Chapter 3

Hence it is that the child, who will one day become ourselves, rarely cares to return to these sculpture galleries; or, if it care to return to any, it is to mixed galleries like those of Florence, where, instead of the statues, it looks at the pictures. And out of pictures, out of the coarse blurs of colour in picture-books, out of the black, huddled, infinitively suggestive engravings in bible and book of travel; out of fine glossy modern pictures which represent a definite place, or tell a definite story; out of all this, confused with haunting impressions, of things seen or heard of (the strange, deeply significant sights and words of our childhood), do we get our original, never really alterable ideas and feelings about art; for much as we may clip, trim, and bedizen our minds with borrowed things, we can never change, never even recast its solid material: a compact, and seemingly homogeneous soul mass, made up of tightly-pressed, crushed odds and ends of impression; broken, confused, pounded bits of the sights and sounds and emotions of our childhood. To the statues we return only quite late, when this long-formed, long-moulded soul of ours has been well steeped in every sort of eclectic and artificial culture; has been saturated with modern art and modern criticism, with mysticism and realism and sentiment and cynicism, with Dante and Zola, and Mozart and Wagner and Offenbach, saturated, with every kind of critically distilled æsthetic essence, till there is not a flavour and not a scent, good or bad, sweet or foul, which may not be perceived in this strange soul of ours. Then we return to the statues; and, having imbibed (like all things) a certain amount of Hellenic, Pagan, antique feeling, we try also to assimilate the spirit of the statues of Phidias or Praxiteles; we expound the civilisation, the mode of thought; we trace the differences of school, we approve and condemn, we speak marvellously well, with subtlety or passion; we imagine all manner of occult, ineffable virtues and vices in this antique art, we dabble deliciously in alternate purity and impurity (this being the perfection of artistic pleasure), as we even occasionally, for a few moments, feel actual, simple, unreasoning, wholesome pleasure in the sight of the old broken marbles. All this we do, and most often are therewith satisfied. Yet if, weighing our artistic likings and dislikings, comparing together our feelings towards so many and so various manifestations, trying to determine what is fresh and wholesome food to our depraved æsthetic (and æsthetico-moral) palate, and what is mere highly flavoured, spicy or nauseous drug-stuff, if, in such a moment of doubt, we ask ourselves, overheard by no one, whether in reality this antique art is, in the life of our feelings, at all important, comforting, influential? we shall, for the most part, whisper back to ourselves that it is not so in the very least. But could it ever have been? Could this, or any art have been for us more than merely one of a hundred feebly enjoyed, more or less exotic mental luxuries; than an historic fossil, by study of which, as with the bone of a pterodactyl or an ichthyosaurus, we can amuse ourselves reconstructing the appearance and habits of a long dead, once living civilisation? Or might these statues have been much more to us? Might they, perhaps, have shaped and trained our souls with their unspoken lessons?

