Richard Lepsius as a Man
The reader of this biography, who has followed with us the development and the subsequent life of Richard Lepsius, will think that he has learned in him to know a character whose estimable and tranquil nature needs no closer inspection. He will consider it a simple one, and therefore of little interest. For although he has followed the life of our hero step by step from his school days to the climax of fame, from childhood to an advanced old age, yet he has at no time observed in it any noticeable alteration. The reader has seen no great blows of destiny interrupt the earthly existence of our friend, until a short time before his death. Where obstacles have appeared in his path they have been seen to sink of themselves, as if to be the more readily surmounted. For this man Fortune seemed to have changed her nature, fickleness to have been transformed to fidelity, and treachery to truth. But a perfectly happy life is like summer at the North Pole where there is no night; always bright, and without timidity or terror. Yet, though strange, it is monotonous, and therefore the longer the day endures the more destitute is it of charm.
The great natural talents, and the fullness of years granted to this man, were used by him wisely and prudently. He left school and university with the highest testimonials, and always fulfilled his duty with the same active zeal and conscientious earnestness, whether as a young scholar in Paris, Rome and London, as the prudent chief of a great expedition which was crowned with rare success, as the famous master and leader of a progressive science, as a teacher at the university, as the director of a museum, or as chief librarian. Every honor which it was possible for him to attain fell to his lot, and he conducted great undertakings to their conclusion with circumspection, energy and discernment. From his youth up his superior character, as well as his personal appearance and bearing, secured him esteem and consideration, and where it was necessary for him to lead he commanded wisely, justly, vigorously and discreetly.
When he was six and thirty years old he found an admirable consort, who loved him with all the warmth of an ardent young heart, and never ceased to recognize his superiority with happy pride and to honor his great qualities. In his own home his wife ruled freely, and yet he was ever the absolute master. Four fine sons promised to maintain the honor of his famous name, and his beloved daughters endowed him with charming grandchildren. When he closed his eyes he might say that his work, and with it his fame, would endure as long as the science to which he had rendered such great services. He presented his complete works to his native town, Naumburg, that all which he had accomplished might be preserved at his birthplace in the Bibliotheca Lepsiana.
It is true that the story of this life shows few shadows amid many lights, and he whom it presents to us underwent no marked change during his years of maturity. Nevertheless, he had not, from childhood up, been this unimpassioned and prudent master of himself, who knew how to control every quick impulse, that he might follow or abandon it as his searching mind decided on its worth or worthlessness. No! for him, too, there must have been a time when an honest man could not have affirmed as he did to his wife in his sixtieth year, that he never had anything to repent, because he always did that which he thought right.
He was considered by many to be essentially a cold man of intellect, in whom feeling was overshadowed by the fully developed and carefully polished mind. This opinion sprang from his dispassionate prudence, the well-bred reserve by which he knew how to hide the weaker parts of his nature, the measured dignity with which he met strangers, and the quiet and thoughtful composure which came from his habit of always holding a dominating position and directing his own affairs as well as those of others. To these were added the imposing dignity of his figure, the clear symmetrical outlines of his fine features, the natural grace of his movements, the finished tones of his speech, and especially the earnest and utterly intolerant severity with which he opposed all falsehood and injustice wherever he encountered them. It was impossible to forget, too, with what energy, wherever he held command, he sought to reduce all that was disorderly to order, or with what independence he, when an attempt was made to depreciate his well won right to the directorship of the Museum,102 unhesitatingly declared that he would resign his professorship and leave Berlin if his well-founded claims were not accorded to him.
Yet in spite of all this those who would deny him warmth of soul are wrong, indeed we can maintain this confidently, although even to his wife the qualities of her husband’s intellect were always more apparent than those of his heart.
Let us hear the judgment which she pronounced on him; not during the first ten years of marriage, when, overflowing with love, she found in him something new to admire every day, but after she had shared the pleasures and pains of life with him for nearly a quarter of a century, and had come to feel with bitterness that she would never succeed in leading him to the same conception of a strictly Christian and contrite life which she had herself arrived at many years before.
