Just as a memorial, just to perpetuate in one’s mind the dead man in
whose image and honour it has been erected, this statue is better than
any that I have seen.... No, pedantic reader: I ought not to have said
‘than any other that I have seen’ Except in shrouded and distorted
outline, I have not seen this statue.
Not as an image, then, can it be extolled by me. And I am bound to say
that even as an honour it seems to me more than dubious. Commissioned
and designed and chiselled and set up in all reverence, it yet serves
very well the purpose of a guy. This does not surprise you. You
are familiar with a host of statues that are open to precisely that
objection. Westminster Abbey abounds 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
formlessness to form, from nothing to everything--this it is that I
find in either statue; and this it is in virtue of which the Balzac has
unbeknown a brother on the Italian seaboard.
Here stands--or rather struggles--on his pedestal this younger brother,
in strange contrast with the scenery about him. Mildly, behind his back,
the sea laps the shingle. Mildly, in front of him, on the other side
of the road, rise some of those mountains whereby the Earth, before she
settled down to cool, compassed--she, too--some sort of self-expression.
Mildly around his pedestal, among rusty anchors strewn there on the
grass between road and beach, sit the fishermen, mending their nets
or their sails, or whittling bits of wood. What will you say of these
fishermen when----but I outstrip my narrative.
I had no inkling of tragedy when first I came to the statue. I did not
even know it was a statue. I had made by night the short journey from
Genoa to this place beside the sea; and, driving along the coast-road
to the hotel that had been recommended, I passed what in the starlight
looked like nothing but an elderly woman mounted on a square pedestal
and gazing out seaward--a stout, elderly, lonely woman in a poke bonnet,
indescribable except by that old Victorian term ‘a party,’ and as unlike
Balzac’s younger brother as only Sarah Gamp’s elder sister could be.
How, I wondered in my hotel, came the elder sister of Sarah Gamp to be
here in Liguria and in the twentieth century? How clomb she, puffing and
panting, on to that pedestal? For what argosy of gin was she straining
her old eyes seaward? I knew there would be no sleep for me until I had
solved these problems; and I went forth afoot along the way I had come.
The moon had risen; and presently I saw in the starlight the ‘party’
who so intrigued me. Eminent, amorphous, mysterious, there she stood,
immobile, voluminous, ghastly beneath the moon. By a slight shoreward
lift of crinoline, as against the seaward protrusion of poke bonnet, a
grotesque balance was given to the unshapely shape of her. For all her
uncanniness, I thought I had never seen any one, male or female, old
or young, look so hopelessly common. I felt that by daylight a noble
vulgarity might be hers. In the watches of the night she was hopelessly,
she was transcendently common.
Little by little, as I came nearer, she ceased to illude me, and I began
to think of her as ‘it.’ What ‘it’ was, however, I knew not until I
was at quite close quarters to the pedestal it rose from. There, on the
polished granite, was carved this legend: