“ Allowed by tradition [Pg xi] to have two heroic cartoons a week, the rest of his pages are dedicated to the god of laughter. Germany reads Punch with stupefaction. What, we not only laugh at the Germans, we laugh more at the English! Extraordinary, sinister, effete, degenerate race! It is true, we laugh at ourselves far more than at anybody else—and very often it is for that painful but cogent reason, that we may not weep. Perhaps at the front they laugh wholeheartedly at Punch; at home it is a different laugh that greets Tommy in his imperturbable good-humour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 grim note of Steinlen and Forain is almost wholly wanting from English cartoons. The Kaiser, who is a devil in France, is merely making an unholy fool of himself in England; the Crown-Prince, a mass of vice in Paris, is "an awful silly blighter" in London. Will Dyson, the young artist of whom Australia has such reason to be proud, is our grimmest product, and even he lets the Prussian off more easily than do the French artists. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is none of the splenetic fury of the German drawings about the majority of the French ones; the Germans are ridiculed and hated, it is true, but the spirit is more steady and less spiteful—it rests on an emotion which for forty-five years has been a religion to the Frenchman.
The English cartoons are as different as possible from both the French and the German. We have no separately published prints, our postcards have been few, vulgar, and negligible; our cartoonists are really only offered the pages of newspapers and magazines in which to exert their influence over us. ”

“ The artistic value of the cartoons issued in all countries—and in some cases it is very great—is a matter for future discussion. It is of no present importance. What is of some actual value is a comparison between the cartoons of the various countries, for they show with unfailing accuracy the trend of public opinion. From the human point of view this comparison is invaluable to the student of humanity in the present upheaval. From the cheap postcard to the twopenny broadsheet, from the most commonplace poster to the finest lithograph, each has its place. ”

“ There are many of his drawings which are too dreadful to be contemplated for long—"Slow Gas Poisoning," the German thief trampling in blood that drops from his heavy sack, the professor and the devil leering delightedly into each other's eyes. But after such horrors one comes always back to the exquisite tenderness which is the real distinguishing characteristic of Raemaekers. The young German soldier who writes home that "our cemeteries now stretch nearly to the sea" is as tenderly drawn as are the widows of Belgium. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ England has never taken cartoons so seriously as has France, nor has she a public for separate topical prints; but she has done as much as she can, for her war cartoons accurately express her mind, and that is their real function and constitutes their real value.
Neutral countries have had to be careful in some ways; it is difficult to find any interesting war-prints or postcards on sale there. What there are [Pg xii] are rather insipid, at any rate to the Allied mind. But in individual newspapers and periodicals the struggle has raged fiercely by pen and pencil, pro-Ally or pro-German. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg vii] 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. ”

“ In the whole of this output it is difficult to find any sign of wavering in the national spirit of France. Once the civilians had decided to hold [Pg x] out, there could be no other stumbling-block. Naturally, in such a range of drawings, there are many that drop into brutality on the one hand, vulgarity on the other; but the overwhelming majority breathe a spirit of calm, determined endurance, with a ready laugh for hardships, a sly dig at politicians, and no little irony at the expense of their own weaknesses and foibles. ”

“ By Leandre, the allegorical cartoonist, in Le Rire Rouge, Paris.
The reputation for silence enjoyed by General Joffre is better-founded than is always the case with the reputed characteristics of great men. In the course of being shaved at a Paris barber's recently, an English client was told that General Joffre had for fifteen years been a regular customer at the shop. "And what sort of person is he really?" "I don't know, sir—he never said anything!"
XXXVI.
XXXVII.
French satire has not devoted itself entirely to our enemies, but has been frequently turned on France. ”

“ To collect these things is not only very interesting, but most enlightening; the national spirit and the national moods of each country are unmistakably portrayed, and the crudest production takes rank with the best as a human document. ”

“ Like Truth in the cartoon with which this book closes, he has held up the mirror to the Prussian, and we can see, Germany can see, the whole world can see, what kind of soul is reflected therein.
ENGLISH CARTOONS
I.
The famous cartoon by F. H. Townsend, "Bravo Belgium," fitly appears as the frontispiece to this book. It is reprinted from Punch by permission of the Proprietors.
II.
REHABILITATED!
Germany (to her Professor) :
"What if we do not fulfil our promises—the whole world must now admiringly confess we are men of honour—we fulfil our threats!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ GERMAN CARTOONS It is not easy to come by copies of the German papers, as the Trade-with-the-Enemy Act frowns upon such commerce. Happily, there are neutral countries, through whose agency something may be done. This and the following six pages are devoted to German Cartoons, from Simplicissimus, the famous Munich illustrated paper. They are very clever, very mordant, very amusing, and always at their best when directed against England.
LIV.
THE LUSITANIA.
"Isn't it madness, to take so many women and children in a munition transport?" ”

“ This print was the first to indicate the enormous boom in war-drawings which has characterized Paris. Published at 5 francs, it was within a few months unobtainable under 500. Collectors took the hint, and the drawings of Forain, Steinlen, and other well-known artists were eagerly sought after, and rose to very high premiums. The character of the prints changed ”