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Dick heard no more, having to slip away at that moment and hide behind one of the statues in the passage during the exit of his step-mother with the weeping Niobe; but when the sound of their footsteps had died away in the distance, he rushed into the oak parlour, and seizing Winnie round the waist, treated her to several convulsive hugs and various exclamations of supreme delight.
Sebastian of Sodoma, with exquisite limbs and head, rich with tendril-like locks, delicate against the brown Umbrian sunset; from the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto seated, with the head and drapery of a Niobe, by the sack of flour in the Annunziata cloister, to the voluptuous goddess, with purple mantle half concealing her body of golden white, who leans against the sculptured fountain in Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, with the greenish blue sky and hazy light of evening behind her; from the most extreme examples of the most extreme schools of Lombardy and Venetia, to the most intense examples of the remotest schools of Tuscany and Umbria; throughout the art of the early sixteenth century, of those thirty years which were the years of perfection, we see, more or less marked, but always distinct, the union of the living art born of the Middle Ages with the dead art left by Antiquity, a union producing life and perfection, producing the great art of the Renaissance.
The sons of Niobe were there with the rest, some mounted on spirited horses richly caparisoned, some driving gay chariots. Ismenos, the first-born, as he guided his foaming steeds, struck with an arrow from above, cried out, "Ah me!" dropped the reins, and fell lifeless.
And it is owing to this that some men, when in sorrow, betake themselves to deserts, as Homer says of Bellerophon: Distracted in his mind, Forsook by heaven, forsaking human kind, Wide o'er the Aleïan field he chose to stray, A long, forlorn, uncomfortable way! And thus Niobe is feigned to have been turned into stone, from her never speaking, I suppose, in her grief.
"A stranger," says Waterton, "would never believe the sound to be the voice of a bird. He would say it was the last groan of a midnight murdered victim, or the cry of Niobe for her children before she was turned into stone.
And yet the beauty of proportion, the agreeable flow of the outline, are not lost in this violent struggle; and a representation, the most appalling to the senses, is yet managed with forbearance, while a mild breath of gracefulness is diffused over the whole. In the group of Niobe there is the same perfect mixture of terror and pity.
She had always had great self-command it was one of the things he most admired in her, one of his greatest grievances against her, because he had never been able to tell what she was thinking. Had she realised that he was following? Her self-possession made him angry; and, disdaining to explain his presence, he pointed to the mournful little Niobe, and said: "That's rather a good thing."
Yet it was the same English Government and people which, feeling, let us hope, some compassion at the sight of this new woe of the "Niobe of nations," determined to try and save her children, as, if they must cast them out, at least it should he alive and full of health on a foreign shore.
The earlier sculpture confines itself to broad, central lines of heroic and divine character, as in the two masterpieces of Pheidias. The latter dealt in great elaboration with the details and elements of the stories and characters that formed its subjects, as in the Niobe group, or the Laocoon, to be mentioned later.
Again he thought of her by the little green Niobe in the Bois de Boulogne, once more rejecting him. His fancy took him on beside his drifting river on the November day when Fleur was to be born, took him to the dead leaves floating on the green-tinged water and the snake-headed weed for ever swaying and nosing, sinuous, blind, tethered.
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