Come and stand at a little distance from the table on which the wooden gable and statues are set. So, now we can get an idea (which in the gallery we cannot) of the general effect of the group. It seems so simple, but it is not: it is in sculpture something like what a fugue is in music: it is a homogeneous form due to the extremely skilful co-ordination of various forms; it is a harmonious whole, because the parts are combined just at the point where their diversities coalesce. For, as the various voices of the fugue, some subtly insinuating themselves half whispered, while the others are thundering their loudest or already dying away into silence, meet and weave together various fragments of the same melody, so also do the figures of the group, some standing, some reclining, some kneeling, some rising, some draped, some nude, meet our sight in various ways so as to constitute in their variety, one great pattern; balance each other on opposite sides of the gable, slope and taper down towards the extremities, grow and rise higher towards the middle where the vertex of the triangular temple front, the triumphant centre of the rhythm and harmony of lines, is formed by the majestic, magnificent mother between her two eldest, most beautiful daughters. And now, think no more of this terra-cotta than, having learned the shape of a hymn by Bach or a psalm by Marcello on the piano, you would think of the poor miserable piano-notes which you hear with your ears, instead of the mass of voices which you hear with your fancy. Think of this Niobe group, twice humansized, standing on the weather-mellowed, delicately painted marble temple front; the amber-tinted figures against the dark hollow formed by the projecting roof; the sunshine drawing on the black back-ground, as with a luminous pencil, the great solemn masses of light and shadow, the powerfully rhythmed attitudes, the beautiful combinations of lines and light and shade produced by the gesture, which now raises, now drops the drapery, opposing to the large folds, heavy and severe, the minute, most supple, and most subtle plaits; and to the strong broken shadows of the drapery, the shining smoothness of the nude. Think of that, and remember then the single figures in their best examples, the mother and eldest daughter of Florence, the headless younger daughter of the Vatican, the exquisite dying boy of Munich; and think, by recollecting these dispersed noblest copies, what must the lost original have been. And thus, looking at the little rough terra-cotta model, and magnifying it in fancy into the great superb group such as it must have stood on the temple, there comes home to us, filling, expanding our mind, an almost ineffable sense of perfection of line and curve, and light and shade, perfection as of the sweeping wave of some great mountain, distant and deep blue against the pale sky; perfection as of the pearled edge of the tiny pink cyclamen petal; as of the single small voice, swelling and diminishing in crisp exquisiteness every little turn and shake, and again as of the many chords of multitudinous voices rolling out in great joyous sound billows; perfection of whole in harmony and graduation of perfect parts: perfection of visible form.
But by the side of this overwhelming positive sense of beauty there creeps into our consciousness an irritating little sense of negation. For the more intense becomes our perception of the form, the vaguer becomes our recollection of the subject; the strong imaginative realization of the story of Niobe, conjured up by the mere mention of her name, dwindles to nothing in the presence of the group representing the chief incident of history; the skrieks and desperate scuffling of feet, which we had heard in our fancy, gradually die into silence; our senses cease to shrink with horror, our sympathies cease to vibrate with pity, as we look upon this visible embodiment of the terrible tragedy. We are no longer feeling emotion; we are merely perceiving beauty. How has this come to pass? Shall we look into ourselves and analyze in the darkness of our consciousness? Nay, rather first look for an explanation in the materially visible, the clear, easily examined work of art. Come and look at the group once more: this time not to understand its beauty, but to understand why there is in it nothing beyond this beauty.
