How big is great? How high is up?
In the wide and numberless fields of creative art, size is a matter of spirit rather than of material bulk. A sonnet may be a masterpiece, and an epic rubbish; or an epic may be sublime, a sonnet petty.
It is only affectation to confine one’s praise to small things. Because a poet delights in a brook chuckling through a thicket of birches he need not therefore despise Niagara. The word “colossal” should not be surrendered entirely to the advertisers.
The Shakespeare of the sonnets wrote also “Hamlet” and “King Lear.” The Beethoven who wrote the giggling Scherzos wrote also the titanic Ninth and added its mighty chorus. Michelangelo did statuettes and sonnets, but also his “Day of Judgment” and his prodigious horned Moses.
To the sincere artist it is the idea that is vital. Once that has inflamed him, he seeks only to give it the shape and the size that its nature dictates.
So Gutzon Borglum, being sensitive to all the moods of life, a born poet, with an innate love of form for its own sake, quick to glow with inspirations of every kind and determined to give each its unique and eloquent shape, has painted and carved without fear or favor the exquisite and the tremendous with equal fidelity.
His genius shines in the little bas-relief of a nymph; in sardonic gargoyles; in the tiny yet epic statuette of the dying Nero, a bloated coward tangled in his toga and drooping to his ignoble death; in the suave portrait of the seated Ruskin; the pathos of the old Boer warrior; in the billowy rush of the stampeding “Mares of Diomedes”; in his colossal head of Lincoln; in his war memorial for Newark, New Jersey, with its marvellously composed forty-two figures and two horses; his magnificent plan for the Stone Mountain, whose thwarting is one of the great tragedies of art; and finally in his supreme achievement, the Mount Rushmore Memorial, where he brought his art to the mountains and left there the four great faces for all eternity.
This unparalleled accomplishment seems to have been not so much the carving of those vast heads upon the peaks as the beating away of the veiling, smothering stone and the releasing of the imprisoned statesmen so that they might look out upon the world and utter their lofty messages in a silence more pervasive and sonorous than any trumpet-tone.
The heads stand up there against the clouds like cloud-gods. Yet they are not offered as gods, but as plain men who glorified the plain man. Each of them is greater in magnitude than the so-called Egyptian Sphinx. The Sphinx represented an unanswerable riddle and she cruelly destroyed all who could not answer it. But these presidents of ours represent brave, clear thinking towards safety and dignity and happiness for all mankind.
The Sphinx was really a portrait, the largest portrait ever made till Borglum came along. It is the head of King Khafre set on the body of a crouching lion guarding the king’s tomb, with his pyramid back of it. Khafre had it built during a reign that ended over four thousand, seven hundred and fifty years ago.
Near the Sphinx and Khafre’s pyramid is the greater pyramid of King Khufu, better known to us as Cheops. He lived from 2898 to 2875 BC. and his pyramid contains over two million blocks of stone, of an average weight of two and a half tons. Herodotus was told that it took a hundred thousand men twenty years to build it.
Near Karnak there are still standing—or sitting—two portrait statues of Amenhotep III, who ruled fourteen hundred years B.C.—just about the time of Moses. These statues are seventy feet high.
One of the four colossal statues at Abu Simbel represents Rameses II, who died about two thousand, six hundred years ago. Lying on its side is a broken statue of Rameses II, once 90 feet high and carved from a single thousand-ton block. This and another statue of him in granite ninety feet high were, according to Breasted writing in 1905, “the greatest monolithic statues ever executed.”
But Borglum’s bust of Washington is larger than the whole figure of Rameses, Lincoln’s nose is 21 feet long and the sparkle in his eye is secured by a block of granite thirty inches long.
Some of the Egyptian portraits were carved upon their cliffs somewhat as Borglum’s statues are upon the peaks. At Abu Simbel there are four such statues of enormous bulk.
The Assyrians also built huge monuments, and inscribed the texts of whole histories on the faces of cliffs. Their kings were usually represented as enormous winged bulls with the heads of bearded men. These were called, strangely enough, “cherubs.”
The Greeks created for their greater gods statues of gold and ivory—whence the epithet “chryselephantine.” Such was the colossal Zeus that Pheidias made for Olympia. It was about fifty feet high. Pheidias made also two colossal figures of Athena for Athens, one in bronze that stood up like a lighthouse and was visible to sailors far 6 out to sea. The other had ivory flesh and robes of gold, and was seventy feet high.
