Graduation Address

"Low’s Address to UNB Graduates" Daily Gleaner (15 May 1958). (UA Case 67, Box 2)

Once upon a time there was a caricaturist who traveled abroad and found himself at last on one of the lesser-known islands in the distant seas. Meeting some of the local people, he was conducted into the presence of the chief and hi ministers.

"Who and what are you?" asked the chief.

"I’m a caricaturist," said the visitor.

"Oh?" said the chief with an ominous air. "Well, caricature us": which the visitor did with such success that they buried him the same afternoon.

With that tale in mind, you will understand my desire to avoid a similar fate; and my readiness to encourage the assumption that I have some part in the processes of Education., and am a fit recipient of the very great honor that you do me today. An honor that is the greater since I stand in such a distinguished company.

Art of Politics?

For myself, I am never quite sure whether I come under the heading of Art or Politics. There are differences of opinion. I recently had the privilege of seeing at the home in London of your Chancellor, Lord Beaverbrook, a magnificent collection of masterpiece paintings destined for the Art Gallery in this city. Priceless treasures of which you will rightly be proud. Standing before a lovely Gainsborough, I happened to mention that Caricature was the basis not only of all visual Art, but of ALL the Arts – painting, sculpture, music, poetry, letters.

My host looked at me narrowly at this and I could see that he thought I was like that celebrated pastry-cook in Vienna who maintained that there were only three really serious Arts in the world – sculpture, architecture and pastry-making, and of these the greatest was undoubtedly pastry-making. But I was not being whimsical.

Art of Caricature

I was not, of course, talking of the somewhat stereotyped and conventional story-telling picture-writing known to newspaper readers today as "Cartooning," but of the Art of Caricature at its highest and purest. What I meant was that if the fundamental principles of Art – ALL Art – are Selection and Emphasis, the discernment and determination of the elements of beauty and character (the same thing, really) in the material, and the representation of these elements in heightened and emphasized form, then Caricature was not merely based on these principles but was the principles themselves, nothing else but.

When I say that beauty and ugliness are equally capable of enhancement, I could hardly hope to convince those who have been brought up to think of Caricature narrowly in the old Italian sense as a form of expression exclusively applied to burlesque, farce, ridicule or insult. The less so since its past frequently belies me. The first caricaturist to be mentioned by name in history, one Pauson, was thrown into the sea because of something nasty he had said about Aristophanes; and the oldest deliberate caricature we have is what awful graffito against Christianity scratched on that wall in Rome. But on the other hand I just mention that Leonardo constantly experimented in caricatural draughtsmanship; that Pieter Brueghel was the first GREAT artist to set up boldly as what we would call a "cartoonist;" that Holbein drew in a kind of austere caricatural draughtsmanship a multitude of what we would call "cartoons," although he called them "moralities;" I mention Daunmer. And Goya, Teborch, Callot, and many others. And I point to Hogarth the grandfather of British cartoonists.

Distinction

When I use the word "cartoonist," I must make a distinction. Artists who use Caricature are caricaturists. When their drawings are about something, they are called "cartoonists;" and frequently what they have to say becomes of more interest than the quality of its expression, so that they accordingly become esteemed, and esteem themselves, less as artists and more as commentators. But, so that the two parts of their performance – thought and expression – make a harmonious unity, the thought has to be in caricature, too. That is to say it has to be the essence of the matter, the WHY, HOW and WHEN emphasized, or if you prefer it, exaggerated.

Today the job of the "cartoonist" is to reduce situations and ideas to a pictorial simplification readily assimilable by the Common Man; to clarify, to abstract the significant and to salt with Satire to sharpen the perception; to make complex matters understandable to the imagination, if not to the intellect; to raise the highlights of the passing scene, to reduce to an outline Public Affairs – and Life.

"Mere Amusement"

Some people thing his overall aim should be to amuse, believing that humanity needs laughter, and if we go around giggling all will be well. John Ruskin, a celebrated British name in Victorian days, was too mild altogether when he said that the function of Satirists was "to soften with loving wit the social scene." Personally, I prefer Emerson’s "Mere amusement is the happiness of those who cannot think" very rightly shaming the ignoble panders who peddle mere amusement.

As Satire becomes more thoughtful, it can’t help becoming more pointed and directional.

It is perhaps too much to expect that in this age of specialization, many people have time to scan whole horizons, to look at Life in the round, so to speak, and as individuals to relate their interests to it. No doubt cartoonists in their own small way, by the mere universality of their means of communication even to those disinclined or perhaps unable to read or listen, fill a public need in supplying a makeshift awareness of contemporary events, even though the method they use is that of the fairy-tale – allegory, symbolism, distortion, occasionally inversion of truth, frequently disrespect and irreverence.

Truth is Truth

Truth is truth, even when she wears a red nose and baggy pants. But, of course, the use of symbol and allegories has its peculiar risks. "A symbol always stimulates the intellect" said Emerson. Well and good if it be a symbol of living thought; but symbols which have outlived their significance yet still persist as habits of thought do not stimulate but only drug the intellect; and I fear our popular imagery too often lags well behind changing reality. Think of John Bull or Uncle Sam, for instance, farmer types fairly representative of the British and American peoples in horse-and-buggy days, but misleading imposters in this nuclear energy age. A trouble is that such personifications, once established, have an aggravating way of taking on a life of their own. They come to be loved or hated for themselves. I remember once a lady who used to write to me every time I drew a cartoon Britannia, threatening to sue me if I kept putting her in the paper.

