Chapter 11

King Khephrën, Cairo Museum

We now know too much to believe that the noble simplicity of King Khephrën—the builder of the second pyramid of Gizeh—is the result of incompetence or of limited means in dealing with the stone out of which he was carved. No artist who follows the careful lines and profiles of this statue, and who understands the broad grasp with which each undulation, however sweeping, comprehends and comprises all that is essential and indispensable, can doubt for an instant that the sculptor who carved it was not only capable of realism, but infinitely superior to it. And he who does not admire the consummate Ruler form of this statue, and see in it the expression of the greatest artistic power that has ever existed on earth, and probably the portrait of the greatest human power that has ever existed on earth, confesses himself, immediately, unfamiliar with the fundamental spirit of great art.[41]

The type of King Khephrën it is quite impossible to admire and to like, unless one is to some extent in sympathy with his ideals and his aspirations. His features will remain strange and quite inscrutable as long as one does not feel one's self leaning, however slightly, to his side, in thought and emotion; but the masterly treatment of his apotheosized portrait by a man who was probably his greatest artist, ought to be apparent to all who have thought and meditated upon the question of what constitutes the greatest art.

Here is to be seen that autocratic mode of expression which brooks neither contradiction nor disobedience; the Symmetry which makes the spectator obtain a complete grasp of an idea; the Sobriety which reveals the restraint that a position of command presupposes; the Simplicity proving the power of a great mind that has overcome the chaos in itself and has reflected its order and harmony upon an object, the most essential features of which it has selected with unfailing accuracy; the Transfiguration that betrays the Dionysian ecstasy and pathos from which the artist gives of himself to reality and makes it reflect his own glory back upon him; the Repetition which ensures obedience, and finally the Variety which is the indispensable condition of all living Art.[42]

For the artist who carved this monument was no coward. His duty was to surpass the beauty of the most beautiful subject on earth in his time. This man whom he has bequeathed to us in stone was not only a king, but a god, and none but the most masterful mind, none but the most ultimate product of ages spent in the observance of a definite and particular set of values, could have been capable of giving this simplified rendering, this selection of essentials, of a man-god who was the highest outcome of these same values.

How was this possible? How were these values maintained so long?

In the first place, it can now be affirmed with confidence that the Egyptians, in the days of Khephrën, were a very pure and united race, having remained, thanks to their isolated position on the Delta of the Nile, aloof and free from the ethical and blood influence of the foreigner for probably thousands of years. Secondly, everybody seems to agree that, whatever its ultimate purity may have been, the Egyptian people, thanks to the inordinate power of their values, certainly had a capacity for absorbing and digesting foreign elements which was simply extraordinary;[43]and, thirdly, we have it on the authority of Wilkinson that "the superiority of their legislation has always been acknowledged as the cause of the duration of an empire which lasted with a very uniform succession of hereditary sovereigns, and with the same form of government for a much longer period than the generality of ancient states."[44]

We can understand King Khephrën, then, only as the apotheosis of a type which was the product of the values of his people. For that they loved him and worshipped him quite willingly and quite heartily, no honest student of their history can any longer doubt.

It was with great rejoicings, and not, as Buckle and Spencer thought, with the woeful and haggard faces of ill-used slaves, that his people assembled annually to continue and to complete the building of his pyramid. Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey, Wilkinson, Dr. Petrie,[45]and many others have cleared up all our doubts on this point, and only an Englishman like Buckle,[46]who could not divorce labour from the modern idea of sweating, and absolute monarchy from the modern idea of cruelty, and slavery from the modern idea of brutality,[47]was able to think otherwise.

For it was highly probable that King Khephrën had no standing army. It is certain that his predecessor had not.[48]It is even probable that he had no armed bodyguard. What, then, was the power which, every year, could muster thousands of his fellow-countrymen about him, and which induced them cheerfully to undertake this most strenuous, this most skilful, and this most highly artistic labour for him?

