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.