Chapter III: Part 3

Strictly speaking, jazz music is a new development--something of the last two years, arriving long after jazz had begun to be played. I mean that ragtime is now so specifically written for the jazz band that it is acquiring new characteristics. Zez Confrey, Irving Berlin, Fred Fisher, and Walter Donaldson, among others, are creating their work as jazz; the accent in each bar, for example, is marked in the text--the classic idea of the slight accent on the first note of each bar went out when ragtime came in; then ragtime created its own classic notion,--the propulsion of the accent from the first (strong) note to the second (weak). In jazz ragtime the accent can occur anywhere in the bar and is attractively unpredictable. Rhythmically--essentially--jazz is ragtime, since it is based on syncopation, and even without jazz orchestration we should have had the full employment of precise and continuous syncopation which we find in jazz now, in _Pack Up Your Sins_, for example. It is syncopation, too, which has so liberated jazz from normal polyphony, from perfect chords, that M Darius Milhaud is led to expect from jazz a full use of polytonic and atonic harmonies; he notes that in _Kitten on the Keys_ there exists already a chord of the perfect major and the perfect minor. The reason why syncopation lies behind all this is that it is fundamentally an anticipation or a suspension in one instrument (or in the bass) of what is going to happen in another (the treble); and the moment in which a note occurs prematurely or in retard is, frequently, a moment of discord on the strong beat. A dissonance sets in which may or may not be resolved later. The regular use of syncopation, therefore, destroyed the fallacy (as I hold it) of the perfect ear; and this is one reason why Americans are often readier to listen to modern music than peoples who haven’t got used to dissonance in their folk and popular music.

It is not only syncopation that makes us indebted to negro music. Another element is the typical chord structure found there, the characteristic variations from the accustomed. Technically described, one of the most familiar is the subdominant seventh chord with the interval of a minor instead of a major seventh--a method of lowering the leading tone which affects so distant a piece as _A Stairway to Paradise_, where the accented syllable of Par´-adise is skilfully lowered. (By extension ragtime also uses the “diminished third.”) The succession of dominant sevenths and of ninths is another characteristic, and the intrusion of tones which lie outside of our normal piano scale is common.[8] Still another attack on the perfect chord comes from the use of the instruments of the jazz band, one for which ragtime had well prepared us. The notorious slide of the trombone, now repeated in the slide of the voice, means inevitably that in its progress to the note which will make an harmonious chord, the instrument passes through discords. “Smears,” as they are refreshingly called, are the deadliest enemy of the classic tradition, for the ear becomes so accustomed to discords in transition that it ceases to mind them. (We hear them, of course; the pedants are wrong to say that we will cease to appreciate the “real value” of a discord if we aren’t pained by it and don’t leave the hall when one is played without resolution.) In contemporary ragtime, it should be noted, the syncopation of the tonality--playing your b-flat in the bass just before it occurs in the voice, let us say--is often purely a method of warning, an indication of the direction the melody is to take.

I put the strange harmonies of jazz first, not because they are its chief characteristic, but because of the prejudice against them. The suggestion is current that they are sounds which ought never to be uttered; and with this goes an attack on the trick instruments, the motor-horns, of the battery-man. The two things have nothing in common. The instruments of the jazz band are wholly legitimate and its characteristic instrument was invented by a German, after whom it is named, in the middle of the last century, and has been used in serious music by (and since) Meyerbeer--I refer to the saxophone. There is no more legal objection to the muted trombone than to the violin _con sordino_. And the opponents of jazz bands will do well to remember that the pure and lovely D-minor symphony of César Franck was thrown out as a symphony because it used the English horn. The actual sounds produced by the jazz band are entirely legitimate. We have yet to see what use they make of them.

