Dyson - Australia at war: a winter record made by Will Dyson on the Somme and at Ypres during the campaigns of 1916 and 1917

This selection of drawings, made during the winters at Ypres and on the Somme reflects more the misery and the depression of the material conditions of these campaigns than it does any of their exaltations or their cheerfulnesses.

Here and nowhere on the new Somme and now when Spring is about us in a land upon which War has not had time to fully wreak his wicked willthese two latter qualities are dominant. In the spirit of Dernancourt and of Villers-Bretonneux the selection made from my drawings may seem to overstress this winter note. They are not primarily cheerfulbut it is open to doubt whether we are behaving generously in demanding that the soldier who is saving the world for us should provide us with a fund of light entertainment while doing it.

The truth is that War has many moods and nothing more is hoped than that the selection made from my drawings and my notes may record something of the one of its moods to which I was temperamentally most attuned during those bad seasons on the Somme and at Ypres.

W. D.,

France,

May, 1918.

Everybody knows that Mr. Dyson, who has made these striking sketches of the great war in which he has himself been wounded, originally became famous as a caricaturist, probably the most original caricaturist of our time. To some it may even need a word of further explanation adequately to connect a caricaturist so fanciful with a tragedy so grave and grim. Nor indeed is the connection only that more obvious one, which has drawn so many men of genius into duties that are simply normal because they are national. Mr. Dyson is indeed as patriotic in external as he is public spirited in internal politics; but his case here must not be confused with what might have occurred if, in some national crisis, the late Phil May had drawn a cartoon for Sir John Tenniel, or if the late Dan Leno had sung, with all possible sincerity, a patriotic song. In such cases men might say that great artists were behaving like good citizens; but that it was rather of their ordinary than their extraordinary qualities that they were at that moment justly proud. The importance of Mr. Dysons work cannot be properly appreciated unless we realise that his patriotism and public spirit are extraordinary as well as ordinary; for to be extraordinary without being also ordinary is merely another name for being mad. Mr. Dyson in becoming more national does not become less individual; nor does he for the first time become serious. The graver work of such an artist will not be merely grotesque, if only because his most grotesque work was always full of gravity. His caricature was a criticism, and indeed a very severe criticism, of the whole modern world. And it is perhaps the severest of all criticisms on the modern world, that the one form of art that has rendered it most seriously and most subtly, is the art of caricature. Here it may well be left an open question whether this character in our time, as compared with former times, means that we more easily appreciate satirists, or merely that we more easily lend ourselves to satire.

In any case the lightest, wildest or even crudest sketch scratched down by Dyson has always had more of the true grip of gravity than the whole of the Royal Academy. It is our modern misfortune that what is most solemn is most frivolous; because it is, in motive if not in method, most facile. There is always genuine thought in the design as well as the detail of Mr. Dysons work; and it is thought of a kind that is too little defined or understood. Where he has always differed from a common capable caricaturist is approximately in this; that it was never the comic but rather the serious feature that he caricatured. It is the soul rather than the body that he has drawn out in long fantastic lines. His comedy has never been merely comic, but rather philosophic and poetic. When he drew a Jew he did not merely draw the nose of a Jew, as a man might draw the trunk of an elephant; the most prominent thing about an elephant but not the most elephantine. He would rather draw that oriental type of eye, so strange in its shape and setting; which can be seen carved on colossal Assyrian masks of stone or painted flat on the cases of Egyptian mummies. And this marks his philosophic sentiment; he throws on things a new light which is also an ancient light; which is in its nature historic and even pre-historic. This is what links him up with the school of the great satirists; for it is one of the chief strokes of satire to tell new things that they are old; nay, in a sense to extinguish them by telling them they are eternal. But there is necessarily the same sort of epic symbolism underlying his treatment of the toils and perils he most sincerely admires, as underlying his treatment of the luxury and tyranny he has most drastically denounced or exposed. And that is why something of this almost allegoric spirit must be appreciated, in appreciating his studies of the appalling pageant of the great war.

Being a satirist he is a humorist; but we must not look for mere lively notes of what may be called the humours of the trenches. Nothing can be more admirable in another aspect than those humours; or above all than the humour, and especially the good humour, which generally endures and records them. But such an artist is not concerned so much with that comic relief, by which details arc relieved against tragedy, as with that high and tragic relief by which the tragedy itself is relieved against the light of heaven. Indeed there is something significant in all that white light and sharp shadow which belongs to such scenes, and is so favourable to the art of black and white. There is even something of allegory in that awful and empty daylight in which armies live, so often without a stick of roof or a rag of curtain. All the soldiers in a great war are historical characters; but these are rather specially standing, not against court or camp, but only against the sky. They are under a light which will indeed prove eternal; even as compared with other historic groups they will continue in a sort of permanent publicity; for we do not yet realise from what distant heights and terraces of time the arena of this war will be seen. And therefore it is, perhaps, that through all the rags and rude equipment that Dyson draws can be traced the lines of a sort of nakedness, like that of the dead on the Last Day.