And to those who live not only in the present but also in past ages by insight and association, the transitory stewardship of things becomes the only view possible. In this generation I possess a gem, a scarab, a carving: it is almost indestructible, it may be lost for a time but will reappear again a thousand, five thousand, twenty thousand years hence in some one else’s hands, and be again a delight and a revelation of past thought, as it is to-day. We have no right to destroy or suppress what happens just for the present to be in our power. To do so is to take the position of a Vandal in the sack of Rome.
Rights of the past.
The past also has its rights, though statues may be misappropriated and churches be “restored.” A work that has cost days, weeks, or years of toil has a right to existence. To murder a man a week before his time we call a crime; what are we to call the murder of years of his labour? Or, without touching life, what difference is there between putting a man in prison for a year so that he cannot work, and destroying a year’s work when it is done? If anything, the balance is in favour of preventing rather than destroying his work. Every monument we see has been lovingly intended, carefully carved, piously erected, in hopes that it would last. And who are we to defeat all that thought and labour? Every tablet, every little scarab, is a portion of life solidified;—so much will, so much labour, so much living reality. When we look closely into the work we seem almost to watch the hand that did it; this stone is a day, a week, of the life of some living man. I know his mind, his feeling, by what he has thought and done on this stone. I live with him in looking into his work, and admiring, and valuing it. Shall I then turn on him like a wild beast and kill so much of his life? Surely if we would draw back from wiping out a few years of the life of some man with whom we have no sympathies, far more should we shrink from even hurting the beautiful and cherished result of the life of a man whose mind we admire and honour in his work. I give my life to do so much work in it, and if I were to know that every night the work of the day would be annihilated, I had rather be relieved of the trouble of living. In all worth, in all realness, the life of past men preserved to us has rights as veritably as the life of present men.
The work of the archaeologist is to save lives; to go to some senseless mound of earth, some hidden cemetery, and thence bring into the comradeship of man some portions of the lives of this sculptor, of that artist, of the other scribe; to make their labour familiar to us as a friend; to resuscitate them again, and make them to live in the thoughts, the imaginations, the longing, of living men and women; to place so much of their living personality current side by side with our own labours and our own thoughts. And has not the past its rights, as well as the present and the future?
What care then, what conscience, must be put into the work of preserving as much as possible of the past lives which those about us are wishing to know and to share in. The mummy of Rameses or of Thothmes, the portrait of the builder of the great pyramid ([Fig. 65]), or of the Pharaoh of the Exodus ([Fig. 66]) is a permanent mental possession of all cultivated mankind, as long as our literature shall last. The knowledge of the growth of the great civilisation of Egypt, from the days of men clad in goat-skins to the height of its power, has all been reconstructed in the past ten years, and will be part of the common stock of our knowledge of man, so long as civilisation continues.
Fig. 65. The Builder of the Great Pyramid.
Fig. 66. The Pharaoh of the Exodus.
Duties.