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But her death was to be a slow one. She was even to have, before passing on the torch to younger hands, a fine reawakening to action. With the Saite dynasty, about the time when Greece emerged from the myth into history, she profited by the decadence of Assyria and that of the interior organization of the Medo – Persian power, to recover courage, in view of her re-established security. Once more she looked about her and into herself, and discovered in her old soul—infused with freshness by the confused presentiment of a new ideal—a supreme flower, as warm as an autumn. She cradled nascent Greece with a farewell song, still quite virile, and very gentle.
But her death was to be a slow one. She was even to have, before passing on the torch to younger hands, a fine reawakening to action. With the Saite dynasty, about the time when Greece emerged from the myth into history, she profited by the decadence of Assyria and that of the interior organization of the Medo – Persian power, to recover courage, in view of her re-established security. Once more she looked about her and into herself, and discovered in her old soul—infused with freshness by the confused presentiment of a new ideal—a supreme flower, as warm as an autumn. She cradled nascent Greece with a farewell song, still quite virile, and very gentle.
Saite
art returned to original sources. It was as direct as the ancient Memphite art.
But it has almost rediscovered the science of Thebes, and if it seems softer
than Theban art, it is because its tenderness is more active. Now, we no longer
find only funerary statues. Saite art escapes the formula; it produces faithful
portraits, precise and nervous—scribes again, statuettes of women, personages
seated on the ground, their hands crossed on their knees, at the height of the
chin.
Egypt
did not fail to obey that consoling law which decrees that every society about
to die from exhaustion or which feels itself dragged into the current of
revolution, shall turn back for a moment to address a melancholy farewell to
woman, to her indestructible power which society, in the course of its vigorous
youth, has usually misunderstood. Societies rising in full flight are too
idealistic, too much concerned with the conquest and the assimilation of the
universe, to look in the direction of the hearth they are abandoning. It is
only on the other slope of life that they look backward to bow their wiser or
more discouraged enthusiasm before the force that conserves while everything
around it wearies, droops and dies—beliefs, illusions which are presentiments,
and civilizing energy. Egypt at her decline caressed the body of woman with
that sort of chaste passion which only Greece knew afterward, and which Greece
perhaps did not express so religiously. Feminine forms, sheathed in a clinging
material, have that pure lyrism of young plants that reach up to drink the
daylight. The silent passage from the slim round arms to the shoulders, to the
ripening breast, to the waist, to the belly, to the long, tapering legs, and to
the narrow, bare feet has the freshness and the quivering firmness of flowers
not yet opened. The caress of the chisel passes and slips over the forms like
lips brushing a closed corolla which they would not dare to press. Man, grown
tender, gives himself to her whom till then he had thought only to take.
In
these last works Egypt confides to us her most intimate thought about the young
women and the men seated like the boundary marks of roads. Everything is a
restrained caress, a veiled desire to penetrate universal life before Egypt
abandoned herself unresistingly to its current. As a musician hears harmony,
the sculptor sees the fluid of light and shade that makes the continuous world
by passing from one form to another. Discreetly he joins the projections that
are barely indicated by the long, rhythmic planes of the thin garment which has
not a single fold. The modeling passes like water, over the most compact
materials. Its wave flows between the absolute lines of a geometry in movement,
it has the balanced undulations that one would call eternal, like the movement
of the sea. Space continues the block of basalt or of bronze by taking up from
its surface the confused illumination that arises from its depths. The mind of
dying Egypt tries to gather together the general energy dispersed through the
universe, that it may transmit it to men to come.
And
that is all. The walls of stone that inclosed the soul of Egypt are broken by
invasion, which recommences and finds her at the end of her strength. Her whole
inner life runs out of the open wound. Cambyses may overturn her colossuses;
Egypt cannot offer a virile protest; her revolts are only on the surface and
accentuate her decline. When the Macedonian comes, she willingly includes him
among her gods, and the oracle of Amnion finds it easy to promise him victory.
In the brilliant Alexandrian epoch her personal effort was practically nil. It
was the Greek sages and the apostles of Judea who came to drink at her spring,
now almost dried up, but still full of deep mirages, that they might try, in
the unsettled world, to forge from the debris of the old religions and the old
sciences a new weapon for the idea. She saw, with an indifferent eye, the
dilettante from Hellas visiting and describing her monuments, and the Roman
parvenu raising them again. She let the sand mount up around the temples, the
mud fill the canals and bury the dikes, and the weariness of life slowly
covered up her heart. She did not disclose the true depth of her soul. She had
lived inclosed, she remained inclosed, shut like her coffins, her temples, her
kings, a hundred cubits high, whom she seated in her oasis, above the
motionless wheat, their foreheads in the solitude of the heavens. Their hands
have never left their knees. They refuse to speak. One must consider them
profoundly and seek in the depth of oneself the echo of their mute confidences.
Then their somnolence is awakened confusedly. . . The science of Egypt, its
religion, its despair, and its need for eternity—that endless murmur of ten
thousand monotonous years—the whole of it is contained in the sigh which the
colossus of Memnon exhales at sunrise.
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