Certainly, the group answers very well to the general idea of the massacre of the Niobides: the figures have the attitudes of men and women overtaken by a sudden danger against which they seek, but vainly, to shield themselves: the mother clasps the cowering, clinging, youngest girl, and tries to cover her with her mantle, her arms, her whole body, to let the child melt into herself and be lost; the youngest son sinks, panting and helpless, on to one knee; the eldest daughter bends forward to throw her veil over a dead brother; the younger daughter mechanically raises her draped arm to ward off the shafts from her face; another son hastens away, looking bewildered around him, trying to see from which side come the arrows, which come from all sides. All this is perfectly correct in expression; we are bound to admit that these are the probable movements and gestures of people situated like Niobe and her children. We cannot find fault with anything, yet we feel a vague sense of unreality. Unreality to ourselves? Nay, rather, unreality to the artist: we perceive, little by little, that everyone of these evident indications of a catastrophe is connected with a grand gesture, a noble fold, a harmonious combination of masses: the mother raising the arm covered with her cloak and clasping the child with the other, produces thereby a magnificent contrast between the round, bunched fold of the mantle, and the straight, narrow folds of her skirt, nay, between the simple and ample drapery covering her own bosom, and the minute clinging crinkles on the back of the little one; the wounded youth sinks down in such a way as to display the grand muscles of his throat and shoulders; the girl covering her naked dead brother, forms with him, a powerfully-balanced mass of brightly-lit nude and broken, shadow-furrowed drapery; and all the remaining children stoop and cower and stretch forth their arms in such a way as to produce the inclination of the two sides of the triangle crowning the temple. Moreover, the pathetic, upward movement of the mother's head, by slightly drawing down the jaw, and in upturning the eyes, contracting the brows into a triangular furrow, accentuates the grandeur of the grand features, and prevents the light from above falling upon a mere flat expanse of cheek and forehead; the eldest daughter stooping tenderly over the dead boy produces, in so doing, an incomparable curve of neck and shoulders; and thus, with all the other figures, the gesture is invariably productive of a definite beauty of form. And, on the other hand, there is not present a single one of the gestures or attitudes which would certainly produce definite ugliness of form, and would yet be as appropriate and inevitable to the situation as these. There is not, in this group, any movement, any effect, of which we could decidedly say that it would not arise in a scene like this; but, in a scene like this, there would certainly be a great many movements and effects which cannot be found in the group. Hence, the dramatic expression of the work is essentially negative: in the mind of the artist the realisation of the scene, the bringing home of the story, has been a purely secondary thing, and therefore the realisation of the scene, the bringing home of the story, is secondary also to us, the spectators. The impression produced in us is exactly corresponding to the interest dominant in the artist: he has cared for the subject only inasmuch as it afforded suggestions for beautiful forms; and we therefore have perceived the beautiful forms, and forgotten the subject. The object of the artist has been, whether or not he formulated it clearly to himself, not to bring home the situation to the fancy; not to awaken an emotion; but to present to the eye and the mind a mere beautiful form. And that such has been his object, is the first and main lesson which we have learned from the Niobe group, as it was the first and main lesson learned by the child of our fairy tale from the innumerable statues which, during those long years in the Vatican, were its silent teachers.
To present to the eye and the mind a mere beautiful form, this seems a terrible low and limited definition of the aim of a great artist, of a whole great national art. Surely not this. The aim of the artist, of the innumerable artists constituting antique art, must have been nobler: the form for them must have been the mere physical embodiment of the ideas and the presentation of the beautiful idea must have been their real object. You think so? well; the child of our fairy tale pretends that the statues told him the contrary; told him that form was the real artistic aim, and that the idea was arranged, clipped, sometimes even mangled, to make it fit the form. We can judge for ourselves. You say idea, and oppose it to form; hence, the idea is, we must presume, what the form is not, and since the form is the sensible, the visible, the concrete, the outwardly existing, the idea must be the invisible, the abstract, the merely intellectually existing. In this sense, what is the idea, the abstract intellectual conception of the Niobe group? Merely the fact of the slaughtering of the Niobides by Apollo and Artemis in the presence of their mother, keep this fact (if you can) in your mind without mentally investing with any shape the Niobides, the gods, or the mother; conceiving the mere bare fact, without conceiving what it would look like; do this and when you have succeeded, as far as any creature not born blind can succeed, you will have the idea of the Niobe group. Such an idea does not require for its conception that you be a great sculptor; indeed you understand that for the idea to be nothing beyond an idea, it requires a man born blind, that is to say, totally deficient, that activity of plastic conception which is possessed in the highest degree by the artist. Now what is the product of that very plastic activity of mind which the artist possesses in the highest degree, and which you required to deaden in yourself in order to conceive the idea in its perfect abstract purity, what is that product of plastic activity? what is it which is for ever hovering before your mental vision, getting between you and the mere idea, interfering with the abstract conception, turning that abstract idea into something (even in your mind) concrete, perceptible by the senses? That