served for us and, so doing, to impair its exceptional value to teach a fundamental truth which our modern world has almost forgotten in theory and quite forgotten in practice. This is the truth that art should be considered not a source of luxury, pleasure, or "culture" for the few, but a necessary food for the eye, the mind, and the spirit of all men and, therefore, should concern itself with the lowliest as well as the loftiest tasks.

This, then, is the first great lesson that our large Egyptian collections can teach our public. But they can teach it only by a close association of the various kinds of things recovered from a given time, fully and instructively labeled, and supplemented by photographs, copies, and casts of illuminative objects elsewhere preserved. Only in this way can a museum collection suggest the character of the life of that time and the part that the artist played in it; and only such a suggestion can attract many eyes to an art which in its more important manifestations is so different from all others, so alien to our own ideas and practices, and in some respects so puzzling as the art of Egypt. Anyone may test this for himself by visiting, for example, the populous rooms at the Metropolitan and then those of a museum where the segregating method has been adopted with the wish to concentrate attention upon the finest products of the "fine arts". Probably no one will deny that to attract the public must be the first step toward informing it and awakening its latent æsthetic sensibilities. And year by year there are fewer who deny that this should be the aim of a great museum, especially in a land which lacks the widespread artistic inheritances of the elder world-an aim which, I need hardly explain, does not exclude that desire to serve the serious student and the already accomplished amateur of art which until recent times was thought the whole duty of man as a museum administrator.

Another important lesson that may be taught by an Egyptian collection better than by any other is a lesson in the meaning of beautiful workmanship. It is taught, of course, with more or less emphasis by the products of every country to which a museum opens its doors, but by those of no other in such diversified ways as by the legacies of Egypt or, in regard to certain kinds of work, with such supreme authority. This people, which had no

forerunners to encourage or instruct it, which knew nothing of precept or precedent, but was its own inspirer, teacher, and critic, seems to have been born-no, very evidently was born-not only with a great gift for ornamental design but with an extraordinary supply of that combination of ingenuity, manual dexterity, and patience which is the endowment of the master-craftsman.

Even in prehistoric times, Neolithic times, this endowment gave proof of itself, for it was in the Valley of the Nile that were most beautifully, most perfectly wrought those weapons and tools of chipped flint which in many quarters of the globe served primitive man before he learned to use the metals. With these we may begin our museum survey. Then from the early historic times that we call archaic, long before the days of the pyramid builders, when copper implements had come into use and the bowdrill and the stone-borer had been invented, we shall find large vessels of so hard a stone, or of alabaster so translucently thin, that a modern workman with modern tools would not care to try to imitate them. And from the time of the pyramid builders we find, on the walls of tomb chambers, mural sculptures in low relief of most precise and skilful workmanship. And so it is as we follow craftsman after craftsman through the long, long centuries-the potter, the weaver, the basket-maker, the carver on a small scale in wood or ivory, stone, or shell, all of whom did admirable work even in prehistoric times, the workers in gold, in silver, in bronze, in enamel, in glass, and the great artists who raised magnificient colonnades with floriated capitals and statues of colossal size, and lined the walls of huge temples with complicated carved and painted pictures. Everywhere we find an admirable and sometimes an unequaled skill of hand, even in the making of garlands and collars of natural flowers and leaves more delicately elaborate than any other people ever devised.

In a large portrait head of very hard stone the modeling may be too much summarized to be properly appreciated by an inexperienced eye, but it is none the less right on that account and is all the more remarkable. And if the generalized, conventionalized treatment of other parts of the body, notably the hands and feet, may seem inadequate, incompetence is not the explanation. Who could use this term to explain, for example, the succinctly

modeled hands of the great alabaster statue of King Mycerinus, in Boston, when he notes that they rest upon knees truthfully and delicately modeled in all those subtile details which make them harder to render than hands? But why the discrepancy? This is one of the problems-they are many!-which add interest to the study of Egyptian art.

But while we are looking for examples of beautiful workmanship we need not concern ourselves with problems. We need only mark the way in which the Egyptian sculptor could perfectly accomplish tasks of the most disparate kinds—the knees of a statue larger than life, gigantic heads carved from the living rock, such as those of Ramses II at Abu Simbel which many pictures have shown us, elaborate ceremonial scenes in very low relief like those from the memorial temple of Ramses I at Abydos, which are prime treasures of the Metropolitan collection, or a lily-shaped cup, a statuette a couple of inches in height, a tiny amulet or seal, a bead of glass or stone or gold, a row of hieroglyphic signs in each of which we may take delight as in a precious little object of art.

