When in the course of human events I shall have been duly instated as
head of the art department of an American newspaper, a decent respect
for the principles of my trade will compel me to convene my cartoonists
and utter the hortatory remarks here following:
“Gentlemen, you will be pleased to understand some of the limitations
of your art, for therein lies the secret of efficiency. To know and
respect one’s limitations, not seeking to transcend them, but ever
to occupy the entire area of activity which they bound—that is to
accomplish all that it is given to man to do. Your limitations are of
two kinds: those inconsiderable ones imposed by nature, and the less
negligible ones for which you will have to thank the tyrant that has
the honor to address you.
“Your first and highest duty, of course, is to afflict the Eminent
Unworthy. To the service of that high purpose I invite you with
effusion, but shall limit you to a single method—ridicule. You may
not do more than make them absurd. Happily that is the sharpest
affliction that Heaven has given them the sensibility to feel. When one
is conscious of being ridiculous one experiences an incomparable and
immedicable woe. Ridicule is the capital punishment of the unwritten
law.
“I shall not raise the question of your natural ability to make an
offender hateful, but only say that it is not permitted to you to do
so in this paper. The reason should be obvious: you can not make him
hateful without making a hateful picture, and a paper with hateful
pictures is a hateful paper. Some of you, I am desolated to point out,
have at times sinned so grievously as to make the victim—or attempt
to make him—not only hateful but offensive, not only offensive but
loathsome. Result: hateful, offensive, loathsome cartoons, imparting
their unpleasant character to the paper containing them; for the
contents of a paper are the paper.
“And, after all, this folly fails of its purpose—does not make its
subject offensive. An eminently unworthy person—a political ‘boss,’
a ‘king of finance,’ or a ‘gray wolf of the Senate’—is a man of
normal appearance; his face, his figure, his postures, are those of
the ordinary human being. In the attempt to make him offensive the
caricaturist’s art of exaggeration is carried to such an extreme as
to remove the victim from the domain of human interest. The loathing
inspired by the impossible creation is not transferred to the person
so candidly misrepresented; the picture is made offensive, but its
subject is untouched. As well try to hate a faulty triangle, a house
upside down, a vacuum, or an abracadabra. Let there be surcease of so
mischievous work; it is not desired that this paper shall be prosperous
in spite of its artists, but partly because of them.
“True, to make a man ridiculous you must make a ridiculous picture,
but a ridiculous picture is not displeasing. If well done, with only
the needful, that is to say artistic, exaggeration, it is pleasing. We
like to laugh, but we do not like—pardon me—to retch. The only person
pleased by an offensive cartoon is its author; the only person pained
by a ridiculous one is its victim.”
1900.