Chapter II: Part 2

That he exists at all is due to the camera and to the selective genius of Mack Sennett. It is impossible to dissociate him entirely from the Keystone comedy where he began and worked wonders and learned much. The injustice of forgetting Sennett and the Keystone when thinking of Chaplin has undermined most of the intellectual appreciation of his work, for although he was the greatest of the Keystone comedians and passed far beyond them, the first _and decisive_ phase of his popularity came while he was with them, and the Keystone touch remains in all his later work, often as its most precious element. It was the time of Charlie’s actual contact with the American people, the movie-going populace before the days of the great moving pictures. He was the second man to be known widely by name--John Bunny was the first--and he achieved a fame which passed entirely by word of mouth into the category of the common myths and legends of America, as the name of Buffalo Bill had passed before. By the time the newspapers recognized the movie as a source of circulation, Charlie was already a known quantity in the composition of the American mind and, what is equally significant, he had created the first _Charlot_. The French name which is and is not Charlie will serve for that figure on the screen, the created image which is, and at the same time is more than, Charlie Chaplin, and is less. Like every great artist in whatever medium, Charlie has created the mask of himself--many masks, in fact--and the first of these, the wanderer, came in the Keystone comedies. It was there that he first detached himself from life and began to live in another world, with a specific rhythm of his own, as if the pulse-beat in him changed and was twice or half as fast as that of those who surrounded him. He created then that trajectory across the screen which is absolutely his own line of movement. No matter what the actual facts are, the curve he plots is always the same. It is of one who seems to enter from a corner of the screen, becomes entangled or involved in a force greater than himself as he advances upward and to the centre; there he spins like a marionette in a whirlpool, is flung from side to side, always in a parabola which seems centripetal until the madness of the action hurls him to refuge or compels him to flight at the opposite end of the screen. He wanders in, a stranger, an impostor, an anarchist; and passes again, buffeted, but unchanged.

The Keystone was the time of his wildest grotesquerie (after _Tillie’s Punctured Romance_, to be sure), as if he needed, for a beginning, sharply to contrast his rhythm, his gait, his gesture, _mode_, with the actual world outside. His successes in this period were confined to those films in which the world intruded with all its natural crassness upon his detached existence. There was a film in which Charlie dreamed himself back into the Stone Age and played the God of the Waters--wholly without success because he contrasted his fantasy with another fantasy in the same tempo, and could neither sink into nor stand apart from it. But in _His Night Out_ the effect is perfect, and is intensified by the alternating coincidence and syncopation of rhythm in which Ben Turpin worked with him. Charlie’s drunken line of march down a stairway was first followed in parallel and then in not-quite-parallel by Turpin; the degree of drunkenness was the same, then varied, then returned to identity; and the two, together, were always entirely apart from the actuality of bars and hotels and fountains and policemen which were properties in their existence. In this early day Charlie had already mastered his principles. He knew that the broad lines are funny and that the fragments--which are delicious--must “point” the main line of laughter. I recall, for example, an exquisite moment at the end of this film. Turpin is staggering down the street, dragging Charlie by the collar. Essentially the funny thing is that one drunkard should so gravely, so soberly, so obstinately take care of another and should convert himself into a policeman to do it; it is funny that they should be going nowhere, and go so doggedly. The lurching-forward body of Turpin, the singular angle formed with it by Charlie’s body almost flat on the ground, added to the spectacle. And once as they went along Charlie’s right hand fell to one side, and as idly as a girl plucks a water-lily from over the side of a canoe he plucked a daisy from the grass border of the path, and smelled it. The function of that gesture was to make everything that went before, and everything that came after, seem funnier; and it succeeded by creating another, incongruous image out of the picture before our eyes. The entire world, a moment earlier, had been aslant and distorted and wholly male; it righted itself suddenly and created a soft idyll of tenderness. Nearly everything of Charlie is in that moment, and I know no better way to express its elusive quality than to say that as I sat watching the film a second time, about two hours later, the repetition of the gesture came with all the effect of surprise, although I had been wondering whether he could do it so perfectly again.

This was the Charlie whom little children came to know before any other and whose name they added to their prayers. He was then popular with the people; he was soon to become universally known and admired--the Charlie of _The Bank_ and of _Shoulder Arms_; and finally he became “the great artist” in _The Kid_. The second period is pure development; the third is change; and the adherents of each join with the earlier enthusiasts to instruct and alarm their idol. No doubt the middle phase is the one which is richest in memory. It includes the masterpieces _A Dog’s Life_, _The Pawnshop_, _The Vagabond_, _Easy Street_, as well as the two I have just mentioned, and, if I am not mistaken, the _genre_ pictures like _The Floorwalker_, _The Fireman_, _The Immigrant_, and the fantastic _Cure_. To name these pictures is to call to mind their special scenes, the atmosphere in which they were played: the mock heroic of _The Bank_ and its parody of passion; the unbelievable scene behind the curtain in _A Dog’s Life_; Charlie as policeman in _Easy Street_, which had some of the beginnings of _The Kid_; Charlie left marking time alone after the squad had marched away in the film which made camp life supportable. Compare them with the very earliest films, _The Pile Driver_ and the wheel-chairman film and so on: the later ones are richer in inventiveness, the texture is more solid, the emotions grow more complex, and the interweaving of tenderness and gravity with the fun becomes infinitely more deft. In essence it is the same figure--he is still a vagrant, an outsider; only now when he becomes entangled in the lives of other people he is a bit of a crusader, too. The accidental does not occur so frequently; the progress of each film is plotted in advance; there is a definite rise and fall as in _A Dog’s Life_, where the climax is in the curtain scene toward which tends the first episode of the dog and from which the flight and the rustic idyll flow gently downward. The pace in the earlier pictures was more instinctive. In _The Count_ the tempo is jerky; it moves from extreme to extreme. Yet one gets the sense of the impending flight beautifully when, at the close, Charlot as the bogus count has been shown up and is fleeing pell-mell through every room in the house; the whole movement grows tense; the rate of acceleration perceptibly heightens as Charlot slides in front of a vast birthday cake, pivots on his heel, and begins to play alternate pool and golf with the frosting, making every shot count like a machine gunner barricaded in a pill-box or a bandit in a deserted cabin.

