Warner Charles Dudley
My Winter on the Nile
CHAPTER XXXIV.—THE WOODEN MAN
THE Khedive and his court, if it may be so called, are not hedged in by any formidable barriers; but there are peculiarities of etiquette. When his Highness gives a grand ball and public reception, of course only the male members of his household are present, only the men of the Egyptian society; it would in fact be a male assembly but for the foreign ladies visiting or residing in the city. Of course there cannot be any such thing as “society” under such circumstances; and as there are no women to regulate the ball invitations, the assembly is “mixed.” There is no such thing as reciprocity with the Arabs and Turks; they are willing to meet the wives or the female friends of all foreigners; they never show their own.
If a lady visiting Cairo wishes to visit one of the royal harems, it is necessary that her husband or some gentleman of her party, should first be presented to the Khedive. After this ceremony, notice is received through the chamberlain of the Viceroy that the lady will be received on such a day and hour, in a palace named, by her Highness So So. Which Highness? That you can never tell before the notice is received. It is a matter of royal convenience at the time. In a family so large and varied as that of the Khedive, you can only be presented to a fragment of it. You may be received by one of his wives; it may please the Queen, mother, who is in charge of his largest harem, to do the honors or the wife of the heir-apparent, or of one of the younger sons, may open her doors to you. I suppose it is a good deal a matter of whim with the inmates of the harem; sometimes they are tired of seeing strangers and of dressing for them. Usually they are eager to break the monotony of their lives with a visit that promises to show them a new costume. There is only one condition made as to the dress of the lady who is to be received at a royal harem; she must not wear black, there is a superstition connected with a black dress, it puts the inmates of the harem in low spirits. Gentlemen presented to the Khedive wear the usual evening dress.
The Khedive’s winter-residence is the Palace of Abdeen, not far from the Ezbekeëh, and it was there that Dr. Lamborn and myself were presented to his highness by Mr. Beardsley, our consul-general. Nothing regal could be more simple or less ceremonious. We arrived at the door at the moment fixed, for the Khedive is a man of promptness and I imagine has his entire day parcelled out in engagements. We first entered a spacious entrance-hall, from which a broad stairway leads to the first story; here were thirty or forty janizaries, gentlemen-in-waiting, and eunuchs, standing motionless, at the sides, and guarding the approach to the stairway, in reception attitudes. Here we were received by an attendant who conducted us to a room on the left, where we were introduced to the chamberlain, and deposited our outer coats and hats. The chamberlain then led us to the foot of the stairs, but accompanied us no further; we ascended to the first landing, and turning to another broad stairway saw the Khedive awaiting us at the head of it. He was unattended; indeed we saw no officer or servant on this floor. The furniture above and below was European, except the rich, thick carpets of Turkey and Persia.
His Highness, who wore a dress altogether European except the fez, received us cordially, shaking hands and speaking with simplicity, as a private gentleman might, and, wasting no time in Oriental compliments, led the way to a small reception-room furnished in blue satin. We were seated together in a corner of the apartment, and an animated talk at once began. Dr. Lamborn’s special errand was to ascertain whether Egypt would be represented in our Centennial, about which the Khedive was well informed. The conversation then passed to the material condition of Egypt, the development of its resources, its canals and railroads, and especially the new road into Soudan, and the opening of Darfour. The Khedive listened attentively to any practical information, either about railroads, factories, or agriculture, that my companion was able to give him, and had the air of a man eager to seize any idea that might be for the advancement of Egypt; when he himself spoke, it was with vivacity, shrewdness, and good sense. And he is not without a gleam of humor now and then,—a very hopeful quality in a sovereign and especially in an Oriental ruler.
The Khedive, in short, is a person to inspire confidence; he appears to be an able, energetic man of affairs, quick and resolute; there is not the slightest stiffness or “divine right” pretence in his manner. He is short, perhaps five feet seven or eight inches in height, and stout. He has a well-proportioned, solid head, good features, light complexion, and a heavy, strong jaw, which his closely-trimmed beard does not conceal. I am not sure that the penetration of his glance does not gain a little from a slight defect in one eye—the result of ophthalmia in his boyhood.
When the interview had lasted about fifteen minutes, the Khedive ended it by rising; at the head of the stairs we shook hands and exchanged the proper speeches; at the bottom of the first flight we turned and bowed, his highness still standing and bowing, and then we saw him no more. As we passed out an order had come from above which set the whole household in a flurry of preparation, a running hither and thither as for speedy departure—the sort of haste that is mingled with fear, as for the command of a power that will not brook an instant’s delay.
