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.