e clerics is returned to them, and that the peasants begin to live happily\ and free of oppression and violence. The Romantic ending of the story is lik\ e a hymn to justice and a call to rebellion and disobedience. In discussing the influence on Gibran of the English Romantics we have already mentioned that one of the Romantic motifs – the intensity of feeling, hate and passion – is subdued in Gibran; he is less radic\ al and less emotional. This does not apply, however, in the case of anticlericalism, which he expresses in his works with fullness and passion. This is no coinci - dence, since Gibran is a native of Lebanon, in which religious hostility held sway. The pressure exerted by the Christian Church on society was strong. Some stories and essays from the collection The Tempests (including “The Gravedigger”, “Slavery” and “The Captive Ruler”) would seem to contain the quintessence of the Romantic world- view. In some cases (for example “The Gravedigger”) their symbolism is complex. On the whole, the tone of these works is of desperation, hopelessness and sadness; they express\ one of the aspects of Gibran’s Romanticism – his conviction that man has the calling of a spiritual life and strives for moral perfection. This b\ rings him close to the Transcendentalists. Let us consider the brief story “The Gravedigger”. 145 The narrator describes how he walks at night along the “valley of life”, scattered with bones and skulls. On the bank of \ the “river of blood” he sees a terrible spectre that advises him to give up his \ literary pursuits and become a gravedigger. Then he would be able to rid “the few living of the corpses heaped about”, for they have been dead since th\ ey were born and there were none who would bury them. When asked how to dis- tinguish the living from the dead, the spectre replies: “Your illusioned eyes see the people quivering before the tempest of life and you believe them\ to be alive ... dead creatures who tremble with the storm and never walk\ with it.” 146 Therefore, the most necessary and useful occupation for those still alive is to be a gravedigger, to bury the “living dead” and in this way to purify the earth. There is, however, no concrete explanation in the story of what one should understand by the term “tempest of life”. One would assume \ that Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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73 romanticism as gibran’s fundamental method this is primarily spirituality and self- knowledge, rather than the gratification of base carnal interests when, in the opinion of the author, the primordial purpose of man – reaching union with God – is forgotten. It is no \ coinci- dence that the spectre repeats: “we genii are the only possessors of \ reality”.

The story expresses an aspect of Gibran’s Romanticism: his belief in \ the spiritual purpose of human life, for the life of man is the life of the \ spirit – the unending striving for perfection and awakening and the thirst for the new. The symbolism of the story is Romantic: life is an unending storm or struggle, in movement, an “obstacle race”. Calm, satisfaction a\ nd the absence of spiritual movement, on the other hand, are tantamount to deat\ h. The same deeply pessimistic attitude to the life of human society can be found in the essay “Slavery”, 147 in which the author fully denies the pos - sibility of free manifestation of the human self. This brief essay is a sharp criticism of slavery, which permeates all spheres of life and all interpersonal relations. The work thus begins: “Men are but slaves of life”. 148 Slavery ac- companies man from the moment of his birth, known for “seven thousand\ years”; it is “inherited from the fathers by the sons as they inhe\ rit the breath of life”. In the author’s view all people are slaves, regardless o\ f their social status, intellectual development or worldly position. Slavery prevails i\ n all countries: “from Babylon to Paris, from Nineveh to New York”. 149 By slavery Gibran understands the worship of God, idols, science or propert\ y; or an admiration for laws, traditions, force or power, or the following of the tastes of the masses: They fought and killed for it and called it “patriotism”. They sub\ mitted to its will and called it the “shadow of God on earth”. Then they burned \ their houses and razed their buildings at its will, and called it “fraternity” \ and “equality”.