This power, there can no longer be any doubt, was the power of affection and profound and sincere reverence. An examination of the pyramids of Gizeh, alone, apart from all historical evidence, is sufficient to convince any one who has any knowledge of what forced labour produces, that love was very largely active in the work of these Egyptians of the third and fourth dynasties;[49]and, if we turn from the actual monuments themselves to the sculpture that adorned them, we become convinced that the people who built them were a united, law-abiding race, who recognized in Khephrën the highest product of their values. And yet, that enormous power was wielded by this one man-god, is proved by every detail that history and the archæological records have handed down to us. He was the remote predecessor of a king who one day would be able to declare—

"I teach the priests what is their duty: I turn away the ignorant man from his ignorance.... The gods are full of delight in my time, and their temples celebrate feasts of joy. I have placed the boundaries of the land of Egypt at the horizon. I gave protection to those who were in trouble, and smote those who did evil against them. I placed Egypt at the head of all the nations, because its inhabitants are at one with me in the worship of Amon!"[50]

He was a man the moral standards of whose people were in many respects higher than those of the Greeks;[51]he and his subjects felt very strongly the value of strength of character and of self-control;[52]though perhaps they laid "greater stress upon discretion and quietness than on any qualities of character. In the repudiation of sins an Egyptian would say: 'My mouth hath not run on;' 'My mouth hath not been hot;' 'My voice hath not been voluble in my speech;' 'My voice is not loud.'"[53]

"Ptahotep urged similar discreetness; he said: 'Let thy heart be overflowing, but let thy mouth be restrained.'"[54]While another Egyptian moralist said: "Do not be a talker!"[55]

Thus we find all the evidences of precisely that principle which goes to rear a great people—the belief that restraint is necessary, and part of the art of life, and that in order to have one group of advantages, another group must be sacrificed.

For this is the principle of all great legislation; it is the principle of all great art,—and it is the principle of all great life.

A great legislator has to discover what sacrifices his people can afford to make, what things they will be able for ever to discard in order to reap the advantages of a certain mode of life. His teaching must include restraint. It is the renunciation of some things and the careful cultivation of others that builds up a noble type. As Mr. Chesterton once observed, with really uncustomary wisdom, you cannot be King of England and the Beadle of Balham at the same time. To be the one you must sacrifice the advantages which are associated with the other. All values, all art,[56]and all life is based upon this principle—that if you grasp all, you lose all; or, as Nietzsche has it: "The belief in the pleasure which comes of restraint—this pleasure of a rider on a fiery steed."[57]

You may argue that the enjoyment of one set of joys is better in your opinion than the enjoyment of another set; but you cannot claim the enjoyment of all; that is impossible. It is only among an uncultured or democratic people that every one aspires to all pleasures, and it is precisely among such a people that some form of Puritanism becomes an urgent need—that is to say, as a substitute for the art of life.[58]Because the indiscriminate pursuit of all joys perforce ends in failure, and therefore in unhappiness. But measure is the delight only of æsthetic natures;[59]hence, where the art of living has not yet been learned, some kind of severe puritanical morality will be a condition of existence, and if that is dropped excesses will soon begin to make their presence felt.

I do not wish you to imagine, therefore, that the Egyptians were an austere, ascetic and self-castigating race; on the contrary, as all authorities declare, they were full of the joy of life and of the love of life;[60]and it was precisely because they recognized well-defined limits in particular things that they could allow themselves a certain margin in others.

In the art of Egypt I recognized this principle of restraint, long before I discovered that it existed in their life and system of society, and I was not surprised to find it observed with greater severity by their rulers than by the mass of the people themselves.[61]

No one can command who has not first learnt to obey his own will. Nobody could command as that Man-God Khephrën commanded,[62]before he had become complete master of himself.

"He who cannot command himself shall obey," says Zarathustra.[63]And about five thousand years ago Ptahotep—the great moralist of the fifth dynasty of Egypt—said: "He that obeyeth his heart, shall command!"[64]

This atmosphere is strange to us. We, who are used to seeing liberty and authority granted indiscriminately as ends in themselves, to everybody and anybody, find it difficult to realize this manner of thought. If we know of it at all, we misunderstand it and confound the moderation of weak natures with the restraint of the strong.[65]

This art of life which takes as a fundamental principle that every joy is bought by some sacrifice, is strange and archaic now. The people it reared communicate little to our age, as their statues will prove if you look at them; the art it created leaves modern spectators cold; and yet, as every great legislator and artist should know, it is precisely upon the principle with which the Egyptian people of the fourth dynasty were reared, and with which the splendid statue of King Khephrën was carved, that all great life and art repose.

It cannot be said too often, therefore, that the Egyptians were a happy and contented people, and this they were because there was some power abroad in their world, and because he who wielded that power could make them believe that the human race was as high as a pyramid, although but one man perhaps could ever represent the apex.