Exaggerated notions are current about harems and harem-receptions, notions born partly of the seclusion of the female portion of the household in the East. Of course the majority of harems in Egypt are simply the apartment of the one wife and her children. The lady who enters one of them pays an ordinary call, and finds no mystery whatever. If there is more than one wife, a privileged visitor, able to converse with the inmates, might find some skeletons behind the screened windows. It is also true that a foreign lady may enter one of the royal harems and be received with scarcely more ceremony than would attend an ordinary call at home. The receptions at which there is great display, at which crowds of beautiful or ugly slaves line the apartments, at which there is music and dancing by almehs, an endless service of sweets and pipes and coffee, and a dozen changes of dress by the hostess during the ceremony, are not frequent, are for some special occasion, the celebration of a marriage, or the entertainment of a visitor of high rank. One who expects, upon a royal invitation to the harem, to wander into the populous dove-cote of the Khedive, where languish the beauties of Asia, the sisters from the Gardens of Gul, pining for a new robe of the mode from Paris, will be most cruelly disappointed.
But a harem remains a harem, in the imagination. The ladies went one day to the house—I suppose it is a harem—of Hussein, the waiter who has served us with unremitting fidelity and cleverness. The house was one of the ordinary sort of unburnt brick, very humble, but perfectly tidy and bright. The secret of its cheerfulness was in a nice, cheery, happy little wife, who made a home for Hussein such as it was a pleasure to see in Egypt. They had four children, the eldest a daughter, twelve years old and very good-mannered and pretty. As she was of marriageable age, her parents were beginning to think of settling her in life.
“What a nice girl she is, Hussein,” says Madame.
“Yes’m,” says Hussein, waving his hands in his usual struggle with the English language, and uttering the longest speech ever heard from him in that tongue, but still speaking as if about something at table, “yes’m; good man have it; bad man, drinkin’ man, smokin’ man, eatin’ man not have it.”
I will describe briefly two royal presentations, one to the favorite wife of the Khedive, the other to the wife of Mohammed Tufik Pasha, the eldest son and heir-apparent, according to the late revolution in the rules of descent. French, the court language, is spoken not only by the Khedive but by all the ladies of his family who receive foreigners. The lady who was presented to the Khedive’s wife, after passing the usual guard of eunuchs in the palace, was escorted through a long suite of showy apartments. In each one she was introduced to a maid of honor who escorted her to the next, each lady-in-waiting being more richly attired than her predecessor, and the lady was always thinking that now this one must be the princess herself. Female slaves were in every room, and a great number of them waited in the hall where the princess received her visitor. She was a strikingly handsome woman, dressed in pink satin and encrusted with diamonds. The conversation consisted chiefly of the most exaggerated and barefaced compliments on both sides, both as to articles of apparel and personal appearance. Coffee, cigarettes, and sweets without end, in cups of gold set with precious stones, were served by the female slaves. The wife was evidently delighted with the impression made by her beauty, her jewels, and her rich dress.
The wife of Tufik Pasha received at one of the palaces in the suburbs. At the door eunuchs were in waiting to conduct the visitors up the flight of marble steps, and to deliver them to female slaves in waiting. Passing up several broad stairways, they were ushered into a grand reception-hall furnished in European style, except the divans. Only a few servants were in attendance, and they were white female slaves. The princess is petite, pretty, intelligent, and attractive. She received her visitors with entire simplicity, and without ceremony, as a lady would receive callers in America. The conversation ran on the opera, the travel on the Nile, and topics of the town. Coffee and cigarettes were offered, and the sensible interview ended like an occidental visit. It is a little disenchanting, all this adoption of European customs; but the wife of Tufik Pasha should ask him to go a little further, and send all the eunuchs out of the palace.
