If, however, I now choose to compare the art of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, and the Parthenon at Athens[39] with that of Egypt, the first falls absolutely to pieces. If I walk from the lions of Gebel Barkal, which Reginald Stuart Poole considers as the "finest example of the idealization of animal forms that any age has produced,"[40] over to the horses of the Parthenon, the latter seem poor, feeble, and slavish beside the powerfully simplified and commanding work of Egypt. And if, with vivid recollections of the diorite statue of King Khephrën at Cairo, I walk up to the best Greek work of the Periclean age, or after, either in London or Paris, I marvel at the denseness of an age which can put the Egyptian Pharaoh second in the order of rank. [Illustration: King Khephrën, Cairo Museum] We now know too much to believe that the noble simplicity of King Khephrën--the builder of the second pyramid of Gizeh--is the result of incompetence or of limited means in dealing with the stone out of which he was carved. No artist who follows the careful lines and profiles of this statue, and who understands the broad grasp with which each undulation, however sweeping, comprehends and comprises all that is essential and indispensable, can doubt for an instant that the sculptor who carved it was not only capable of realism, but infinitely superior to it. And he who does not admire the consummate Ruler form of this statue, and see in it the expression of the greatest artistic power that has ever existed on earth, and probably the portrait of the greatest human power that has ever existed on earth, confesses himself, immediately, unfamiliar with the fundamental spirit of great art.[41] The type of King Khephrën it is quite impossible to admire and to like, unless one is to some extent in sympathy with his ideals and his aspirations. His features will remain strange and quite inscrutable as long as one does not feel one's self leaning, however slightly, to his side, in thought and emotion; but the masterly treatment of his apotheosized portrait by a man who was probably his greatest artist, ought to be apparent to all who have thought and meditated upon the question of what constitutes the greatest art.