It was foreordained that the improvised kind of comedy should give way to something more calculated, and in Charlie’s case it is particularly futile to cry over spilled milk because for a long time he continued to give the _effect_ of impromptu; his sudden movements and his finds in the way of unsuspected sources of fun are exceptional to this day. In _The Pawnshop_[5] Charlie begins to sweep and catches in his broom the end of a long rope, which, instead of being swept away, keeps getting longer, actively fighting the broom. I have no way to prove it, but I am sure from the context that this is all he had originally had in mind to do with the scene. Suddenly the tape on the floor creates something in his mind, and Charlie transforms the back room of the pawnshop into a circus, with himself walking the tight rope--a graceful, nimble balancing along the thin line of tape on the floor, the quick turn and coming forward, the conventional bow, arms flung out, smiling, to receive applause at the end. Again, as ever, he has created an imaginary scene out of the materials of the actual.

The plotting of these comedies did not destroy Charlie’s inventiveness and made it possible for him to develop certain other of his characteristics. The moment the vagrant came to rest, the natural man appeared, the paradoxical creature who has the wisdom of simple souls and the incalculable strength of the weak. Charlie all through the middle period is at least half Tyl Eulenspiegl. It is another way for him to live apart from the world by assuming that the world actually means what it says, by taking every one of its conventional formulas, its polite phrases and idioms, with dreadful seriousness. He has created in Charlot a radical with an extraordinarily logical mind. Witness Charlot arriving late at the theatre and stepping on the toes of a whole row of people to his seat at the far end; the gravity of his expressions of regret is only matched by his humiliation when he discovers that he is, after all, in the wrong row and makes his way back again and all through the next row to his proper place. It is a careful exaggeration of the social fiction that when you apologise you can do anything to anyone. The same feeling underlies the characteristic moment when Charlot is fighting and suddenly stops, takes off his hat and coat, gives them to his opponent to hold, and then promptly knocks his obliging adversary down. Revisiting once an old Charlie, I saw him do this, and a few minutes later saw the same thing in a new Harold Lloyd; all there is to know of the difference between the two men was to be learned there; for Lloyd, who is a clever fellow, made it seem a smart trick so to catch his enemy off guard, while Chaplin made the moment equal to the conventional crossing of swords or the handshake before a prize fight. Similarly, the salutation with the hat takes seriously a social convention and carries it as far as it can go. In _Pay Day_ Charlot arrives late to work and attempts to mollify the furious construction-gang boss by handing him an Easter lily.

_The Kid_ was undoubtedly a beginning in “literature” for Charlie. I realize that in admitting this I am giving the whole case away, for in the opinion of certain critics the beginning of literature is the end of creative art. This attitude is not so familiar in America, but in France you hear the Charlot of _The Kid_ spoken of as “theatre,” as one who has ceased to be of the film entirely. I doubt if this is just. Like the one other great artist in America (George Herriman, with whom he is eminently in sympathy), Charlie has always had the Dickens touch, a thing which in its purity we do not otherwise discover in our art. Dickens himself is mixed; only a part of him is literature, and that not the best, nor is that part essentially the one which Charlie has imported to the screen. _The Kid_ had some bad things in it: the story, the halo round the head of the unmarried mother, the quarrel with the authorities; it had an unnecessary amount of realism and its tempo was uncertain, for it was neither serious film nor Keystone. Yet it possessed moments of unbelievable intensity and touches of high imagination. The scenes in and outside the doss-house were excellent and were old Charlie; the glazier’s assistant was inventive and the training of Coogan to look like his foster-father was beautiful. Far above them stood the beginning of the film: Charlot, in his usual polite rags, strolling down to his club after his breakfast (it would have been a grilled bone) and, avoiding slops as Villon did, twirling his cane, taking off his fingerless gloves to reach for his cigarette case (a sardine box), and selecting from the butts one of quality, _tamping it_ to shake down the excess tobacco at the tip--all of this, as Mr Herriman pointed out to me, was the creation of the society gentleman, the courageous refusal to be undermined by slums and poverty and rags. At the end of the film there was the vision of heaven: apotheosis of the long suffering of Charlot at the hands of the police, not only in _The Kid_--in a hundred films where he stood always against the authorities, always for his small independent freedom. The world in which even policemen have wings shatters, too; but something remains. The invincible Charlot, dazed by his dream, looking for wings on the actual policeman who is apparently taking him to jail, will not down. For as they start, a post comes between them, and Charlot, without the slightest effort to break away, too submissive to fight, still dodges back to walk round the post and so avoid bad luck. A moment later comes one of the highest points in Charlie’s career. He is ushered into a limousine instead of a patrol wagon--it is the beginning of the happy ending. And as the motor starts he flashes at the spectators of his felicity a look of indescribable poignancy. It is frightened, it is hopeful, bewildered; it lasts a fraction of a second and is blurred by the plate glass of the car. I cannot hope to set down the quality of it, how it becomes a moment of unbearable intensity, and how one is breathless with suspense--and with adoration.