We had believed that summer was come. But we learned that March in Cairo is, like the same month the world over, treacherous. The morning of the twenty-sixth was cold, the thermometer 60°. A north wind began to blow, and by afternoon increased to a gale, such as had not been known here for years. The town was enveloped in a whirlwind of sand; everything loose was shaking and flying; it was impossible to see one’s way, and people scudding about the streets with their heads drawn under their robes continually dashed into each other. The sun was wholly hidden. From our boat we could see only a few rods over the turbulent river. The air was so thick with sand, that it had the appearance of a yellow canvas. The desert had invaded the air—that was all. The effect of the light through this was extremely weird; not like a dark day of clouds and storm in New England, but a pale, yellowish, greenish, phantasmagoric light, which seemed to presage calamity. Such a light as may be at the Judgment Day. Cairo friends who dined with us said they had never seen such a day in Egypt. Dahabeëhs were torn from their moorings; trees were blown down in the Ezbekëeh Gardens.
We spent the day, as we had spent other days, in the Museum of Antiquities at Boulak. This wonderful collection, which is the work of Mariette Bey, had a thousand times more interest for us now than before we made the Nile voyage and acquired some knowledge of ancient Egypt through its monuments. Everything that we saw had meaning—statues, mummy-cases, images, scarabæi, seals, stelae, gold jewelry, and the simple articles in domestic use.
It must be confessed that to a person uninformed about Egypt and unaccustomed to its ancient art, there is nothing in the world so dreary as a collection of its antiquities. The endless repetition of designs, the unyielding rigidity of forms, the hideous mingling of the human and the bestial, the dead formality, are insufferably wearisome. The mummy is thoroughly disagreeable. You can easily hate him and all his belongings; there is an air of infinite conceit about him; I feel it in the exclusive box in which he stands, in the smirk of his face painted on his case. I wonder if it is the perkishness of immortality—as if his race alone were immortal. His very calmness, like that of so many of the statues he made, is an offensive contempt. It is no doubt unreasonable, but as a living person I resent this intrusion of a preserved dead person into our warm times,—an appearance anachronistic and repellant.
But as an illustration of Egyptian customs, art, and history, the Boulak museum is almost a fascinating place. True it is not so rich in many respects as some European collections of Egyptian antiquities, but it has some objects that are unique; for instance, the jewels of Queen Aah-hotep, a few statues, and some stelæ, which furnish the most important information.
This is not the place, had I the knowledge, to enter upon any discussion of the antiquity of these monuments or of Egyptian chronology. I believe I am not mistaken, however, in saying that the discoveries of Mariette Bey tend strongly to establish the credit of the long undervalued list of Egyptian sovereigns made by Manetho, and that many Oriental scholars agree with the director of this museum that the date of the first Egyptian dynasty is about five thousand years before the Christian era. But the almost startling thought presented by this collection is not in the antiquity of some of these objects, but in the long civilization anterior to their production, and which must have been necessary to the growth of the art here exhibited.
It could not have been a barbarous people who produced, for instance, these life-like images found at Maydoom, statues of a prince and princess who lived under the ancient king Snéfrou, the last sovereign of the third dynasty, and the predecessor of Cheops. At no epoch, says M. Mariette, did Egypt produce portraits more speaking, though they want the breadth of style of the statue in wood—of which more anon. But it is as much in an ethnographic as an art view that these statues are important. If the Egyptian race at that epoch was of the type offered by these portraits, it resembled in nothing the race which inhabited the north of Egypt not many years after Snéfrou. To comprehend the problem here presented we have only to compare the features of these statues with those of others in this collection belonging to the fourth and fifth dynasties.
The best work of art in the Museum is the statue of Chephron, the builder of the second pyramid. “The epoch of Chephron,” says M. Mariette, “corresponding to the third reign of the fourth dynasty of Manetho, our statue is not less than six thousand years old.” It is a life-size sitting figure, executed in red granite. We admire its tranquil majesty, we marvel at the close study of nature in the moulding of the breast and limbs, we confess the skill that could produce an effect so fine in such intractable material. It seems as if Egyptian art were about to burst its trammels. But it never did; it never exceeded this cleverness; on the contrary it constantly fell away from it.
The most interesting statue to us, and perhaps the oldest image in Egypt, and, if so, in the world, is the Wooden Man, which was found at Memphis. This image, one metre and ten centimetres high, stands erect, holding a staff. The figure is full of life, the pose expresses vigor, action, pride, the head, round in form, indicates intellect. The eyes are crystal, in a setting of bronze, giving a startling look of life to the regard. It is no doubt a portrait. “There is nothing more striking,” says its discoverer, “than this image, in a manner living, of a person who has been dead six thousand years.” He must have been a man of mark, and a citizen of a state well-civilized; this is not the portrait of a barbarian, nor was it carved by a rude artist. Few artists, I think, have lived since, who could impart more vitality to wood.
