Egyptomania, by Bob Brier

Many know Bob Brier (television’s Mr. Mummy) through his many televisions appearances, as well as through such best-selling books as The Murder of Tutankhamen, The Daily Life of the Ancient Egyptians and The Secret of the Great Pyramid.  We were lucky enough to do an extensive interview with Bob that will run soon in these pages, but, for now, let’s look at his latest book, Egyptomania.

If we at The Jade Sphinx have a taste for all things Egyptian, we are the merest pikers compared to Bob Brier (born 1943).  He has coined the word Egyptomania to cover everything from a passion for exquisite antiquities to a taste for Egyptotrash.  In his book Egyptomania, he charts a course of the West’s love of all things Egyptian starting with the Roman invasion all the way through to the Napoleonic wars that brought scores of artists and scholars to the region, and the bursts of King Tut craziness that erupted with the discovery of his tomb and through the revival of interest in the 1970s.

It is all much of a muchness to Brier, whose enthusiasm is boundless and indiscriminate.  More important, he manages to bring a remarkable variety of things to life, from shipboard explosions during the English attack on French forces during the Battle of the Nile, to the sometimes bizarre juxtaposition of various ancient cultures on cigarette boxes in the 1920s.  (Some of these images, despite their inherent silliness, are wonderfully evocative Art Deco and Art Nouveau compositions.)  Brier has written a book that is completely accessible to all ages, and can be read with satisfaction by adults or presented to younger readers who are cultivating their own interest in Ancient Egypt.

Brier wonders aloud why Ancient Egypt has such a grip on our imaginations, and not, say, Ancient Mayans or the Babylonians.  He believes that it is an odd mixture of the familiar and the exotic: while believing in jackal-headed gods and the actual physical resurrection of the body, the Egyptians also had a surprising modernity in medical research, statesmanship and religious philosophy.  They are different… but not enough to be completely alien. 

Equally important, an enthusiasm for Ancient Egypt has a wonderful zest and, well… zaniness that makes King Tut breakfast cereal possible, along with scholarly research on hieroglyphs.

Brier’s book makes many interesting side-trips, among them the various engineering feats that made the transportation of Egyptian obelisks possible to Rome, London and New York.  The stories of these three voyages are book-worthy in themselves, and Brier does a terrific job of maintaining a zippy narrative while keeping track of all the moving parts. 

Also delicious is Brier’s argument that the start of Egyptomania was during the Ancient World.  The Romans were enthralled by the hieroglyphics they could not read; while Alexander the Great (who nearly conquered all of the known world), wanted to become an immortal pharaoh.  He also relates how Emperor Hadrian built Antinopolis as a memorial to his lover, the beautiful Antinous.  We have never fully recovered.

As we grew up on Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Christopher Lee emerging from behind Egyptian pillars to put the whammy on various reincarnated loves, Brier’s Egyptomania was catnip to us.  We highly recommend his book to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject.

Charles Robinson Illustrates Oscar Wilde Part IV

We come today to an illustration for what is, I think, the most beautiful story in Wilde’s collected fairy tales: The Nightingale and the Rose. 

In this story, a student pines for a rose to give to his beloved, and thus ensure that she will dance with him.  The nightingale goes from tree to tree, looking for an exquisite red rose, offering to sing her most beautiful song in exchange.  The bird finds a tree that will produce the rose – but it must be colored red with the nightingale’s own heart’s blood.  The nightingale impales herself on a thorn on the tree, singing a beautiful song all night, creating a rich, red rose.  Finished, she falls dead.

The student finds the rose and presents it to his beloved, who spurns it in favor of the offerings of a rich boy.  The dejected student throws the rose into the gutter, where it is run over by a cart, before going off to study philosophy.

Of course, the story is open to multiple interpretations.  Is Wilde making a comment on empty social conventions?  Or the cost of things vs. value?  The inconstancy of love?  Maybe all of these things and more.  But your correspondent always thought that Wilde identified with the nightingale.  The nightingale is – in the strictest sense – an artist, creating beauty at great cost, only to have the results trampled in the gutter.  The artist gives his soul, only for it to be tossed aside.  What artist has not, at one time or another, felt the same?

Wilde writes:

"If you want a red rose," said the Tree, "you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with your own heart's-blood. You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn. All night long you must sing to me, and the thorn must pierce your heart, and your life-blood must flow into my veins, and become mine."

