“THOU art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold or hot.... Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing.... I counsel thee ... anoint thine eyes with eye-salve, that thou mayest see.”
Raemaekers has patience with most things, but with neutrality he would scorn to be patient. He refuses to parley with it, even when it waves the colors of his own country in its hand—if it ever does anything so sturdy as to wave colors. These old women are dreadful, they are almost as terrifying as his Prussian monsters. The persuasive old fanatic in the foreground arguing the divinity of lukewarmness is dreadful in herself, and more dreadful still because we all know that she exists, in belligerent as in neutral countries. And worse, far worse, is the granite female with her stone brooch in her marble collar behind her. The others are surprised, doubtful, not yet entirely won over to the specious argument; but the woman behind is a very Gibraltar of neutrality.
Seldom, very seldom, does Raemaekers draw dreadful women. His Germania is a symbol, not a woman. I can only remember one other cartoon, a merciless drawing of the Kaiser and the Kaiserin, in which a woman stands for evil. He likes to picture pity and mercy and nobility in the form of women, and when he wishes to paint sorrow and endurance he gives us such cartoons as those of the mothers and widows of Belgium. And this makes it the more likely that in these gossiping, selfish, silly, wicked creatures he is drawing a type of mind rather than a type of female. In every country there are “old women”; but they are not always females.
“A Pitiful Exodus”
THIS is one of Raemaekers’ crowds. He is fond of depicting crowds, and he is right. He has the art of making them singularly effective. He catches wonderfully both the general impression and the value of a face or figure here and there not violently obtruded but individually appealing.
And these crowds are so effective because they are so true. This is a war of crowds. The nations have fought in crowds, they have suffered in crowds. “Multitudes—multitudes in the valley of decision” might be said to be its text.
And Antwerp was ever a place of crowds; though not, of course, like this. Who does not know Antwerp as she was before the war? A great, buzzing, thriving hive on the water’s edge, filled with a jolly, comfortable, busy bourgeoisie; mediæval and modern at once, with her churches and her quays, her florid “Rubenses” her Van Dycks, her Teniers, her Maison Plantin, and all the rest of her past; her world commerce, her fortifications of to-day, deemed impregnable!