These stupendous remains attest, in the first place, the unbounded wealth that is affirmed by historians to have been at the command of the Egyptian monarchs;—a wealth derived chiefly from the extraordinary fertility of the country, which, like the plains of Babylon, yielded a three hundred-fold return of grain. And as the revenues of a vast empire were added to the home resources of the Babylonian monarchs, so the products of a widely extended commerce came in to augment the treasures of the Egyptian kings. The mouths of the Nile were the centres of trade between the eastern and the western worlds; and that river, after depositing a teeming mud in one year, bore upon its bosom in the next, the harvest it had given, for the feeding of distant and less fertile regions. Nor was the industry of the people—numerous beyond example, wanting to improve every advantage of nature. But for whom was this unbounded wealth amassed, or under whose control was it expended? The testimony of historians coincides with that of the existing ruins in declaring that a despotism—political and religious—of unexampled perfection, and very unlike anything that has since been seen, disposed of the vast surplus products of agriculture and of commerce for the purposes of a gigantic egotism.
By what forms of exaction or of monopoly the Egyptian kings held at their command the property and the services of the people, cannot be certainly determined; but it seems as if one only centre of real possession was acknowledged, and that habits of thinking and acting—bound down to unalterable modes, by a thousand threads of superstitious observance, favoured the tranquil transfer of all rights to the head of the state. With such resources therefore at his disposal, and with a people much better fitted by their temperament and habits for labour than for war—the inhabitants of fertile plains have ever been less warlike than those of mountainous regions—the master of Egypt might find it easy to expend his means in realizing monstrous architectural conceptions.
That degree of scientific skill in masonry which belongs to a middle stage of civilization, in which the human faculties are but partially developed, is what the accounts of historians would lead us to expect; and it is just what these remains actually display. There is science—but there is much more of cost and of labour than of science. The works undertaken by the Egyptian builders were such as a calculable waste of human life would be certain to complete; but they were not such as involve a mastery of practical difficulties by means which mathematical genius must devise.
The Egyptian builders could rear pyramids, or excavate catacombs, or hew temples from out of solid rocks of granite; but they attempted no works like those that were executed by the artists of the middle ages. For to poise so high in air the fretted roof and slender spire of a Gothic Minster required a cost of mind greater far than appears to have been at the command of the Egyptian kings.
The purposes to which the structures of Egypt apparently were devoted, agree also with the accounts of historians. The established despotism was indeed such as to permit capricious sovereigns to indulge their personal vanity without restraint; nevertheless, better and more wise maxims of government were acknowledged, and often followed; and so it is that the traces of public works of vast extent, and of great utility, everywhere attest the intelligence and the good dispositions of some of the Egyptian kings. Canals, piers, reservoirs, aqueducts, are not less abundant than temples and pyramids. Indeed, the temples of Egypt must not be placed altogether to the account either of the vanity of kings, or of the pride of priests; for as the Roman emperors expended a portion of the tribute of the world in the erection of theatres for the gratification of favoured provinces, so the Egyptian kings, for the pleasure of their subjects, reared, in all parts of the land, those sacred menageries of worshipful bulls, crocodiles, cows, apes, cats, dogs, onions, and other—the like august symbols of the common religion. It is recorded that the two kings whose names were held in execration by posterity on account of the cruel labours they exacted from their people, were not builders of temples—but of pyramids.
A mound of earth, one foot in height, satisfies that feeling of our nature which impels us to preserve from disturbance the recent remains of the dead; but a pyramid five hundred feet in height was not too tall a tomb for an Egyptian king! The varnished doll, hideous to look at, into which the art of the apothecary had converted the carcase of the deceased monarch, must needs rest in the deep bowels of a mountain of hewn stone! More complete proof of the utter subjugation of the popular will in ancient Egypt cannot be imagined than what is afforded by the fact, that so much masonry should have been piled, for such a purpose, almost to the clouds. The pyramids could never touch the general enthusiasm of the people, they could only gratify the crazy vanity of the man at whose command they were reared. These tapering quadrangles, as they were the product, so they may be viewed as the proper images of a pure despotism; vast in the surface it covers, and the materials it combines, the prodigious mass serves only to give towering altitude to—a point.
A literature like that of Greece would have protected the Egyptians from the toils of building pyramids:—for, had they possessed poets like Homer, historians like Thucydides, and philosophers like Aristotle, their kings would neither have dared, nor indeed have wished, to attach their fame to bulks of stone, displaying no trace of genius, either in the design, or the execution. The Egyptian kings consigned their names to the custody of pyramids, which have long since betrayed the trust.—The Greeks committed the renown of their chiefs to the frail papyrus of the Nile, and the record has shown itself to be imperishable.
The accordance of the taste displayed in the forms and embellishments of the Egyptian temples, with the temperament and the institutions of the people, as described by historians, deserves to be noticed; though, of course, no very positive conclusions ought to be drawn from facts of this class. It is the province of art, whatever may be the material upon which it works, to combine, in various proportions, the two elements of effect—sameness and difference—uniformity and variety—harmony and opposition. A work of art in which these principles should be wholly disjoined, or which should exhibit only one of them—if that were possible—might amaze the spectator, but could never produce pleasure. To combine them in exact accordance with the intended effect of the work, is the perfection of art. If the impression to be produced inclines to the side of grandeur and sublimity, the principle of sameness or uniformity must predominate; and every variety that is admitted in the embellishments must be quelled by constant repetitions in the same form. But if the sentiment to be awakened is that of pleasure—gaiety, and voluptuousness, the second principle, or that of difference, variety, and opposition, must triumph over the first. Now a uniform preference of one of these styles in works of art, must be held to characterise the prevailing temper of the people whom they are intended to please.
But now the Egyptian architecture is distinguished, perhaps beyond that of any other people, by its subjection to the law of uniformity, and by the apparent aim of the artist to vanquish the imagination of the spectator by an aspect of sublimity; to kindle the sentiment of awe was the intention; and bulk and sameness were the means.
This character of Egyptian art, which prevails almost without exception among the existing remains of the more ancient structures, comports well with the idea of the subjugation of the people beneath a system of stern religious and civil despotism. And yet further, it has a remarkable significance when considered in its relation to the nature of the worship to which these temples were devoted. While we gaze with amazement and awe at the massy buttresses of these structures—at their towering obelisks—at their long ranges of columns, formed as if to support the weight of mountains, and at the colossal guards of the portico, we have to recollect that these temples were the consecrated palaces of crocodiles, of cows, of ichneumons, of dogs, cats, or apes. It seems as if, for the very purpose of effecting the most complete degradation of the popular mind, the national superstition had been framed from the vilest materials it was possible to find; while, to enhance and secure its influence, a nobly-imagined art combined every element of awful grandeur. The imagination was first seduced by a show of sublimity, in order that the moral sense might, the more effectually, be, in the end, trodden in the dust.