something was the form. When you involuntarily said to yourself—"the mother looked in such a way, the sons in such another," this that you were conceiving was no longer the mere idea, it was the form: not the action, but the visible appearance presented by the action. To conceive the mere idea, all plastic fancy must be in abeyance; to conceive the form, all plastic fancy must be active; and as the artist is the man in whom plastic fancy is more than usually active, that which the artist conceives is not the idea, but the form: not the abstract intellectual side of the action, but the concrete, the visible. The idea, the fact of the action, and all its non-visible, psychological details, come to the artist from without; the knowledge that Niobe saw her children slaughtered by the gods, and the psychological inferences therefrom that Niobe, being a mother, and mothers feeling anguish at the sufferings of their children, must have undergone great anguish at thus seeing her children slaughtered—this fact by its psychologic developments, comes from without to the artist, it may come from the same individual man of whom the artist is a portion, but even in this case it comes equally from without the artist; if Mr. Rossetti invent a story about a Blessed Damozel, and then paint a picture representing her looking down from heaven, the story, the idea of the Blessed Damozel is given by Mr. Rossetti, the poet, that is the man who conceives facts and their psychologic developments, to Mr. Rossetti, the painter, that is the man who conceives the visible appearance of actions; the two artists happen to be united in one person, but they are two distinct artists nevertheless, and the painter is not the artist who conceives the idea of the action, but the one who conceives the form of the action. Thus, the artist is the man who conceives the form. Now, since his activity is entirely limited to the form, since, as an artist, he can produce only the form, how is this artist to do what behoves every man and every artist: his best? How is he to give the world the greatest possible benefit of his special endowment? Evidently, since his endowment is for the creation of form, the result of the greatest activity of his endowment will be seen in the form; if he do his best, he will do his best with the only thing which, inasmuch as he is an artist, he can control, namely, the form. But how do his best, with the form? Clearly, by making the form as good as possible. Good in what way? Shall we say as expressive as possible? Nay, but the expressiveness is a mere correspondence between the idea and the form, it is not an inherent quality of the form itself; given only the form, without the idea, we cannot judge of its expressiveness: to judge whether or not the Niobe group is expressive, we must first be told that which it might or might not express; the idea, the fact and its psychologic developments, which do not lie within the domain of the man of mere form. Thus the goodness of the form must not be a fittingness to something outside and separate from the form, it must be intrinsic in the form itself. And what is this excellence which can be intrinsic to the form, which can be fully appreciated in the contemplation of that mere form, which requires no comparison with anything outside the form? Not expressiveness, we have seen; not likeness, for that, like expressiveness, is an extrinsic quality of which we can judge only by bringing into comparison something besides this form; still less fittingness to some material or moral use. We must look for the intrinsic possibilities of form, that is for the effect which the form can, without intermediary or collateral help, produce upon the spectator; shall we say clearness? Clearness is an intrinsic quality of form, but it is not an ultimate quality. That a form is clear means that we can see it well; but the question remains, why should we care to see it well? what is the intrinsic quality of form in obtaining which the artist is doing the utmost which, in his capacity of mere artist, he can do? What is that which can make it desirable for us to see clearly a form isolated from any extraneous interest of expressiveness, resemblance or utility? That highest intrinsic quality of form is beauty; and the highest merit of the artist, of the mere form creator, is to make form which is beautiful.
Can the Niobe teach us more? Has your Vatican child learned any more from the statues? you ask, contemptuous at this definition, narrow, as must be all definitions of duty. Perhaps the Niobe may teach us next how this highest artistic quality of beauty, this sole aim of the artist, is to be attained? Be not so contemptuous. The Niobe can teach us something about the mode of attaining to this end; it cannot, indeed, teach us what to do, for the knowledge of that, the knowledge of how to combine lines and curves and lights and shades, is the secret belonging to the artist, to be taught and learned only by himself; but it can teach us what not to do, teach us the conditions without which those combinations of lines and curves and lights and shades, cannot be created. Let us return to the Niobe once more: let us see the group clearly in its general composition, and then, with the group before us, let us ask ourselves what plastic form is conceived in our imagination when there comes home to it the mere abstract idea of the sudden massacre of the Niobides, by Apollo and Artemis. Nothing, perhaps, very clear at first, but clearer if we try to draw what we see or to describe it in words. In the first place, we see, more or less vaguely, according to our imaginative endowment, a scene of very great confusion and horror: figures wildly shuffling to and fro, clutching at each other, writhing, grimacing with convulsed agony, shrieking, yelling, howling; we see horrible wounds, rent, raw flesh, arrows sticking in torn muscles, dragging forth hideous entrails, spirting and gushing and trickling of blood; we see the mother, agonised into almost beast-like rage and terror, the fourteen boys and girls, the god and the goddess adjusting their shafts and drawing their bows; we see all, murderous divinities, writhing victims, impotent, anguished mother. If we see it, how much more fully and more clearly, in every detail, is it not seen in the mind of the sculptor, of the man whose special gift is the