To understand the mind of the artist we must look to those qualities which in their literature were held up as the ideals of life. Stability and Strength were the qualities most admired, and the name for public monuments was “firm things.” Assuredly all mankind has looked on the works of Egypt as giving a sense of these qualities before all others. Closely connected is the sense of Endurance, which was enjoined in words, and carried into practice in the laborious work on the hardest rocks. It was for endurance that statues were made of diorite or granite, though they were painted with life-like hues, so that their material was scarcely seen. Upon these primary qualities was built a rich and varied character, reflected in the elaborate and beautiful sculpture which covered, but never interfered with, the grand mass of a monument. Truth and Justice were qualities much sought for in life, and were expressed by the artist in the reality of his immense blocks of stone, often more hidden than seen, and in the fair and even bearing of all material, without any tricks or paradoxes of structure. In all his earlier work his monolith columns and pillars were a protest that a structural unit must express unity, that what supports others must not be in itself divided. The Discipline and Harmony which were looked on as the bond of social life are shown by the subordination of the whole, by the carrying out of single schemes of decoration illustrating the use of every part of a building on all its walls, by the balance of the proportions of the whole so that there seems a perfect fitness of connection through all parts. And the happy union of vigorous Action with prudent Reserve, which showed the wise man in the proverbs, is the basis of those life-like scenes which cover the walls of the tombs, but which never betray the artist into attempting impossibilities or revealing too much. As true art, then--that is, the expression of his being, and the communication to others of his best feelings and sense of things--the Egyptian work must stand on the highest plane of reality. It would have been a falsehood to his nature to aspire, as a Gothic architect sometimes did, in towers and pinnacles which crush their foundations and will not hold together without incongruous bonds. Nor did he wish to express the romantic sense of beauty, in structure which may tend to exceed the limits of stability. All that belongs to the atmosphere of troubadours and knights errant. The Egyptian possessed in splendid perfection the sense of Strength, Permanence, Majesty, Harmony, and effective Action, tempered with a sympathy and kindliness which cemented a vast disciplined fabric. And these aims of life as a whole he embodied and expressed in his art, with a force and truth which has impressed his character on all who look on his works. He fulfils the canon of true art as completely as any race that has come after him. CHAPTER II THE PERIODS AND SCHOOLS