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]