World Film and Television Progress (1938)

To-day is the day of the picture. Cartoonists have long been important and useful to Society. The future promises them an even more decisive role, writes Isabel Simeral Johnson in this survey of cartoon history. a cartoon on tme tea-tax, 1774. The caption reads: A NEW METHOD OF MACARONY-MAKING AS PRACTISED IN BOSTON. For the Custom House officer's landing the Tea They Tarr"d him and Feathered him just as you see And they Drench' d him so well both behind and before That he begged for God's sake they would drench him no more. Cartooning, as we know it to-day, is an outgrowth of caricature. Cartooning is not caricature evolved to a higher plane. Rather, a division seems to have occurred at some time in the seventeenth century, and thereafter two simultaneous developments are apparent — caricature, or the distorted representation of an individual, and cartooning, which is the more or less distorted representation of issues, situations, and ideas. . . . The earliest cartoonists revelled in personal caricature. Exaggerated drawings of an individual's deformities were hailed as the height of humour. The more malignantly cruel, the funnier the drawing was deemed to be. As Miss Repplier has said, "The unhallowed alliance between the cruelty that we hate and the humour that we prize is a psychological problem that frets the candid mind". But since the middle of the nineteenth century, cartoons, especially in America, have moved farther and farther away from personal caricature. The individual is rarely attacked to-day except as the sponsor or symbol of principles which the artist disapproves. Cartoons have grown subtle and intellectual. From Holland the cartoon travelled with slight delay to England, where it found a congenial freedom, though even in England the royal family was never caricatured before the advent of the House of Hanover. William Hogarth (1697-1764), the first of England's eminent graphic satirists, arraigned the society of his time in Mariage a la Mode, The Rake's Progress, The Harlot" s Progress, Idleness and Industry, Gin Lane; and lived to see the correction of some of the worst abuses which he attacked. William Hazlitt wrote of Hogarth : "His pictures are not imitations of still life, or mere transcripts of incidental scenes and customs, but powerful moral satire exposing vice and folly in their most ludicrous points of view and with a profound insight into the weak sides of character and manners. . . . His object is not so much 'to hold the mirror up to nature' as 'to show vice her own image' . . . Criticism has not done him justice but public opinion has". AFTER HOGARTH Two notable cartoonists followed Hogarth —Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) and James Gillray (1757-1815). Rowlandson was a very genius of social satire, but so gross in the treatment of his themes that his drawings become repellent. Gillray was England's first great political cartoonist. His task and delight it was to depict the contemporary Napoleon, who had come to seem the incarnation of indomitable glory, as after all only a swaggering guttersnipe, swollen with self-importance. He portrayed the victorious Emperor as a tiny, bumptious Gulliver strutting into the presence of a Brobdingnagian King George. Naturally a Liberal, Gillray was nevertheless driven by the excesses of the French Revolution into the Tory fold, and did much to build in England a cohesive public unity against Napoleon. Of Gillray's Napoleonic series the most significant is Napoleon in the Valley of Death. The theme is taken from Bunyan's conception of Christian treading that grim path. Note in the background the figures of two 20