On the other hand, the creator of ideas must be satisfied with a smaller following, at least at first, and at any rate with slower appreciation. Yet here, too, there are degrees of slowness, according to the medium of expression which he employs. Of all such artists, he who works in words will reach the people most quickly, since this is an age of words, especially of the written word.
The public eye is habituated to the printed page; though, truly, not so much in search of ideas or for suggestive stimulus to thought, but rather to the loss of independent thinking and to the smothering of the imagination in a banal prodigality of detailed statements. In the palmy days of painting and sculpture it was to them that the eye was habituated, and the impressions thus received were informed with the experience and the imagination of each observer. We, however, in the superiority of our modern education, run our eye over a painting or piece of sculpture to discover what there is in either that is convertible into words, and overlook the qualities which affect the senses abstractly, which are indeed the bones and marrow and very physiognomy of the work of art, its distinguishing characteristics and capacity to move us. And this powerlessness to enter into a work of art from the artist’s point of view deprives us of all independence and initiative of appreciation. When a gap has been made by some bell-wether in the hedge of stubborn intolerance which public opinion had set round the art of a Rodin, we take our turn in the long row of sheep that follow each other’s tails through the gap and fancy that we are discoverers and appreciators of genius. Small wonder, then, if one of our own prophets, merely a young sculptor of America, should still be waiting for honour in his own country.
Yet it is here, if anywhere, that Borglum’s work should be appreciated, since it is American to the core, dealing with the incidents of cowboy life on the western prairies. Others have essayed the same subject, but rather from an outside standpoint with technical equipment derived from, or at least inspired by, the teaching of the Parisian schools. Borglum, on the other hand, knew from childhood the inside of the life, was himself a cowboy, and for a long time with no thought of anything but the joy and interest of the life itself. Least of all had he any notions about art. The free, open-air existence amid spaciousness of earth and sky; the recurring seasons, each with its separate routine of necessary work, demanding the exercise of vigour, resourcefulness and courage; intimacy with man and animal life, and sympathy begotten of mutual hardships and frequent dangers—these things possessed him, and in the vast silence of nature
COWBOY MOUNTING
By Solon Hannibal Borglum
LOST IN A BLIZZARD (marble)