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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 aesthetic 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 AEginete 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 Graeco-Roman statues, and statues of the Graeco-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 Quatremere, nor Ottfried Mueller, 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, Graeculan, 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 archaeologic or aesthetic formulae, in the simple manner in which children learn all that is most important to know, this child learned. So that, without desire for archaeologic and aesthetic 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-cott
a, 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.