* * * * *

In Krehbiel’s book the whole question of rhythm is comparatively taken for granted, as it should be. Syncopation discovered in classic music, in the Scot’s snap of the Strathspey reel, in Hungarian folk music, is characteristic of three-fifths of the negro songs which Krehbiel analyzed (exactly the same proportion, by the way, as are in the interval of the ordinary _major_). But it is such a normal phenomenon that I have never found a composer to be interested in it. Krehbiel, to be sure, does refer to the “degenerate form” of syncopation which is the basis of our ragtime, and that is hopeful because it indicates that ragtime is a development--intensification, sophistication--of something normal in musical expression. The free use of syncopation has led our good composers of ragtime and jazz to discoveries in rhythm and to a mastery of complications which one finds elsewhere only in the great composers of serious music. In describing the Dahoman war dances at the Chicago World’s Fair, Krehbiel says:

“Berlioz in his supremest effort with his army of drummers produced nothing to compare _in artistic interest_ with the harmonious drumming of these savages. The fundamental effect was a combination of double and triple time, the former kept by the singers, the latter by the drummers, but it is impossible to convey the idea of the wealth of detail achieved by the drummers by means of exchange of the rhythms, syncopation of both simultaneously, and dynamic devices.”

The italics are mine. I am fully aware of the difference between savage and sophisticated, between folk music and popular music; yet I cannot help believing that this entire statement, including the Berlioz whom I greatly admire, could be applied to Paul Whiteman playing _Pack Up Your Sins_ or his incredible mingling of _A Stairway to Paradise_ with a sort of _Beale Street Blues_.

Freedom with rhythm is audible--should I say palpable?--everywhere. _Stumbling_ (Zez Confrey) is in effect a waltz played against a more rapid counter-rhythm, and is interesting also for its fixed groups of uneven notes--triplets with the first note held or omitted for a time, and then with the third note omitted. A similar effect with other means occurs in the treatment of three notes in _Innocent Ingénue Baby_, by George Gershwin, where the same note falls under a different beat with a delightful sense of surprise and uncertainty. Mr Hooker’s words are equally tricky, for it isn’t “Innocent-Ingénue-Baby” at all; it is Innocent Ingénue (_baby_). In _By and By_ Gershwin has shifted an accent from the first to the second simply by giving the second the time-value usually given to the first, a fresh, delightful treatment of a sentimental expression. The variety of method is vastly interesting. Louis Hirsch, whom I rank fairly low as a composer for jazz, has done perfectly one obvious, necessary thing: stopped syncopating in the middle of a piece of ragtime. In the phrase “shake and shimmy everywhere” in _It’s Getting Very Dark on Old Broadway_, he presents the whole-tone scale descending in two bars of full unsyncopated quarter-notes. In the works of Zez Confrey (they are issued with a snobbish tasty cover, rather like the works of Claude Debussy) the syncopation and the exploitation of concurrent, apparently irreconcilable rhythms is first exasperating and eventually exciting. They are specifically piano pieces and require a brilliant proficiency to render them.

It is a little difficult, unless one has the piano score, to determine what part is the work of the composer, what of the jazz orchestra. You can only be fairly certain that whatever melody occurs is the composer’s, and that rhythmically he is followed with some fidelity. All you need to do is to listen to the violin, piano, or whatever instrument it is which holds the beat, to realize what the composer has given. Harmonization is often, and orchestration nearly always, left to other hands. Mr Berlin makes a habit now of giving credit to his chief collaborator, and he deserves it.[9]

* * * * *

Mr Berlin’s masterpieces (June, 1923, but who shall say?) in jazz are _Everybody Step_ and _Pack Up Your Sins_. I have written so much about him in connexion with song and shows that I can say little more. I see no letting down of his energy, none in his inventiveness. He is, oddly, one of the simplest of our composers. A good way to estimate his capacity is to play the more sentimental songs (_I’m Gonna Pin My Medal on the Girl I Left Behind_, _Someone Else May Be There While I’m Gone_, _All by Myself_) in slow time and then in fast. The amazing way they hold together in each tempo, the way in which the sentiment, the flow of the melody, disengages itself in the slow, and then the rhythm, the beat takes first place in the fast time, is exceptional. You cannot do the same with his own _Some Sunny Day_, nor with _Chicago_ or _Carolina in the Morning_. Berlin’s work is musically interesting, and that means it has a chance to survive. I have no such confidence in _Dardanella_ or _Chicago_. The famous unmelodic four notes occur in the latter as in _Pack Up Your Sins_ (the source is the same, but we need not go into that); the working out is vastly inferior. Fred Fisher’s work is sledge hammer in comparison with Berlin’s, and lacks Berlin’s humour. Of that quality Walter Donaldson has some, and Gershwin much. Donaldson wrote Al Jolson’s _Mammy_ (I can’t remember which, but I’m afraid I didn’t like it), and a song I count heavily on: _Carolina in the Morning_. This song is, incidentally, a startling example of how jazz is improving the lyrics, for the majority of jazz songs are not meant primarily for singing, so the balladists take liberties, and not being held to a definite end-rhyme give us “strolling with your girlie when the dew is pearly early in the morning.”[10] The music is clean, rapid, and audacious. It carries the introduction (of the chorus) almost to the point of exhaustion, suspending the resolution of its phrases until the last possible moment, and then lets go, with a vast relief on the long, somewhat yodelly note. Confrey has done the same thing in _Kitten on the Keys_ where one bar is repeated five times with successive tightening of interest.

