On Egyptian Influence

We may reasonably expect that the Egyptian excavations will produce an Egyptian fashion in English drawing-rooms. It cannot, indeed, be hoped that the fashion will pursue all the possibilities of the fancy. Furniture dealers and decorators will surely take a hint from those beautiful bedsteads and tables, that are rounded off with the heads of wild beasts, or rest upon the feet of quadrupeds. I have wondered since childhood why more was not made of the parallel j ever since I could sit on a wooden horse as if it were a chair, or bestride a chair and pretend it was a horse. And it would be pleasant to wave our friends towards a hospitable board that terminated in the tusks or horns of a great glaring elephant or elk. But I fear that the fashion will not go to all its possible limits. It is doubtful if the furniture dealers will deal in mummy-cases for modern corpses, or treat such painted coffins as furniture. It is doubtful if we shall ever see poor Uncle Henry or the late lamented Aunt Mary standing about the drawing-room in an embalmed condition. Such artificial preservation seems to have been natural to the old Egyptians in the moral atmosphere of their own religion, whatever it may have been. For even when we come to know a little of the religion, we know nothing of the atmosphere. But to Christians the practice would seem as creepy as keeping a stuffed grandfather in a glass case. For us, decay itself is more decent j corruption itself is less loathsome than that stiff mask of lifej and there is more hope in visible dissolution than in that terrible terrestrial immortality.

But it is probable, as has been said, that the Egyptian fashion will fall short of the Egyptian religion. The society lady may wear the veil of Isis, though perhaps less consistently than the goddess. But I rather doubt whether society gentlemen will assume head-dresses simulating the heads of dogs, in the manner of Anubisj and even whether the ladies will all wish to identify themselves with cats, in honour of Pasht. It is more likely that for a little time the conventions of decoration might be affected and possibly in decorative literature as well as decorative art. The lotus might be substituted for the rose, or even the ibis for the nightingale. But it will be long before any spontaneous Western poet speaks of the ibis as Keats spoke of the nightingale, or of the lotus as Ronsard spoke of the rose. These things are decorative precisely because they are dead 5 they can be used upon screens and carpets precisely because they have been flattened like dried plants in an album, or microscopic sections on a slide. What the living

Egyptian religion was like, not the most learned man can possibly tell. For we know how wildly the most learned can misunderstand even a living religion. And even our guesses about it have been a great deal vulgarized by the trick of writing trashy tales and theories about reincarnation, which always revolve (I cannot imagine why) round the mystery of ancient Egypt. So far as I know, Egyptian religion did not involve reincarnation. I cannot imagine why romances of reincarnation should always involve Egyptian religion. They also generally involve Egyptian royalty 3 and those recovering the memory of their former lives seldom fail to remember having been Egyptian princesses, or the lovers of Egyptian princesses. It would seem that, at that stage of the earth's history, all the inhabitants were Egyptians, and all the Egyptians were royal personages. If I have lived before in remote ages, I would much rather have been an ancient Chinaman. I might have been an ancient Chaldean or an ancient Persian. It even seems barely possible that I might have been an ancient European, as I am now a modern European. A great deal of imaginative work might be done for the Etrurian civilization, as Flaubert did it for the Carthaginian civilization. I need hardly add that I do not believe In these Pythagorean notions at all; but, apart from believing In them, I am bored with them. I think I could justify the boredom, if boredom can ever be justified. My mortal life on this planet, thousands of years ago, would only be mystical as my ordinary life now is mystical j and that is quite mystical enough for me. But the memory would be in no sense a vision j it would only be like remembering any day that I happen to have forgotten. The day would be but another glimpse of ordinary daylight j or as ordinary or extraordinary as daylight is today. What makes a real religion mystical, in a much more tremendous sense, is that it claims (truly or falsely) to be hiding a beauty that is more beautiful than any that we know, or perhaps an evil that is more evil. This gives another sort of intensity to common things, suggesting something that is redder than red, or more white than white.

It is possible that the new interest in Egyptian history may save us from the dullness of this Egyptian romance. Perhaps when we know a little more about Egypt we shall not boast of knowing so many Egyptian princesses. We shall be less proud of our previous lives and our pre-natal love affairs. We may make the strange discovery about these dead people that they were living people, and not merely our own dead selves on which we have risen on steppingstones to our present dizzy height of wisdom and virtue. In short, it is to be hoped that all the sham mysticism that has vulgarized the view of Egypt will give place to the more human thing which we call history. And, indeed, the glimpse we have of that remarkable man who is currently referred to as the "heretic Pharaoh" is a genuine and serious and suggestive piece of history. He is not an empty mummy-case, to be filled with our old selves according to our fancy, but a real historical figure of a recognizable historical type. There is something to be said against the type as well as for it. There is something in it of Marcus Aurelius^ something also of Julian the Apostate 3 something, again, of Joseph of Austria, the brother of Marie Antoinette. Few and fragmentary as are the facts that can be collected about him, far away in such an infinite desert of forgotten antiquity, there are enough of them to converge and convince us of the sort of character involved. He was the sort of idealist who always seeks to simplify j and perhaps has too intellectual an impatience in simplifying. He appealed to that nobler notion of monotheism which really remained in the background of most polytheism, and set up as a substitute and a symbol of God the disk of the sun. It is said that he also tried to introduce a more naturalistic style in artj disregarding the hieratic rules of representation 3 seeking to make his own image a portrait rather than an idol. I believe it is also true that he was, as humane and high-minded men of his type generally are, an opponent of Imperialism. In looking up some facts for a book upon Palestine, I found he was quite severely criticized for not having taken sufficiently seriously the suzerainty which Egypt was supposed to exercise over the Palestinian tribes. The more Jingo dons and historians flew into quite a wild fury with that withered mummy out of a forgotten world j simply because he was a Little Englander, or, rather, a Little Egypter. All these things, taken together, are enough to make up a real historical character. It is a kind of man who is very much of a hero and sometimes a little of a prig. He often fails in his own fight with popular superstition, because he has not enough sympathy with popular sentiment. It is the paradox of his position that his ideals are impersonal but the interest of him is wholly personal. He will hear of nothing less than saving the whole world and he saves only his own soul.

But these guesses of ours confirm another historical truth of high importance. Such a reformer failed in the old heathen world because of the broad fact about that world — that popular religion was one thing, and personal philosophy quite another. Religion was a social function, almost in the sense that a dance or a dinner is a social function. What was individual was not really religion, but rather speculation. The speculator was separated from social religion, whether he lived alone, like Buddha, or died alone like Socrates. What Christianity did was to combine these two things in a third thing that had never existed before j a public worship that could be believed, and a private conviction that could be shared. It took the popular superstitions very sympathetically, but it grouped them round something that could also be taken seriously. It made a creed that was more than a cult and was also a culture. The more we realize the real history of all that almost prehistoric paganism, the more we shall see that this change was one of the few giant strides made by man.