They strove then and made every effort for it, calling it “wealth”\ and “trade”. 150 The entire work consists of a pessimistic monologue permeated with despair. Humanity, Gibran considers, has known only two true “sons of Liberty”, but “One died crucified, one died mad”. 151 Undoubtedly Gibran is referring here to Jesus Christ and Nietzsche. “And none other was born”, he continues. Dolinina believes that if by this “son of Liberty” Gibran does not\ mean himself, then he considers himself all the same to be his forerunne\ r. 152 These stories, and also the story “The Storm”, have led certain scholars, both Soviet and Arab, to speak of Gibran’s receptivity at this stage \ to the philosophy of Nietzsche. 153 The philosophy of Nietzsche exerted an influ- ence on many writers and thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twent\ ieth centuries, both in Europe and the East, for example, the great Indian po\ et and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938). 154 There is no doubt that Gibran was also influenced. To some degree Nietzsche’s conservative and Romantic views, as expressed in early essays such as “Morgenröte”\ (= “Day - break”), “Die fröhliche Wissenschaft” (“The Gay Science”) and “Jenseits von Gut und Böse”(“Beyond Good and Evil”), and his cult of\ a powerful self whose individualism overcomes the banality of bourgeois consciousness an\ d Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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74 kahlil gibran the Romantic idea of a “man of the future” who has left the presen\ t age with its vices and falsehood far behind, would have been close to his own outlook.

Gibran undoubtedly took on certain features of the German philosopher’\ s prophetic and messianic style. Nietzsche’s view on the Church and social institutions also turned out to be close to his own. Here we may draw on the research of Joseph Ghougassian: “From Nietzsche Gibran learned how to convey his ideas in a messianic overtone, while at the same time usin\ g a flammatory style for criticizing the organized religion and the social\ estab- lishment.” 155 A little later Ghougassian quotes the words of Gibran himself:

“His [Nietzsche’s] form [style] always was soothing to me. But I t\ hought his philosophy was terrible and all wrong. I was a worshipper of beauty –\ and beauty was to me the loveliness of things.” 156 However, S.F. Oduev comments that Nietzsche’s main characteristic is his advocacy of strength and the strong individual, who possesses the ri\ ght to exploit the weak and even to eradicate them for the sake of consolida\ t- ing his strength. 157 Nietzsche believed that war cleanses humanity of the impurity of weakness and doubt and leads to the triumph of strength and the preservation of nature. What is particularly alien in Nietzsche for the Eastern Romantics, however, is his contempt and hatred for the “crowd”, and the opposition of “the crowd” to the “selected individual”\ and “the masses” to the “Superman” that is typical of bourgeois individu\ alist con - sciousness. Also foreign to Gibran is the glorification of the strong \ individ- ual who stands mercilessly and triumphantly on the throat of his victim.\ If Gibran also allows himself animosity and cruelty, as in “The Gravedigger”, then this is only intended to challenge the inertness of his compatriots\ , their fatalism and their indifference to the vices of society. Indeed, on the whole certain of his works (“The Storm”, “The Gravedigger” and “Slavery”) have a mood of hopelessness and sadness. Even when he shows open contempt for people and their civilisation, one can feel a longing for people and an immense pity for them, which changes into a fathomless despair and an unbearable sorrow. Gibran passionately loves and pities mankind. In the individualism and strong- man of the author is concealed his pain and suffering for humanity and his thoughts on it. Overall, Gibran’s path was complex. Ultimately his form of rebellion \ had a specific character that differed from that of the Romantics in Western lit - erature. This difference is most evident in the less- than- complete splitting of the Romantic person from society, in his conceptions of the prophetic role of the poet in the Arab tradition, and in the philosophical thought of G\ ibran himself. It should be noted here that certain of his works (such as “Defeat”, “The Eye”, “The Ambitious Violet”, “The Captive Ruler” and “O Sons of my Mother”) as it were refute the idea that the theme of the hero’\ s complete break with society and the feeling of superiority over the crowd is not \ char - acteristic of Gibran. Certainly, the parable “The Eye” 158 can be interpreted as a hymn to Romantic rebellion, while “The Ambitious Violet” 159 glorifies self- sacrifice for the sake of self- perfection in order to become “like God”. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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75 the prophet: a new stage in gibran’s work A violet sees a rose, is astonished by its beauty and wants to become a \ rose herself. She addresses nature in a prayer, asking to be changed into a rose.