The famous bronze Colossus of Rhodes, erected about 274 B.C. by Chares of Lindus, was 105 feet high. It did not straddle a stream, as tradition has it. Half a century after it was set up, an earthquake overthrew it; in 656 A.D. it was sold for junk and carried off by a caravan of 900 camels.
In China one still sees enormous Buddhas, and in our own world the Mayan monstrosities are being brought back from the jungle that swallowed them like a sea.
The statue of Liberty—a gift to us from France—is 151 feet high; with its pedestal it is 305 feet tall.
But none of the giants ancient or modern has approached the size of the greater works of Borglum.
This carver of mountains was himself a mountainy man, born in the mountainous state of Idaho on March 25, 1871. His full name was John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum. His parents had come over from Denmark. His father, at first a woodcarver, became a physician and surgeon, also a breeder of horses on a 6000-acre ranch. He had no money to give his children, but he gave them a love of form and a knowledge of the horse that not only inspired Gutzon Borglum to some of his most magnificent work, but also made a splendid career for his younger brother, Solon. Solon took fire from Gutzon’s fire, worked his way to Paris, won honors there, and came home to his West where he turned out a stream of important sculptures that perpetuate many poignant phases of Western life. His life was suddenly ended in 1922 by an attack of acute appendicitis.
Gutzon’s indomitable will carried him from the Idaho ranch to an art school in San Francisco, thence to Paris. He began as both painter and sculptor and was accepted as both by the French salons. In England, critics and royalty heaped honors on him. After painting a series of murals for a big hotel at Leeds and another series for a concert hall at Manchester, he began to abandon the brushes for the chisel, and to turn out statuary in almost every field and almost every imaginable form.
From the first, his works won the highest honors. The Metropolitan Museum bought his “Mares of Diomedes” at once and the French Government promptly purchased a partial replica of it for the Luxembourg Gallery. Commissions rained on him and there was never any repetition in the spirit or treatment of his responses.
There is not space here for even a catalogue of his triumphs. He also wrote much and well. He was an engineer and an inventor, overcoming by his own skill supposedly unconquerable problems involved in the construction of his larger works. He was an orator of eloquence with a practical skill in politics. At times he was a statesman and the close associate of Paderewski and Masaryk in their re-creation of their lost republics. During the first World War he investigated and exposed the causes for a mysterious and dangerous failure in American aircraft manufacture. His career has a strange kinship in its versatility with that of Leonardo da Vinci, and I believe that his name will live as long.
In 1909 he married Mary Montgomery, a distinguished scholar in ancient Oriental languages, and a translator of cuneiform inscriptions. A son and a daughter blessed this union of two great souls.
It was in 1907 that I first met Gutzon Borglum while preparing an article on his work, to which I paid complete homage. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship of which I wrote him while he was glorifying the South Dakota mountains:
“I have always had an awe and a reverence for you that fought with my love for the simple, jovial, twinkling-eyed friend you always were.”
He answered: “You have said your say about me and it is a wet eye that reads through the letter. You know how vandalism in the name of Civilization raids the tombs of our ancestors and destroys the records of History. One of my motives in this work was to carve these records of our great West-World adventure as high into the heavens as I could find the stone.”
As man and as sculptor he was passionately American and he has not only given to his country monuments of art that equal the greatest of other nations, but he has given artistic expression to the ideals that make America America.
The Sphinx and its temple have only recently been recovered from the sand that submerged them for thousands of years. Yet even now the worst tyrannies and cruelties of the Pharaohs have been revived and paralleled in Europe, just as our gentlest, noblest ideals were to be found co-existing with savagery in ancient Egypt.
I hope, I believe that in 7000 A.D. there will be pilgrimages to Mount Rushmore by Americans still keeping alive the flames of freedom kindled and rekindled by the four heroes Borglum had immortalized, immortalizing himself and his and their ideals along with them.
His Mount Rushmore Memorial presents to posterity four great Americans who upheld the rights and equalities of all mankind, and who were themselves the very personifications of Americanism.
Their noble heads are lofty enough to mingle with the clouds, and the parading lights of sun and moon and stars, and the processionals of rain and snow and mist give them a beauty that is always changing yet everlastingly changeless.
Only a great soul and a great artist could have conceived or achieved such a monument to them and to himself. His gifts of spirit and execution were, I feel, unsurpassed by anything of their kind in the history of the world.