But with Borglum it was otherwise. The experience here preceded the expertness, and the latter is not such as the schools can teach or possibly should try to teach. His groups have little of the ordered arrangement of traditional composition, nor does the modelling show facile skill or elegant refinement. His work, indeed, is much more an expression of nature than of art, the frank, untrammelled expression of a natural artist giving utterance to the fulness of his thoughts. He acknowledges with gratitude the great assistance that he received from Mr. Rebisso, and when he went to Paris he enjoyed the critical encouragement of Frémiet and Saint-Gaudens; but for the rest he is self-taught. His visit to Paris lengthened into a sojourn of four years, during which he took a short course in the study of the figure at Julien’s Academy and frequented the Louvre and Luxembourg; otherwise keeping very much to his studio, drawing inspiration from the memory of his own experiences, and discovering for himself a technique that should give substance to his ideas.
So Borglum’s work does not readily line up with that of other modern sculptors. In its disregard of symmetrical composition, in the frequent appearance of passages left suggestively in the rough and in the vivid naturalness that characterises it we may for a moment fancy that we detect the influence of Rodin. Yet it shows none of the latter’s feeling for subtlety of modelling, and by comparison is crude; moreover, the point of view of each is widely different. Rodin’s is profoundly analytical and introspective at the same time; Borglum’s more spontaneous and instinctive, aiming to interpret in a vigorous ensemble the vivid impression of an objective fact. Again, in breadth of handling and in knowledge of animal structure and movement, we might compare him with Barye; only to find, however, that the latter far excels him in nobility of line and mass and falls as far behind him in the expression of sentiment.
For Borglum’s work reveals in a remarkable degree the sentiment which comes of intimate, habitual companionship. He does not, on the one hand, invest his animals with any quasi-human sentimentality, or, on the other, look at them from the outside standpoint of the hunter or otherwise observant student. He has entered into the actual sentient part which they play in the life they share with man. Hence the sentiment that his work reveals is most poignantly affecting. I doubt, indeed, if any sculptor of animals has ever represented with such fidelity and convincingness their intelligence and emotions. Note, for example, some of the phases of character-building in which he represents the bronco. Here it is full-grown, though still untamed, but quiet as a lamb, resting its muzzle on its dam’s back. It has not yet come in contact with the disciplining force of man. Now it is confronted with a saddle that lies upon the ground and recoils with a mixture of trembling and curiosity. There it has been rounded up and thrown, at first struggling with impotent fury, then stretched in utter exhaustion. Later the saddle is on its back, and it is pitting its strength and cunning against the knowledge and endurance of man; then finally tamed, and coöperating with man in the taming of other horses, or sharing the night watch, or meeting with him the mortal peril of the blizzard.
But Borglum’s power of stimulating our imagination includes in some cases even a suggestion of the environment of the figures, as, for instance, in the marble group of a mare and foal caught in a snowstorm. The little one is unconscious of danger, content as it noses close up to the mother’s side for shelter; but the gesture of the latter is full of solicitude and anxiety. In the swish of her tail and the droop and stiffening of the hind quarters, we are made to realise the force of the blizzard; while, is it the little mass of piled-up snow, or the whiteness of the marble, or the intensity of the sculptor’s imagination, that conveys to our own a sense of white, snowy desolation all around the two poor creatures? It is seldom in modern sculpture that one will find an expression of sentiment so unaffected and affecting.
And the other notable element in his work is its rendering of movement. It matters not what kind of movement—impetuous dash, sudden arrest of action, alert repose, the vicious fling of body and heels as the beast prepares to turn a somersault, the limp of pain, the submission of exhaustion, the supple step to music in the circus, the pause of doubt, the spasm of baffled rage—each and all and others are represented with an intimacy of knowledge and an instinctive certainty of method. He knows his subject so well and realises in his mind so vividly the impression which he seeks to interpret, that all pettiness of observation is swallowed up in a large
TAMED
By Solon Hannibal Borglum