Nature replies to her with a word of caution: “You know not what you are seeking; you are unaware of the concealed disaster behind your blind amb\ i- tion. If you were a rose you would be sorry, and repentance would avail you but naught.” 160 However, the violet gets her way and becomes a rose. Later a storm blows up and the violet that has become a rose is destroyed and \ her petals are scattered through the mud. The other violets, which have surv\ ived the storm because they grow low to the ground, begin to reproach her in \ an arrogant and facetious manner. But the violet replies to them: “I shall die now, for my soul has attained its goal. I have finally extended my knowle\ dge to a world beyond the narrow cavern of my birth. This is the design of L\ ife ... This is the secret of Existence.” 161 One can detect notes in this story of a later neo- Romanticism and a Nietzschean enthusiasm.

The collection The Tempests is entirely devoid of the marks of Senti- mentalism. Gibran’s work, influenced by the Western Romantics, has finally taken on the garb of the Romantic method. And this can be seen not so much in the individual motifs and themes as in the overall rebel - lious, protesting spirit of the collection as a whole. In terms of Roman\ ti - cism it presents a problem of the relationship of the individual to society, re- evaluates the role of civilisation, glorifies the individual and harsh\ ly criti - cises the Christian Church and its rites. While underlining the closenes\ s of Gibran’s Romantic hero to those of Western Romantics, we should point out their areas of difference: the degree of rebelliousness and rejectio\ n in Gibran’s heroes comes over in a far more subdued manner, as though clad in the dress of pacification. His Romantic hero is more lyrical and in\ clines towards abstracts. The link between the Romanticism of The Tempests and the traditions of classical Arabic literature can also be traced in such\ ele - ments as complex symbolism, an exalted style, the richness of metaphor a\ nd the presence of didactic elements. The Prophet : a new stage in Gibran’s work From among Gibran’s later works we have selected his book The Prophet (al- Nabi), because this work signifies the final stage in the development o\ f his creative method. Its theme is one of the most widespread in world li\ tera - ture. A prophet is frequently understood to be someone with a high calli\ ng, a poet or tribune who proclaims elevated and eternal truths. One may point here to John Milton and Blake in English literature, Ernest Renan in French, and Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov in Russian. Genea - logically speaking, the motif derives from the Old Testament legends of the prophets and from the Koranic account of the Prophet Muhammad. The Prophet was written in English and published in New York in 1923. Not until after Gibran’s death was it translated into Arabic, b\ y the Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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76 kahlil gibran Archimandrite of Damascus, Antonius Bashir. In the Preface to his transla- tion Bashir writes: If we confined ourselves to merely the external appearance of religion\ , then one could call Gibran an atheist, and in that case I would be mistaken in tr\ anslating this book into Arabic. But this translator is not an atheist, and he exa\ mines the essence of the religion and not merely its exterior. If we approach Gibran and his works in this way, then it becomes clear that he stands at the head of the most faithful, but at the same time seeks the eternal truth without fear or d\ elusion and without the bustle and vanity of the world. 162 Bashir goes on to represent Gibran as a talented writer and innovator who was able to liberate himself from “blind imitation” and from “\ the eyes of the past”. Here he quotes extracts from statements by Western cultural figures about Gibran, in which they speak with admiration and love for his person and his artistic mastery: “In years, Gibran is still a you\ th, but in his intelligence and artistry he is an elder”; “in Gibran’s wor\ k there is not a trace of imitation or stagnation. He is not an optimist but neither is\ he a pessimist. He is not a minister of religion, but nor is he an atheist.\ He is simply a prophet and clairvoyant, one who sings the hymn of eternal art.\ With the eyes of an Easterner he was able to see what we, inhabitants of \ the West, were unable to see”; “All of Gibran’s books urge the reade\ r to deep reflection”; “We are certain that the work of Gibran is immortal”; “Gibran has come close to the West, but there remains on his lips the lovely smile of the East”. Also quoted are the words spoken by Auguste Rodin after\ visiting an exhibition of Gibran’s pictures in Paris: “The world may expect much of this exceptional figure from Lebanon, from the William Blake of the twentieth century.” 163 In 1955 Mikhail Naimy, who after many years of close contact with Gibran knew him well, produced a second translation of The Prophet that came closer to the original. 164 This allowed him to assert that “ The Prophet is Gibran’s moral and ethical credo”. Naimy avoided a literal transla\ tion, and sought forms of expression that matched the spirit of the original. The idea for The Prophet came to Gibran early on. Work on the book began in 1918 and continued for more than four years. It contains the qu\ in - tessence of the writer’s world- view: his thoughts on life and death, on the essence and meaning of human existence, and on good and evil. The author\ embraces human life in all its complexities and depths, unified with, \ and mutually permeated by, the unending stream of life and by the unity of existence. In a letter to Mayy Ziyada, Gibran writes about The Prophet as follows: As for The Prophet – this is a book which I thought of writing a thousand years ago, but I did not get any of its chapters down on paper until the end o\ f last year.

