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