For, make no mistake, it is adoration, not less, that he deserves and has from us. He corresponds to our secret desires because he alone has passed beyond our categories, at one bound placing himself outside space and time. His escape from the world is complete and extraordinarily rapid, and what makes him more than a figure of romance is his immediate creation of another world. He has the vital energy, the composing and the functioning brain. This is what makes him æsthetically interesting, what will make him for ever a school not only of acting, but of the whole creative process. The flow of his line always corresponds to the character and tempo; there is a definite relation between the melody and the orchestration he gives it. Beyond his technique--the style of his pieces--he has composition, because he creates anything but chaos in his separate world. “You might,” wrote Mr Stark Young, wise in everything but the choice of the person addressed, “you might really create in terms of the moving picture as you have already created in terms of character.” As I have said, the surest way to be wrong about Charlie is to forget the Keystone.

This is precisely what Mr Stark Young would like him to do--and what Charlie may do if the intellectual nonsense about him is capable of corrupting his natural wisdom and his creative gift. Mr Young has addressed an open letter to “Dear Mr Chaplin”[6] in which he suggests that Charlie play _Liliom_ and _He Who Gets Slapped_ and _Peer Gynt_. (Offended as I am by these ideas, I must be fair. Mr Young does say that better than all of these, “you could do new things written by or for you, things in which you would use your full endowment, comic and otherwise ... develop things calculated strictly for it [the screen] and for no other art, made up out of its essential quality, which is visual motion and not mere stage drama photographed....”) This is, of course, corruption. It means that Mr Young has either not seen the Charlie of before _The Kid_ (as I suspect from the phrase about creating in terms of character) or not liked him (which I am sure about); he has failed to recognize in _The Pawnbroker_ “his full endowment, comic and otherwise.” It implies to me that Mr Young would prefer a “serious film” and that suggests the complete absence of a critical sense, of taste and gusto, of wisdom and gaiety, of piety and wit. “The larger field” ... “serious efforts” ... “a more cultured audience” ... “the judicious”--O Lord! these are the phrases which are offered as bribes to the one man who has destroyed the world and created it in his own image!

There is a future for him as for others, and it is quite possible that the future may not be as rich and as dear as the past. I write this without having seen _The Pilgrim_, which ought to be a test case, for the two films which followed _The Kid_ (_Pay Day_ and _The Idle Class_) determined nothing. If the literary side conquers we shall have a great character actor and not a creator; we shall certainly not have again the image of riot and fun, the created personage, the annihilation of actuality; we may go so far as to accomplish Mr Stark Young’s ideal and have a serious work of art. I hope this will not happen, because I do not believe that it is the necessary curve of Charlie’s genius--it is the direction of worldly success, not in money, but in fame; it is not the curve of life at all. For the slowing-up of Charlie’s physical energies and the deepening of his understanding may well restore to him his appreciation of those early monuments to laughter which are his greatest achievement. He stood then shod in absurdity, but with his feet on the earth. And he danced on the earth, an eternal figure of lightness and of the wisdom which knows that the earth was made to dance on. It was a green earth, excited with its own abundance and fruitfulness, and he possessed it entirely. For me he remains established in possession. As it spins under his feet he dances silently and with infinite grace upon it. It is as if in his whole life he had spoken only one word: “I am here _to-day_”--the beginning before time and the end without end of his wisdom and of his loveliness.

_Say It With Music_

SAY IT WITH MUSIC

The popular song is never forgotten--except in public. Great events and seven-day-wonders pass into oblivion. Hobson, who was a hero, became a prohibitionist; Aguinaldo, a good citizen; McKinley, a martyr--but _Good-by, Dolly Gray_, _In the Good Old Summer Time_, and _Just Break the News to Mother_ are immortal in our private memories and around them crystallize the sights and sounds and smells, the very quality of the air we breathed when these songs were in their high day. A more judicious pen than mine may write about these songs without sentimentality; I cannot. For in addition to the pathos of time past, something else brings an air of gentle melancholy to “words and music.” In recent years a change has come and the popular song is no longer written to be sung, but to be played. The new song that can’t be sung has virtues of its own--on the whole they are virtues I prefer. But I doubt whether it will ever be, as the old song was, a clue to the social history of our time.

