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?