The action presented in the volume before us relates to those days when the guiding intellect of Egypt became irrevocably dual, and when between the two parts of it, the priests and the pharaohs, opposition appeared so clearly defined and incurable that the ruin of both sides was evident in the future.
The ruin of a pharaoh and the fall of his dynasty, with the rise of a self-chosen sovereign and a new line of rulers, are the double consummation in this novel. The book ends with that climax, but the fall of the new priestly rulers is a matter of history, as is the destruction wrought on Egypt by tyrants from Assyria and Persia. The native pharaohs lost power through the priesthood, whose real interest it was to support them; but fate found the priests later on, and pronounced on them also the doom of extinction.
Alexander Glovatski was born in 1847 in Mashov, a village of the Government of Lublin. He finished his preliminary studies in the Lublin Gymnasium, and was graduated from the University of Warsaw. He took part in the uprising of 1863, but was captured, and liberated after some mouths' detention. As a student he showed notable power, and was exceptionally attracted by mathematics and science, to which he gives much attention yet, though occupied mainly in literature.
Glovatski's published works are in seventeen volumes. These books, with the exception of "The Pharaoh and the Priest," are devoted to modern characters, situations, and questions. His types are mainly from Polish life. Very few of his characters are German or Russian; of Polish types some are Jewish.
Alexander Glovatski is a true man of letters, a real philosopher, retiring, industrious, and modest. He spends all his winters in Warsaw, and lives every summer in the country. He permits neither society nor coteries, nor interests of any sort, to snatch away time from him, or influence his convictions. He goes about as he chooses, whenever he likes and wherever it suits him. When ready to work he sits down in his own house, and tells the world carefully and with kindness, though not without irony, what he sees in it. What he sees is exhibited in the seventeen volumes, which contain great and vivid pictures of life at the end of the recent century. Men and women of various beliefs, occupations, and values, are shown there.
Glovatski is entirely unknown to Americans. This book will present him.
Excepting the view in the temple of Luxor the illustrations given in this volume are from photographs taken by me in 1899, while I was traveling in Egypt.
The title of this volume has been changed from "The Pharaoh" to "The
Pharaoh and the Priest," at the wish of the author.
JEREMIAH CURTIN.
BRISTOL, VERMONT, U. S. A.,
July 28, 1902.