Magic Words

All that might seem more deplorable than it really is, were the arts of communication more efficient than they are; and if while we are waiting for you young men and women to produce the World of Reason, it did not at times become urgently expedient that we should have at least our prejudices up-to-the-minute and conveniently deployed. If we must have short cuts to thinking for the simple-minded (and it seems we must in a race for survival between competing Ways of Life), there is no need to excuse picturesque imagery any more than slogans, shock headlines, or anything else that stirs the grey matter. Or Magic Words – LIBERTY, JUSTICE, LOYALTY and so on – words originally signifying thoughtful concepts, which have been waved about like flags until they have degenerated into substitutes for thought, DEMOCRACY, NAZISM, COMMUNISM.

The Weakness

I remember a friend of mine, a British statesman with a long life spent in politics, saying to me: "The weakness of Democracy is that you always have to keep telling it what it is." We were discussing political statistics; somebody had worked it out that if you could get ten per cent of the people actively earnest about Democracy (I don’t mean about Parties or about Leaders but about ideas), we might ultimately realize it. It was agreed that we had about four per cent, and that kept us afloat, but only just. To prove this or some other point, we went out and talked to people, took a sort of amateur Opinion Poll, all very friendly, here, there and everywhere. We had one question. It was: "Would you please tell us what you understand to be the working principles of Nazism, of Fascism and of Democracy; compare and express your preference." Well, we were in the midst of a bitter world war about just that. The answers were profoundly unsatisfactory. One chap showed a glimmering of sense, but off the point; and in the circumstances was painfully ironic. He said that the price of Democracy was higher, because the implication was that we, ALL of us, must take a real interest in the matters concerning our lives and deaths, otherwise we were lost – and deserved to be … I just add that I sincerely hope we are better informed today about the difference between Democracy and Communism. But I doubt it.

Headaches

In newspaper cartooning these days some of us have syndicated publication in distant places. Frequently a long time elapses between the making of a piece of work and its appearance in some newspaper on the other side of the world. Days, weeks – even months. Headaches for the poor oracles to have to keep up-to-date on events due to happen far ahead. But not really so difficult. Massive movements in this world are much more predictable than you would suppose; and coming events throw surprisingly long shadows before them. So long, in fact, that an optimistic philosopher once said that a clear-minded troglodyte who was present at, say, the invention of the Wheel, ought to have been able from that point onward to deduce the course of Man: the development of industry, trade rivalries, national wars, power groups, world wars, the readjustment violent and otherwise of social systems, world government, the conquest of space, of time, of life itself. One factor alone frustrated unlimited precise prophecy – Man himself, the unpredictable.

Foresight

Yet the view from my drawing-board irresistibly suggests that the crying need of our generation is a keener appreciation of the sequence of cause-and-effect, and the habit of foresight. That is where I disagree with Confucius, who held that in time of trouble, one should take short views – only up to lunchtime. To think in terms of less than fifty years is a waste of time. Better make it a hundred. In my time most of our ills have arisen from lack of timely adjustment to rapidly changing circumstances (adjustment, that is, not of principles but of their application). That is a cartoonist’s simplification. Perhaps an oversimplification. At any rate too simple for the clever ones whose habit of progress has been to look for ditches to fall into. How many notable hearts have I seen broken, how many ideals wrecked for want of a little calculation of the probabilities.

Foresight, I suggest, is one of the purposes of education.

No Advice

I presume to offer no advice to you young men and women prepared and preparing for the Future. I remember too well that the Voice of Experience is not necessarily the Voice of Wisdom. What we expect from Youth is Boldness and Action. What we expect from Age is, I regret to say, Caution and Repose.

This is a grand world and you are going to have interesting lives. If I could have had my choice of centuries to live in, I would certainly have taken this one. How fortunate we are to be living in such stirring times. The things to do, the problems to solve. No limit. Enough to keep the blood racing, enough to keep us on our toes. The conflict of ideas, the integration of systems, the building of better societies; problems of Population, problems of Leisure (and the rediscovery of the Fun of Work); expeditions to the unexplored regions of The Mind – even to the source of Life itself; the Universe to play with: (Rockets to the Moon is small stuff. So far as I am concerned you can have the moon. It looks a boring place to me). Bankruptcies, peace, wars and crises, of course. Would you want a life without peril? That you will never get. In my whole life I have never known a time when there was not some crisis or other. As the old Chinese philosopher is said to have remarked: "If it’s not one thing, it’s another. It’s never Nothing" – for which you should be truly thankful.

Cartoonist’s Fear

New missiles, rockets, bombs. If I refrain from delivering a dirge about the end of the world it is because I am haunted by a cartoonist’s fear of being old-fashioned and out-of-date. I have an uneasy feeling that again we are not thinking fast enough; that we are fascinated by the arguments of a year – six months - ago and that active bomb-war (I exclude bluff) looks less and less like the form future tussles for power will take. In a materialistic age it is hard to convince some people that there are forces more potent than H-bombs even, to change the face of humanity.

This will be your world, these affairs your affairs, ready for you and your pursuit of happiness. The happiest man I ever met was Mahatma Gandhi. In a delightful conversation, full of laughs and chuckles, I asked him to tell me how to be happy, too. As a tailpiece of this talk it is fitting that I should give you the benefit of his wise reply:

"Have no possessions and want none. No trivial ambitions to win admiration, wealth or power. Do what you do because you think it right, seeking nothing else, not even the personal gratification that would accompany the achievement of your purpose. With simplicity, directness and strength, such a man can never be defeated."

A tough philosophy. I could not follow it, believing as I did that enough was good, only more than enough was bad. But he was a happy man. And he was not defeated.