Page:America in the war -by Louis Raemaekers. (IA americainwarbylo00raem).pdf/48



There are creatures that to be hated need but to be seen.

The sight of the serpent awakens all the dead, old body-memories of ancient ages, when that reptile was man's ever-present, mortal enemy.

The domestic horse, made unafraid by a thousand generations, when he smells his ancient enemy, the bear, will rear and plunge to break and run for his life.

The face features a man's character, his eyes window his soul. There are faces that instantly beckon all our better nature and bind us in loving thrall. There are other faces that repel us as the snake repels. There are human tongues voiced with the serpent's hiss. There are persons about whom hangs an odor of the reptile that wakens all the dead old memories of primal hate.

The poet is born the poet. Genius is an inheritance. Human character is a summation of ancestral traits. So the traitor-spy is an atavic embodiment of all that is reptilian in a line of ancestry back to the serpent of Eden.

Though after-acquaintance may camouflage him to our eyes, still the first sight, the first impression of the traitor-character has in it the temper of aversion. One who has in him the heart and taste for atrocious conduct, one who has in him the grass-lurking viper's soul, wears a warning in his face for the safety of others.

The true caricaturist—and Raemaekers is one—sees and accentuates what God has placed in the face of the scoundrel, the traitor, the spy, for our protection.

Great occasions are great opportunities for great genius. War exacts the supreme from all men and all women. Only the superlative poet can give the inevitable expression to master deeds on the stage of war, and only the supreme artist can picture them with the due and true inevitable expression, which is more aptly and more truly given in caricature than in any other form, because in caricature that and only that which is supremely characteristic is portrayed. Of all the artists of this world war, none has, better than Raemaekers, given in clean and lucid unit view, the true character of what he has pictured.

HUDSON MAXIM.