Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/25

 have all been woven into the fabric of the race. In this way only can we explain the fact that the peoples of Northern Europe have alone been able to comprehend and place upon canvas the ever-varying moods of nature—savage, cruel, and relentless at times, and at times exquisitely gentle, brooding, and poetic.

What is more difficult to explain, however, is the fact that this ability should only have developed and ripened within the last hundred years. Of course, viewed in the larger sense, European pictorial art, as a whole, is a comparatively modern thing—a mere matter of four or five centuries. But in its earliest development it was in no sense an expression of out-of-door life or out-of-door feeling.

This is doubtless in part explained by the fact that the earliest European art