Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/203

Rh quarries by a multitude of minor lateral kanyons, which, after rains, add their tribute to the main artery, and each block was subdivided by the crumbling of the softer and the resistance of the harder material—a clay conglomerate. The color varied in places from white and green to yellow, but for the most part it was a dull ochrish red, that brightened up almost to a straw tint where the sunbeams fell slantingly upon it from the strip of blue above. All served to set off the curious architecture of the smaller masses. A whole Petra was there, a system of projecting prisms, pyramids, and pagoda towers, a variety of form that enabled you to see whatever your peculiar vanity might be—columns, porticoes, façades, and pedestals. Twin lines of bluffs, a succession of buttresses all fretted and honeycombed, a double row of steeples slipped from perpendicularity, frowned at each other across the gorge. And the wondrous variety was yet more varied by the kaleidoscopic transformation caused by change of position: at every different point the same object bore a different aspect.

And now, while we are dashing over the bouldered crossings; while our naughty mules, as they tear down the short steep pitches, swing the wheels of the mail-wagon within half a foot of the high bank's crumbling edge; while poor Mrs. Dana closes her eyes and clasps her husband's hand, and Miss May, happily unconscious of all peril, amuses herself by perseveringly perching upon the last toe that I should have been inclined to offer, the monotony of the risk may be relieved by diverting our thoughts to the lessons taught by the scenery around.

An American artist might extract from such scenery as Church Butte and Echo Kanyon a system of architecture as original and national as Egypt ever borrowed from her sandstone ledges, or the North of Europe from the solemn depths of her fir forests. But Art does not at present exist in America; as among their forefathers farther east, of artists they have plenty, of Art nothing. We can explain the presence of the phenomenon in England, where that grotesqueness and bizarrerie of taste which is observable in the uneducated, and which, despite collections and art-missions, hardly disappears in those who have studied the purest models, is the natural growth of man's senses and perceptions exposed for generation after generation to the unseen, unceasing, ever-active effect of homely objects, the desolate aspects of the long and dreary winters, and the humidity which shrouds the visible world with its dull gray coloring. Should any one question the fact that Art is not yet English, let him but place himself in the centre of the noblest site in Europe, Trafalgar Square, and own that no city in the civilized world ever presented such a perfect sample of barbarous incongruity, from mast-headed Nelson with his coil behind him, the work of the Satirist's "one man and small boy," to the two contemptible squirting things that throw