in them. They confront you
throughout London and the provinces. They stud the Continent. Rare
indeed is the statue that can please the well-wishers of the person
portrayed. Nor in every case is the sculptor to blame. There is in the
art of sculpture itself a quality intractable to the aims of personal
portraiture. Sculpture, just as it cannot fitly record the gesture of a
moment, is discommoded by personal idiosyncrasies. The details that
go to compose this or that gentleman's appearance--such as the little
wrinkles around his eyes, and the way his hair grows, and the special
convolutions of his ears--all these, presentable on canvas, or evocable
by words, are not right matter for the chisel or for the mould and
furnace. Translated into terms of bronze or marble, howsoever cunningly,
these slight and trivial things cease to be trivial and slight. They
assume a ludicrous importance. No man is worthy to be reproduced as bust
or statue. And if sculpture is too august to deal with what a man has
received from his Maker, how much less ought it to be bothered about
what he has received from his hosier and tailor! Sculpture's province is
the soul. The most concrete, it is also the most spiritual of the arts.
The very heaviness and stubbornness of its material, precluding it from
happy dalliance with us fleeting individual creatures, fit it to cope
with that which in mankind is permanent and universal. It can through
the symbol give us incomparably the type. Wise is that sculptor who,
when portray an individual he must, treats arbitrarily the mere actual
husk, and strives but to show the soul. Of course, he must first catch
that soul. What M. Rodin knew about the character and career of Mr.
George Wyndham, or about the character and career of Mr. Bernard Shaw,
was not, I hazard, worth knowing; and Mr. Shaw is handed down by him
to posterity as a sort of bearded lady, and Mr. Wyndham as a sort of
beardless one. But about Honore' de Balzac he knew much. Balzac he
understood. Balzac's work, Balzac's soul, in that great rugged figure
aspiring and indeflexible, he gave us with a finality that could have
been achieved through no other art than sculpture.

There is a close kinship between that statue of Balzac and this statue
of which I am to tell you. Both induce, above all, a profound sense of
unrest, of heroic will to overcome all obstacles. The will to compass
self-expression, the will to emerge from darkness to light, from
forml