The popular song is so varied, so full of interest, that for a moment at least one can pretend that it isn’t vulgar, detestable, the ruin of musical taste, and a symptom of degeneracy; we can pretend also that _Less Than the Dust_ isn’t more artistic than _Swanee_. Since the Spanish-American War the American popular song (including the foreign song popular in America) has undergone the most interesting modulations; it has expressed everything except _fin de siècle_. Out of the ’nineties persisted a characteristic song: _Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay_, the chorus and tune of which, woven into mysterious words about “three little niggers in a peanut shell” I must have heard at the same time as _Daisy_ with its glorification of the simple life “on a bicycle built for two.” Since then, for a rough generalization, we have had three types of popular song: the exotic-romantic, the sentimental, and the raggy-gay. The sentimental song we have always with us. “That sweet melody with a strong mother appeal” is advertised on the back of “Those Black Boy Blues” and Irving Berlin writes _When I Lost You_ between _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ and _Some Sunny Day_. At moments it is dominant and a fake ballad, with a simple and uninteresting tune, makes _After the Ball_, by Charles K. Harris, a world wonder. Or we have a simplification of the whole history of romantic love in _Love Me and the World Is Mine_. The curious about social life in America may compare this song with _I’m Just Wild About Harry_.

Beaumarchais, who knew no jazz, makes Figaro say that what can’t be said can be sung--and this applies far more to the sentimental than to the obscene. Think of the incredible, the almost unspeakable idea in the following, presumably spoken by a father to a child:

Down in the City of Sighs and Tears,
Down by the White Light’s Glare,
Down in the something of wasted years,
You’ll find your mamma there!

Or consider the pretty imagery and emotion of _I’m Tying the Leaves_, as sung by a precocious and abominable child who has been told that mother will die when the leaves begin to fall. It would be easy to say that these songs are gone never to return; but it was only two years ago that _They Needed a Songbird in Heaven--so God Took Caruso Away_ (“idea suggested by George Walter Brown” to the grateful composers). I do not dare to contemplate _A Baby’s Prayer at Twilight_ or to wonder what constituted the _Curse of an Aching Heart_; but history has left on record the chorus of

My Mother was a Lady
Like yours, you will allow,
And you may have a sister
Who needs protection now;
I’ve come to this great city
To find a brother dear,
And you wouldn’t dare insult me, sir,
If Jack were only here.

It was for songs like this that a masterpiece in another _genre_, the burlesque popular song, was created. I have heard _A Working Girl Was Leaving Home_ credited to the brothers Smith (the boys the mother-in-law joke invented, according to George Jean Nathan, and for their sins they should have written this song) and to the late Tiny Maxwell, and to an unidentified English source. It’s title and chorus at least are immortal:

(Then to him these proud words this girl did say):

Stand back, villain; go your way!
Here I will no longer stay.
Although you were a marquis or an earl.
You may tempt the upper classes
With your villainous de-mi tasses,
But Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.

The cure for the sentimental song is the ironic; and irony, it happens, is not what America lives on. Even so mild an English example as _Waiting at the Church_ gained its popularity chiefly from the excellent tag line:

Can’t get away
To marry you to-day.
My wife won’t let me.

Yet appearing from time to time we had a sort of frank destruction of sentimentality in our songs. Some, like _I Picked up a Lemon in the Garden of Love_, appeal directly to the old “peaches” tradition; but we went further. In the same year as the romantic _Beautiful Garden of Roses_--it was one of the early years of the dance craze--we heard _Who Are You With To-night_ (to-night?...) down to “Will you tell your wife in the morning, Who you are with to-night?” and the music perceptibly winked at the words. _I Love My Wife (but, Oh, You Kid!)_ had little quality, but the dramatization of an old joke in _My Wife’s Gone to the Country_ rose to a definite gaiety in the cry of “Hooray! Hooray!” So, too, one line in the chorus of _I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now_, a song which skilfully builds up a sentimental situation in order to tear it down with two words:

Wonder who’s looking into her eyes,
Breathing sighs, telling lies ...

where the music pretended to make no difference between the last two phrases, except for softening, sweetening the second. Yet another in the malicious mould is _Who Paid the Rent for Mrs Rip Van Winkle (when Rip Van Winkle Went Away)_--unforgettable for the tearing upward phrase to a climax in the first _Rip_ with a parallel high note on the second.

The characteristic of these songs is that they were rather like contemporary fiction in giving form to social phenomena without expressing approval or disapproval. Eternal love and fidelity go by the board with “the dreamy, peachy, creamy, Vision of pure delight,” the companion who will not be mentioned to “your wife in the morning.” “Tell me, Mister, Is it your sister....” Well, hardly.

There were, beside these realistic treatments of marriage (I continue the professorial tone) a few slightly suggestive songs, and these also were opposed to current morality, and these also were popular. One was called, I think, _Billy_, and purported to be a statement of virginal devotion: “And when I walk, I always walk with Billy ...” and so following, to “And when I sleep, I always--dream of Bill.” There were delicious implications in _Row, Row, Row_, as Al Jolson sang it; earlier still was Hattie Williams’s song _Experience_, in _The Little Cherub_. The persistence of these songs is something of a miracle and the shade of difference between the permissible and the impossible is of vast importance in the success of a song. About fifteen years separate _Who Are You With To-Night?_ (I quote all these songs and titles from memory, but I am fairly sure about the grammar of this one; if it was printed “whom” it was sung “who”) and _He May be Your Man (but he comes to see me sometimes)_, and the second song is more explicit; when Edith Wilson or Florence Mills sang the repeat chorus it shocked her audience. Essentially it is the same thing, only, fifteen years ago, the questionable stanza would have been left to the unauthorized street version.

