THE CRYSTAL PALACE.
THE EGYPTIAN COURT.
Tun art of the Crystal Palace begins where the world's art began— at Egypt. Strange to think that the earliest remaining monuments of this land bad seen almost as many centuries before the Christian aora as they and the world have seen since. Stranger still, it is the first impulse to think, that what men have known of art in the succeeding ages has not been very much beyond what the Egyptians knew, however wide and important have certainly been their strides in learning how to express their knowledge. But in reality this is not strange ; the strange thing would be if it were otherwise. It is not strange that men having eyes to see should use them rightly, and see nearly as much as lies within their horizon-line. An open eye and undepraved intelligence wi]l, with- out Any laborious process, conceive much of the true essence of Art— what she should aim at, and how aim at it. The brain may be more or less schooled in the means, the hand in the methgd ; but the clearness of physical and mental vision is the same. Would that the parallel held good throughout ; that the impulse, if substantially as true when unin- formed as when informed and at the zenith of art, could preserve itself unenfeebled thenceforward. But this will not be. The means supersede the end ; the learning chokes the knowledge ; the accidental overlies the essential. As language, in its noble use reveals, and in its ignoble use conceals the thought of the speaker, so Art has its two phases, analogous, yet with a difference. It does not aim at embodying :Nature and nothing else, for Nature has already embodied herself better than any copy can do it for her. The true aim of Art is to embody a man's thought concerning Nature. It will be successful or unsuccessful according as it penetrates to her essence or skims her surface ; but, either way, it will be genuine, and is not ignoble. It becomes ignoble when, instead of revealing a man's thought about Nature, it conceals his want of thought about her. All faithful early Art has done the first, and all futile and effete art the secoqd. For the absence of thought may co- exist with the possession of information. When Art is in her dotage, you may still find in her plenty of information about Nature—more than before, after a certain manner ; but the thought is bestowed upon the mere art and the artist—what he can do for self-display, or to resemble another man's art, or not to resemble it.
The thought which the Egyptians derived from Nature most absorb- ingly, and expressed most distinctly, was that of repose. To their eyes, assuredly, Nature was not "a perpetual flux," but a perpetual endeavour towards rest. The endeavour was the dust of the race, the repose its crown.
"Rest, rest, for ever rest, Spread over brow and breast : Her face is toward the West, The purple land."
Monotony is one feature of repose ; and the Egyptians have it. The ruling sentiment resides in a single seated figure, the legs straight, fixed, and identical, the bands spread on the knees, the head poised without either raising or depression, the eyes set forward ; but it resides far more than fiftyfold in fifty such figures. The huge mass and colossal scale of Egyptian art are another feature of repose, forming in themselves a cha- racteristic nationally distinctive, yet still subordinate in expression to the leading thought. The pyramid, the labour of whose building has con- sumed years and ground down thousands into their unknown graves, shall endure for ages on ages. It cannot be removed or altered; it rests for ever there. The vast temple-columns shall not be transplanted ; the sculptured giants shall sit supporting the rock they are carved from while there remains a rock to support. The repose of Egyptian art often approaches or becomes passivity. But the Egyptian artist was not incapable of anything else. The bas-re- liefs continually exhibit action and motion, as well as clearly-marked dis- tinctions of character. For instance : the young Sesostris overcoming two Asiatic chiefs, from the temple of Abou Simbel, is vigorous, and even spirited, in these respects, and presents effectively the contrast of youth- ful strength in its full exercise with the lassitude of coming death : the triumph of Ramses Mai Amun, from the temple of Medinet Abou, is not only full but amply diversified in the actions, especially of the captives. Still, each figure seems arrested in his motion,—not like a moving man petrified, but one that pauses of his own accord, and stands fixed. It is true that there is quite as much in this of the sculptor's want of power to do more, as of his intentional abstinence from doing it : but his whole being was so moulded that he did not wish to attain the more ; the art which his view comprehended did not include it. Had the de- sire existed, the power would have come. All this, however, shows that he had not ceased to think of Nature, treating Art as the expression of his thought. One main idea possessed his mind; but the repose which he saw brooding over universal Nature did not obliterate her ebb and flow. Of all art, the Egyptian is the most permanent, as well in the tone and self-reproduction which imbued it from age to age as in the expression of its particular monuments. Yet even Egypt has her alternations and her gradual descent. Her art under the native dynasties surpassed that of the Ptolemaic period ; to which, however, are due the beautiful lotus-leaved and palm-leaved capitals ; and the Ptolemaic art surpassed the Roman. We have seen thought of nature expressed with a monotony often al- most servile, yet still not losing its nobility as thought. Let us turn to one of