Excerpt from West Winds: California's Book of Fiction Written by California Authors and Illustrated by California Artists Though, at this hour of our day, it is become trite to draw the familiar parallel between California and Ancient Greece, it yet remains the source from which any utterance concerning western art must proceed. The cold northlands were always the mothers of great deeds. First in conquest, later in the inventions that make for material well-being, they led the world. But while their children were still chanting their boisterous sagas to the clashing of shields, the cadences of real song, rhythms of true poetry, were rising and falling in the southlands in harmony with the surge and re cession of blue Mediterranean waves. Not until, by conquest and commerce, there ensued an intermingling of races and the barbarians of the north came under the soft spell of the south, did their rude arts acquire real beauty.

That climate is the mother of art there can be no doubt. In a pleasant land which yields its fruits with out exhausting labor, where neither tweaking cold chill nor prostrating heat enervate, the mind will inevitably achieve its highest flights, and these ideal conditions which made the Mediterranean the cradle of the arts, are duplicated in California.

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