THE INFLUENCE OF

ARTISTIC RACES:

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE INVITATION OF THE

LIVERPOOL ARCHITECTURAL SOCIETY,

IN THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, LIVERPOOL, STH JANUARY, 1879,

BY

B. L. BENAS.

LIVERPOOL:

J. A. D. WATTS AND CO. PRINTERS.

MDCCCLXXIX.

THE INFLUENCE OF ARTISTIC RACES.

MUST thank your President for having invited me to address this excellent Society. It is one that pursues the interests of a profession, realizing to a great extent the ideal of the poet, and has achieved results that have immortalized many a work that lives on, whilst the worker is dead to posterity even by name. Such is the grand humility of the true artist; he identifies himself with his own productions, and loves the true and beautiful, not for the sake of personal gratification, but because the culture of art is natural and congenial to his soul. We hear of late a great deal spoken in Liverpool of art and Artistic Races; now it is my turn to speak a few words to you. Necessarily they must be a few words, for an address on a subject like this expands, perhaps, involuntarily into a volume-and nothing tends to alienate the interest of my hearers as that verbosity which high authority teaches just at present as a thing to be avoided. I want to speak to you of Artistic Races, who they were, what they have done for us, what they left for us to imitate, and what to avoid.

If we reduce the word art, as a chemical student would say to its ulterior element, it means "Power." Now power or force is the qualification which, with its mere animal associations, means the brutish triumph of might over weakness. The moment, however, man, the noblest of animals, asserted his place in creation, from that instant "power" assumed another exemplification. Observe it, for example, in its lowest phase; in the South Sea Islands, inhabited by about the most debased of any species of humanity, there is a continual strife between the various tribes until an island becomes at times entirely depopulated. If an islander, however, happens to be a canoeman, that is, one skilled in the rude form of constructing a boat and can cover it with

hides, he is at once freed from the dangers of strife. By mutual consent he is relieved from the vicissitudes of defeat and captivity, and is never put to death by either combatant. Here we have an illustration of ars-power

in its earliest and rudest form. This savage may be weak, puny, but because he can effect something which others of the tribe cannot do, he has greater ars or power than all the rest combined.

I do not pretend to address you on speculative philosophy, or to answer critics as to whether the annals that the past has left us are trustworthy records suffice it is for the object I have in view, that they have held their own for several thousands of years, and that they reflect vividly and with remarkable fidelity the mode of life of the people they profess to describe. I here refer to that most excellent of works, the sacred volume.

Now in the Scriptures we are told that "there were giants in those days,' and yet the giants seemed thoroughly helpless, for when the chaos of inundation threatened to overwhelm the portion of the world described in the book of Genesis, it was not one of the giant families that devised means to save themselves from destruction, but rather one of the puny families, namely Noah. By the exercise of that ars power-always the prompting of a more divine spirit-than mere physical strength, which can only effect results when led by the superior mental force, he thought out and constructed a mode of deliverance, which perhaps was despised by those who never thought, but merely acted.

Thus we have an exemplification that art (ars) or power may be mental power only, may exist likewise in the combination of the mental and the physical, but can never be the product of the physical alone. It seems passing strange that of all the great races that the world has produced, and of all the vast empires that have existed and fallen to decay, only two very minute people, inhabiting a country hardly larger than an English province, should be accepted by the civilized world as their mental and artistic teachers. From the little land beyond the Ægean Sea we derive our ideal of plastic art, of form, beauty and symmetry. From a little land below Syria came forth messengers who have caused the poetry of their forefathers, and the hymns of a shepherd king, to be sung in every cathedral, meeting house and conventicle. We see, wherever civilization exists, one day in the week set apart, and a portion of that day devoted to the laudation and glorification of the bards and seers of a puny Arab tribe, who, according to their sacred version, were supernaturally delivered from the mighty empire of Egypt.

But, according to the Egyptians themselves (and this assertion is no doubt prompted by envy), they were ejected as worthless elements in their national economy. Yet we can readily believe the rulers of the land of the Nile would have cared to accept the legends and bardic effusions of the Arab tribe that had left their dominions, just as little as Great Britain would pay heed or attention to the legends and songs of the Skatchewan tribe of red skins; whose leader, educated by the Government, or perhaps as a youth had been adopted by the Prince of Wales, during his visit to Canada, (as a royal protégé,) yet always entertaining a hankering for the wild freedom of his native associates, would eventually rejoin the Skatchewans, and lead them far away from the fire-water drinkers, the pale-faced residents of black brick tenements, who never hunt the buffalo, nor ever see a pure blue sky to gladden their hearts. But we, who live many thousand years later, know that the true ars was exercised by the feeble ones; for, whilst the colossal and mighty empire of Egypt is gone, her fabrics only remaining to remind us of what once she was, the ejected ones are living yet, and are ever increasing inpower-and influence.

Later on I am going to speak to you about another little tribe that left the shores of Schleswig-Holstein, nay only a portion of a tribe, so insignificant as hardly to have created a void in the small province that they quitted. That little tribe settled in an island called after their own name—Angleland or England—that little family exercising a wonderful ars or power over the other inhabitants, stamping their language, customs, manners, upon the remnants of the aborigines, nay more, whilst succumbing physically to an invasion of a Norman or Northman chief, had sufficient ars power left again to morally vanquish the conquerors, troopers and immigrants, and making Angleish or English, and not Northmanish, the dominant or ruling element of the island. Ever active, the little people of Schleswig-Holstein rapidly filled the island with their descendants; and, as they came to the island in boats, so they are continually sending a number of their surplus children, just as their Jutlandic ancestors before them, in bigger boats to other coasts. Out of this little tribe ever so many little Anglelands are springing up, in fact filling the world with these Angleish or Englishmen. This was a wonderful little tribe, worthy heirs of those other little ones of the Ægean Sea and those of the tail end of Syria. But the marvel is that the ars or power of the Schleswig-Holstein tribe is not exhausted, but has plenty of hard work before it yet, which I venture to think it is quite capable of accomplishing.