THE ROMANTICS 160tion and hostile criticism among the more conservative elements in his
community. By turns Shabbi was called a rebel, a heretic, an atheist and the
Voltaire of the Arabs, and in fact to this day many of the numerous writings
or commentaries on al-Shabbi's life and works, not only in Tunisia, but in
other Arab countries too, seem to suffer from a spirit of partisanship,^121 even
though he is generally acclaimed, not the least in his own country, to be
Tunisia's greatest modern poet. We shall see later how the hostility which
this work aroused contributed in no small measure to the poet's sense of
grievance and isolation.
It is not the intention here, of course, to discuss Shabbi's ideas or their
relation to their sources, the chief of which was 'Aqqad who, as has been
demonstrated, in turn derived his ideas about Aryan myth-making (once a
fashionable subject) from Herbert Spencer, Ernest Renan and Tito Vignoli.^1 "
This remarkably inconoclastic work has been quoted, partly in order to
show the full extent of the revolutionary impulse in some of the Arab
romantics, partly because the words in which the author expresses his views
on literature, poetry and mythology, on nature, love and women, provide
an admirably faithful description of the attitude to these topics revealed in
his own poetry and indeed in much of the best work of the Arab romantic
poets.
Songs of Life was primarily the work of a romantic rebel. But it is very dif-
ferent from, for instance. The Serpents of Paradise. Unlike Abu Shabaka, Shabbi
does not seem to strike attitudes; despite his deep passion, his voice never
rises to the point of screaming: that is why his passion sounds to us all the
more genuine. Because of his early training in the traditional type of madrasa
Shabbi's command of the Arabic language is (despite some weaknesses
pointed out by 'Umar Farrukh) much greater, a thing which, together with
his great gifts and acute sensitivity, enabled him to attain heights of poetic
utterance not easily reached by Abu Shabaka who in Serpents seemed to
cultivate what is perilously close to a fin-de-siide type of attitude, confining
his poetry to the world of sensations, of sex and drink. There are no prostitutes
in the poetry of Shabbi: on the contrary, the women he addresses in his poems
are all highly idealized and, as in the case of Naji, described in religious terms.
While Abu Shabaka writes 'The Red Prayer', we find Shabbi composing his
'Prayer at the Altar of Love'.^123 This is a full poetic statement of al-Shabbi's
reverential attitude to woman already expressed in his essay on The Arab
Poetic Imagination. In structure it is similar to Shelley's 'Skylark', in which the
poet tries to define his feelings by a series of comparisons and analogies drawn
from a wide range of experience. The result is that the poem strikes us mainly
by its rich profusion of imagery, for at times the images seem to be only
tenuously related to the main theme. The poet's beloved is sweet like child-