A Nation-wide Art
atures of feudal Europe—all this cannot last much longer. They will he forced out of their corners, their prejudices, by those hardy pioneers—steel rails, journalism, moving pictures, popular tales and songs, local festivals, world's fairs, clamorous cities. At last they will have to follow the people, obey the people's need of them. They will have to "go west," leaving Europe, and even New Europe, behind. And in that day our art, our literature, will cease to be provincial, will resume the continental habit which began with Whitman and Mark Twain.
Who can measure, for example, the future spiritual influence of the Grand Cañon of Arizona—the architectonic effect of its beauty of structural line and subtly harmonized color? Years ago I wrote—in the Atlantic for December, 1899:
It is as though to the glory of nature were added the glory of art: as though, to achieve her utmost, the proud young world had commanded architecture to build for her and color to grace the building. The irregular masses of mountains, cast up out of the molten earth in some primeval war of elements, bear no relation to these prodigious symmetrical edifices, mounted on abysmal terraces and harmoniously grouped to give form to one's dreams of heaven. The sweetness of green does not last forever, but these mightily varied purples are eternal. All that grows and moves roust perish, while these silent immensities endure. Lovely and majestic beyond the cunning of human thought, the mighty monuments rise to the sun as lightly as clouds that pass. And forever glorious and forever immutable, they must rebuke man's pride with the vision of ultimate beauty, and fulfil earth's dream of rest after her work is done.
That journey took me across the strange desert in a stagecoach, and ended in a log shack at Grand View. This year
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