Well, once upon a time (let us invent a fairy tale), a child was brought to the Vatican: just such an one, only perhaps a trifle more wayward, than those we met this morning, demurely led about, or scampering through the galleries: its name signifies nothing, suffice it that it was a child. Now, it so happened, that upon that day the statues (who, as our forefathers of the middle ages knew) are merely stone imprisoned demons, dethroned gods of antiquity, were bent upon getting some small amount of amusement in their dreary lives: all the more dreary since the great joyful hope of restoration in the hearts of men which they had conceived when Winckelmann and Goethe came to them and adored, had been slowly disappointed by seeing that what men cared for was not them, but merely their own impertinent theories and grandiloquent speeches. The Statue-demons were sick of the bitter amusement of watching the follies of their pretended or deluded worshippers. So they sorely wanted excitement, diversion of some sort; and in their idleness, they capriciously determined to amuse themselves, no longer with grown men, but with children. So, as a toy for the moment, they singled out this particular child we are speaking of, who was wandering wearily through the gallery, overpowered like its companions by the sense of negativeness, of greyness, of silence, of want of character and movement and story, and as it passed them, the statue-demons looked at each other with their pupilless eyes, as much as to say: "This is the one we shall take," and determined to cast a spell upon it which would make it theirs. How they did is more than any of us can tell: there was a little gurgling fountain in the garden outside, where a broken-snouted dragon spirted a trickle of water through the maiden-hair choking up the basin, and of this water the child did drink a little in the palm of its hand, the rest running up its sleeve; there was also an old noseless Vertumnus in a corner, on whose pedestal a great tuft of wild grass had shot up, and round whose arms and neck an ivy plant had cast its green trailing leaves; and one of these bitter glossy leaves that child did certainly munch; but whether the charm was in the water or the leaf, or in neither, and only a mysterious spell, a sort of invisible winged seed of passion which they cast direct into that little soul, no one may ever decide. Be it as it may, the child remained for a while conscious of nothing at all, never dreaming that it had in any way come in contact with that demon world imprisoned in the stone. It lived its child life of romping and day dreams and lessons and punishments, and, with its companions, fretted to get away from this dreary, horrible Rome of the popes: this warm, wet place with its sordid houses, its ruins embedded in filth and nettles; its tawdry, stuffy churches, filled with snuffling of monks and jig-quavering of strange, cracked, sickening-sweet voices; its whole atmosphere of decay and sloth, as of a great marsh-pond, sprinkled with bright green weed and starred with flaunting nauseous yellow lilies. The child wondered at all these things: dug bits of porphyry and serpentine out of gutters, collected pieces of potshard from the Palatine; read and re-read the stories of shipwrecks and red Indians and volcanoes: played in dressing-gowns and shawls, at processions of cardinals and prelates, and, with yelling companions in pinafores and napkins, at church music, with tremendous time-beating with rolls of paper; laughed and pouted and quarrelled as children do; quite unconscious of being the chosen one, the changeling, the victim of the statues. But little by little, into its everyday life, stole strange symptoms; sometimes there would come like a sudden stop, as of a boat caught in the rushes, a consciousness of immobility in the midst of swirling, flowing movement, a giddy brain-swimming feeling; and then things went on again just as before. But the symptoms returned, and others with them. What was the matter? A vagueness, a want; a seeking, a clinging, but seeking for, clinging to the unknown. In the evenings of early spring, when the children had returned from their scrambling walks, and were waiting for supper, chattering, looking at books, or strumming tunes; this child would watch the bank of melting colours, crimson, and smoke-purple and gold, left by the sun behind the black dome of St. Peter's; and as the white vapours rose from the town below and gathered on the roofs like a veil, it would feel a vague, acheless pain within it; and at any stray, trifling word or bar of dance music, its eyes and its whole little soul would fill with a mist of tears. The spell cast by the statues was not idle, the mysterious philter which they had poured into it was working throughout that childish soul: the child was in love; in love with what it had hated; in love intensely, passionately, with Rome. And as a part of Rome it loved, blindly, for no other reason, that desolate Vatican; to the statues it returned, and in a way, grew up in their presence. And one day the child looked at itself, and perceived that it was a child no longer; knew all of a sudden, that in those drowsy years of childish passion and day dreams, it had been learning something which others did not know. For it heard one day a few pages of a symphony of Mozart's; the first it had ever heard save much more modern music; and those bars of symphony were intelligible words, conveyed to the child a secret. And the secret was: "we are the brethren, the sounding ones of the statues: and all we who are brethren, whether in stone, or sound, or colour, or written word, shall to thee speak in such a way that thou recognise us, and distinguish us from others; and thou shalt love and believe only in us and those of our kin." Then the child went forth from the Vatican, and went in among the pictures, and among the poems and the music, and did indeed find that all those who were of the same kin as the statues spoke to it intelligible words, and returned its love by making it happy. This came of the statues having had the whim of giving to that child the love potion which had made it love Rome.

All this is a fairy tale, a very meagre one indeed, quite inferior to any told us by nurse or peasant woman; but a fairy tale nevertheless; for, of course, we all know that statues cannot give love philters, nor children fall in love with towns, nor symphonies talk about having brothers in marble or colour. All this is rubbish of the same sort as the dancing water, the singing apple, the dragon Fafner's blood which made Sigurd understand the language of the birds, the enchanted lake into which Charlemagne sat gazing out his life, because of the ring cast into it; mere rubbish, and, consequently, not to be examined into or reasoned about. But as the wise men of to-day tell us that in all our nursery tales (Heaven forbid that anything so appalling be true) there is a hidden, sensible meaning; perhaps, also, there may be one in this absurd little story of the child in the Vatican, and that we may see. And so, now, we must be serious and examine methodically into the matter.