She had sought once more, on Christmas eve, 1869, to win him over to the charms of that pious faith in miracles which filled her own soul, and to lead him to that fountain “whence alone flowed strength and happiness for her.” He answered her that she should not desire impossibilities, and should hold to that which was good in him, as he gladly contented himself with the many things that were excellent in her. Thereupon she wrote, “Truth and uprightness are family virtues of the Lepsius race. They have usually serene and well disposed natures, noble minds, which despise everything that is trivial, and a strong sense of honor. Richard adds to these a disposition to mediate and reconcile which makes him greatly beloved. Intelligence and clear sobriety of thought prevail among all the brothers and sisters. Richard has attained self-control and moderation amongst the manifold relations of life, and to this his prudence and his knowledge have added. Vain he is not; in short an homme comme il faut. At every moment he does what he thinks right, and therefore never has anything to repent of, (he once told me so himself.)” She then calls his character a well-regulated and symmetrical one, with a prevailing intellectual tendency, and, (we repeat), she exclaims after a married life of four and twenty years, and speaking with irritation, “If there were even any positive faults that I had to bear in Richard—but there are no faults, he has none, it is only community of faith which I miss.”
In this analysis of his character there are certainly many words of warm appreciation, and indeed his uprightness was such that every judgment, every expression of opinion which we hear him utter either publicly or in writing to his acquaintances, corresponds exactly to what is contained in confidential letters to his family, and the memoranda intended for himself alone. But his own wife sees in him only the well-meaning, faultless and stainless man of intellect, and forgets that for him, too, there must have been a time when he had to strive against those impulses and emotions to which few men are strangers. Regarding this conflict he had written to her in former years a beautiful and perfectly unreserved letter.
In this document, which gives us a key to the understanding of both his intrinsic and his external qualities, he writes: “I recognize an impulsive disposition as an old fault in myself, and I think I have observed it also in you. Impulsiveness is often beautiful and charming, and often resembles, in a small way, that which, on a large scale, is among the most splendid products of human inspiration and noble self-sacrifice. But it does not go deep, is not enduring in action, dissipates itself for inferior aims, impedes the quiet and blessed development of those tender and precious germs of grace, resignation, cheerful peace, and ready receptivity for whatever is good in all things and men, which slumber in every well-disposed nature. An impulsive temperament shows itself in every quick emotion which outruns kindness, in hasty judgment which so easily becomes prejudice, in a variable temper, upon which the blood should have no influence, in a tendency to complaint, against oneself as well as against others, and in love of criticism of oneself and others. On this account the diaries which I have sometimes kept have only helped me on the wrong way. The best remedy for an impulsive nature, and one which never fails in the long run, is a determination strengthened by religious conviction and faith to acknowledge to ourselves every disagreeable, disturbing, passionate impulse as wrong and unworthy of ourselves, and simply to put it aside, without regret and without considering ourselves martyrs. Besides this, there is great benefit in a regard for external forms, and refined, gentle manners. These require for their outer clothing freedom from passion, delicate and careful consideration, and an upright endeavor to reach what is really unattainable, and please all at once, except the wicked. It is an enviable thing to please whether among courtiers or in a students’ tavern, and yet to be neither a courtier nor rude. As you see, I say all these and a great many more things like them to myself, but do not follow them much in practice.”
This beautiful monition from a rigorously truthful man contains the confession that impulsiveness was an old fault of his own. But it includes at the same time a strong condemnation thereof, and a summons to battle against it. The remedy which he here declared to be efficacious he had tried on himself, and who knows with what grievous struggles he arrived at that dominion over the impulses of a strong nature, that restraint of external forms, and the practice of those refined and well-bred manners, which already distinguished him when he came to Rome, and which awakened the regard of Frau v. Bunsen (See page 98). It was certainly his honest and firm will and his manly strength, which led him to victory, but not these alone, for through his admonition we can hear the echo of Luther’s “Nothing is done by our own might,... may the Right Man aid us in the fight.” His firm trust in God, his simple but genuine Christianity, free from every misinterpretation, self-torment and extravagance, supported him in that hard conflict.
In the beginning of his twentieth year he had already set before himself his ideal of life, and this, supported by the energy of his harmoniously constituted nature, he pursued to the end, first with struggle and conflict, and finally without any extraordinary effort, and as if of his own free will.
