Take Egypt first. There the sculptor thinks of himself far less as artist than as priest and servant of the Mysteries: that is, of the great Divine heart of Existence behind this manifested world, and the official channel which connected It with the latter. The Gods, for him, are frankly unhuman—superhuman— unlike humanity. We call them 'forces of Nature'; and think ourselves mighty wise for having camouflaged our ignorance with this perfectly meaningless term. We have dealt so wisely with our thinking organs, that do but give us a sop of words, and things in themselves we shall never bother about:—like the Grave-digger, who solved the whole problem of Ophelia's death and burial with his three branches of an act. But the Egyptian, with mental faculties unrotted by creedal fatuities like our own, would not so feed 'of the chameleon's dish,'—needed something more than words, words, and words. He knew also that there were elements in their being quite unlike any we are conscious of in ours. So he gave them purely symbolic forms: a human body, for that which he could posit as common to themselves and humanity; and an animal mask, to say that the face, the expression of their consciousness, was hidden, and not to be expressed in terms of human personality. While affirming that they were conscious entities, he stopped short of personalizing them. What was beneath the mask or symbol belonged to the Mysteries, and was not to be publicly declared.
But when he came to portraying men, especially great kings, he used a different method. The king's statue was to remain through long ages, when the king himself was dead and Osirified. The artist knew—it was the tradition of his school—what the Osirified dead looked like. Not an individual sculptor, but a traditional wisdom, was to find expression. What sculptor's name is known? Who wrought the Vocal Memnon?—Not any man; but the Soul and wisdom and genius of Egypt. The last things bothered about were realism and personality. There were a very few conventional poses; the object was not to make a portrait, but to declare the Universal Human Soul;—it was hardly artistic, in any modern acceptation of the word; but rather religious. Artistic it was, in the highest and truest sense: to create, in the medium of stone, the likeness or impression of the Human Soul in its grandeur and majesty; to make hard granite or syenite proclaim the eternal peace and aloofness of the Soul.—Plato speaks of those glimpses of "the other side of the sky" which the soul catches before it comes into the flesh;—the Egyptian artist was preoccupied with the other side of the sky. How wonderfully he succeeded, you have only to drop into the British Museum to see. There is a colossal head there, hung high on the wall facing the stairs at the end of the Egyptian Gallery; you may view it from the ground, or from any point on the stairs; but from whatever place you look at it, if you have any quality of the Soul in you, you go away having caught large glimpses of the other side of the sky. You are convinced, perhaps unconsciously, of the grandeur and reality of the Soul. Having watched Eternity on that face many times, I rejoiced to find this description of it in De Quincey;—if he was not speaking of this, what he says fits it admirably:
"That other object which for four and twenty years in the British Museum struck me as simply the sublimest sight which in this sight-seeing world I had seen. It was the memnon's head, then recently brought from Egypt. I looked at it, as the reader must suppose in order to understand the depth which I have here ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a symbolic head; and what it symbolized to me were: (1) the peace which passeth understanding. (2) The eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation—the eternity which had been, the eternity which was to be. (3) The diffusive love, not such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn. You durst not call it a smile that radiated from those lips; the radiation was too awful to clothe itself in adumbrations of memorials of flesh."
Art can never reach higher than that,—if we think of it as a factor in human evolution. What else you may say of Egyptian sculpture is of minor importance: as, that it was stiff, conventional, or what not; that each figure is portrayed sitting bolt upright, hands out straight, palms down, upon the knees, and eyes gazing into eternity. Ultimately we must regard Art in this Egyptian way: as a thing sacred, a servant of the Mysteries; the revealer of the Soul and the other side of the sky. You may have enormous facility in playing with your medium; may be able to make your marble quite fluidic, and flow into innumerable graceful forms; you may be past master of every intricacy, multiplying your skill to the power of n;—but you will still in reality have made no progress beyond that unknown carver who shaped his syenite, or his basalt, into the "peace which passeth understanding"—"the eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation."
If we turn to Assyria, we find much the same thing. This was a people far less spiritual than the Egyptians: a cruel, splendid, luxurious civilization deifying material power. But you cannot look at the great Winged Bulls without knowing that there, too, the motive was religious. There is an eternity and inexhaustible power in those huge carvings; the sculptors were bent on one end:—to make the stone speak out of superhuman heights, and proclaim the majesty of the Everlasting.—In the Babylonian sculptures we see the kings going into battle weaponless, but calm and invincible; and behind and standing over, to protect and fight for them, terrific monsters, armed and tiger-headed or leopard-headed—the 'divinity that hedges a king' treated symbolically. As always in those days, though many veils might hide from the consciousness of Assyria and later Babylon the beautiful reality of the Soul of Things, the endeavor, the raison d'etre, of Art was to declare the Might, Power, Majesty, and dominion which abide beyond our common levels of thought.
Now then: that great Memnon's head comes from behind the horizon of time and the sunset of the Mysteries; and in it we sample the kind of consciousness produced by the Teaching of the Mysteries. Go back step by step, from Shakespeare's
"Glamis hath murdered Sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more.";
to Dante's
"The love that moves the Sun and the other Stars";
to Talesin's