It is, perhaps, difficult for us to imagine an Egyptian in love repeating madrigals to his mistress,* for we cannot easily realise that the hard and blackened bodies we see in our museums have once been men and women loving and beloved in their own day.
* The remains of Egyptian amatory literature have been
collected, translated, and commentated on by Maspero. They
have been preserved in two papyri, one of which is at Turin,
the other in the British Museum. The first of these appears
to be a sort of dialogue in which the trees of a garden
boast one after another of the beauty of a woman, and
discourse of the love-scenes which took place under their
shadow.
The feeling which they entertained one for another had none of the reticence or delicacy of our love: they went straight to the point, and the language in which, they expressed themselves is sometimes too coarse for our taste. The manners and customs of daily life among the Egyptians tended to blunt in them the feelings of modesty and refinement to which our civilization has accustomed us. Their children went about without clothes, or, at any rate, wore none until the age of puberty. Owing to the climate, both men and women left the upper part of the body more or less uncovered, or wore fabrics of a transparent nature. In the towns, the servants who moved about their masters or his guests had merely a narrow loin-cloth tied round their hips; while in the country, the peasants dispensed with even this covering, and the women tucked up their garments when at work so as to move more freely. The religious teaching and the ceremonies connected with their worship drew the attention of the faithful to the unveiled human form of their gods, and the hieroglyphs themselves contained pictures which shock our sense of propriety. Hence it came about that the young girl who was demanded in marriage had no idea, like the maiden of to-day, of the vague delights of an ideal union. The physical side was impressed upon her mind, and she was well aware of the full meaning of her consent. Her lover, separated from her by her disapproving parents, thus expresses the grief which overwhelms him: “I desire to lie down in my chamber,—for I am sick on thy account,—and the neighbours come to visit me.—Ah! if my sister but came with them,—she would show the physicians what ailed me,—for she knows my sickness!” Even while he thus complains, he sees her in his imagination, and his spirit visits the places she frequents: “The villa of my sister,—(a pool is before the house),—the door opens suddenly,—and my sister passes out in wrath.—Ah! why am I not the porter,—that she might give me her orders!—I should at least hear her voice, even were she angry,—and I, like a little boy, full of fear before her!” Meantime the young girl sighs in vain for “her brother, the beloved of her heart,” and all that charmed her before has now ceased to please her. “I went to prepare my snare, my cage and the covert for my trap—for all the birds of Puânît alight upon Egypt, redolent with perfume;—he who flies foremost of the flock is attracted by my worm, bringing odours from Puânît,—its claws full of incense.—But my heart is with thee, and desires that we should trap them together,—I with thee, alone, and that thou shouldest be able to hear the sad cry of my perfumed bird,—there near to me, close to me, I will make ready my trap,—O my beautiful friend, thou who goest to the field of the well-beloved!” The latter, however, is slow to appear, the day passes away, the evening comes on: “The cry of the goose resounds—which is caught by the worm-bait,—but thy love removes me far from the bird, and I am unable to deliver myself from it; I will carry off my net, and what shall I say to my mother,—when I shall have returned to her?—Every day I come back laden with spoil,—but to-day I have not been able to set my trap,—for thy love makes me its prisoner!” “The goose flies away, alights,—it has greeted the barns with its cry;—the flock of birds increases on the river, but I leave them alone and think only of thy love,—for my heart is bound to thy heart—and I cannot tear myself away from thy beauty.” Her mother probably gave her a scolding, but she hardly minds it, and in the retirement of her chamber never wearies of thinking of her brother, and of passionately crying for him: “O my beautiful friend! I yearn to be with thee as thy wife—and that thou shouldest go whither thou wishest with thine arm upon my arm,—for then I will repeat to my heart, which is in thy breast, my supplications.—If my great brother does not come to-night,—I am as those who lie in the tomb—for thou, art thou not health and life,—he who transfers the joys of thy health to my heart which seeks thee?” The hours pass away and he does not come, and already “the voice of the turtle-dove speaks,—it says: ‘Behold, the dawn is here, alas! what is to become of me?’ Thou, thou art the bird, thou callest me,—and I find my brother in his chamber,—and my heart is rejoiced to see him!—I will never go away again, my hand will remain in thy hand,—and when I wander forth, I will go with thee into the most beautiful places,—happy in that he makes me the foremost of women—and that he does not break my heart.” We should like to quote the whole of it, but the text is mutilated, and we are unable to fill in the blanks. It is, nevertheless, one of those products of the Egyptian mind which it would have been easy for us to appreciate from beginning to end, without effort and almost without explanation. The passion in it finds expression in such sincere and simple language as to render rhetorical ornament needless, and one can trace in it, therefore, nothing of the artificial colouring which would limit it to a particular place or time. It translates a universal sentiment into the common language of humanity, and the hieroglyphic groups need only to be put into the corresponding words of any modern tongue to bring home to the reader their full force and intensity. We might compare it with those popular songs which are now being collected in our provinces before the peasantry have forgotten them altogether: the artlessness of some of the expressions, the boldness of the imagery, the awkwardness and somewhat abrupt character of some of the passages, communicate to both that wild charm which we miss in the most perfect specimens of our modern love-poets.
END OF VOL. V.