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CARTOONS 191
the scenes he witnesses. For he can only expect things to come to pass which follow from what has already been seen to happen. Only the present can causally evoke a premonition of the future. But surprise is not susceptible of degrees. Even in a fairy-tale one can to some extent tell in advance what might happen to man or beast in the course of the story. But what can happen to mere lines and patches of light and shadow is something no one can foresee.
CARTOONS
At the beginning of this book I told the story of the painter in the Chinese legend who walked into his own painting and never came back. That was a very simple case. What happened was simply that the old Chinaman had created reality with his paintbrush, not art. This was the Chinese belief: everything is what it seems, there is no difference between appearance and reality. Well-painted dragons would fly away.
The natural history of the cartoon film is not as simple as this. It first manifested itself in Felix the Cat, the ancestor of this admirable art form. Its originator was the brilliant Pat Sullivan who created that amazing world, of which the prime mover and omnipotent ruler is the pencil or paintbrush. The substance of this world is the line and it reaches to the boundaries that enclose the graphic art. Drawings such as these do not transform themselves into a natural reality, which their creator might enter like the Chinese painter his landscape. For this world is peopled only by being drawn with pencil or pen. Their outlines do not depict a shape existing independently somewhere outside this world, but form their only actual body. Appearance is not transformed into reality here as in the Chinese story. Appearance is the sole reality here, and art is not made into reality. Indeed the Sullivan cartoons knew nothing of this duality. When Felix the Cat bends his tail into the shape of a wheel, he can already roll away on it. No need for it to turn into the reality of a wheel. A drawn wheel is good enough for a drawn cat. In Sullivan's drawn world there are no miracles; for in it there are only lines and these function according to the shape they take on.