GEORGE GERSHWIN
]

Two composers are possible successors to Berlin if he ever chooses to stop. I omit Jerome Kern--a consideration of musical style will indicate why. I am sure of Gershwin and would be more sure of Cole Porter if his astonishing lyrics did not so dazzle me as to make me distrust my estimate of his music. Gershwin is in Berlin’s tradition; he has almost all the older man’s qualities as a composer (not as a lyrics writer; nor has he Berlin’s sense of a song on the stage). That is to say, Gershwin is capable of everything, from _Swanee_ to _A Stairway to Paradise_. His sentiment is gentler than Berlin’s, his “attack” more delicate. Delicacy, even dreaminess, is a quality he alone brings into jazz music. And his sense of variation in rhythm, of an oddly placed accent, of emphasis and colour, is impeccable. He isn’t of the stage, yet, so he lacks Berlin’s occasional bright hardness; he never has Berlin’s smartness; and with a greater musical knowledge he seems possessed of an insatiable interest and curiosity. I feel I can bank on him. Banking on Porter is dangerous because essentially he is much more sophisticated in general attitude of mind than any of the others, and although he has written ragtime and patter songs and jazz of exceptional goodness, he has one quality which may bar him forever from the highest place--I mean that he is essentially a parodist. I know of no one else with such a sense for musical styles. A blues, a 1910 rag, a Savoy operetta serio-comic love song, a mother song--he writes them all with a perfect feeling for their musical nature, and almost always with satiric intention, with a touch of parody. It is only the most sophisticated form which is germane to him; in highly complex jazzing he is so much at home, his curiosity is so engaged, he feels the problem so much, that the element of parody diminishes. Yet _The Blue Boy Blues_, almost as intricate a thing as Berlin ever wrote, with a melody overlaid on a running syncopated comment, has a slight touch of parody in the very excess of its skill. Jazz has always mocked itself a little; it is possible that it will divide and follow two strains--the negro and the intellectual. In the second case Porter will be one of its leaders and Whiteman will be his orchestra. The song _Soon_, for example, is a deliberate annihilation of the Southern negro sentiment carefully done by playing Harlem jazz, with a Harlem theme, mercilessly burlesquing the _clichés_ of the Southern song--the Swanee-Mammy element--in favour of a Harlem alley. Porter’s parody is almost too facile; _Soon_ is an exasperatingly good piece of jazz in itself. He is a tireless experimenter, and the fact that in 1923 others are doing things he tried in 1919, makes me wonder whether his excessive intelligence and sophistication may not be pointing a way which steadier and essentially more _native_ jazz writers will presently follow. Native, I mean, to jazz; taking it more seriously. Whether any of them could compose such a ballet as Porter did for the Ballet Suédois is another question.

The other way is still open--the way of Sissle and Blake, of Creamer and Layton, of A. Harrington Gibbs. The last is a name unknown to me ten days before the moment of writing; I do not know if it represents a Southern negro or a Welshman. But--if he has composed anything, if _Runnin’ Wild_ isn’t a direct transcript of a negro devil-tune--he is in the school of the negro composers and he has accomplished wonders already. For _Runnin’ Wild_ is a masterpiece in its _genre_. Note the cleverness of the execution: the melody is virtually without accompaniment; it consists of groups of three notes, the interval of time being simple, and the interval of pitch in the group or between two successive groups, is quite conventional. Once three groups of three notes are played in succession; toward the end the group is twice lengthened to four notes; the orchestra is heard after each group has been sung, giving an unnerving effect of alternating sound and silence. But there is something more: There is the complete evocation of the two negro spirits--the darky (South, slave) and the buck (Harlem); the negro and the nigger. It ends with a shout which is lyrical and ecstatic at once, wild and free. It is an enchantingly gay piece, it expresses its title--one sees our own Gilda Grey stepping out in it bravely; it is, in a way, a summary of the feeling of negro music which _Shuffle Along_ and its followers restored to prominence.

