International Cartoons of the War
INTRODUCTION
THE HISTORIAN who, a couple of centuries hence, tries to get at the real kernel of the great War, will find himself overwhelmed with material, buried under evidence, like the great authority on Penguinia. Every doubtful point will be clearly and irrefutably decided for him in at least seven different ways. A burning sense of conviction may be his, but he will not be sure which conviction it is. The lot of the historian has changed for the worse since the days of Herodotus. It no longer suffices for an account of a battle to be possible if not probable, marvellous if not possible, for it to rank as history; mankind chose to start on the thorny quest of Truth, and is now beginning to see that in every affair there are exactly as many Truths as there are actors.
When the war broke out in August, 1914, the curious art of conveying a knowledge of thoughts and fact between two or more human organisms, the only art or appliance which man has really invented without referring to Nature—the art of writing—was resorted to on every hand. An unprecedented crop of war books began to sprout from the blood-fertilized fields of Flanders. Men might safely exclaim: "Mine enemy hath written a book"; they had perforce to add: "And so hath each of my friends." They poured from the Press, little books and big, sober and hysterical, speculative and emotional. After them came the sedate polychromatic procession of Government literature. Along with them flowed the swift and multitudinous efforts of journalism. And in a very short time began those strange enterprises, at once droll and portentous, the Serial Histories of the War.
What the great historian will make of all this when his time comes to correlate it, it is difficult to say. If he feel conscientiously bound to consult contemporary evidence, there is little hope for him, unless he takes the bold step of writing a historical novel out of his inner consciousness instead.
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.
Cartoons are meant for the man in the street; they are meant to tell a story, to convey some feeling or idea rather than to be an artistic rendering of an object or collection of objects. Therefore artistic canons apply to them in this limited sense—that while the great cartoonist may and must be as big an artist as he can, he must first of all remember that he has to explain himself and his subjects, or he ceases to be a cartoonist at all. A Futurist Forain, a Cubist Raemaekers, are inconceivable because they would be quite useless as cartoonists, whatever they were as artists.