B. The Lady Nophret.

But you may object that in some of the works of this period the Egyptian artists showed a lack of restraint, a lack of the instinct that knows how much to sacrifice, which far surpassed this same vice in the art of the Greeks. You may point to the perfectly stupendous realism of the Lady Nophret and her husband or brother, and declare with Fergusson that "nothing more wonderfully truthful and realistic has been done since that time, till the invention of photography."[66]

The Lady Nophret (Cairo Museum)

I confess that when I drew near to these statues in the Museum at Cairo, it is no exaggeration to say that I was literally startled by their lifelike appearance. Like Miss Jane Harrison, I felt that the "Lady Nophret," at least, must be able to rise and come forward,[67]so ridiculously fresh and warm did she appear in her spotless white dress and her majestic wig. I soon realized that I was in the presence of a kind of realism which transcended anything I had ever seen in ancient or modern art, for its convincingness and truth; and it was difficult to believe that this piece of wholesale deception—certainly more perfect than any waxwork figure I had ever known,—like the statue of the Man-God Khephrën, was a product of the pyramid period.

You must not gather, from what I have just said, that the Lady Nophret is in the slightest degree as vulgar or as commonplace as an ordinary waxwork figure or modern portrait. Though its vitality cannot be denied,[68]there are artistic qualities in the simple moulding of the figure which place it very much higher than the realistic work either of ancient Greece or of modern Europe. It is only beside the statue of King Khephrën that it appears so weak; and, as it is almost a contemporary of this magnificent person, the manner in which it has been presented to us by the artist seems to be a problem.

The first lesson it teaches you is this—that whatever you may think about the conventionalism of King Khephrën, such conventionalism has nothing whatever to do with archaic clumsiness, inability to see Nature, or incompetence. It is clear that the Egyptians were greater masters in rendering nature realistically than any people before or after them.[69]If they had not been, they could never have produced the portrait-statues of the architect Ti; the two portrait-statues of Ranofir, priest of Ptah of Memphis, and that of the Scribe and of the Cheikh-el-Beled[70]—all in the museum at Cairo.

When they are not realistic, then, it is because they do not wish to be; it is because they deliberately desire to rise above nature, to transfigure it, simplify it, and arrange it—in fact, to be artists.

What, then, was the object of these realistic portrait-statues about which I have chosen to speak collectively in my references to the Lady Nophret?

They were never intended by the artist who made them to be seen by the eye of man. They were never intended to be works of Ruler-art, set up to emphasize and underline the values of a people. They had a definite purpose, of course, but this purpose was quite foreign to that of Art as I defined it in my last lecture. What was this purpose?

It was related to Death.[71]No realistic sculptural work was associated with Life by the ancient Egyptians. As men who were still able to believe in a Man-God, and were still convinced of the power of man-wrought miracles, how could they associate realism or that principle of manufacture whereby a man deliberately suppresses his will to art and makes himself subservient to nature—how could they associate this with Life,—Life which to these dwellers on the Nile was inextricably bound up with the hand, the thought, the will, and the power of man?

No—these realistic sculptures which throw all our puerile Police Art into the shade were associated not with Life, but with the opposite of Life—with Death, with underground tombs and sarcophagi, with mummies and musty mastabas, and with the hope of conquering Eternal Sleep.

The Egyptians believed that a living man consisted of a body, a Ka or ghost, and a Ba or soul. At death, the Ka and Ba were supposed to be liberated; but it was hoped that a day would nevertheless come when the Ka, which was the element in which the life of the deceased person was specially believed to reside, would come back to the body and effect its resurrection. Hence the care with which a body was embalmed and preserved from putrefaction.

Accidents, however, might happen, thought the ancient Egyptians. The embalmed mummy might perish, it might be destroyed. What would the unfortunate Ka do, if it returned and found the mummy of its former body annihilated? A way out of this difficulty quickly occurred to the nimble minds of these imaginative people. If the mummy had perished, they thought, the Ka might possibly enter an effigy of its former body, provided that effigy were sufficiently lifelike. In this way the realistic Ka-statues were introduced, and for fear lest even these might perish, wealthy people would sometimes multiply their number to what would seem a ridiculous extent.

Once they were manufactured, these Ka-statues would be placed far away from the sight of living man, in the tomb of the departed person, and in this way his resurrection was supposed to be ensured.[72]

For the Egyptians could imagine no world better than their own. And even a resurrection could but occur amid surroundings which were as like as possible to those of everyday life on earth.

The realism of the Ka-statue of the Lady Nophret, therefore, need not frighten us. On the contrary, it only helps to throw the transfiguration and power of King Khephrën's diorite statue into greater relief. The Egyptians knew perfectly well that a Ka-statue was only a duplication, a copy, and a repetition of reality, and they knew also that its proper place was underground and out of sight.[73]If Lady Nophret and her companion Ka-statues had never been found, however, we might have believed, as many have believed, that the conventionalism of Egyptian sculpture was beneath instead of very much above Nature.