What can I tell you about this prophet? He is my rebirth and my first baptism, the only thought in me that will make me worthy to stand in the light of\ the Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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77 the prophet: a new stage in gibran’s work sun. For this prophet had already “written” me before I attempted \ to “write” him, had created me before I created him. 165 In The Prophet the author strives to move out of his individualism and to understand and express the thoughts and hopes of ordinary people. Every- thing that they feel and experience, the hero must feel and experience. In another letter to Mayy he wrote: “This book is only a small part of what I have seen and what I see every day, a small part only of the many things yearning for expression in the silent hearts of men and in their souls.”\ 166 Gibran’s mature and settled philosophical conception in The Prophet is matched by the completeness of the composition and the refinement of t\ he language. It is difficult to give this work an unequivocal definitio\ n of genre.

It is at once a confession, a framed narrative and a philosophical essay\ in the form of a prose poem. The structural harmony and completeness of composition of The Prophet form a counterpoint to the simplicity, naturalness and compactness of the narrative. The content of the work can be summarised as follows:

al- Mustafa, who has lived in the city of Orphalese for 12 years, awaits the\ ship that is to take him back to his homeland. Before the ship arrives, \ a crowd of men and women hurry towards him to see him off and ask him to speak to them before he departs. Al- Mustafa then leads them to the great square in front of the temple in the city, and addresses the people with his words of farewell. These form the entire body of the work. Addressing the people of Orphalese, al- Mustafa is aware of a sense of immense responsibility towards them and also towards himself. It is nece\ s- sary for him to speak about everything that he has comprehended in his depths and achieved, for the sake of the people. He asks himself, “Sh\ all the day of parting be the day of gathering? And shall it be said that my\ eve was in truth my dawn?” He begins to speak about love and marriage, about children, about houses, about clothing and eating and drinking, ab\ out work, about buying and selling, crime and punishment, friendship, good and evil, pain and pleasure, beauty, sorrow and joy; he speaks on religion and prayer, life and death, teaching and self- knowledge and other matters.

Then evening comes and the ship draws near. “Farewell to you and the youth I have spent with you”, he says to the people of Orphalese, and\ then “he made a signal to the seamen, and straight away they weighed ancho\ r and cast the ship loose from its moorings, and they moved eastward.” 167 We should first remark that the image of al- Mustafa the Prophet, the teacher and visionary, corresponds precisely to Gibran’s Romantic under - standing of the Poet. His Prophet, just as the Poet of the Romantics and Transcendentalists, is called to express all that which other people expe\ ri - ence intuitively but cannot utter. As Emerson says: “The sign and creden- tials of the poet are, that he announces that which no man foretold. He \ is the true and only doctor; he knows and tells; he is the only teller of n\ ews, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes.” 168 Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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78 kahlil gibran The same is true of Gibran’s Prophet. Addressing the people, he says\ :