conception of visible appearances? Oh, yes, he sees it: here the mother, here the elder daughters, there the other children, further off, Apollo and Artemis, sees how each stands, moves, looks, sees the convulsed features, the rumpled garments, the fear, the pain, the anger, the hopelessness, the pitilessness. He takes three planks, nails together their extremities: this is the gable of the temple, the triangular cavity or box into which he must fit his group; then, with thumb and fingers, roughly moulds a certain number of clay puppets, places them in the triangular box, removes them, alters them, replaces them, takes them out once more, throws some away, elaborates others; works for hours, days, weeks, till we return to his workshop, and find a number of models, tiny moulded dolls in the plank triangle; large statuettes, half-finished, roughly-worked heads—drawings, perhaps, of parts of the group. And we examine it all. It is the rudiment of the Niobe group. But see: of all those things which we saw in our fancy, which the artist, being an artist, must have seen with infinitely more completeness and clearness, only a portion has here been reproduced. Of all the movements and gestures there remain but a very few: the convulsions, the writhings, and grimacings are gone; there is no trampling, no clutching, no howling, no grimacing, there are no quivering limbs, or disembowelled bodies. Why so? Ask the artist. Because, he will answer, all those movements and gestures were radically ugly; because all that howling and grimacing in agony entirely ruined the beauty of the features; because the situation could not be adequately represented, except to the utter detriment of the form. Hence, of all the movements and gestures which had presented themselves to his inner vision, at the first mention of the story of Niobe, the artist has rejected those which were at all detrimental to the beauty of the form, and accepted those others which were conducive thereto. He has cast aside a whole portion of the real appearance of the event, because it interfered with his, perhaps unspoken and unformulated, but instinctively imperious artistic aim: to create beautiful form.
But this is not all. He has left out something else which was a most essential, nay, an all important part of his first mental vision of the scene. He has actually left out—guess what—some son or daughter of Niobe?—has run counter to the tradition of the seven girls and seven boys?—oh, in comparison, that would be nothing. He has actually and absolutely left out the god and goddess—left out the murderers from the representation of the murder. Why in the world has he done this? Granting that he need not transfer to his group all the terrible details he has seen in his mind, why should he leave out Apollo and Artemis? They need not be convulsed, or writhing, or grimacing; on the contrary, they ought to be quite calm and passionless in their cruel beauty. There is nothing unbeautiful in Apollo and Artemis surely. No: not in Apollo and Artemis, taken in themselves; but in Apollo and Artemis considered as part of this group. Listen: we will explain. Since Apollo and Artemis are, between them, slaughtering all the Niobides, closing them in with their arrows, it is obvious that Apollo and Artemis must be placed in such a manner as to command the whole family of Niobides; there must be no Niobides behind them, for that would mean that there are Niobides who are out of danger and can escape. So the god and goddess must be placed in one of three ways: either back to back in the very centre of the group, each shooting down one half of the family; or else entirely separated, each at one extremity of the group, so as to face each other and enclose all the Niobides between them; or else above the Niobides, floating in mid air and raining down arrows like hail. Now, which of these three arrangements shall the sculptor select? He rejects at once the plan of placing the god and goddess back to back in the centre of the group, and we agree with him; for the two figures, thus applied to each other, each more or less in profile, would form the most ludicrous double-headed Janus. Place, then, Apollo at one end and Artemis at the other. There is nothing ugly in that, is there? There would not be were the sculptor modelling the oblong bas-relief of a sarcophagus; but there would be something very ugly now that, as it happens, he is modelling a group for the triangular gable of a temple. For, as the sides of the triangle slope sharply down, the figures beneath them necessarily become smaller and less erect in proportion to their distance from the vertex; so the god and goddess, if placed at the extremity of the group, must be flattened down in the acute angles of the base, must crouch and squat with their bows barely on a level with the knees of their victims. So this arrangement will not do; there remains the third plan of placing Apollo and Artemis above the Niobides. This is an admirable idea: the vertex of the triangle is filled by the floating figures of the gods, who appear calm, beautiful, mysterious, showering down death from inaccessible heaven. Will this do? Alas, much less than either of the others. The arrangement would be beautiful if the triangle of the gable, instead of being filled with a group of statues, were walled up, plastered, and could be painted on in fresco. The colour, light and shade, and perspective of painting, by creating a seeming depth of back-ground, by hiding one figure partially behind another, so as to make them appear not in actual contact, by piling up ætherial clouds or waving light draperies, would permit the artist to show the Niobides on solid ground below, and the gods in the air, high, distant above. But the sculptor, without any such means, could only suspend Apollo and Artemis (at tremendous expense of iron clamps) in such a way that they should seem to be standing on the shoulders of the Niobides; or interpose between them a thick bolster of marble clouds, a massive flutter of streaming marble draperies. Now do you think that the marble clouds and the marble fluttering drapery would be conducive to the beauty of the group, to the perfection of visible forms? Certainly not. And, therefore, Apollo and Artemis, gods though they are and chief actors in the story, have simply been left out in this its artistic representation.