In Paris, on the occasion of the unveiling of the Vendôme column (Page 61) he wrote: “What can make a deeper impression than the strength of mind which shows itself in a composed bearing and an expression of control, in contrast with the unbridled passions of similar human minds.” To win this “composed bearing,” to acquire perfect command over unbridled impulses, was the aim of all his labor with himself. No, the character of a Lepsius did not come into the world as a thing completed, did not spring like Pallas Athene from the head of Zeus: it was won by hard, prolonged and repeated struggles.
In this campaign against an adversary who, however often he may be slain, continually wakens to new life, he accustomed himself to consider impulsiveness as an enemy, as a peace-breaker, as a disease of sound human nature. This latter, to his eyes, could only be truly great when ruled by calm self-control. Here we find an explanation of the words which he wrote to Bunsen when twenty-nine years old, and which must appear paradoxical and startling to the uninitiated. During his sojourn in England in 1839 his heart had been won by a lovely maiden, but his material circumstances would not permit him to woo her. All this he confessed to his sympathetic patron in reply to his enquiries, and added, “I hold every passion to be a defect in love, and why shall I, at the very outset, declare myself too weak to preserve the purity of true love, and keep it from cooling into passion?”
To all asceticism the healthy nature of this man, with his keen enjoyment of life, was a stranger, but for him the words “impulse” and “impulsiveness” had come to embody everything which transgresses the limits of an orderly and law-abiding life, everything which compels the rider, who should seek to govern his steed and guide it according to his will, to follow the animal instead wherever it may bear him. He at least knew how to compel the steed to submission. In England he seems to have shed warm heart’s blood in his effort to obtain the mastery over himself. There, where he found friendship, love, and the fullest inspiration, we often see him dissatisfied with himself, and hear him complain of “faint-heartedness and every sort of bondage.” (See page 100). He chiefly means here by “bondage” his faulty control over the powerful impulses of his nature, which he endeavors to subdue. Here he confesses to Bunsen (See page 127), that he daily feels he has not yet passed beyond the period of education.
His vivacious wife was astonished, when he was a mature man, to behold him rule over himself with entire and sovereign power, and guide the ship of his and her life. She was often forced to give expression to what she felt at this sight. “Richard,” she says, “always the same, I always depressed or excited.” On one occasion she compares herself with her husband in a different way, and says: “It is very true that it is better and makes one’s path easier through life, to be so passionless. One does not hope for too much, one is not so timid, one is not so much troubled, one does not have to struggle so much. But that is the way I am made, and at the bottom, I would not even care to be so self-poised; if one has a harder struggle, one has also more ardor and heartfelt delight.”
But the nature of this man cannot be called so perfectly self-poised, for he was as much beloved as a companion as he was esteemed as a scholar. He never showed in his manner the least trace of pedantry, and, as she herself had previously acknowledged, (See page 247) he gave himself up entirely and thoroughly to everything in which he engaged, whether it was social pleasures or the most serious affairs.
The admirable method of life which he recommends as a means of subduing unruly impulses, distinguished him to the end. It was his fortune to be equally a welcome guest whether at the imperial court or amidst the gay ringing of glasses in the friendly circle, and this was because he was able to take part in the sharpest exchange of opinions, and to experience the heartiest pleasure, without exceeding the limits of good breeding. He could play with his children and knew how to establish himself in their youthful souls. His student comrades remained the friends of his old age, and his travelling companions, over whom he had ruled as a leader, clung to him with affection until his or their death. Who ever showed greater fidelity or firmer friendship than he did towards those equals and colleagues who had come into close relations with him in scientific matters or in family intercourse? They remained closely linked to him in the bonds of affection for decades. From his school-days on, he felt the need of friendship, and when a youth in Paris he gave expression to his thoughts on friendship, and wrote: “A circle of four friends bears the same relation to one of three that a four-legged table bears to a three-legged. Thus two friends form a line and three a surface.” His choice of friends fell exclusively on men of intellectual prominence, but the “intellectual” in its modern, and especially in its Berlin, sense, was repugnant to him. Manfully did he defend the interests of those whom he knew to be men of ability and of whose labors he had availed himself. After the designer Weidenbach had done him invaluable service in Egypt and in the preparation of the great work on monuments and the embellishment of the museum at Berlin, he was left without employment. Lepsius wished to procure him a permanent situation in the museum, and with good right, for his best years had been passed entirely in works ordered by the government, and these he had executed in the best possible manner and without regard to the more lucrative situations which were offered him. Nevertheless the Minister, v. Raumer, coolly refused the petition for this very deserving artist, with the remark that Weidenbach might look for some other employment. Thereupon Lepsius replied to the high official, who was a man of strict piety but little human feeling, and whose ministry has long been recognized as pernicious, “So you think as Talleyrand did, who to the appeal of a suppliant “Mais il faut pourtant que je vive,” replied: “Je n’en vois pas la nécessité.” Lepsius knew how to procure the desired situation for his protégé, in spite of Raumer, and Weidenbach filled it admirably to the end.