The exotic romantic song in America has little to do with all of this. Before the professional glorification of our separate states began, we had the series of Indian songs of which Neil Moret’s _Hiawatha_ is the outstanding exemplar. The stanza is almost as hard to sing as _The Star-spangled Banner_; the chorus--it is always the chorus which makes a song--is banal, a pure rum-tum-tiddy. Yet it was more than popular, for it engendered a hundred others. _Cheyenne_ and (musically) _Rainbow_ are its descendants. _Hiawatha_ bewilders and baffles the searcher after causes; but its badness as a song explains why the Indian song was submerged presently in the great wave of negro songs which have shown an amazing vitality, have outlived the Hawaiian exotic, and with marvelous adaptability (aided by one great natural advantage) have lived through to the present day.

The negro song is partly, but not purely, exotic. Remembering that songs are written on Forty-fifth Street in New York and put over in New York cabarets, it is easy to see how _California in September_ (a dreadful song) and _Carolina_ (I recall five songs embodying the name of that state; the latest is superb) are also exotic; and how _Over on the Jersey Side_ and songs about Coney Island came to be written to glorify New York as a summer resort. The rustic period, again, reacts against sophistication as _In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree_ reacts against the exoticism of the sheltering palm. Neither rustic nor local, however, achieves the highest success, and it is left for the Pacific to give the last setting before the shouting song of the negro and his plaintive cry are triumphant in our music.

First, however, the era of the waltz song. In earlier days America had little to do with the waltz out of comic opera and _The Merry Widow_ and _My Hero_ and _Beautiful Lady_ and the superb melodies from _Gypsy Love_ and from _Die Czardas Fürstin_, of which I forget the American name, and something from _The Arcadians_ came from anywhere across the sea and captured us. The _Velia Song_ and _The Girl from the Saskatchewan_ were better than their corresponding waltzes; _The Chocolate Soldier_ had pages of music as good as _My Hero_--many better. Only _The Dollar Princess_ managed to put over its less ostentatious pieces--and that is rather amusing, since Leo Fall is held by the Viennese to be the true successor of Johann Strauss.

The mention of that great name makes it clear that the waltz song itself is a hybrid; for whatever words have been sung to _The Beautiful Blue Danube_, the music was meant to be played and for the dance; it was not meant for song. Yet the slow tempo, the softness, the gentle sentimentality of the waltz lends itself peculiarly to song--and to memory. I do not think it has anything to do with the really great things in our popular songs, but I cannot resent its success--any more than I can resent the success of another song, wholly out of our American line--_Un Peu d’Amour_. This was the last great song before the war; it held France and England and America enslaved to its amorous longing. Something more cheery and more male had to be found for the English soldier, who eventually picked up _Tipperary_ (also a song of nostalgia), and for the American something snappier; but _Un Peu d’Amour_ persisted during the war. To hear a soldier standing on the fire-step on a dark night, leaning his cheek against the disc of his Lewis gun, and softly humming _Un Peu d’Amour_, was to recognize that for actual millions that song and a few others like it, and not the great music to the condition of which all art aspires, were all of beauty and all of exaltation they were ever to know. The materials in this particular case were not tawdry, only equivocal. For it was a better song as _A Little Love_ than in the French. The word _amour_ means, but does not signify, the same thing as the word love, and “_pour t’entendre à ce moment suprême, Murmurer tout bas, tout bas: Je t’aime_” has connotations not transferred to the English. The song is a fake French and a good Anglo-Saxon piece of sentiment, precisely the counterpart of the waltz song. Like them it conquered a world.

Lehar and Monckton and Caryll and Fall and Kalman followed successes with moderate failure, and at the same time revues and American musical comedies stepped out grandly. I note three songs from this source which actually claimed all of the popular attention. The song to be sung was at its best in the Princess shows--best of all in _The Siren Song_ from _Leave it to Jane_. It is Mr Kern’s masterpiece, a sophisticated, tidy score with amusing and unexpected retards and pauses, with a fresh freedom of tonalities. _The Siren Song_ never actually came up to _The Love Nest_ in acclaim; Mr Hirsch’s bid for immortality is almost contemptible in words and music and has only a single point of interest--the three notes against two in the second line of the chorus (“cozyandwarm” instead of, say, nice--and--warm). It is impermissible in a man who only a year later wrote _It’s Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway_.

The third song is _Say It With Music_. Mr Berlin is as much responsible as any one for the turn from the song-to-be-sung to the song-to-be-played; yet he is so remarkable that he can reverse himself, and just as in 1915 he produced a whole revue (_Stop! Look! Listen!_) from which not one song became really popular, so, seven years later, when the singing-song had gone out, he produced a revue and gave us one more of his tributes to the art he adores. It isn’t musically half as interesting as _I Love a Piano_; but it is much more singable and it has great virtues. Nothing that a jazz orchestra can do has any effect on the purity of its musical line. I wonder whether it may not be the last of the songs; for we are now full in the jazz age and darkness has set in.