And if the date assigned to this statue is correct, sculpture in Egypt attained its maximum of development six thousand years ago. This conclusion will be resisted by many, and on different grounds. I heard a clergyman of the Church of England say to his comrade, as they were looking at this figure:—
“It’s all nonsense; six thousand years! It couldn’t be. That’s before the creation of man.”
“Well,” said the other, irreverently, “perhaps this was the model.”
This museum is for the historian, the archaeologist, not for the artist, except in his study of the history of art. What Egypt had to impart to the world of art was given thousands of years ago—intimations, suggestions, outlines that, in freer circumstances, expanded into works of immortal beauty. The highest beauty, that last touch of genius, that creative inspiration which is genius and not mere talent, Egyptian art never attained. It achieved wonders; they are all mediocre wonders; miracles of talent. The architecture profoundly impresses, almost crushes one; it never touches the highest in the soul, it never charms, it never satisfies.
The total impression upon myself of this ancient architecture and this plastic art is a melancholy one. And I think this is not altogether due to its monotony. The Egyptian art is said to be sui generis; it has a character that is instantly recognized; whenever and wherever we see a specimen of it, we say without fear of mistake, “that is Egyptian.” We are as sure of it as we are of a piece of Greek work of the best age, perhaps surer. Is Egyptian art, then, elevated to the dignity of a type, of itself? Is it so to be studied, as something which has flowered into a perfection of its kind? I know we are accustomed to look at it as if it were, and to set it apart; in short, I have heard it judged absolutely, as if it were a rule to itself. I cannot bring myself so to look at it. All art is one. We recognize peculiarities of an age or of a people; but there is only one absolute standard; to that touchstone all must come.
It seems to me then that the melancholy impression produced by Egyptian art is not alone from its monotony, its rigidity, its stiff formality, but it is because we recognize in it an arrested development. It is archaic. The peculiarity of it is that it always remained archaic. We have seen specimens of the earliest Etruscan figure-drawing, Gen. Cesnola found in Cyprus Phoenician work, and we have statues of an earlier period of Greek sculpture, all of which more or less resemble Egyptian art. The latter are the beginnings of a consummate development. Egypt stopped at the beginnings. And we have the sad spectacle of an archaic art, not growing, but elaborated into a fixed type and adhered to as if it were perfection. In some of the figures I have spoken of in this museum, you can find that art was about to emancipate itself. In all later works you see no such effort, no such tendency, no such hope. It had been abandoned. By and by impulse died out entirely. For thousands of years the Egyptians worked at perfecting the mediocre. Many attribute this remote and total repression to religious influence. Something of the same sort may be seen in the paintings of saints in the Greek chambers of the East to-day; the type of which is that of the Byzantine period. Are we to attribute a like arrest of development in China to the same cause?
It is a theory very plausibly sustained, that the art of a people is the flower of its civilization, the final expression of the conditions of its growth and its character. In reading Mr. Taine’s ingenious observations upon art in the Netherlands and art in Greece, we are ready to assent to the theory. It may be the general law of a free development in national life and in art. If it is, then it is not disturbed by the example of Egypt. Egyptian art is not the expression of the natural character, for its art was never developed. The Egyptians were a joyous race, given to mirth, to the dance, to entertainments, to the charms of society, a people rather gay than grave; they lived in the open air, in the most friendly climate in the world. The sculptures in the early tombs represent their life—an existence full of gaiety, grace, humor. This natural character is not expressed in the sombre temples, nor in their symbolic carvings, nor in these serious, rigid statues, whose calm faces look straight on as if into eternity. This art may express the religion of the priestly caste; when it had attained the power to portray the rigid expectation of immortality, the inscrutable repose of the Sphinx, it was arrested there, and never allowed in any respect to change its formality. And I cannot but believe that if it had been free, Egyptian art would have budded and bloomed into a grace of form in harmony with the character of the climate and the people.
It is true that the architecture of Egypt was freer than its sculptures, but the whole of it together is not worth one edifice like the Greek temple at Pæstum. And to end, by what may seem a sweeping statement, I have had more pleasure from a bit of Greek work—an intaglio, or a coin of the best period, or the sculptures on a broken entablature—than from anything that Egypt ever produced in art.