“Ay, I knew your joy and your pain, and in your sleep your dreams were my dreams. And oftentimes I was among you a lake among the mountains. I mirrored the summits in you and the bending slopes, and even the passing\ flocks of your thoughts and your desires.” 169 In one of his letters to Mayy, Gibran wrote of the agonising struggle he underwent within himself in realising subconsciously that the poet can o\ nly become realised as such when he becomes the voice and mouthpiece of the people, the one who expresses thoughts and feelings:

The Prophet, Mayy, is only the first letter of a single word ... in the past I was under the impression that this word was mine, in me and derived from me;\ for that reason I was unable to pronounce the first letter of that wor\ d. My inability to do so was because of my illness, indeed the cause of my sou\ l’s pain and suffering. After that God willed that my eyes be opened so that I could see the light, and God willed that my ears be opened so that I could hear ot\ her people pronounce this first letter, and God willed that I should open my lips and repeat that letter. I repeated it with joy and delight because for the first time I recognised that other people are everything and that I with my se\ parate self am nothing. 170 Gibran’s Prophet cannot remain detached; it is only by merging with t\ he people that his significance as a unique figure is realised. A number of questions vital for man’s world- view are posed in The Prophet : freedom, life and death, good and evil and the essence and meaning of human existence. They are treated very briefly and with remarkable \ sim- plicity, when one considers the abstract character of the problems posed.

They are all treated from a deeply humanist perspective and in the spiri\ t of high Romantic pathos, which calls man to a path of knowledge and per - fection. In seeking to penetrate these problems Gibran starts out from t\ he certainty that the human is the highest achievement of the creation, tha\ t his nature is deeply moral and that he has the potential to overcome the for\ ces of evil. On his approach to complete freedom man must above all overcome\ all that is false, which would detract from the principal aims of perfec\ tion and knowledge. And in order to become free, it is necessary to liberate oneself from base needs and wants. The Prophet says: You shall be free indeed not when your days are without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief, But rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound. 171 In his discussion of man, his destiny and completion, Gibran, like the Transcendentalist poets, does not indicate a specific individual belong\ ing to a particular race, religion or social group, but speaks rather of a k\ ind of universal, a person free of any specific circumstances or conditions. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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79 the prophet: a new stage in gibran’s work Hope in the possibility of improving human nature and belief in spiritua\ l development are reflected in moral principles, the requirement of unco\ n - ditional integrity and the necessity of work. Speaking of work, the Prophet expresses a thought dear to the writer: that life is work, and to love l\ ife is to love work: And in keeping yourself with labour you are in truth loving life, And to love life through labour is to be intimate with life’s inmost secret. 172 Man’s primary calling is to knowledge of life and the essence of bein\ g.

But this is impossible without work: “And all knowledge is vain save where there is work”. 173 Gibran’s understanding of the necessity of work was an organic element among the progressive Romantics. We can point specifi - cally to Thoreau in his book Walden, in which he declares work to be the basis of life, and to numerous verses and poems by Whitman (“Song of the Broadaxe”, etc.). The basic premises of the Prophet coincide almost completely with those of the Transcendentalists, in the treatment of global questions relating to the existence of man and exalting him as the centre of the creation: Like the ocean is your god- self; It remains for ever undefiled.

And like the ether it lifts but the winged.