the latest statues in the Egyptian Court, one of the Augustan period, which is thus described by Mr. Sharpe in the official handbook. "A statue of a priest. It was made by a Greek artist under the Roman sway. His head-dress and the cloth round his loins are Egyptian, so is the square block behind which supports it : in every other respect it is a Greek figure." Not wholly so, we submit. The face has the Egyptian smile, and the attitude something of the Egyptian formality. But the smile has lost its meaning : it is no longer the calm satisfaction of one at rest well-earned, but the mean grin of an idiot, who knows not why he should grin, but does so none the less. The formality is not grand and weighty, a part of the statue's being; but a mere addition to make it bear some affinity to a certain style. The Greek artist has given us more in- formation about Nature than the Egyptians had done—he knows what an arm or a leg is better than they did: but he has not got a thought of Nature in his composition, and so can only express himself as a handi- craftsman and nothing else. Another example of a much-earlier period* may suffice. Thc lions before the model of the temple of Abou Simbel will be immediately felt as less grand than those of a still remoter age at the entrance from the nave, the originals of which are in the British Mu- seum. The cause does not consist in any less amount of conventional grandeur in arrangement, but in the fact that the older lions are more thoroughlf leonine and feline than the others. The first are majestically recumbent, but with the grim fierceness about them of a future spring at their prey, which the dull gravity of the second does not possess. The sculptor has seen more deeply into nature and the essence of lion than his successor, and has expressed something greater. Some Egyptian scholars assert that the further we go backwards, even
* The two compilers of the handbook do not coincide in their chronology. According to Mr. Jones, the temple of Abou Simbel was built by Ramses the Third, in 1565 B.C.; according to Mr. Sharpe, by Ramses the Second, about 1150; and corresponding discrepancies occur in other instances. Where we give dates, we have followed Mr. Sharpe.
to the very origin of known records, the more advanced and admirable does the art of Egypt appear. The two great pyramids are the most an- cient buildings of which we have cognizance, and the most stupendous : fully constructed temples preceded rock-temples, and the necessary fea- tures of the first are reproduced, not for necessity but foe style, in the second. The finest Egyptian works at the Crystal Palace belong generally to a very early epoch, beginning about the fifteenth century B.c., and having dignity and refinement conspicuously united. There is less attempt to do anything of which the art was not then capable, less mus- cular development and more proportion. The figures and details of the temple of Abou Simbel, ancient as they also are, have much of the mon- strous and overgrown in the parts independently of the enormous dimen- sions of the whole. The earliest art had not done at all what was never done in Egypt or Ethiopia better than badly. The chief Egyptian monuments here represented are a portico of the Ptolemaic period, being the façade towards the nave; an outer court, with important reliefs ; a façade of the ball of Karnac, giving compara- tively but a few columns, only one-third the actual size ; a model of the temple of Abou Simbel, two of whose colossi, of their original height of 61 feet each, are repeated in the Northern transept ; two porticoes taken from the island of Philce; another portico of the period of Amunothph the Third (about 1260 n.c.) ; a portion of a tomb at Beni-Hassan; a portico with lotus-leaved columns ; and on the façade towards the Greek Court some very beautiful and interesting reliefs. The court is still in progress. In the museum, among several statues and reliefs, appear two casts of the Rosetta Stone.
The system of polychromatism adopted at the Crystal Palace is one which will give rise to frequent discussion varying according to its appli- cation to different kinds of architecture and of art. It may be used fear- lessly upon the Egyptian works so far as authority goes; though occasion- ally the particular colouring employed has been conjectural. It will be considered, however, by many, and by us among the number, that the brightness and newness of the colouring detracts not a little from the force of the impression ; and the snore so as taken in connexion with the re- duced scale of many of the copies of famous monuments. On examining the details, and studying them, we shall recover the befitting tone of mind more or less ; but the remotest antiquity of which we possess a trace, monuments stained and blurred with the ravage and decay of centuries, and the most colossal proportions in which stones hewn for temples and sculptured for statues have ever been made to express the genius and aspi- ration of man, are very inadequately represented by models reduced to the ordinary modern size, coloured like the rooms of a new clubhouse, only a good deal brighter, and smelling of paint and putty. It is Egypt in duo- decimo; a huge battered family Bible compressed into the last moroccoed, gold-edged, and gilt-clasped Anglican" Morning and Evening Lessons." But no mode in which the thing could have been done would have been free from something of the same objection ; and we think that, in this case, the additional facts displayed and implied by the polychromatism were worth the possibly additional weakening of the antique illusion.
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