Heins and Lafarge, the original architects, had listened to discussions ten years before any of the building was started. They had listened to the reports of sundry committees who never came to them with anything but grief. And, if they were like other men, they must have become fairly callous and a little deaf to each new sound of woe.
G. L. Heins, State Architect and a member of the firm that had designed St. John’s, seemed to have some doubts about Borglum. It is not quite clear whether he thought the sculptor too headstrong or too argumentative. Gutzon wrote to him a singularly polite letter at the beginning of his commission, outlining the Borglum theories of ecclesiastical art. And by that nobody could have been offended.
“There it will stand to praise or damn us,” Gutzon said, “not so much concerned whether we have been wise or not, but whether we have been sincere or not.” Heins replied to that but, unfortunately, his letter has been mislaid. One gathers the purport from the sculptor’s answer. Gutzon wrote:
I agree with you about making the figures as archaic as possible. Still, if a little of the unstudied natural charm that was creeping into sculpture about the time of Donatello should appear in the figures of Christ, the Virgin and the two saints, I think that the gain in real beauty would be a great advantage.
It will be interesting to hit upon a character of interpretation in the sculpture of this great church that will be at once religious in the best sense, profiting even by the mannerisms of the Middle Ages, yet clearly a distinct product of the larger, modern view.
The sculpture should be what I feel you are making your architecture, no slavish interpretation of what has preceded, but an intelligent adaptation of what has proved best, not forgetting the large human view that our western civilization, in its best moments, holds in all matters religious.
That seems to have ended the architect’s worries, although the sculptor appears to have had plenty left. Shortly thereafter a visiting English architect, E. W. Hudson, wrote this in the journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects:
Mr. Borglum’s work shows a marked originality, tending even to impressionism. His determination not to sink his individuality has brought upon him the criticism of a passing generation of contemporaries working in Gothic, whose sympathies are with the archaeological exactitude of the Revival, and who strive to get as near as possible to the effects of a past age. On this account Mr. Borglum will probably have to wait awhile for full appreciation, as M. Rodin himself has had to wait. He seems, however, indifferent to praise or blame, and appears determined to retain his individuality, although it has involved the refusal of commissions for collaborating with architects whose buildings in American cities require as the summum bonum exact compliance with conventional precedent.
This critique seems a little out of step in view of Gutzon’s declaration that the figures on the cathedral should be “made as archaic as possible.” But he never took notice of it. He went on for months with his work, vigorous and pleased with all that went on about him.
When he raised his voice, however, all of New York heard him. He had discovered that John Barr, the contractor, was sending his models to a Hoboken stoneyard to be finished by machinery under contract. This, of course, had not been written in the bond. The machine treatment may have made the pieces look more archaic, but it also made them look cheaper. Some of them looked less like saints than gargoyles, and Gutzon was angrily indignant.