More must be said of the negro side of jazz than I can say here. Its technical interest hasn’t yet been discussed by anyone sufficiently expert and sufficiently enthusiastic at the same time. In words and music the negro side expresses something which underlies a great deal of America--our independence, our carelessness, our frankness, and gaiety. In each of these the negro is more intense than we are, and we surpass him when we combine a more varied and more intelligent life with his instinctive qualities. _Aggravatin’ Papa_ (don’t you try to two-time me) isn’t exactly the American response to a suspected infidelity, yet it is humanly sound, and is only a little more simple and savage than we are. The superb _I’m Just Wild about Harry_ is, actually, closer to the American feeling of 1922 than “I Always dream of Bill”; as expression it is more honest than, say, _Beautiful Garden of Roses_; and _He May be Your Man_ is simply a letting down of our reticences, a frankness beyond us.

I shift between the two teams, Sissle and Blake, Creamer and Layton, uncertain which has most to give. Sissle and Blake wrote _Shuffle Along_; the others accomplished the intricate, puzzling rhythm of _Sweet Angelina_, one or two other songs in _Strut Miss Lizzie_, and _Come Along, I’m through with Worrying_. Of this song a special word can be said. It is based on _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_, and imposes on that melody a negro theme (the shiftlessness and assurance of “bound to live until I die”) and a musical structure similar to that applied to the same original by Anton Dvořak in the _New World Symphony_. I am only a moderate admirer of this work; I am not trying to put _Come Along_ into the same category, for its value is wholly independent of its comparative merits; nor am I claiming that jazz is equal to or greater or less than symphonic music. But I do feel that the treatment of a negro melody, by negroes, to make a popular and beautiful song for Americans ought not to be always neglected, always despised. I say also that our serious composers have missed so much in not seeing what the ragtime composers have done, that (like Lady Bracknell) they ought to be exposed to comment on the platform.

If they cannot hear the almost unearthly cry of the _Beale Street Blues_ I can only be sorry for them; the whole of Handy’s work is melodically of the greatest interest and is to me so versatile, so changing, in quality, that I am incapable of suggesting its elements. Observed in the works of others, the blues retain some of this elusive nature--they are equivocal between simplicity, sadness, irony, and something approaching frenzy. The original negro spiritual has had more respect, but the elements have been sparsely used, and one fancies that even in looking at these our serious composers have felt the presence of a regrettable vulgarity in syncopation and in melodic line. _Jesus Heal’ de Sick_ is negro from the Bahamas; its syncopation, its cry, “Bow low!” are repeated in any number of others; the spirituals themselves were often made out of the common songs in which common feeling rose to intense and poetic expression--as in _Round About de Mountain_, a funeral song with the Resurrection in a magnificent phrase, “An she’ll rise in His arms.” The only place we have these things left, whether you call the present version debased or sophisticated, gain or loss, is in ragtime, in jazz. I do _not_ think that the negro (in African plastic or in American rag) is our salvation. But he has kept alive things without which our lives would be perceptibly meaner, paler, and nearer to atrophy and decay.

I say the negro is not our salvation because with all my feeling for what he instinctively offers, for his desirable indifference to our set of conventions about emotional decency, I am on the side of civilization. To anyone who inherits several thousand centuries of civilization, none of the things the negro offers can matter unless they are apprehended by the mind as well as by the body and the spirit. The beat of the tom-tom affects the feet and the pulse, I am sure; in _Emperor Jones_ the throbbing of the drum affected our minds and our sensibilities at once. There will always exist wayward, instinctive, and primitive geniuses who will affect us directly, without the interposition of the intellect; but if the process of civilization continues (will it? I am not so sure, nor entirely convinced that it should) the greatest art is likely to be that in which an uncorrupted sensibility is _worked_ by a creative intelligence. So far in their music the negroes have given their response to the world with an exceptional naïveté, a directness of expression which has interested _our_ minds as well as touched our emotions; they have shown comparatively little evidence of the functioning of _their_ intelligence. _Runnin’ Wild_, whether it be transposed or transcribed, is singularly instinctive, and instinctively one recognizes it and makes it the musical motif of a gay night. But one falls back on _Pack Up Your Sins_ and _Soon_ as more interesting pieces of music even if one can whistle only the first two bars. (I pass the question of falling farther back, to the music of high seriousness, which is another matter; it is quite possible, however, that the _Sacre du Printemps_ of Strawinsky, to choose an example not unaffected by the jazz age, will outlive the marble monument of the Music Box.)

