CHAPTER NINE

_THE BIRTH OF A MYTH_

The building of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at Morningside Heights, New York, might have been done for Gutzon Borglum alone. At any rate, it had his close and abiding interest for a number of years.

“It is a fine example not only of medieval art but of the spirit of the early churchmen,” he said. “It is something out of another age untouched by pretentiousness and vanity.”

So he was immensely pleased in 1905 when he was asked to make the statues for the structure and to supervise the carving on the Belmont chapel, the first section of the cathedral to be finished. It was a definite honor that must have been coveted by most of the sculptors in New York, and out of sheer enthusiasm for the work he agreed to make models of a hundred saints and angels. The fee wasn’t anything that could be called remunerative in itself, and Borglum was presently to learn that medievalist sculptors had about as many troubles as moderns.

It was in this pious undertaking that he laid the groundwork for the first of the stories about his alleged evil temper. He was profoundly disturbed by this development because, he argued, he didn’t have any evil temper at all. He could have admitted, however, that he was saltily vigorous in defense of what he decided was right. But anyway, the longevity of what he titled an unfounded legend frequently puzzled him.

He knew from the beginning that he had a large order. In addition to the topmost figures on the outside of the chapel there were larger, more detailed ones of the Virgin, the boy Christ, two saints and two angels. About the inside were any number of historic church dignitaries, bishops and saints. And there was a concourse of other symbolic figures in the King and St. Columbia chapels. Altogether there were twenty life-size statues outside and about seventy-five smaller ones inside. It has been pointed out by one shrewd observer that the chances for disagreement between the sculptor and the architects and committee members were virtually unlimited.

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.

For once the art committee gave him a quick hearing, and presently he was allowed to exercise general supervision over the contractor’s work and accept it or reject it as he saw fit. But that wasn’t the end of the controversy. The contractor, it seems, wasn’t so much interested in the shape of an angel as he was in the price of rock. He began to change the position of arms and legs and wings to suit the contours of his blocks of stone. Borglum declared that these revised figures were caricatures, and he condemned them. The contractor wouldn’t listen to him. The committee gave him no satisfaction; so this time he carried his complaint to the press.

Borglum seems to have been his own best public-relations agent. He demanded that the carving of the stone should be done on the cathedral grounds under his own eye. Inasmuch as this was strictly in keeping with the medieval tradition in church building, he had one faction of the cathedral’s congregation backing him to start off with. The art critics generally thought his point well taken, and thousands of people who knew nothing at all about sculpture wondered what was the use of models if they weren’t to be followed.

Borglum won his point. A working studio was established on the cathedral grounds, and there Gutzon supervised the carving. He shared honors with his assistant sculptors, Price and Gregory, who had come over from England. Their names are signed to the work they shared in. Only the contractor thought that the sculptor was hard to get along with.

Many of the statues which Gutzon had condemned were recut and properly placed. The seventy-odd interior figures were one of the largest collections of images of religious leaders ever gathered under one roof since the beginning of the Christian era. They were also the largest collection ever carved by one artist. And as revised, they began to look somewhat respectable. Every detail of miter, chasuble and coat of arms was perfect. There had been much correspondence to determine the finger on which the pontifical ring should be placed.

By this time Gutzon had worked amicably with the cathedral authorities for two years. His early arguments about machine-cut statues were forgotten. And then came an incident which made people conscious of him again. A bit of newspaper confusion gave him a reputation for bad temper that he carried for the rest of his life.

It began in the meditations of Dr. John Peters, canon of the cathedral, in a bourn far from newspapers and street-corner arguments. Dr. Peters, all of a sudden, had become a little uncertain about the sex of angels. He wasn’t at all controversial about the matter, but he thought that he should convey what he had learned to Gutzon Borglum. So, in an innocent way, he did. In a letter to Borglum he wrote:

Dr. Huntington calls my attention to something that in the execution of the statues I had quite overlooked. He points out that the Angel of the Incarnation is named in the Bible as the Archangel Gabriel.

Now Gabriel is a masculine name, and, in point of fact, unless I am mistaken, the archangels are thought of as masculine--Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, etc. I am perfectly aware that in art one meets frequently a feminine angel type bearing the lily of the Incarnation, but is that really correct? Should not the heads of both these angels and the figures in general be made if not distinctly masculine, at least not distinctly feminine?

There you have all the correspondence on one side of this important controversy. Gutzon’s reply is appended because it is all that was said on the other side. He wrote this to Dr. Peters:

My Dear Dr. Peters, I have your letter referring to the feminine character of the angels. I fully recognize the correctness of your criticism from the standpoint of the Bible, though art and tradition have practically ignored this. I shall change them as you suggest.

One might have thought that Gutzon’s quick acquiescence would have ended the “controversy” over the angels. But things seem to have been different in the rarefied atmosphere of the cathedral grounds. Severe trouble was on its way the moment Dr. Peters dropped his letter into the mailbox.

Gutzon wasn’t much concerned with the sex of the angels. The model of the Angel Gabriel was still in soft clay. It was a simple matter to remove the offending face and model one with sterner features. Gutzon kept the original face, had it cast in silver and used a photograph of it as a Christmas card. It brought to the Borglum home a signed photograph of Bishop Potter. Everything was sweetness and light until a reporter noticed that Gabriel’s countenance had quit being pretty and amiable and was now a little hard ... and analytical and dour. The discovery pleased him and he made a quick departure for his office.

The next morning his story appeared under a headline that didn’t seem to fit it:

BORGLUM SMASHES ANGELS IN A HUFF

Other newspapers took up the cry and soon the subscribers were filling the press with their personal, and no doubt authoritative, opinions on the intriguing subject: Were angels men or women?

Gutzon wasn’t much concerned with this argument. He didn’t think it concerned him. And, save for the fact that the first story had pictured him smashing up things in a rage, he was probably right. It seemed good fun, but twenty years later, during the Stone Mountain disagreement, a reporter dug up the original story to prove that Gutzon’s temper was ungovernable and always had been. The Atlanta _Constitution_, trying to ferret out the truth, telegraphed the cathedral and got a reply from Dr. Peters: “Angels still stand serene in their places where Borglum put them,” he said. “We never had any trouble with the sculptor.”

The story of how Borglum smashed the inoffensive angels went on, however, for years and years--and it still goes on. The evil that men do, somehow, never lives as long as some of the evil that they never thought of doing. Borglum, however, did think that destruction might have been a good idea.

The last time he heard reports that he had gone berserk in his studio on the grounds of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, he sadly shook his head. “I didn’t think of it soon enough,” he said.