“We Don’t Seem to Inspire
Enough Confidence”
THE one memorable contribution to art produced by the great war is to be found in the cartoons of Louis Raemaekers. It is not necessary here to analyze the qualities of his fine and powerful drawings as art. They must be apparent to everyone who looks at them with considerate eyes. But Raemaekers’ cartoons also have a high literary and historic quality. I do not mean by this that they tell or suggest stories, which are used generally as an attraction for very commonplace pictures, but that they have that quality of enduring literature which awakens the deepest feelings and points to the loftiest ideals which are as enduring as the history of the race in its striving to reach the heights of achievement. Hogarth was one of the few men in the history of art who possessed these qualities, but great as Hogarth was, Raemaekers has always been upon a higher level. Raemaekers has the poetic imagination and we can feel in his work the
In his cartoons we find the appeal to all that is best in human nature, to the finest impulses of man, to his deepest passions and his noblest emotions.
All Raemaekers’ work is marvellously effective, but I take one single example, not perhaps the most important—his treatment of the rulers of Germany and Austria—in order to show his genius. By the power of his cartoons Raemaekers has fixed in the public mind a truer and deeper conception of the two emperors and the German crown prince than endless pages of print could possibly produce. The brutality, the over-weening arrogance, the hideous religious cant of the Emperor of Germany, with the touch of lunacy upon him, will live forever in Raemaekers’ portraits. The feeble senility of the late Emperor of Austria—joined as he frequently is with the Sultan and the King of Bulgaria, kindred spirits—a senility marked by the drivelling insensibility of extreme old age—those unlovely attributes are all there. As for the Crown Prince, he is known through these cartoons to millions who have never seen him and never will see him and will have only this image of him graven in their minds. As depicted by Raemaekers, he has a figure and face of low dissipation in which degeneracy and ferocity contend for mastery. And yet all these figures harmonize with the rest of the cartoons in teaching the one overpowering lesson as to the meaning of German victory. The barbarism, the belief in might as against right, the faith in brute force, the absence of human feeling,—these cry out to us through the pencil of the great artist that a world in which Germany should be dominant would be a world of slaves in which no free man could wish to live.
HENRY CABOT LODGE.