Again, a man cannot be permanently happy unless he has a just sense of proportion. He who is too big for his boots must needs limp; and he who has a swollen head is in perpetual discomfort. The history of the lives of men, the history of the nations, gives one a fairer sense of proportion than does almost any other study. In the great company of the men of old he cannot fail to assess his true value: if he has any conceit there is a greater than he to snub him; if he has a poor opinion of his powers there is many a fool with whom to contrast himself favourably. If he would risk his fortune on the spinning of a coin, being aware of the prevalence of his good-luck, archæology will tell him that the best luck will change; or if, when in sore straits, he ask whether ever a man was so unlucky, archæology will answer him that many millions of men have been more unfavoured than he. Archæology provides a precedent for almost every event or occurrence where modern inventions are not involved; and, in this manner, one may reckon their value and determine their trend. Thus many of the small worries which cause so leaden a weight to lie upon the heart and mind are by the archæologist ignored; and many of the larger calamities by him are met with serenity.
But not only does the archæologist learn to estimate himself and his actions; he learns also to see the relationship in which his life stands to the course of Time. Without archæology a man may be disturbed lest the world be about to come to an end: after a study of history he knows that it has only just begun; and that gaiety which is said to have obtained “when the world was young” is to him, therefore, a present condition. By studying the ages the archæologist learns to reckon in units of a thousand years; and it is only then that that little unit of threescore-and-ten falls into its proper proportion. “A thousand ages in Thy sight are like an evening gone,” says the hymn, but it is only the archæologist who knows the meaning of the words; and it is only he who can explain that great discrepancy in the Christian faith between the statement “Behold, I come quickly” and the actual fact. A man who knows where he is in regard to his fellows, and realises where he stands in regard to Time, has learnt a lesson of archæology which is as necessary to his peace of mind as his peace of mind is necessary to his gaiety.
It is not needful, however, to continue to point out the many ways in which archæology may be shown to be necessary to happiness. The reader will have comprehended the trend of the argument, and, if he be in sympathy with it, he will not be unwilling to develop the theme for himself. Only one point, therefore, need here be taken up. It has been reserved to the end of this chapter, for, by its nature, it closes all arguments. I refer to Death.
Death, as we watch it around us, is the black menace of the heavens which darkens every man’s day; Death, coming to our neighbour, puts a period to our merrymaking; Death, seen close beside us, calls a halt in our march of pleasure. But let those who would wrest her victory from the grave turn to a study of the Past, where all is dead yet still lives, and they will find that the horror of life’s cessation is materially lessened. To those who are familiar with the course of history, Death seems, to some extent, but the happy solution of the dilemma of life. So many men have welcomed its coming that one begins to feel that it cannot be so very terrible. Of the death of a certain Pharaoh an ancient Egyptian wrote: “He goes to heaven like the hawks, and his feathers are like those of the geese; he rushes at heaven like a crane, he kisses heaven like the falcon, he leaps to heaven like the locust”; and we who read his words can feel that to rush eagerly at heaven like the crane would be a very fine ending of the story. Archæology, and especially Egyptology, in this respect is a bulwark to those who find the faith of their fathers wavering; for, after much study, the triumphant assertion which is so often found in Egyptian tombs—“Thou dost not come dead to thy sepulchre, thou comest living”—begins to take hold of the imagination. Death has been the parent of so much goodness, dying men have cut such a dash, that one looks at it with an awakening interest. Even if the sense of the misfortune of death is uppermost in an archæologist’s mind, he may find not a little comfort in having before him the example of so many good men, who, in their hour, have faced that great calamity with squared shoulders.
“When Death comes,” says a certain sage of ancient Egypt, “it seizes the babe that is on the breast of its mother as well as him that has become an old man. When thy messenger comes to carry thee away, be thou found by him ready.” Why, here is our chance; here is the opportunity for that flourish which modesty, throughout our life, has forbidden to us! John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, when the time came for him to lay his head upon the block, bade the executioner to smite it off with three strokes as a courtesy to the Holy Trinity. King Charles the Second, as he lay upon his death-bed, apologised to those who stood around him for “being such an unconscionable time adying.” The story is familiar of Napoleon’s aide-de-camp, who, when he had been asked whether he were wounded, replied, “Not wounded, killed,” and thereupon expired. The Past is full of such incidents; and so inspiring are they that Death comes to be regarded as a most stirring adventure. The archæologist, too, better than any other, knows the vastness of the dead men’s majority; and, if, like the ancients, he believe in the Elysian fields, where no death is and decay is unknown, he alone will realise the excellent nature of the company into which he will there be introduced.
There is, however, far more living going on in the world than dying; and there is more happiness (thanks be!) than sorrow. Thus the archæologist has a great deal more of pleasure than of pain to give us for our enrichment. The reader will here enter an objection. He will say: “This may be true of archæology in general, but in the case of Egyptology, with which we are here mostly concerned, he surely has to deal with a sad and solemn people.” The answer is that no nation in the world’s history has been so gay, so light-hearted as the ancient Egyptians; and Egyptology furnishes, perhaps, the most convincing proof that archæology is, or should be a merry science, very necessary to the gaiety of the world. I defy a man suffering from his liver to understand the old Egyptians; I defy a man who does not appreciate the pleasure of life to make anything of them. Egyptian archæology presents a pageant of such brilliancy that the archæologist is often carried along by it as in a dream, down the valley and over the hills, till, Past blending with Present, and Present with Future, he finds himself led to a kind of Island of the Blest, where death is forgotten and only the joy of life, and life’s good deeds, still remain; where pleasure-domes, and all the ancient “miracles of rare device,” rise into the air from above the flowers; and where the damsel with the dulcimer beside the running stream sings to him of Mount Abora, and of the old heroes of the days gone by. If the Egyptologist or the archæologist could revive within him one-hundredth part of the elusive romance, the delicate gaiety, the subtle humour, the intangible tenderness, the unspeakable goodness, of much that is to be found in his province, one would have to cry, like Coleridge:—
“Beware, beware!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.”
CHAPTER III
THE MISFORTUNES OF WENAMON
In the previous chapter it has been suggested that the archæologist is, to some extent, enamoured of the Past because it can add to the stock of things which are likely to tickle the fancy. So humorous a man is he, so fond of the fair things of life, so stirred by its adventures, so touched by its sorrows, that he must needs go to the Past to augment the supplies provided by the Present.