_Tearing a Passion
to Ragtime_

TEARING A PASSION TO RAGTIME

There is only one sense in which the word “rag” has any meaning in connexion with music, and that is not conveyed in the word “ragtime.” Ragtime is not, strictly speaking, time at all; neither is _tempo rubato_: and eminently safe composers have been known to score their music _con alcuna licenza_, which leaves the delicate adjustment of time to the performer. A certain number of liberties may be taken with ragtime, and beyond this point no liberties may be taken. Within its framework, ragtime is definite enough; and you must syncopate at precisely the right, the indicated and required moment, or the effect of the syncopation is lost.

It is only when one looks at the songs that one realizes what ragtime means. For literally, the music, which has always been with us and yet arrived only yesterday, has torn to rags the sentimentality of the song which preceded it. The funeral oration for the popular song was preached in the preceding chapter. This is the coroner’s inquest, with the probable verdict that the popular song was unintentionally killed by ragtime, which is in turn being slowly poisoned by jazz. A neat, unobtrusive, little man with bright eyes and an unerring capacity for understanding, appropriating, and creating strange rhythms is in the foreground, attended by negro slaves; behind him stands a rather majestic figure, pink and smooth, surrounded by devils with muted brass and saxophones. They are Irving Berlin and Paul Whiteman, and they will bear listening to. What is more, they will make listening a pleasure.

It seems strange to speak of the great George M. Cohan as a disappointment in anything he has ever tried; but looking back at the early years of the century, when it was apparent that he would be our most popular song writer as well as our most popular everything else, suddenly calls to mind that our Georgie, the Yankee Doodle Dandy, just failed to make it. Irish wit and an extraordinary aptitude for putting into simple song the most obvious of jingo sentiments were not quite enough. The situation which Cohan faced at the time was beginning to be complicated: the ballad song was becoming a bore; the substitutes for it had failed to absorb rhythms fresh enough and swift enough to please the public. And between dawn and daylight ragtime was upon us.

_Enfin_ Berlin _vient_! How much ragtime had been sung and played before, no man may calculate; it had been heard in every minstrel show, and its musical elements were thoroughly familiar. What was needed was a crystallization, was one song which should take the whole dash and energy of ragtime and carry it to its apotheosis; with a characteristic turn of mind Berlin accomplished this in a song which had no other topic than ragtime itself. _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ appeared with its bow to negro music and its introduction of _Swanee River_; it was simple and passionate and utterly unsentimental and the whole country responded to its masterful cry, _Come on and hear!_ Presently _Waiting for the Robert E. Lee_ is heard--a levee song and one would say that the South had already conquered; but Berlin is first of all a writer of rag and the Southern theme is dropped (the negro music remaining) while he gives the world two further dazzling rags: _The International_ and _The Ragtime Violin_. Everybody’s doing it was true of singing and dancing and--composing. For the day which was awakened with _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ was a day of extraordinary energy and _Skeleton Rags_ and _Yiddische Rags_ and _Pullman Porters’ Balls_, and everything that could be syncopated, and most things that could not, paid their quota to ragtime. There have been periods equally definable: the time of the waltz song, of the ballad, of jazz. What makes the first rag period important was its intense gaiety, its naïveté, its tireless curiosity about itself, its unconscious destruction of the old ballad form and the patter song. The music drove ahead; the half-understood juggling with tempo which was to become the characteristic of our music led to fresh accents, a dislocation of the beat, and to a greater freedom in the text. For half a century syncopation had existed in America, anticipating the moment when the national spirit should find in it its perfect expression; for that half century serious musicians had neglected it; they were to study it a decade later when ragtime had revealed it to them.

The early rags were made to be sung and they were sung, universally. What the departing queen of Hawaii offered in _Aloha Ohe_ was swiftly integrated into the existing form and _On the Beach at Wai-ki-ki_ is a rag in every respect, using material which is foreign only in appearance. (The fact that ragtime can without offense adapt the folk song of nearly every nation--and is only absurd with Puccini and Verdi’s worst when it takes them seriously--indicates how essentially decent an art ragtime is.) The nostalgia which later came into Hawaiian songs does not exist in this first greatly popular song of those islands any more than it exists in the _Robert E. Lee_ or in _When that Midnight Chu-chu Leaves for Alabam’_. Berlin himself was not untouched by the Hawaiian scene and in _The Hula-Hula_ he wrote a song superior, in my mind, to _Wai-ki-ki_, yet never popular in the great sense. The rush and excitement of _Wai-ki-ki_ aren’t in _The Hula-Hula_; some one had told too much about the undulations of the dance and the sensuousness of the southern Pacific. Louis Hirsch, years later, did the same thing in _’Neath the South Sea Moon_, a respectable piece of work. But it remained for Jerome Kern, a decade and more after _Wai-ki-ki_, to make another Hawaiian song popular. This was _Ka-lu-a_ (out of _Good Morning, Dearie_) and in every way it showed cleverness and intelligence. For it was not a song of Hawaii at all. It was produced in an Englishy garden, sung by women in hoopskirts surrounding Oscar Shaw in evening clothes; and it is all, all a longing for--I think it is a longing for Wai-ki-ki the song, as much as for the beach. The old romantic properties are in the words, slightly set off in mockery by the premature and internal rhymes; they are suffused with memory and the music is purely nostalgic. It was not for nothing that Mr Kern wrote _The Siren Song_.