Even like the sun is your god- self ... 174 We may recall Emerson’s statement: “Man carries the world in his head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he the proph\ et and discoverer of her secrets.” 175 Like Emerson, Gibran considers man to be the most important part of nature: “That which is you dwells above the mountains and roves with the wind.” 176 Or “But you who are born of the mountains and the forests and the seas can find their prayer in your heart”. 177 Gibran’s representation of the human is in permanent agitation, striving upwards, towards spirituality and the heights of unlimited knowledge: “\ But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped a\ nd tamed. ... For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of t\ he sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.” 178 Religion in the book is not confined to the limits of Christianity, Islam or any other religion. In his preaching, al- Mustafa not only does not recognise religion with its external attributes, rites and priesthood, but also ma\ kes no reference to the independent existence of God. For him, religion and God\ are life itself; religion is found in the thoughts and deeds of people. \ Asked by the crowd what is religion, he replies: “Your daily life is your temple and your religion.” 179 Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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80 kahlil gibran The question of beauty and its essence, a favourite among the Roman- tics, is also examined in The Prophet. Understanding beauty as inspiration, intuition and an instinctive comprehending of the truth, Gibran gives an\ aphoristic definition: “Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.” He repudiates all external attributes of beauty and regards it as the essence of life \ itself, from which the outer covering is shorn away: “Beauty is eternity gazi\ ng at itself in a mirror.” 180 Here again Gibran is close to Emerson, who considered beauty to be “the creator of the universe”. The Prophet also talks about everyday life, simple concerns: food and drink, housing and clothing, buying and selling, pain, joy and sorrow, giving and so on. In doing this he draws on the common experience, honed\ over centuries, and on profoundly moral traditional ideas. For example, \ he preaches moderation in eating and drinking and in clothes: And though you seek in garments freedom and privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.

Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment ... 181 When asked about buying and selling, al- Mustafa replies: And suffer not the barren- handed to take part in your transactions, who would sell their words for your labour. 182 On the question of giving, the Prophet again gives a purely folk concep- tion of “charity”: giving in response to the call of the heart, wi\ thout expect- ing either gratitude or a reward in heaven: “It is when you give of y\ ourself that you truly give.” 183 One’s attention is drawn here to the refined aphoris- tic character and specificity of aim of the Prophet’s speech. The addresses of al- Mustafa, his sermons and his desires contain not only the Romantic contemplation of the world of the Transcendentalists, which draws man into the sphere of abstract moral ideas, but also the concrete aspiration to share those things that are borne and suffered by the hero\ himself. The entire tone of al- Mustafa’s preaching is imbued with a deep respect for and goodwill towards people, for they have no menace, anger, coercion or intimidation. What is unique about Gibran the Romantic is that his hero appears much closer to the people than do the classic Romantic heroes. With his love for the common people and his proximity to them, his understanding of their everyday life and their needs, al- Mustafa is not only contrasted with the “crowd”, but also, as it were, merges with it. While the \ principal theme in Romanticism is that of the self and the crowd, and is formed ou\ t of sharp opposition and conflict, the Prophet expresses the thoughts a\ nd feelings of the crowd and is always ready to come to its aid like a wise\ and devoted friend. The attitude of the people to the Prophet is in accordan\ ce with this: he is always surrounded by an atmosphere of kindness, love an\ d respect. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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81 the prophet: a new stage in gibran’s work In his farewell speech al- Mustafa speaks of his deep commonality with all people: “And your heartbeats were in my heart, and your breath was up\ on my face, and I knew you all.” 184 The confessionary character of the poet’s address to the people is un\ - characteristic of Romantic literature. Furthermore, in The Prophet Gibran acknowledges that he is called not only to devote himself to the people \ and to teach them, but also, necessarily, to learn from them wisdom, optimism and patience: “I came to take of your wisdom ... it is a flaming sp\ irit in you ever gathering more of itself ... You have given me my deeper thirsting after life.” 185 It may seem at first sight that the image of al- Mustafa might to some degree resonate with that of the prophet from Nietzsche’s book Also Sprach Zarathustra . We would point out at once that the humanistic and demo - cratic pathos of the Arab writer’s work differs sharply from the nihilistic and all- destroying tenor of Nietzsche’s book, and we can find nothing in common between these two characters whatsoever. The teachings of al- Mustafa are not in any way contiguous with those of Zarathustra. The positive side of the latter’s message is his blistering criticism of \ the Church and the foundations of bourgeois culture, which are absent in Gibran’\ s work.