To grow up in the presence of the statues; to become acquainted with antique art long before any other; to perceive the beauty and enjoyableness of a statue before seeking for the beauty and enjoyableness of a picture or a piece of music; this is the reverse of the artistic training which every individual man or woman obtains consciously or unconsciously in our own day; for we begin with the art born nearest our time, then proceed to those further; we go from music to painting, and from painting to sculpture. But humanity at large received the opposite training in the last four-and-twenty centuries, since humanity knew beauty in the statue before knowing beauty in the picture, and beauty in the picture before beauty in music. The first standard of artistic right and wrong (since architecture, being a thing partly for use, and only partly for beauty, has a mixed morality of its own) was the standard of sculpture. Let us see what that was, and how we must alter and enlarge it (as humankind has done), in order to obtain the standard of right and wrong in painting and that in music. The statues, in our fairy tale, told the child that they had brethren in sound, brethren which, knowing them, he should also know from the resemblance. But first, what like are these first born of art, these statues? What is this character in them which, found in the younger things, in painting and music, shall show that even these are of the same stock as the statues? What like are these statues? What a question! it is perfectly insulting to any one of us most æsthetic creatures. What like are these statues? Does any of us require to ask or to be taught that? And to begin with, the very question is a gross error, an unendurable blunder: statues, antique statues.... You think that so simple, do you? You think, perhaps, like the people of the sixteenth century, that there is only one kind of antique statue; know, most impudent of ignoramuses, that there are innumerable sorts of statues and antique statues, there are good statues and bad statues, and early statues and late statues, there are Dedalian statues and Æginete statues, and immediately pre-Phidian and Phidian, and immediately post-Phidian and Praxitelian statues, and statues of the school of Pergamus, and statues of the school of Rhodes, and Græco-Roman statues, and statues of the Græco-Egyptian revival under Hadrian, and statues.... Enough, enough! We have been talking of the teachings of the statues themselves, of the lesson which they, with their unchangeable attitude and gesture, their lines and curves and lights and shadows of body, their folds and plaits of drapery, have silently, slowly taught to a child; and the statues themselves, who have never read Winckelmann, nor Quatremère, nor Ottfried Müller, do not know all these wondrous classifications of schools of which (with their infinite advantage of teaching us to admire only one or two schools, and abominate all the others as barbarous, decaying, Græculan, etc., without even looking at them) we are so justly proud. Oh, yes, the statues which taught the child were a very mixed company, such as the carefully-trained of our day, who can endure only Phidias, and next to Phidias, only Clodion or Carpeaux, would scarcely like to know at all. Not Phidian, all of them, nor even, alas, Praxitelian; they were not the Elgin marbles nor the Venus of Milo, sole objects of the feeble love of us good, learned folk; they were those extremely harum-scarum statues of the Vatican: a few of them copies of lost, irreproachable originals, like the Doryphoros, the Minerva, the Amazon, the Satyr; a certain number of impostors of now exploded reputation, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Antinous, and a whole host of quite despicable others, of every degree of lateness of epoch and baseness of work. And what is still worse, the child was taught, not merely by this multifarious company, but by heaven knows what dreadful statues besides; things to shudder at, things, hewn stones (for the right-minded cannot call them statues) out in gardens, noseless, armless things under artificial ruined temples, in niches of clipped box, or half-swathed up with ivy and creeping roses. All these said to that child that, although some of them were quite artistic patricians and princes, and others the merest ragtag and bobtail, nay, unspeakable ruffians and outcasts, they yet belonged to the same stock, they all being antique; and that all of them, according to their degree and power, some in unspoken words perfect as any of Plato's, and others in horrible, jumbled slang, malaprop gibberish, would teach him the same lesson, if he would listen to them all: the lesson of their own nature and kinship. And from all of them, insensibly, slowly, without archæologic or æsthetic formulæ, in the simple manner in which children learn all that is most important to know, this child learned. So that, without desire for archæologic and æsthetic answers, we now ask, referring to this lesson learnt by the child--"What like _are_ the statues?" What like? Why, of course--well, they are like--like--like--what in the world should statues _be_ like?--things cannot be defined in that cut and dry fashion--why, statues are like--. In short, such questions can neither be asked nor answered by intelligent folk. They can be put only by people who believe in love philters and symphonies which talk, and children who fall in love with towns; idiotic questions like "Why should there be sin?"--and "Why love our neighbours when they are nasty?"--which only children ask--questions to answer which as they deserve, you had better get hold of your eternal fairy-story child, and ask him what the statues said they were like. Nay, do not lose all patience. And see, since you think that the question, "What like are the statues" is fit to be answered only by the child of the fairy tale, we will pretend, for a moment, that the fairy tale is true, and play, for your benefit, the part of that child. And the things which that child would have learned, scarce consciously, in the course of its own growth, and during years of familiarity with all this host of statues, we will try and explain in an hour or so, by examining together a single work of ancient sculpture. This work is the Niobe group; and we have chosen it, after a little thought, for the purpose, because, from the complication of the story and of the group itself, it will enable us to illustrate a greater number of points than could well be done in the examination of isolated antique figures, or groups of merely two or three, such as there are plenty of here in Rome. But the Niobe is not in Rome, you will say; why not take some statue or group of statues here in the Vatican? Because the Niobe can teach us most in least time; and because also, you need not think of the group as it stands in the gallery in Florence. Indeed, you must not think of that group at all, spread out as it is, in idiotic confusion, round the walls of Peter Leopold's oblong hall. What you must think of, look at, is this--See: here we have all the figures composing the group, very fairly copied in terra-cotta, the largest not much longer than your arm; and these figures we have placed, according to their relative size, in this rough wooden model of the triangular gable of a Greek temple; following approximately the design of the restored temple front which Cockerell made years ago for the Florentine gallery.

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.