"Death is a great price to pay for a red rose," cried the Nightingale, "and Life is very dear to all. It is pleasant to sit in the green wood, and to watch the Sun in his chariot of gold, and the Moon in her chariot of pearl. Sweet is the scent of the hawthorn, and sweet are the bluebells that hide in the valley, and the heather that blows on the hill. Yet Love is better than Life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man?"

So she spread her brown wings for flight, and soared into the air. She swept over the garden like a shadow, and like a shadow she sailed through the grove.

The young Student was still lying on the grass, where she had left him, and the tears were not yet dry in his beautiful eyes.

"Be happy," cried the Nightingale, "be happy; you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's-blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover, for Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty. Flame- coloured are his wings, and coloured like flame is his body. His lips are sweet as honey, and his breath is like frankincense."

Once again, artist Charles Robinson is influenced by Art Nouveau style.  It’s important to remember that Art Nouveau, which flourished from the 1890s through the Great War, was more a design style than a new manner of painting the figure.  Art Nouveau was primarily a movement within the decorative arts, and book illustration was seen, by many, as mode of decoration.  Its curvilinear formations were most often influenced by flowers and plants, or other elements of the natural world.  It has a certain sensuous grace, to my eye, and is especially suited to figures that are fantastic or other-worldly.

The dainty illustration here is a wonderful evocation of the Art Nouveau aesthetic. How wonderfully “decorative” is the woman’s dress, festooned with blossoms (so much so, that it looks like an extension of the blossoms topping the garden wall).  The intricate line of her body and clothes mirrors the sweeping line of flowers, with her neck almost forming a delicate stem to support the flower of her head.  There is a great deal of downward draping from her form – sleeves, earrings and handkerchief – much like the drooping petals of a languid flower.  In fact, her lack of feet in some way reinforces the sensation that she, too, is rooted to the ground.

The young swain is indeed a saturnine lover and, looking at him, it is no surprise that he fails to live up to the high standards set by the nightingale.  The floral motif is reflected in the student, as well, with the voluminous tunic he wears looking like a flower bud.

The thing I love the most about Robinson’s watercolors is his delicacy of touch and subtle coloration.  These pictures are precise and gentle, but never precious.  Any additional detail would render the picture too ornate (or twee), but Robinson’s Spartan background serve as the perfect counterpoint.

One last thought about the story.  The nightingale, who sings and dies, is a great artist – selfless and brave.  I would not be surprised if this was the image of the artist to which Wilde himself aspired.  However, unlike the swallow and the Happy Prince, the nightingale is not rewarded in heaven or commemorated on earth.  It is possible that Wilde feared that all art is inevitably futile; or perhaps he simply thought that real artists must suffer.  In any event, one can only wish writing his tale brought a sense of resolution to him.

Charles Robinson Illustrates Oscar Wilde Part III

It is natural for anyone – be they devotee, scholar, aesthete – to turn to an artist’s work to get some sense of the inner man.  Every poem, every painting, any work of prose all spring from some part of the creator, and are aspects of himself. 

This practice, however, is also fraught with peril.  Where does the inner man end and poetic license begin?  Are we to judge Shakespeare, for instance, by the violence of Titus Andronicus and the bleak ending of Romeo and Juliet?  Or by the soaring language and mighty imagination of The Tempest?  Was Zola a degenerate for showing the world Nana, or a great humanist?  And where do we find the real man in an imagination as protean as Oscar Wilde?  Is the real Wilde the man behind The Picture of Dorian Gray?  Or the moralizing comedian of An Ideal Husband?  Or the blood-drenched decadent of Salome?

In the final analysis, we all must create the image of the artist in our mind’s eye, using both the existing work and our own empathy in interpreting it.  Each portrait reveals, as Wilde would say, both the artist and the sitter; to that, I would add it reveals the viewer, as well.

To me, the work which best explains Wilde the man are his two volumes of fairy tales.  These stories are only ostensibly for children; in reality, they are as close to moralizing as the great artist could get and still remain faithful to his own credo of art for art’s sake.  They also bring into stark relief Wilde’s generosity of spirit, his profoundly loving nature, his kindness and his love of language.

Wilde’s prose is often ornate and bejeweled, and this is certainly true in his fairy stories.  Here is more of The Happy Prince:

All the next day he sat on the Prince’s shoulder, and told him stories of what he had seen in strange lands.  He told him of the red ibises, who stand in long rows on the banks of the Nile, and catch gold-fish in their beaks; of the Sphinx, who is as old as the world itself, and lives in the desert, and knows everything; of the merchants, who walk slowly by the side of their camels, and carry amber beads in their hands; of the King of the Mountains of the Moon, who is as black as ebony, and worships a large crystal; of the great green snake that sleeps in a palm-tree, and has twenty priests to feed it with honey-cakes; and of the pygmies who sail over a big lake on large flat leaves, and are always at war with the butterflies.