But even when we know what we do know, it is only with the utmost difficulty that an artist who is a child of this weak and impotent age can feel any love for these strange, transcendentally powerful, and almost superhuman figures in granite and diorite which the sculptors of Egypt have left us. The artist may perhaps get nearer to them than any one else in his age, because he, by virtue of the modicum of creative power that is in him, initiates himself almost automatically into the mysteries of this great Egyptian simplicity, order, and transfiguration. But others who are not artists can only pass them by. For these figures are the apotheosis of a particular type. They are what all art should be, a stimulus, and a spur to a life based upon a definite set of values. How, then, could people stop and admire them who are living under values which are possibly the very reverse of those which this art advocates, or under no definite values at all?

The style of the statue of King Khephrën, with but a few modifications, was the style of all Egyptian statuary until the days of Psammetichus, over two thousand years later: how can we, the changeable and restless children of Europe, understand these things?

C. The Pyramid.

How can we admire and understand even the symbol of King Khephrën's social organization—the Pyramid, when we know and love only the level plain?

The Pyramid, which in its form embodies all the highest qualities of great art, and all the highest principles of a healthy society, is the greatest artistic achievement that has been discovered hitherto.

This symbolic wedlock of Art and Sociology still stands, with all its six thousand years of age, on the threshold of the desert—that is to say, on the threshold of chaos and disorder, where none but the wind attempts to shape and to form; and reminds us of a master will that once existed and set its eternal stamp upon the face of the world in Egypt, so that posterity might learn whether mankind had risen or declined.

In its synthesis of the three main canons, simplicity, repetition and variety,[74]nothing has ever excelled it; in its mystic utterance of the conditions of the ideal state, in which every member takes his place and ultimately succeeds in holding highest man uppermost and nearest the sun, it is unparalleled in history; and in its sacred revelation that Man can attain to some height if he chooses, that he can believe in Man the God, and Man the Hierophant, and Man the Prophet, if he chooses, and that he can be noble, happy, lasting and powerful in so doing—in this treble advocacy of these sublime ideals, the pyramid and the Egyptians who created it stand absolutely alone in the history of the world.

The best in Greece was borrowed from them; the best we still possess is perhaps but a faint after-glow of their setting sun, and the cold and unfamiliar tone in which their art seems to appeal to modern men ought to prove to us how remote, how incalculably far off, they are from our insignificant age of progress and advancement, of feebleness and mediocrity, and of hopeless errors, in which "the prince proposes, but the shopkeeper disposes!"[75]

I cannot go into the details of their society with you now. I can but assure you that the more you read about it in the works of men like Wilkinson, Petrie and Brugsch-Bey, the more convinced you will become of its transcendental superiority. And if, in praising their art above that of any other nation, I have been forced to deal all too hastily with their morals and their State, it is simply because I can conceive of no such perfect art being possible, save as the flower of the noble and man-exalting values which I find at the base of the Egyptian Pyramid.

In identifying Nietzsche's art canon with that admired and respected by Egypt at its best, I have done nothing at all surprising to those who know Nietzsche's philosophy. Everything he says on Art in his maturest work,The Will to Power, drove me inevitably, not to Italy, not to Greece, not to Holland, and not to India—but to the Valley of the Nile; while in two books already published I forestalled these lectures, in one respect, by declaring Nietzsche's ideal aristocratic state to have been based symbolically upon the idea of the Egyptian Pyramid.

Only a romantic idealist would have the sentimental fanaticism to stand up before you now to preach an Egyptian Renaissance. I wish to do nothing of the sort. I know too well to what extent the Art of Egypt was the product of a people reared by a definite set of inviolable values, to hope to transplant it with any chance of success on to our democratic and anarchical soil. What I do wish to advocate, however, is, that when you think of the best in Art, your mind should go back to the severe and vigorous culture of Egypt and not to that of any other country.

This will at least give you a standard of measurement, according to which most of the culture of the present day will strike you as tawdry and putrescent. In this way a salutary change may be brought about, and the words of Disraeli concerning the Egyptians may also come true, in which he said: "The day may yet come when we shall do justice to the high powers of that mysterious and imaginative people."[76]

Nothing can be done, however, until our type is purified,until we have at least become a people. For until that time it will be impossible to discover a type which may become the subject-matter of the graphic arts.

