1958 Fredericton Encaenia

Low, David Alexander Cecil

Doctor of Laws (LL.D.)

Orator: Cattley, Robert E.D.

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L to R: Colin B. Mackay, David Alexander Cecil Low, F.J. Toole
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Source: UA PC-4 no.7k

Citation:

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1958
DAVID ALEXANDER CECIL LOW
to be Doctor of Laws

What is a cartoonist? As well ask What is Truth? and What is Life? David Low will shortly be giving an answer to the first question; and in the process you will learn much about the second and the third. Where he understands all three, I can only compare and describe.

He is a satirist with the wit of Aristophanes, felicity of Horace, intensity of Juvenal, irony of Swift, barb of Pope, brilliance of Shaw, and humour of Gilbert. He is the gadfly stinging the noble horse, and, if ink were hemlock, he would, like Socrates, have been judicially murdered long ago. In his own artistic medium he is the confessed descendant of Hogarth.

He is the man, next only to Churchill, most dreaded and duly proscribed by Mussolini and Hitler (though never by the Russians); the caricaturist under whose pen Colonel Blimp has become an idiom, and a statesman's umbrella as immortal as its bearer.

He can be said to have employed Lord Beaverbrook to run the Evening Standard expressly for Low's cartoons, and never to have incurred damnation -- itself no human feat.

He is that rare genius who belongs to no one race, creed, ideology, or party, but to the whole world. For Low is Life and Truth and, like both, Low is universal.

Quidquid agunt homines Humilis farrago libelli est.

From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.

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