ind 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 app