Gods or the Soul; from sacred becoming secular; from impersonal,
personal. There is, perhaps, little enough in pre-Pheidian Greek
sculpture that belongs to the history of Art at all (I do not
speak of old cycles and manvantaras, the ages of Troy and
Mycenae, but of historical times; I cast no glance now behind the
year 870 B. C.). For the real art that came next before the
Pheidian Greek, we have to look to Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Take Egypt first. There the sculptor thinks of himself far less
as artist than as priest and servant of the Mysteries: that is,
of the great Divine heart of Existence behind this manifested
world, and the official channel which connected It with the
latter. The Gods, for him, are frankly unhuman--superhuman--
unlike humanity. We call them 'forces of Nature'; and think
ourselves mighty wise for having camouflaged our ignorance with
this perfectly meaningless term. We have dealt so wisely with
our thinking organs, that do but give us a sop of words, and
things in themselves we shall never bother about:--like the
Grave-digger, who solved the whole problem of Ophelia's death and
burial with his three branches of an act. But the Egyptian, with
mental faculties unrotted by creedal fatuities like our own,
would not so feed 'of the chameleon's dish,'--needed something
more than words, words, and words. He knew also that there were
elements in their being quite unlike any we are conscious of in
ours. So he gave them purely symbolic forms: a human body, for
that which he could posit as common to themselves and humanity;
and an animal mask, to say that the face, the expression of their
consciousness, was hidden, and not to be expressed in terms of
human personality. While affirming that they were conscious
entities, he stopped short of personalizing them. What was