HERE Raemaekers draws aside from his fierce mood of indictment of the aggressor and, touched with a neutral’s pity, tries to express something of the agony that comes impartially to those who fight for and those who fight against the right. The candid critic must confess that this mood has not the interest of his satire and invective. But it is natural for the imaginative artist to be deeply moved by these, as it were, impartial horrors and good for us stay-at-homes to be helped to realize them.
In the early days of the war, waged as it was over the most intensively cultivated soil in Europe, the mortality from this dread horror, Tetanus, was very great. The skill of the bacteriologist and the surgeon has indefinitely reduced the mortality. And perhaps those of us who are bowed down by the thought of all the needless pain and incalculable waste may take a crumb of comfort from the thought that out of all the suffering and death grow knowledge and skill that will relieve suffering and prevent death in the future. So the eternal courage and resourcefulness of man always recapture the citadel he seems to have lost in the first onset.
Shakspere’s Tercentenary
FOLLOWING out this truly Teutonic line of reasoning, there is no reason why Beethoven should not be claimed as English, and surely Christopher Columbus was Russian—or French, or Norwegian. A sense of humor would have saved Germany from this absurdity of claiming the whole world’s genius as her own, but that sense is the one thing that Germany lacks above all others, and from the deficiency has arisen this war and all its evils.
For a sense of humor—or a sense of proportion, which is precisely the same thing—would have given Germany to understand that in these days no nation may aspire to domination over other and different races; it would have given her to understand that there are other forms of culture besides her own Kultur, which, after all, is merely order and discipline, and not a finer perception or a greater development of intellect; it would have given her to understand that which the world’s history has failed to teach her, that aggression does not pay, and that essays in tyrannic dominance inevitably fail.
Raemaekers’ satire is unerring, for though no German has yet stated that Shakspere’s plays are based on the work of a poet who lived two centuries later, yet the professors and pedants of Kultur have attempted equal absurdities, even to showing Germany as a country of simple, kindly people, who abhor a war that has been forced on them. One is tempted to quote from the world-poet who, in this cartoon, faces his antithesis with such an air of gentle incredulity, but the temptation, if yielded to, would lead too far.
Germany has not only claimed Shakspere, but she has claimed control of all the Western world; one claim is as likely to be conceded as the other.