Twenty Drawings

by Unknown

His sensitive appreciation of the interrelation of the arts enables him to be the spokesman for the genius of the Arabic people to whom the Western world owes a debt which it is only beginning now to appreciate, and no poet of former generations has done more to bring about a closer understanding between the East and the West than Kahlil Gibran.

Tagore, for instance, belongs exclusively to India. Whether we read him or not—whether we incorporate his work with that of other modern schools, nevertheless this does not affect the value of Tagore to India. For he has not lived in the land of Cosmopolis nor does he lend his interests to the new era in western literature. But Gibran has chosen to co-operate with Western arts and letters and his faith in the development of our “static culture” is indeed a lesson to posterity.

He has surrendered his position as a leader in the world of the near East in order to bring the traditions and genius of the Arabic people to the attention of the Western world. And although commentators have long since acknowledged our debt in literature to the Arabs, who introduced rhyme into Europe over a thousand years ago, and historians have admitted the impetus which was given to the sciences by Arabic philosophers, yet it remains the task of a modern to introduce us in painting to the vast poetical conceptions which constitute a part of the heritage of the Arabian race mind.

Kahlil Gibran is one of the artists who are engaged in the struggle between the old and the new, or as in other times, the conflict was termed, the oscillation between the classic and the romantic tendencies in art. As a poet, he is a Romanticist, moving abreast the times and incorporating the keenly analytic spirit of our age into the ancient parable or the simple form of rhythmic prose. But in painting he is a Classicist and his work owes more to the findings of da Vinci than it does to any of our modern insurgents. Thus Gibran is also caught in the struggle which is the besetting problem of the world today, the reconstruction of an era which will adjust the imperishable legacy of the old world, the classic traditions, with the ever evolving, fluctuating tendencies in art which constitute the essence of true Romanticism.

For the cataclysm which has overwhelmed our world and is causing us to reconstruct our geographical boundaries and political tenets, also demands us to reconstruct our moral valuations and our standards in the life of the soul, of which art is one of the most profound manifestations. And as we think back upon the destruction which has separated the world with which we were familiar from the world in which we move today, we become more and more aware of the cataclysm which has so completely shattered our philosophies, dogmas and artistic beliefs.

A sombre burden has descended upon the shoulders of the coming generation, whose task it is to create a world as yet in embryo—and, if our arts are not to go down before such inspirations as the camouflage, and if science is not to be prostituted to such creations as the tank,—if a nobler expression of energy is yet to redeem man from the pit into which his destructive power has plunged him, then in the period of reconstruction he must insensibly turn to new and more vital forms of self-expression. Religion in the traditional meaning can no longer lift him out of the rut of his suffering and only in another form of expression which will portray the realities of the soul devoutly, either in terms of art, science or social creeds, will he be able to effect a transition between the death agony of the old world and the travail of the new.

But even in this dark traverse through which we are passing in an effort to win a newer life as our own, we are aware of certain germinating influences which already foreshadow the art of the future, so that the productions of an artist can never be evaluated in terms of self-expression alone but must be measured by their relation to the organic processes of which they are an integral part.

To the interpretive mind, for instance, the destruction of Carthage cannot be judged as a pyrotechnical display of military prowess, for that which is significant was the impetus of change which that act gave to civilization. With the importation of the cult of Cybele, the great Mother, Rome was placed in direct communication with the East and a contact between the modern and the ancient world was firmly established. Eventually, the religion and the art of the East not only acquired a foothold, but became an integral part of later Roman culture, so that Rome was conquered by that which centuries before it had set out to subdue. The Romans set out to conquer a rival and brought back the religion and thereby much of their rival’s system of power. In this way a process which on the surface was nationalistic became fundamentally a part of the organic evolution of civilization, which redirected the cultural processes of a nation and eventually of what was, then, the modern world.

Thus the term modern loses its coin value when we see how lightly it can be shifted from era to era, denoting certain types of ideas rather than periods of time. For the life of the inner world is without boundaries other than personal limitations, without national or particularistic interests other than those we voluntarily adopt. We shift our emotional contents upon a word like “Spartacide” and it becomes a modern equivalent; it is at once cut adrift from its original connotation and it becomes vitally related to our own interests and feelings. In short the word, the symbol flashes the past to life and passes on to meaning into the present in order to stimulate the mind to seek out new intellectual pastures.

For the soul is occupied with but a few problems and these are singularly few. Life in its elemental functioning is but a transformation of the processes of Birth, Love and Death. The hunger of the appetites and the hunger of possession; the desire for adventure and the fear of the unknown; to love and to be loved; out of these essential simplicities, man has erected the vast complexities of life and to these essential simplicities the artist must return who seeks a new means of expression amidst the clutter of religions, arts and moralities.