But there will be at least one unfailing guide for him. The very
increase in mechanical processes which contributes to his undoing in
the matter of books, will come to his aid with regard to pictures.
Every great event since the invention of mechanical reproductive
processes has produced its due reflection in the mirror of the artist.
The crude old broadsheets told their tale of the Napoleonic wars
more vividly than any historian could; and the present struggle,
while it slew nearly every other art for the time being, worked up to
fever-pitch the output of pictorial comment. In France, where this
form of expression has always been popular, an unexampled flood of
cartoon and caricature poured from artists both celebrated and unknown.
Other countries followed suit, in proportion to their national liking
for prints; and the evidence supplied by this mass of international
material is as direct and reliable as anyone need demand.
II.
THE VALUE of the contemporary cartoon is very great; for it deals
almost entirely with what people are feeling, in distinction to what
they are doing. It uses their deeds as a mere background to their
emotions, and it is only the emotions which count. What the soldier
feels, the sailor, the mother at home, the man in the street—these
are the really important things, for it is these things which are the
causes of events. If enough ordinary people want peace at any price,
the Governments of all the States in the world will be powerless to
wage war one moment longer; if enough ordinary people consider their
honour involved in fighting to a finish, emperors and kings and
presidents and trade unions and the N.C.C. will united be unable to
break the smallest twig from the olive.
The material of the cartoonist is drawn from sources useless to the
writer, or at best, of only ephemeral utility. A chance-heard remark,
the expression of a face seen in the street, the glances turned on a
wounded man as he hobbles by on his stick, the ineptitude of a comment
on the day's news—these are the media by which the cartoonist conveys
his view of what his country feels. And he has this advantage over the
writer—that a well-done drawing is a volume in itself; in one glance
the eye has absorbed the background which a tedious explanation is
necessary to convey in words, and is free to take in the essential
meaning of the drawing. A picture appeals as directly to the eye as
does a sunset, or as food to the stomach, or a soft bed to the tired
body. It uses a natural sense, not a cultivated faculty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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