"Upwards life striveth to build itself with columns and stairs: into remote distances it longeth to gaze: and outwards after blissful beauties—thereforeit needeth height!

"And because it needeth height, it needeth stairs and contradiction between stairs, and those who can climb! to rise striveth life, and in rising to surpass itself!

"Verily, he who here towered aloft his thought in stone knew as well as the wisest ones about the secret of life!

"That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty and war for power and supremacy: that doth he here teach us in the plainest parable.

"Thus spake Zarathustra."78

[39]I am quite willing with Mr. Gardner to acknowledge the superiority of the latter over the former. SeeHandbook to Greek Sculpture, p. 216et seq.

[40]Encyclopædia Britannica(9th Edition), Article, "Egypt."

[41]See Dr. Petrie,A History of Egypt. On page 54 of this book, the author says, speaking of King Khephrën: "It is a marvel of art; the precision of the expression combining what a man should be to win our feelings, and what a King should be to command our regard. The subtlety shown in this combination of expression—the ingenuity in the over-shadowing hawk, which does not interfere with the front view; the technical ability in executing this in so resisting a material—all unite in fixing our regard on this as one of the leading examples of ancient art."

[42]Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez,A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. II, p. 239: "The true originality of the Egyptian style consists in its deliberately epitomizing that upon which the artists of other countries have elaborately dwelt—in its lavishing all its executive powers upon chief masses and leading lines, and in the marvellous judgment with which it seizes their real meaning, their proportion, and the sources of their artistic effect."

[43]A History of Egypt, by Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey, Vol. I, p. 7: "Although in so long a space of time as sixty centuries, events and revolutions of great historical importance must of necessity have altered the political state of Egypt, yet, notwithstanding all, the old Egyptian race has undergone but little change; for it still preserves to this day those distinctive features of physiognomy, and those peculiarities of manners and customs, which have been handed down to us by the united testimony of the monuments and the accounts of the ancient classical writers, as the hereditary characteristics of this people."

[44]The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Vol. I, p. 293.

[45]A History of Egypt, p. 40: "It is said that a hundred thousand men were levied for three months at a time (i.e. during the three months of the inundation, when ordinary labour would be at a standstill); and on this scale the pyramid building occupied twenty years." [He is speaking of the Great Pyramid built by Kheops, Khephrën's predecessor; but this does not affect my contention.] "On reckoning number and weight of the stones, this labour would fully suffice for the work. The skilled masons had large barracks, now behind the second pyramid, which might hold even four thousand men; but perhaps a thousand would quite suffice to do all the fine work in the time. Hence there was no impossibility in the task, and no detriment to the country in employing a small proportion of the population at a season when they were all idle by the compulsion of natural causes. The training and skill which they would acquire by such work would be a great benefit to the national character."And the same writer says inThe Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 211: "Thus we see that the traditional accounts that we have of the means employed in building the great Pyramid, require conditions of labour supply which are quite practicable in such a land, which would not be ruinous to the prosperity of the country, or oppressive to the people, and which would amply and easily suffice for the execution of their work."

And the same writer says inThe Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 211: "Thus we see that the traditional accounts that we have of the means employed in building the great Pyramid, require conditions of labour supply which are quite practicable in such a land, which would not be ruinous to the prosperity of the country, or oppressive to the people, and which would amply and easily suffice for the execution of their work."

[46]History of Civilization in England(Ed. 1871), Vol. I, pp. 90, 91, 92, 93. And Herbert Spencer'sAutobiography, Vol. II, pp. 341-343.

[47]Quite typical of Western inability to understand the basis of a patriarchal government, and of the misinterpretation of such a form, which writers like Buckle did their best to increase and spread, was the first Act of the playFallen Idols, recently presented at His Majesty's Theatre, London, in which Egyptian slaves were seen cringing and crawling before an inhuman taskmaster, who continually lashed out at them with a big whip.

[48]Fergusson,History of Architecture, Vol. I, p. 95: "Nor is our wonder less when we ask ourselves how it happened that such a people became so strongly organized at that early age as to be willing to undertake the greatest architectural works the world has since seen in honour of one man from among themselves. A king without an army, and with no claim, so far as we can see, to such an honour, beyond the common consent of all, which could hardly have been attained except by the title of long-inherited services acknowledged by the community at large." And on p. 94, speaking of the pictures in the Great Pyramid, the author says: "On these walls the owner of the tomb is usually represented seated, offering first-fruits on a simple table-altar to an unseen god. He is generally accompanied by his wife, and surrounded by his stewards, who enumerate his wealth in horned cattle, in oxen, in sheep and goats, in geese and ducks. In other pictures some are ploughing and sowing, some reaping or thrashing out corn, while others are tending his tame monkeys or cranes, and other domesticated pets. Music and dancing add to the circle of domestic enjoyments, and fowling and fishing occupy his days of leisure. No sign of soldiers or of warlike strife appears in any of these pictures, no arms, no chariots or horses. No camels suggest foreign travel."

