Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/310

LANDSCAPE PAINTING repeat themselves, it is only after the lapse of many centuries.

To every energetic people there comes sooner or later a time of great material prosperity; it may be as the result of successful wars, of territorial expansion or of commercial supremacy. Whatever the cause, this period of prosperity is invariably accompanied by a tremendous mental stir and awakening, and this, in turn, is followed by a magnificent outburst of art, which lasts for fifty, or maybe a hundred years, and dies away as it came.

Now, if ever in the history of the world conditions have been ripe for the birth of a great art movement, they are so in America to-day. Titanic forces have been at work for a century preparing the way, extracting untold wealth from a virgin soil; increasing this wealth an hundredfold by the help of marvellous [244]