In which, I think, much light is once more thrown on the inner history of the race, and the curious and fatal position Greece holds in it.  For here we see Art emerging from its old Position as a hand-maid to the Mysteries and recognized instrument of the Gods or the Soul; from sacred becoming secular; from impersonal, personal.  There is, perhaps, little enough in pre-Pheidian Greek sculpture that belongs to the history of Art at all (I do not speak of old cycles and manvantaras, the ages of Troy and Mycenae, but of historical times; I cast no glance now behind the year 870 B. C.).  For the real art that came next before the Pheidian Greek, we have to look to Egypt and Mesopotamia.

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: