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.