II
That which is expressed by the soul of the West in its extraordinary wealth of media—words, tones, colours, pictorial perspectives, philosophical systems, legends, the spaciousness of Gothic cathedrals and the formulæ of functions—namely its world-feeling, is expressed by the soul of Old Egypt (which was remote from all ambitions towards theory and literariness) almost exclusively by the immediate language of Stone. Instead of spinning word-subtleties around its form of extension, its “space” and its “time,” instead of forming hypotheses and number-systems and dogmas, it set up its huge symbols in the landscape of the Nile in all silence. Stone is the great emblem of the Timeless-Become; space and death seem bound up in it. “Men have built for the dead,” says Bachofen in his autobiography, “before they have built for the living, and even as a perishable wooden structure suffices for the span of time that is given to the living, so the housing of the dead for ever demands the solid stone of the earth. The oldest cult is associated with the stone that marks the place of burial, the oldest temple-building with the tomb-structure, the origins of art and decoration with the grave-ornament. Symbol has created itself in the graves. That which is thought and felt and silently prayed at the grave-side can be expressed by no word, but only hinted by the boding symbol that stands in unchanging grave repose.” The dead strive no more. They are no more Time, but only Space—something that stays (if indeed it stays at all) but does not ripen towards a Future; and hence it is stone, the abiding stone, that expresses how the dead is mirrored in the waking consciousness of the living. The Faustian soul looks for an immortality to follow the bodily end, a sort of marriage with endless space, and it disembodies the stone in its Gothic thrust-system (contemporary, we may note, with the “consecutives” in Church music[[202]]) till at last nothing remained visible but the indwelling depth- and height-energy of this self-extension. The Apollinian soul would have its dead burned, would see them annihilated, and so it remained averse from stone building throughout the early period of its Culture. The Egyptian soul saw itself as moving down a narrow and inexorably-prescribed life-path to come at the end before the judges of the dead (“Book of the Dead,” cap. 125). That was its Destiny-idea. The Egyptian’s existence is that of the traveller who follows one unchanging direction, and the whole form-language of his Culture is a translation into the sensible of this one theme. And as we have taken endless space as the prime symbol of the North and body as that of the Classical, so we may take the word way as most intelligibly expressing that of the Egyptians. Strangely, and for Western thought almost incomprehensibly, the one element in extension that they emphasize is that of direction in depth. The tomb-temples of the Old Kingdom and especially the mighty pyramid-temples of the Fourth Dynasty represent, not a purposed organization of space such as we find in the mosque and the cathedral, but a rhythmically ordered sequence of spaces. The sacred way leads from the gate-building on the Nile through passages, halls, arcaded courts and pillared rooms that grow ever narrower and narrower, to the chamber of the dead,[[203]] and similarly the Sun-temples of the Fifth Dynasty are not “buildings” but a path enclosed by mighty masonry.[[204]] The reliefs and the paintings appear always as rows which with an impressive compulsion lead the beholder in a definite direction. The ram and sphinx avenues of the New Empire have the same object. For the Egyptian, the depth-experience which governed his world-form was so emphatically directional that he comprehended space more or less as a continuous process of actualization. There is nothing rigid about distance as expressed here. The man must move, and so become himself a symbol of life, in order to enter into relation with the stone part of the symbolism. “Way” signifies both Destiny and third dimension. The grand wall-surfaces, reliefs, colonnades past which he moves are “length and breadth”; that is, mere perceptions of the senses, and it is the forward-driving life that extends them into “world.” Thus the Egyptian experienced space, we may say, in and by the processional march along its distinct elements, whereas the Greek who sacrificed outside the temple did not feel it and the man of our Gothic centuries praying in the cathedral let himself be immersed in the quiet infinity of it. And consequently the art of these Egyptians must aim at plane effects and nothing else, even when it is making use of solid means. For the Egyptian, the pyramid over the king’s tomb is a triangle, a huge, powerfully expressive plane that, whatever be the direction from which one approaches, closes off the “way” and commands the landscape. For him, the columns of the inner passages and courts, with their dark backgrounds, their dense array and their profusion of adornments, appear entirely as vertical strips which rhythmically accompany the march of the priests. Relief-work is—in utter contrast to the Classical—carefully restricted in one plane; in the course of development dated by the Third to the Fifth dynasties it diminishes from the thickness of a finger to that of a sheet of paper, and finally it is sunk in the plane.[[205]] The dominance of the horizontal, the vertical and the right angle, and the avoidance of all foreshortening support the two-dimensional principle and serve to insulate this directional depth-experience which coincides with the way and the grave at its end. It is an art that admits of no deviation for the relief of the tense soul.
Is not this an expression in the noblest language that it is possible to conceive of what all our space-theories would like to put into words? Is it not a metaphysic in stone by the side of which the written metaphysics of Kant seems but a helpless stammering?
There is, however, another Culture that, different as it most fundamentally is from the Egyptian, yet found a closely-related prime symbol. This is the Chinese, with its intensely directional principle of the Tao.[[206]] But whereas the Egyptian treads to the end a way that is prescribed for him with an inexorable necessity, the Chinaman wanders through his world; consequently, he is conducted to his god or his ancestral tomb not by ravines of stone, between faultless smooth walls, but by friendly Nature herself. Nowhere else has the landscape become so genuinely the material of the architecture. “Here, on religious foundations, there has been developed a grand lawfulness and unity common to all building, which, combined with the strict maintenance of a north-south general axis, always holds together gate-buildings, side-buildings, courts and halls in the same homogeneous plan, and has led finally to so grandiose a planning and such a command over ground and space that one is quite justified in saying that the artist builds and reckons with the landscape itself.”[[207]] The temple is not a self-contained building but a lay-out, in which hills, water, trees, flowers, and stones in definite forms and dispositions are just as important as gates, walls, bridges and houses. This Culture is the only one in which the art of gardening is a grand religious art. There are gardens that are reflections of particular Buddhist sects.[[208]] It is the architecture of the landscape, and only that, which explains the architecture of the buildings, with their flat extension and the emphasis laid on the roof as the really expressive element. And just as the devious ways through doors, over bridges, round hills and walls lead at last to the end, so the paintings take the beholder from detail to detail whereas Egyptian relief masterfully points him in the one set direction. “The whole picture is not to be taken at once. Sequence in time presupposes a sequence of space-elements through which the eye is to wander from one to the next.”[[209]] Whereas the Egyptian architecture dominates the landscape, the Chinese espouses it. But in both cases it is direction in depth that maintains the becoming of space as a continuously-present experience.