“Dear little Swallow,” said the Prince, “you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women.  There is no Mystery so great as Misery.  Fly over my city, little Swallow, and tell me what you see there.”

So the Swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates.

There is no ugliness in Wilde’s interior world; or, if there is, it is a cardinal sin.  To Wilde, beauty was both visible and invisible; though for him, like Gautier, “the visible world existed,” the invisible world was no less real.  Most of his stories for children are warnings against ugliness of spirit or demonstrations that the Philistine is unworthy of the artist.

Artist Charles Robinson, like Wilde, was incapable of ugliness.  The stunning watercolor above shows the beggars near the gates of a beautiful house, wherein the rich make merry.  Many Victorian-era moralists would have made a grittier and more textured image than this: imagine, for instance, what Sir Luke Fildes would have done with this passage.  But Robinson knew what Wilde meant when he wrote you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery.  Wilde, who would come to know personal misery, also saw its exalted beauty, because misery is one of the great and inescapable mysteries of our existence.

In Robinson’s illustration, the beggars are huddled in a subdued blue, yellow and ochre light.  The faces are indistinct, but the eyes are hidden in shadow and the noses peek out from within hidden faces.  The figures are drawn in aspects of both supplication and adoration, looking as much like holy pilgrims as hungry people.

Color is also denied these unfortunates.  A garland of blossoms streaks behind the figures, and the greenery and the great house as so set in the background as to be another world.  The great pillar that supports the garland also serves to reinforce the distance between the people in the picture and the warm, comforting background.

Robinson does not rely upon the stylizations of Art Nouveaux here, opting instead for a lyrical realism.  It is an image of great sadness and even greater beauty which is, after all, the point of Wilde’s story.

Charles Robinson Illustrates Oscar Wilde Part II

We return to our look at some of the illustrations created by Charles Robinson for Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). 

Robinson (1870-1937) was born into a family of artists, and both of his brothers became illustrators, as well.  Robinson had a particular facility for illustrating children’s books – both with pen and ink drawings and watercolor pictures of delightful delicacy. 

Though we’re looking at his illustrations for Wilde’s fairy tales, I cannot help but include a page from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1895) by Robert Louis Stevenson (see below). Look at how Robinson creates his page layout -- the long illustration with the reaching minarets, all pointing upward to the moon.  The child in the lower foreground is a stand-in for ourselves, and one cannot help but look on in wonder.  He then balances this delicious drawing with the child and clock to the right, the chains of the clock pointing downward at the tyke, a perfect counterpoint to the adjourning illustration.  Masterful.

The story of the Happy Prince is tragic, indeed.  The Prince is a statue in the town square.  “He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword hilt … He was very much admired indeed.”

But the Prince is not only beautiful of form and figure, but of soul, as well.  He entreats a swallow, en route to make merry with friends in Egypt, to take various jeweled parts of his body to the hungry and suffering poor.  Before long, there is little outward beauty left to the Prince and the swallow, exhausted, dies at his feet.  Now shabby, the statue is taken down and burned in the furnace.  However, Wilde ends his tale on a redemptive note:

“Bring me the two most precious things in the city,” sad God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird.

“You have rightly chosen,” said God, “for in my garden on Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me.”

Robinson made two color illustrations for this story; here is the Palace of Sans-Souci, the home of the Prince when he was alive, and a place where sorrow is not allowed to enter.  This watercolor is a wonderful example of Art Nouveaux, and highlights all of Robinson’s strengths of composition.  If Sans-Souci is, indeed, a place where sorrow is not allowed to enter, how best to design paradise than as a place of great beauty … of marked stillness?  There are birds here, but they rest upon the grass (or on a maiden’s fingertip), at peace.  The women, beautifully dressed, are in conversation with one another, or listening to the lute played by one of their numbers.  The plants around them are in blossom, and a garland of flowers hangs overhead.  The highly idealized trees accentuate the heavenward thrust of the picture, and the curvilinear architecture that surrounds them is a perfect encapsulation of the Art Nouveaux aesthetic.

All of the women look alike.  Are they sisters?  Perhaps muses to some unseen artist?  The text tells us nothing more than Sans-Souci is a paradise, and to Robinson that seems to mean conversation, music, nature and beauty.  He may have a point.