IT was five years ago that Solon H. Borglum was first represented at the Salon; he also received a silver medal at the Universal Exposition of 1900 and another at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo; quite recently a fuller display of his work has been seen at the Keppel Gallery in New York. Yet, although he is probably the most original sculptor that this country has produced, he is still but little known to the American public.

It may seem strange that a people with such eagerness for novelty should in some cases be so slow to appreciate originality. But there is no necessary connection between the two; indeed, the pleasure in novelty may easily pass into a craving for it, as enfeebling to the mind as the habitual use of drug or dram; whereas the recognition of originality demands some independence and original effort on the part of ourselves. Again, originality does not act by blind jumps in midair, as in that species of dream with which some of us may be familiar, wherein we find ourselves midway in a leap, and then, by successive contractions of the muscles, seem to continue our leaps in the air until we fancy that we are flying. The leap of originality must always commence from some mental terra firma—conscious or unconscious experience; and, according as there is in ourselves some degree of corresponding experience, shall we appreciate or at least be impressed by the originality of the inventor and the artist; of the creator, in a word, whether he deals in facts or in ideas. For this reason the creator of facts meets with readier recognition than the creator of ideas. Marconi, for example, though he deals with matters far beyond the understanding of most people, nevertheless appeals to their imagination through their habitual, though it may be unscientific, acquaintance with the previous methods of telegraphic communication. So, in the case of every creator in the domain of practical experiment; either he meets a realised need or quickly suggests a need through the analogy of our every-day experience.

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

penetrated silently the fibers of his being. He grew and grew unconsciously; his manhood matured before the artist in him awoke; his mind stored with experiences before the need came upon him of expression.

The dormant artistic instinct was an inheritance from his father, a Danish wood-carver, who had migrated to this country early in the sixties. He settled in Ogden, Utah, where Solon was born in 1868; but he found no encouragement for his craft and, resolving to become a doctor, turned back to St. Louis, took a degree in medicine, and then established himself in Fremont, Nebraska, where his practice soon extended far into the prairies. He kept many horses, and the son grew up among them, with little inclination for school studies and a keen desire for the open-air life. At first he worked as a cowboy on a ranch of his father’s; later assumed control of a larger one, where for a number of years he lived in that close companionship with men and animals which breeds sympathy as well as knowledge.

One of his elder brothers, Gutzon, had already become an artist, and it was a visit that he paid to the ranch in 1890 which first aroused in Solon’s mind a thought of trying to draw. He began to experiment with the pencil, and gradually the fascination of representing form grew upon him, so that sketching occupied all his leisure time with continually increasing grip upon his desire, until by 1893 he made up his mind to sell out his share in the ranch and go forth and study art.

First he sought his brother in the Sierra Madre Mountains of California and studied painting with him for a few months; then drifted to Los Angeles, and thence to Santa Anna. In the latter town he rented his first studio at two dollars a month; but it was not long before he found his clothes were getting shabby, and, moreover, the confinement of the four walls was irksome. So he put a sign upon his door, “In Studio Saturdays Only”; and under cover of the dusk started for the wild country of the Saddleback Mountains. All through the week he lived among the old Spanish Indians and Greasers—lawless people who have been left stranded in the march of civilisation—eating with them, sleeping beside them in the thicket, sketching everything he saw. On Friday he started back for the town, and, sleeping on the outskirts, was early astir in the morning and passed unobserved to his little room before the towns-people were awake.

That first Saturday he was uninterrupted in his work, and at nightfall again set out for the mountains. But the following week, to his surprise, a visitor called, a school-teacher from the East, and the result of the visit was first a commission to paint the stranger’s portrait for five dollars, and secondly, the beginning of a valued friendship. Next Saturday the teacher called again, accompanied by two ladies, who wished to learn to paint. The lessons were continued weekly at a dollar a visit, and thus for nearly a year he subsisted, one day of each seven in his studio and during the others among the mountains; until, encouraged by his friend, he made a sale of his drawings, netted sixty dollars, and therewith packed up his blanket and oil-stove and set his face toward Cincinnati.

Here he entered the day and evening classes in drawing and rented a little room. Before long, however, he was heartsick for the old, free life. It was beyond his reach; yet, as he went to and from his work, he passed the United States mail stables, and the sight of the horses stirred the old feeling of comradeship. The lights were kept burning at night in the stables, so morning after morning before daybreak he lived among them, drawing and studying. By degrees he turned to modelling and executed the figure of a horse pawing a dead one. It was shown to Mr. Rebisso, the head of the school of modelling, who, discovering the young man’s ability, gave him encouragement and advice, permitting him to work in his own studio and finally making it possible for him to visit Paris.

Until Borglum’s fingers had found their way to clay he had been groping in the half-light of unrealised purpose. Now, however, he discovered at one stride the kind of subject nearest to his heart and the method of expression best fitted to his experience and temperament.

For, look you, his experience had been of facts; facts, it is true, from which in the aftermath of memory his temperament was to extract their romance and sentiment; but, in the first place, facts of the most direct and vigorous form. The subtleties, to which painting better lends itself, were outside the habit of his mind; whereas the tangible shape and more simple obviousness of sculpture exactly fitted his need. He had reached it through the same natural, unpremeditated growth that had characterised all his development. Such kind of growth is, perhaps, only possible to one whose boyhood and early manhood have been spent in the large vacancy of nature and the natural life. To those who are bred within the crowded and conscious civilisation of cities the desire of being an artist will probably come earlier; it will anticipate the experiences of life; from the first will shape itself more definitely and in its course conform to existing opportunities of instruction. While still immature in character and manhood the student will be run through the mould of a matured system which will turn him out at best an inexperienced expert.

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

comprehension which disregards details, except in so far as they are essential to the action or the sentiment. And how characteristic are the details which he does introduce! Here, for example, is the figure of a horse, “tamed.” A saddle lies upon the ground. It is the object which excites, first the terror, then the anger of the untamed horse. But this one is conquered and hangs his head submissively over the instrument and badge of his defeat. He stands with front feet planted forward, the legs trembling, the hind ones limp and sluggish; the line of the ribs exposed as the flank heaves; the nostrils distended with the gasps of breath; the eye listless, the ear fallen. But, keenest touch of all, note how the saddle-cloth and girths have left a hot, glossy impress upon the body, the hair around their edges being clotted with sweat. It is detail such as this, full of character, that one finds in all these pieces of sculpture; and, for the rest, the modelling is broadly suggestive, yet always distinctly characteristic; not only rendering structure and action, but offering varieties of flesh texture, according to the condition and character of the horse represented.

Borglum, in a word, is an impressionistic sculptor, untrammelled by formula or tradition, seeking nature direct, with an eye habituated to essentials and with a degree of sympathetic comprehension that corresponds with the range and reality of his life’s experiences. His work is, thus, truly original; a product of his own manhood, fashioned to artistic fitness.