Gibran’s positive hero, meanwhile, liberated of anything supernatural\ , has nothing in common with the “Superman” of the German philosopher. Something in common can be seen between the image of al- Mustafa and that of Christ in Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (The Life of Jesus). This is expressed primarily in the attempts by both writers to reach a moral ide\ al.

Renan found this ideal in Jesus Christ, in his idea of love, all- forgiveness and belief in the principle of the basic good of the human person. Gibra\ n also took these moral principles as the basis for his hero, the Prophet.\ Into the mouth of al- Mustafa he puts the idea of selfless love, which can bring people together: Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.

He threshes you to make you naked.

He sifts you to free you from your husks.

He grinds you to whiteness.

He kneads you until you are pliant; And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast. 186 It should be noted that there was a certain period during which the imag\ e of Christ occupied Gibran’s creative imagination in a number of his w\ orks, such as “Eventide of the Feast”, 187 “The Crucified” 188 and Jesus the Son of Man (1928). 189 Gibran embodied in Christ his belief in the ideal that was intended to become the symbol of “truth and freedom”. A number of Arab scholars of Gibran believe that he would not have become an artist had he lost his belief in this ideal. In particular, ¡Abd al- Karim Ashtar writes: “His belief in Christ prevented Gibran from Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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82 kahlil gibran completely rejecting religion and becoming an atheist. And had he lost that belief and those convictions ... his rebelliousness and extremism w\ ould be without aim and his activities would end in spiritual ruin, as occurr\ ed with Nietzsche. And, like Nietzsche, he would have created for himself an abstract Superman.” 190 In Gibran’s works Christ is a real person, a martyr and a rebel, who struggles for the high ideals of goodness and love. “The Crucified” is for him the herald of high justice and true humanity. Gibran’s Christ “never lived a life of fear, nor did He die suffering or complaining”, 191 but rather “He lived as a leader; He was crucified as a crusader; He died with a heroism that frightened His killers and tormen - tors”. 192 The author represents him not as “a bird with broken wings”; rather, “He was a raging tempest who broke all crooked wings”; 193 he came to send forth upon this earth a new spirit, with power to crumble the fo\ undation of any monarchy built upon human bones and skulls. ... He came to demoli\ sh the majestic palaces, constructed upon the graves of the weak, and crush\ the idols, erected upon the bodies of the poor. ... He came to make the human heart a temple, and the soul an altar, and the mind a priest. 194 The Prophet should not be understood as something unusual that is out of line with the general principles and logical development of Gibran’s previous work, but rather as the concluding phase in his natural and logical movement. In The Prophet the Romantic conception of belief in the human being is joined to the conviction of the possibility of his mo\ ral resurrection. Gibran’s Prophet is an exceptional individual whose intrinsic self- value is interior, but this does not place him in opposition to the surrounding world.