How is it conceivable the man lacked feeling who, during his whole lifetime, was the object of the warmest attachment from men of such tender feeling as Bunsen, the Grimms, Carl Ritter, Ernest Curtius, Max Müller, and many others. Who can venture to accuse of heartlessness the man who knew how to win the hearts of the best men and women, as he did? On October 17th, 1838, Frau v. Bunsen wrote to Abeken from Llanover: “Lepsius has won the first place in the heart of my mother, (a truly venerable old lady of great experience) and is praised and admired in different degrees by all.” And from how many friends and relations who did not live in Berlin do we hear that it was a festival for them when they received a visit from this great man, who, with all his personal dignity, was most cheerful and sympathetic. His own mother had died early (1819), but his father had married her younger sister, and had found in her a worthy companion for himself, and the most faithful, loving and discreet care-taker and educator for his children that could have been imagined. After the death of the President of the Court the widow’s share of his property amounted to so much that Frau Julie’s future appeared to be assured. Nevertheless, her stepson Richard, our Lepsius, with the cordial assent of his noble wife, immediately declared himself ready to renounce in her favor the not inconsiderable inheritance which would fall to his own share. The old lady did not accept this gift, but Richard appears to have been always the favorite among her stepsons. Do I need to recall the fatherly love and fidelity which he showed to the adopted daughter, whom he brought up with his own six children?
Before us lies a large quarto volume beautifully bound. It contains in forty-eight manuscript pages an excellent description of Thebes. This is entitled: “A cyclorama of Thebes, sent as a greeting from the distance to my dear parents on their silver wedding, April, 1845.”103 The whole has the appearance of a “festal congratulation,” such as children offer to their parents, and its beautiful penmanship evinces the most loving care. Yet the author and writer was no less a person than the celebrated leader of a great expedition and was then four and thirty years old. The conclusion of this “congratulation” runs thus:
“We close to-day, with the week, both our sojourn and our labors in the Memnonia of ancient Thebes. They have kept us fully occupied for fourteen weeks. To-morrow, as a farewell to our Theban capital, I intend to celebrate a little festival, which I have privately arranged. It will be on the top of our hill, where this description was written. I am going to have a new tent raised there and have it decked with green pennons, and will share these pages with my travelling companions, as a little celebration of your wedding feast. They are accustomed to feel a friendly sympathy in all that nearly concerns or moves me, and therefore in you. Thus, in the immediate enjoyment and observation of this beautiful and remarkable scene, we will once more impress the principal points upon our memories before our departure. We will remember you and the large family circle, which, we hope, will have gathered from the south and the north to surround you in undisturbed happiness. But I shall think of you most vividly, since I cannot myself hand to you both this greeting from the Nile. But so much the more impatiently do I hope to follow it in a few months.”
These words were written by a warm-hearted man, and to them he appends the following significant verses:
For science, though with effort strong we see
Her seek a lofty goal,
Though from its chains she wakes, and quick sets free,
The darkened soul,
Yet still has but a cold and borrowed light,
Like moonshine pale,
If the heart’s breath of life be wanting quite,
If warm love fail!
