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