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