[49]I should like to reproduce here Fergusson's enthusiastic account of the work in the interior of the Great Pyramid. I have not space, however, and earnestly recommend readers to refer to it on pp. 93, 94 of Vol. I in hisHistory of Architecture.

[50]Dr. Henry Brugsch-Bey,History of Egypt under the Pharaohs, Vol. I, pp. 444-445.

[51]Dr. Petrie,Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, p. 86.

[52]Ibid., p. 112.

[53]Ibid., p. 116.

[54]Dr. Petrie,Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, p. 116.

[55]Ibid., p. 117. This moralist was Any.

[56]G. E., p. 107: "Every artist knows how different from the state of letting himself go, is his 'most natural' condition, the free arranging, locating, disposing and constructing in the moments of 'inspiration'—and how strictly and delicately he then obeys a thousand laws, which, by their very rigidness and precision, defy all formulation by means of ideas."

[57]W. P., Vol. II, p. 309.

[58]See Nietzsche's remarks on the great need of Christianity in England,G. E., p. 211.

[59]W. P., Vol. II, p. 309.

[60]See Brugsch-Bey,A History of Egypt, Vol. I, p. 25; Wilkinson,The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Vol. I, p. 156; Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez,A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, p. 38; Dr. Petrie,Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, p. 162.

[61]See Wilkinson, Vol. I, p. 179.

[62]SeeIbid., p. 167. Where he is speaking of the Pharaohs he says: "By the practice of justice towards their subjects, they secured to themselves that good-will which was due from children to a parent ... and this, Diodorus observes, was the main cause of the duration of the Egyptian state."

[63]Z., III, LVI.

[64]Dr. Petrie,Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, p. 120.

[65]W. P., Vol. II, p. 309.

[66]History of Architecture, Vol. I, p. 95.

[67]Miss Jane Harrison,Introductory Studies in Greek Art, p. 6.

[68]Dr. Petrie,A History of Egypt, p. 35. Referring to the Lady Nophret and her husband, the author says (speaking quite in the style of a modern art-critic): "These statues are most expressive, and stand in their vitality superior to the works of any later age in Egypt."

[69]On the walls of some of the tombs I inspected at Sakarah, the consummate mastery with which some of the minutest characteristics of domestic animals were represented in bold outline gave me a standard by the side of which even M. Boutet de Monvel's beautiful studies of animals seemed to fall into the shade. (See his illustrations to La Fontaine's fables.)

[70]Models of the Scribe and of the Cheikh-el-Beled are to be seen at the British Museum; but they give one but a poor idea of the originals.

[71]Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez,A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. II, p. 181. Speaking of these portrait statues, they say: "They were not ideal figures to which the desire for beauty of line and expression had much to say; they were stone bodies, bodies which had to reproduce all the individual contours of their flesh-and-blood originals; when the latter was ugly, its reproduction had to be ugly also, and ugly in the same way."

[72]See Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez,A History of Art in Ancient Egypt, Vol. II, p. 181. Speaking of the arrangements which were necessary to enable the inhabitants of the tomb to resist annihilation, the authors say: "Those arrangements were of two kinds, a provision of food and drink, which had to be constantly renewed, either in fact or by the magic multiplication which followed prayer, and a permanent support for the Ka or double, a support that should fill the place of the living body of which it had been deprived by dissolution."

[73]Okakura-Kakuzo passes a funny remark in regard to our modern realistic portraits; he says: "In Western houses we are often confronted with what appears to us useless reiteration. We find it trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us from behind his back. We wonder which is real, he of the picture, or he who talks, and feel a curious conviction that one of them must be a fraud."—The Book of Tea, p. 97.

[74]See Hogarth,The Analysis of Beauty(Ed. 1753), p. 21: "There is no object composed of straight lines that has so much variety, with so few parts, as the pyramid: and it is its constantly varying from its base gradually upwards in every situation of the eye (without giving the idea of sameness as the eye moves round it) that has made it esteemed in all ages, in preference to the cone, which in all views appears nearly the same, being varied only by light and shade."

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