But even when we know what we do know, it is only with the utmost difficulty that an artist who is a child of this weak and impotent age can feel any love for these strange, transcendentally powerful, and almost superhuman figures in granite and diorite which the sculptors of Egypt have left us. The artist may perhaps get nearer to them than any one else in his age, because he, by virtue of the modicum of creative power that is in him, initiates himself almost automatically into the mysteries of this great Egyptian simplicity, order, and transfiguration. But others who are not artists can only pass them by. For these figures are the apotheosis of a particular type. They are what all art should be, a stimulus, and a spur to a life based upon a definite set of values. How, then, could people stop and admire them who are living under values which are possibly the very reverse of those which this art advocates, or under no definite values at all? The style of the statue of King Khephrën, with but a few modifications, was the style of all Egyptian statuary until the days of Psammetichus, over two thousand years later: how can we, the changeable and restless children of Europe, understand these things? C. The Pyramid. How can we admire and understand even the symbol of King Khephrën's social organization--the Pyramid, when we know and love only the level plain? The Pyramid, which in its form embodies all the highest qualities of great art, and all the highest principles of a healthy society, is the greatest artistic achievement that has been discovered hitherto. This symbolic wedlock of Art and Sociology still stands, with all its six thousand years of age, on the threshold of the desert--that is to say, on the threshold of chaos and disorder, where none but the wind attempts to shape and to form; and reminds us of a master will that once existed and set its eternal stamp upon the face of the world in Egypt, so that posterity might learn whether mankind had risen or declined. In its synthesis of the three main canons, simplicity, repetition and variety,[74] nothing has ever excelled it; in its mystic utterance of the conditions of the ideal state, in which every member takes his place and ultimately succeeds in holding highest man uppermost and nearest the sun, it is unparalleled in history; and in its sacred revelation that Man can attain to some height if he chooses, that he can believe in Man the God, and Man the Hierophant, and Man the Prophet, if he chooses, and that he can be noble, happy, lasting and powerful in so doing--in this treble advocacy of these sublime ideals, the pyramid and the Egyptians who created it stand absolutely alone in the history of the world.