THB PRE-ROMANTICS 82affirms his kinship with the neoclassicists by regarding himself primarily
as a moral teacher when he writes in the preface to his first volume:
The greatest recompense that I could hope for is that in the following
moral tales, unusual anecdotes, parables and imaginary representa-
tions ... the reader will share my feelings while perusing my book, thereby
approving of virtue and grieving over vice and will benefit from my counsel
and derive a cure for his wounds from mine.
Poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge could boast of even stronger moral
intentions. I have chosen to call him pre-romantic for a significant reason,
however. Although in his sensibility, in his themes and in some of his ideas
he does betray an unmasked romanticism, there is much in his use of the
Arabic language which, despite its originality, points backward rather than
forward. The influence on him of his early teacher and friend, the great
Arabic scholar Ibrahim al-Yaziji, on whose death he wrote two eloquent
poems, remained strong all through his life. Mutran's childhood reading in
the work of classical Arabic poets such as Abu Tammam and Buhturi left
an indelible mark on his style and language which, with few exceptions,
tended to be somewhat archaic, or at least not fully modern. In his style
the rational, conscious element is perhaps a little too dominant: he is con-
stantly polishing his language,^22 constantly vigilant and self-critical, with
the result that one feels that there is not enough spontaneity in his poetry
to make him a thorough-going romantic. With the almost obsessive desire
to observe the outward form of the language goes a fairly rigid adherence
to the metres and rhymes of traditional Arabic verse, although we have to
admit that he shows considerable freedom in handling the stanzaic form
based upon al-muwashshah (i,33;35), and in one poem he uses two different
metres to indicate different speakers (i,61). We even find him making an
attempt at writing vers libre in 1907, in an elegy on Ibrahim al-Yaziji which
is quite impressive with its powerful rhythm, striking imagery and biblical
tone (i,294). However, there is generally some tension between the old form
and the new content in his poetry and it is this tension which leads me to
call him a pre-romantic, in spite of the possible misunderstanding to which
the term may give rise.
Besides, there is much in Mutran's poetry that is in no way different
from the conventional output of the neoclassicists. There are many panegyrics
of one kind or another, there are scores of conventional elegies written on
friends and public figures, innumerable poems of direct commentary on
social and political occasions. In fact Mutran's innovation does not appreci-
ably go beyond what he has achieved in the first volume of 1908. If anything,
in the second volume we notice already a gradual increase in the number