The purpose of his teaching is not “to humiliate the people and elevate himself”, but instead to reveal to them the deepest truths. There is \ no divid - ing wall between him and the people; he does not consider himself superi\ or to the “crowd” and has no disdain for anybody. The essence of the image of the Prophet is what Volkov called “the profound meaning of the character of the individual”, who lives not merely as the life of the soul and \ heart, but also in the life of the people around him. This determines the evolution\ of Gibran’s Romantic creativity towards actual reality and characterises\ his inclination to simplicity and clarity. Our observation on the complexity of Gibran’s approach to the problem of the hero versus the crowd, which \ is fully revealed in The Prophet, can also be justified in relation to later devel- opments in Oriental Romanticism. The demand in Gibran for complete human liberation, his hatred of slavery, his idea of the interdependence and interlinking of the phenomena of life and human actions, and his ideas of love and belief and the prin\ ciple that goodness and justice are inherent in man, bring the writer’s position close to the philosophical ideas and principles of the Romanticism of th\ e Transcendentalists, in particular Emerson. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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83 the prophet: a new stage in gibran’s work In terms of subject matter The Prophet is continued to a degree in the later The Garden of the Prophet (1933, published posthumously). 195 This book describes the arrival of al- Mustafa on his native island and his reception by its inhabitants. For forty days he retreats to the garden where his hous\ e is situated and where his ancestors are buried. After this, students and in\ hab- itants of the island come to see him, and he addresses them with homilie\ s and guidance. The Garden of the Prophet is closer to a philosophical treatise; its dis - cussions are more abstract and cover general philosophical questions –\ the essence of matter, of forms and of existence, etc. Rarely in this book does al- Mustafa directly address the people, and he almost never touches on their worldly everyday needs. His preaching is in fact closer to a self- absorbed confession. However, both works are imbued with the idea of the unity of the prophet and the people. In philosophical terms The Garden of the Prophet reaffirms and develops the same optimistic conception as does The Prophet: the life of the universe is eternal, and man is its most important manifestation, whose grandeur \ is unfathomable. The self of man is that “which is for ever the deep cal\ ling upon the deep”. Later in the work he adds: “I teach you your large\ r self, which contains all men”. 196 The idea is also further developed that the essence of the being of an individual self consists in the knowledge and degree of completion of that self. The common subject matter and philosophical basis of the two Prophet books also gives rises to a number of repeating symbolic images. For example, in both works the universe is likened to the ocean, and the lif\ e of each person to a stream or river that is finally united with that ocea\ n. The image of the mist and the crystal also recurs, symbolising the infinit\ y of matter and the image of endlessly unfolding life, represented in the see\ ds of plants and the human generations. Both works carry the motif of the unit\ y of man and nature. Something of a departure from The Prophet is the development of the theme of “being”. Here, “being” is considered not solely fro\ m a philosophi- cal perspective but also in terms of human life and the relations between the various lines of work: thus, “to be” is to be a weaver, a builder, a ploughman or a fisherman, etc. In The Garden of the Prophet Gibran also touches on issues that concern the life of the Arab nation in general. These are his Romanticised under\ - standings of various principles attributed to the East and the West. On the one hand, he blames the West for its exploitation of the East, and on the other hand, he blames the East for its failure to act, its submissivenes\ s and its humility. Generally speaking, The Garden of the Prophet continues the ideas of love and goodness and of mutual understanding and tolerance. This work not only maintains the principle of moral didactics of The Prophet, but also introduces new elements. From an artistic point of view, however, in our Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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84 kahlil gibran opinion – in terms of the completeness of the subject, the belief in,\ and valuing of real life, and the clarity and precision of the language –\ The Prophet is clearly superior to the second book. Gibran’s creative method formed unusually quickly. Beginning with Sen- timentalism, and mastering many of its achievements, he made his contrib\ u - tion towards the establishment of Sentimentalism within Arabic literatur\ e.

His story Broken Wings and several short stories (such as “Marta al- Baniyah” and “Warda al- Hani”) possessed, in addition to their intimate and contem- plative subject matter, a social relevance, and in artistic and stylistic terms were to a certain degree enriched by Romantic tendencies and elements. The transition from Sentimentalism to Romanticism did not involve, in Gibran’s case, a long incubation period. This would seem to be explained by the fact that throughout his creative life there were no great change\ s in the subject matter and problematics of his works. The themes of freedom,\ beauty, love and the value of the individual and of nature permeate all the author’s works. After 1914, Gibran’s work runs along a Romantic course ( A Tear and a Smile). In the early twentieth century Gibran became one of the leading Romantics of Arab émigré literature ( The Tempests, 1920, The Prophet , 1923).

The legacy of the Western Romantics, and in particular of the Lake School and the American Transcendentalists, was one of the primary sources for Gibran, and his assimilation of this legacy enabled him to establish and\ develop the Romantic method in his own works. Imangulieva, Aida. Gibran, Rihani & Naimy : East–West Interactions in Early Twentieth-Century Arab Literature, Anqa Publishing, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=588815.

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