The moment Hawaii faded out nothing was left but the South, and here the music began to drive the words with a hard hand and a high check. An observer unfamiliar with the nature of ragtime would conclude that the American people had a complex about nigger mammies and that the sublimation thereof was in the popular song. The true explanation is simpler. The mother element is, of course, a sure-fire hit in the pictures and in song; but the nigger mammy enters for the same reason as cotton fields and pickaninnies and Georgia--because our whole present music is derived from the negro and most composers of popular songs haven’t yet discovered that the musical structure is applicable to other themes as well. (George Gershwin’s _Walking Home with Angeline_ in _Our Nell_, Cole Porter’s _Blue Boy Blues_, about the Gainsborough painting, and Berlin’s _Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil_ are examples of the transfer successfully accomplished, and gratifying, too. Best of all is _Limehouse Blues_, by Philip Braham, a veritable masterpiece in the _genre_.) There exist a number of natural themes--slavery, the local scene (Swanee River), the cabin, the food, and the train whereby one arrives. The genius of Tin Pan Alley has worked upon this material, and in both words and music has been amazingly imitative, uninventive, and dull. Yet the idea of taking a theme and so handling it that the slightest variation from the preceding use of the same material shall give the effect of novelty and freshness is a sound one--we know from the history of Greek drama. Alas! there was little novelty and the tradition was never firm enough to bear what they did to it. Yet they had their reward, if they can accept it vicariously, for one of them, not at the beginning and not at the end, which is not yet, took the old material and fashioned a great song. His name is George Gershwin and the song which, before the blue-jazz age, achieves pre-eminence is _Swanee_. To have heard Al Jolson sing this song is to have had one of the few great experiences which the minor arts are capable of giving; to have heard it without feeling something obscure and powerful and rich with a separate life of its own coming into being, is--I should say it is not to be alive. The verse is simple and direct, with faint foreshadowings of the subtly divided, subtly compounded elements of the chorus where the name “Swanee,” with a strong beat, long drawn and tender, ushers in the swift passages leading to the repetition, slow again, of the name; and the rest of the song is the proper working out of a problem in contrasting cadences, and in dynamics. After the chorus, and in another key, there is a coda, a restatement of the theme with a little more restraint, and then, surprisingly and gratefully, for the first time the introduction of the final bars of _Swanee River_. I analyze this song as if it could be taken apart and the essence of it remain; the truth is that it bears inspection and is worth inspection because it has a strongly individual quality, a definite personal touch. Mr Gershwin has progressed[7] in his technical handling of syncopation, as in _Innocent Ingénue Baby_ (not primarily a song to be sung or for the dance, but to hear; it is musically the solution of a problem in pauses, and the answer is delicious); but in _Swanee_ he is at his highest point, for he has taken the simple emotion of longing and let it surge through his music, he has made real what a hundred before him had falsified. He should “do it again.”

IRVING BERLIN
]

_Swanee_ was popular, but by no means as popular as _Some Sunny Day_, a song by Mr Berlin which will simply not bear analysis. I hold Mr Berlin to be still the foremost writer of popular music in spite of it. Three years and a masterly technique separate the two songs and _Some Sunny Day_ is devilishly clever, but most of it isn’t properly singable. It is a good dance tune; analyzed, it resolves itself into a weak treatment of _Old Black Joe_ (clever Mr Berlin to take the first bar of the old _verse_ for the first bar of his _chorus_) and a regrettable quotation again of _Swanee River_. The arrangement is neat, and the inversion of the first bar halfway through the chorus, when the song has dribbled into meaningless fragments, has lost all intensity and is suddenly revived and refreshed, while the words of the first bar are repeated--that sufficiently indicates the master hand. The words are among Mr Berlin’s weakest and it is hard to believe that at the same moment he was revelling in the two _Music Box Revues_, in _Say It With Music_ and _Pack Up Your Sins_, which are superb.

It is not entirely an accident that a consideration of the effect of ragtime on popular song begins and ends with Irving Berlin. For as surely as _Alexander’s Ragtime Band_ started something, _Pack Up Your Sins_ is a sign that it is coming to an end. For this tremendous piece of music simply cannot be sung; it baffled the trained chorus on its first appearance, it can hardly be whistled through, and, although the words are good, they aren’t known. Ragtime is now written for jazz orchestra; three phrases occupy the time of two; four, five, and even six notes the time of two or three. The words which are becoming wittier than ever are too numerous, too jostled, to be sung, and the melodic structure with arbitrarily changing beat baffles the voice and the mind as much as it intrigues the pulse and the heel. The popular song and the ragtime song are vanishing temporarily. But something terrible and wonderful has already taken their place. Already there is an indication of how they will return and--I am tired of speaking of Mr Berlin, but I can’t help it--Mr Berlin has indicated how and where. His _All by Myself_ is in essence a combination of the sentimental song with ragtime--so it was sung by Ethel Levey. And it is played with enthusiasm by jazz orchestras--a perceptible pleasure is ours from recognizing something entirely simple and sentimental weaving its way through those recondite harmonies.