For beauty of form has a double origin: it is not only an intellectual conception, but also a physical embodiment; and the intellectual conception is altered by the nature of the material in which it is embodied. The abstract form which will be infinitely delicate and life-like in the brown clay, which receives every minute dimple and crease from the finger of the artist, which presents a soft, uniform tint to the spectator; this same abstract form will be coarse and lifeless in the purple speckled porphyry, against whose hard grain the chisel is blunted, and the mottled colour and salt-like sparkle of which hide from the eye the real relations of line and curve, of concave and projection. The Mercury who, in the green bronze, floats upwards like a bubble, would jump like a clodhopper in the dingy white plaster. And these, remark, are differences only in one category of material and handling; change the sort of material and manner of handling and the differences become still greater. Statues, whether in clay, bronze, porphyry, or plaster, are always similar in the fact of being wholly free—round as Vasari calls them—of being interfered with by no complications of shadows like the figures of a high, middle or bas-relief; hence, as soon as the figures cease to be round, as soon as they are attached to a back-ground, the whole composition is altered by the consideration how the different degrees of projection, and the consequent play of light and shadow, will affect the apparent shape of the figures. And yet we are still within the domain of sculpture. How great a difference of form will not result when, instead of the tintless, tangible projections of stone, we get to the mere semblance of infinite depth and distance cunningly obtained by light and shade, colour and perspective, on a flat surface; where the light, instead of existing variable and confusing outside the work, is within that very work, inside the picture, combining, graduating every detail, making form melt gently into form, or stand out in triumphant relief? Thus the things which can be done in bronze must not be attempted in porphyry, the group of statues must be conceived differently from the bas-relief; the picture is different from the statue; for the beauty of form depends not only on the conception but upon the embodiment: if the material is violent, the conception is warped; and the same beauty can be obtained in all the arts only by remembering that those arts are different that, with the material and modes of handling, must change the conception.
Thus we have seen that the sculptor of the Niobe deliberately refused to embody his complete mental vision of the scene of massacre; that he selected among the attitudes and gestures and expressions suggested to him by this scene, rejected those which were inherently ugly, and accepted those which were intrinsically beautiful; and that he left out of his representation of the incidents its principal actors, because he could not have introduced them without either violating the nature of the whole composition to which he was bound, or violating the nature of the material in which he was working, and by so doing sacrificing the perfection of visible form which, being the only intrinsic quality to which his art could independently attain, was the one object of his desires and efforts. Such is the logical conclusion which we have consciously and perhaps wearisomely obtained from our analysis of the mode of conception and treatment of the Niobe group; and such the lesson which, unconsciously, vaguely, the child of our fairy tale must have learned from its marble teachers in the Vatican: That the only intrinsic perfection of art is the perfection of form, and that such perfection is obtainable only by boldly altering, or even casting aside, the subject with which this form is only imaginatively, most often arbitrarily, connected; and by humbly considering and obeying the inherent necessities of the material in which this form is made visible or audible. That by such artistic laws they themselves had come into existence, and that all other things which had come into existence by the same laws, were their brethren, was the secret which those statue-demons imparted to that child; the secret which enabled it to understand those symphony notes of Mozart's, when they said: "we also, the sounding ones, are the brethren of the statues; and all we who are brethren, whether in stone, or sound or colour, shall to thee speak in such a way that thou recognize us, and distinguish us from all others; and thou shalt love and believe only in us and those of our kin; in return we will give thee happiness." And this, as we have told you, came to pass solely because the statues took the whim of bewitching that child into falling in love with Rome.