The work of the painter has, of course, been less abundantly preserved than the work of the sculptor to which, especially in the earlier periods, it was held subordinate. Yet in wall paintings and steles, in mummy cases and coffins, we have a great deal of it, often in its pristine freshness. There could hardly be better examples of the tasteful and dexterous use of colour in intricate little patterns than we may see on certain great wooden coffins recently acquired by the Boston Museum.

Considering all these varied things, we find another reason why with the very best others less excellent should be shown us. It is the eye that we are educating, and the eye learns chiefly by making comparisons. So, to take one example, it may most surely learn to value the exquisitely modeled heads of some of those little figures, most often of blue-glazed faïence, which are called ushebtis ("responders", servants buried with the dead man to answer his call and act as his substitutes if onerous tasks are laid upon him), when it can compare them with others varying through many lessening degrees of accomplishment to rudely modeled specimens where the features are indicated by touches of black paint.

Even Egypt could not ensure long life to works of art in the precious metals. Into the melting-pot of its conquerors, its tomb robbers, or its needy citizens went sooner or later incalculable treasures of gold and silver, electrum and bronze. Yet hosts of minor ones survive statuettes, small articles of use, and jewelry often of the finest quality.

Jewelry, we say, but the term is misleading, for we cannot escape from its suggestion of that modern jewelry which, with its subordination of the metal work to a profusion of sparkling diamonds and of coloured gems mistakenly cut in facets in the hope that they will sparkle too, seems almost as trivial and meretricious as Christmas tree gauds in comparison with the beautifully designed and chiselled, richly yet soberly coloured, sumptous yet dignified ornaments that Egyptian men and women wore. For these, goldsmith's work is a truer term than jewelry, all the more because the Egyptians had none of our gems but only what we call semi-precious stones and, moreover, did some of their most beautiful work in gold alone. Scarcely any museum can be without some small specimens, but in Cairo is the largest store of great ones and, next to Cairo, in New York.

Here the chief group of them includes the ornaments worn in life by the Princess Sat-hathor-iunut, whose tomb lies near the pyramid of her father, Sesostris II, at Lahun in the Fayoum. Dating back to about the year 1900 B. C., more than five centuries before the days of Tut-ankh-amen, they come from the best period for such work, the period called the Middle Kingdom. "So many of them seem to be chiefly beads," said, rather slightingly, someone who had not yet seen but had only read about them. Yes-but, as we commonly use them, the pearls we so highly value are beads. And even the glass beads that the Egyptians of the later periods made are little works of art, delicately striped and figured, while these Middle Kingdom beads are variously and beautifully shaped of precious materials-lapis lazuli, giving a fine dark blue, turquoise, pale blue-green feldspar, coral red cornelian, purple amethyst, and very yellow gold. The clear, quiet, yet rich and strong colour thus achieved, I may add, was enhanced by the lack of colour in the garments it was worn with, and its sumptuousness by their scantiness. Men and

women alike, these Egyptians of high rank dressed chiefly in thin white linen, and a little of it often sufficed them.

The most splendid of the princess's possessions is a great girdle with elongated gold ornaments in the shape of cowrie shells separated by rows of rhombic beads of three colours; the most delicate are bracelets formed of many strands of little beads disposed in gold bordered panels; the most precious and lovely is a pectoral of gold and polychrome enamel, an openwork design with the oval containing the name of Sesostris II supported by two great falcons. It was made as are the cloisonné enamels that we all know, but with bits of precious stones instead of fused pastes, and on the back is elaborately and delicately engraved. But in any of these adornments of Pharaoh's daughter, in others from other periods which are scarcely less wonderful, and in many minor things wrought in the precious metals, we may study in variety the very perfection of human handiwork.

These, then, are two important lessons which the public at large, which even an eye not yet trained to seek and appreciate purely æsthetic values, may learn from our Egyptian collections: it may learn how all embracing should be the service of art to a community, and it may learn the difference between admirable and untutored or mechanical workmanship. Both of these lessons we need to learn, we must learn, if in America good taste is to grow and great art is to develop; for the chief among the arts of design cannot rightly flourish unless the eyes of the people are sensitive enough to ask for beauty in small things as well as great, in things of use as well as in things of luxury and display. A feeling for good workmanship as such, I may add, especially needs cultivation in these days when we must not only revive taste and skill in the handicrafts but must try to master another problem-the production of beautiful, or at least of agreeable, machine made things. In many directions a hopeless problem? Perhaps! But in many directions it has not yet been attacked.

M. G. VAN RENSSELAER.