If the song returns in any way the ancient protest against its vulgarity will also return, and it is worth making up our minds about it now. The popular song takes its place between the folk song and the art song. Of these the folk song hardly exists in America to-day: _Casey Jones_ and _Frankie and Johnny_ are examples of what we possess and one doesn’t often hear them sung along country roads or by brown-armed men at the rudder in ships that go down to the sea. The songs of the Kentucky mountains (English in provenance) and the old cowboy songs are both the object of antiquarian interest--they aren’t as alive as the universal _Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here_ or _We Won’t Go Home ’til Morning_. If we refuse to call our ragtime folk music, then we must face the fact that we are at a moment in history when folk songs simply do not occur. (Even the war failed to give us very much; it is interesting to note that besides _Katy_ and _Mr Zip_, the songs written by the best and most expert of our composers, Berlin and Cohan, were both meant to be sung and were sung--and this took place in the midst of the change to the unsingable type.) At the opposite extreme is the art song--usually the setting and degradation of a poem written for its own sake and usually--let us say dull. The composers of art songs are about fifty paces behind the symphonists and the symphonists are nearly nowhere. The result is that we aren’t in any sense _nourished_ by the writers of art songs and, since we are a musical people, for better or for worse we fall back on the popular song. It is to me a question whether we would be better citizens and more noble in the sight of God if we sang _Narcissus_ instead of _The Girl on the Magazine Cover_.

Once in a while something between the art and the popular song appears, and it is called _My Rosary_ or _The End of a Perfect Day_, and it is unbearable. Because here you have a pretentiousness, a base desire to be above the crowd and yet to please (it is called “uplift,” but it does not mean exalt) the crowd; here is the touch of “art” which makes all things false and vulgar. To be sure, these songs, too, are popular; the desire for culture is as universal as it is depressing. And these are the only popular songs which are really vulgar. I will ask no one to compare them with the real thing. Compare them with false, trivial, ridiculous imitations of the real thing--it exists in some of the occasional songs which composers are always trying and which hardly ever come off. I recall a song written about the Iroquois fire; another about Harry K. Thaw (“Just because he’s a millionaire, Everybody’s willing to treat him unfair”). Only the two songs about Caruso succeeded, and there never was a good one about Roosevelt. Here is one written for Jackie Coogan in _Oliver Twist_:

When the troubles came so fast you kept on smiling,
Like a sunbeam ’mid the clouds up in the sky;
Though the rest were deep in crime
You stayed spotless all the time
Though they flayed you
Till they made you
Weep and cry.

When your little heart was aching for a mother’s tender love,
Then the Lord looked down and heard you and blessed you from above.
Though they tried to make you bad
You stayed good, dear little lad.
Would God I could
Be half as good
As you
_Oliver Twist_.

The music is just like that, too. Lower than this--much lower, at least--the popular song never dropped. These songs _never_ become actually, universally popular because the general taste is too high. And I cheerfully set the lowest example beside _A Perfect Day_ for comparison. One type is not obnoxious and the other is; one is common, the other vulgar; one is strong and foolish, the other silly and weak. The case for the popular song may as well rest in the solution of this dilemma as anywhere.

_Toujours Jazz_

TOUJOURS JAZZ

The word jazz is already so complicated that it ought not to be subjected to any new definitions, and the thing itself so familiar that it is useless to read new meanings into it. Jazz is a type of music grown out of ragtime and still ragtime in essence; it is also a method of production and as such an orchestral development; and finally it is the symbol, or the byword, for a great many elements in the spirit of the time--as far as America is concerned it is actually our characteristic expression. This is recognized by Europeans; with a shudder by the English and with real joy by the French, who cannot, however, play it.

The fact that jazz is our current mode of expression, has reference to our time and the way we think and talk, is interesting; but if jazz music weren’t itself good the subject would be more suitable for a sociologist than for an admirer of the gay arts. Fortunately, the music and the way it is played are both of great interest, both have qualities which cannot be despised; and the cry that jazz is the enthusiastic disorganization of music is as extravagant as the prophecy that if we do not stop “jazzing” we will go down, as a nation, into ruin. I am quite ready to uphold the contrary. If--before we have produced something better--we give up jazz we shall be sacrificing nearly all there is of gaiety and liveliness and rhythmic power in our lives. Jazz, for us, isn’t a last feverish excitement, a spasm of energy before death. It is the normal development of our resources, the expected, and wonderful, arrival of America at a point of creative intensity.

Jazz is good--at least good jazz is good--and I propose to summarize some of the known reasons for holding it so. The summary will take me far from the thing one hears and dances to, from the thing itself. The analysis of jazz, musically or emotionally, is not likely to be done in the spirit of jazz itself. There isn’t room on the printed page for a glissando on the trombone, for the sweet sentimental wail of the saxophone, or the sudden irruptions of the battery. Nor is there need for these--intellectually below the belt--attacks. The reason jazz is worth writing about is that it is worth listening to. I have heard it said by those who have suffered much that it is about the only native music worth listening to in America.