We have already repeatedly shown the beautiful and intimate relation which bound Lepsius to his father, and pointed out how zealously he ever tried to impart to his father everything that could please or interest him. He never forgot what he owed to the guide of his youth and childhood,—and it was not little. Above all others, the gift which he had received from his father was the strong love of truth and order by which he was distinguished. It was not only that this lightened his most difficult labors, but it rather made many of them possible. Hand in hand with this went the painstaking accuracy with which he worked. He never laid aside anything which was not entirely completed and finished up to the last detail. Thence it comes, for example, that the second and third volumes of his chronology, announced in the preface, were never published. He had begun important preparatory works for them, but as these were not entirely finished he only gave them to the press in detached monographs, which he could regard as completed. If, with the exception of the Decree of Canopus, and a portion of the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead, we possess no continuous translation of hieroglyphic texts by him, this circumstance is also to be explained by his dislike to letting anything leave his hand and go to press which contained flaws or was not perfectly completed and filled out. All that he translated from ancient Egyptian into German gives the most sufficient evidence of his mastery of this branch also, but the critical philologist never prevailed upon himself to deliver a line which was only half known as one that was known. The fragment of his translation of the “Book of the Dead” which we have previously mentioned, and which has for its basis a critical comparison of all the texts obtainable, shows much greater ability than the translation of the entire “Book of the Dead” which has recently been prematurely attempted by a later Egyptologist.
It would be an error to call Lepsius a genius. He lacked the strong imagination, the winged creative power which achieves feats that soar beyond the conception of men of pure understanding, as well as the indifference to the things of this world and the ardent temperament of a genius. But he was a man of talent of the first order, with wonderful intensity of intellect, and the rarest strength of will and capability for learning and work. Besides this he was not only, as his wife said, an “homme comme il faut,” that is, a man fitted to appear in society, but also the model of a scholar, and what is more, of a man. It is true that warm feeling is necessary for the latter, and we remain true to our conviction that he possessed this.
In his Parisian diary, which was intended for himself alone, he tells of the fall of a platform on the occasion of a public festival. A boy, who was a stranger to him, was injured by it; he took him in his carriage, and subsequently wrote: “I held him afterwards for a long time in my arms, so that at least he should see something of the unveiling of the statue.” On the 25th of July, 1834, he wrote in the same journal: “A disagreeable and entirely unfounded slander will perhaps put an end to my Egyptian project,” and immediately afterwards: “Heap coals of fire on the head of thy enemy.”
This is what we call “kind-hearted,” this is christian in the right sense of the word. He had absolute control of the property and never restricted the beneficence of his wife, half of whose life was devoted to the care of the poor and the like occupations. Even such sums as five hundred thalers he willingly gave away when it was a question of saving a poor family. Just as he visited me as a teacher, and gave me a portion of his precious time, when a protracted illness prevented my going out of the house, so did he seek out in the hospital a needy scholar as soon as he heard of his severe illness, and there extend to him the most cordial assistance, though the young man had never been personally intimate with him, and had not been, like me, recommended to him by a Grimm. And how many such things, which never came to my knowledge, could be told of him!
Although those who cling to the letter of the faith would not approve his Christianity, yet his life was a truly christian one. He ever made an open confession of faith in God and Christ, he took, whenever he felt the need for it, the holy sacrament, he experienced in himself the blessings which Christianity had brought into the world, he recognized them in history, and he allowed his children to be educated by his pious wife without opposition. He declared to her, to Trumpp, and to others, that the highest duty of human beings was “to love God above all others, and one’s neighbor as oneself.” The new conquests of natural science had no power to shake his faith in God, although he followed them with interest after two of his sons had devoted themselves to such studies. When doubts arose in him he imposed upon his own acute mental powers the task of dissipating them, and an interesting composition was found among his papers, in which he attempts to subvert the two principal propositions in an eloquent masterpiece of Bois-Reymond’s104 which had disturbed his mind.
There has gone to the grave in Lepsius a true man, a noble and admirable human being, and, (if we except the last years of his life) a fortunate one; a man who was among the greatest, most zealous, and most successful scholars of his time, and whose name and works will outlast the centuries. We will close this biography with the earnest and reverential words addressed to us by G. Maspero, the greatest of living French Egyptologists and the worthy successor of Mariette in the guardianship of all the monuments and excavations in Egypt, after he had received the intelligence of the departure of our Senior Master.
“Lepsius,” he says, “était un des derniers survivants de notre âge héroique, et il avait été pendant longtemps nôtre maître à tous. Je ne demande qu’une chose pour mon compte: c’est que plus tard au moment où l’on en sera venu à dire pour moi ce que je dis pour lui, on puisse affirmer que j’ai fait pour la science la moitié de ce qu’il a fait pour elle.”