* * * * *

Nowhere is the failure of the negro to exploit his gifts more obvious than in the use he has made of the jazz orchestra; for although nearly every negro jazz band is better than nearly every white band, no negro band has yet come up to the level of the best white ones, and the leader of the best of all, by a little joke, is called Whiteman. The negro’s instinctive feeling for colourful instruments in the band is marked; he was probably the one to see what could be done with the equivocal voice of the saxophone--a reed in brass, partaking of the qualities of two choirs in the orchestra at once. He saw that it could imitate the voice, and in the person of Miss Florence Mills saw that the voice could equally imitate the saxophone. The shakes, thrills, vibratos, smears, and slides are natural to him, although they produce tones outside the scale, because he has never been tutored into a feeling for perfect tones, as white men have; and he uses these with a great joy in the surprise they give, in the way they adorn or destroy a melody; he is given also to letting instruments follow their own bent, because he has a faultless sense of rhythm and he always comes out right in the end. But this is only the beginning of the jazz band--for its perfection we go afield.

We go farther than Ted Lewis, whom Mr Walter Haviland calls a genius. M Darius Milhaud has told me that the jazz band at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston is one of the best he heard in America, and stranger things have happened. The best of the negro bands (although he is dead, I make exception for that superb 369th Hell-fighters Infantry Band as it was conducted by the lamented Jim Europe) are probably in the neighborhood of 140th street and Lenox avenue in New York and in the negro district of Chicago. Many hotels and night clubs in New York have good jazz bands; I limit myself to three which are representative, and, by their frequent appearances in vaudeville, are familiar. Ted Lewis is one of the three; Vincent Lopez and Paul Whiteman are the others. There is a popular band led by Barney Bernie (as I recall the name, perhaps incorrectly) which is an imitation Ted Lewis, and not a good one. Lewis must be prepared for imitators, for he does with notorious success something that had as well not be done at all. He is totally, but brilliantly, wrong in the use of his materials, for he is doing what he cannot do--_i.e._, trying to make a negro jazz orchestra. It is a good band; like Europe’s, it omits strings; it is quite the noisiest of the orchestras, as that of Lopez is the quietest, and Lewis uses its (and his) talents for the perpetration of a series of musical travesties, jokes, puns, and games. I quote a eulogy by Mr Haviland:[11]

For instance, there is his travesty of the marriage ceremony.
To the jazzed tune of the good old classic “Wedding March”
Lewis puts a snowy, flower-decked bridal veil on the sleek,
pomaded head of the trombone player. He puts it on crooked,
with a scornful flip of his slender, malicious hands. Then
he leads forward the hardest-looking saxophone player, and
pretends to marry “Ham” and “Eggs”--and incidentally draws
the correct conclusion as to marriage as it exists in America
to-day. Perfect satire in less than three minutes.

Well, this is extraordinarily tedious and would be hissed off the stage if it were not for the actual skill Lewis has in effecting amusing orchestra combinations. His own violence, his exaggeration of the temperamental conductor, his nasal voice and lean figure in excessively odd black clothes, his pontificating over the orchestra, his announcement that he is going to murder music--all indicate a lack of appreciation of the medium. He may be a good vaudeville stunt, but he is not a great jazz leader. Again Mr Haviland:

It is not music. It has the form of music, but he has
filled it with energy instead of spirituality. What is the
difference? You’ll understand if you hear his jazz band. It
interprets the American life of to-day; its hard surface, its
scorn of tradition, its repudiation of form, its astonishing
sophistication--and most important, its mechanical, rather
than spiritual civilization.

And again no. Lewis may have a perfectly trained orchestra, but the _sense_ of control which one absolutely requires he does not give. He has violence, not energy, and he cannot interpret those qualities which Mr Haviland so justly discovers as being of our contemporary life because he isn’t hard and scornful and sophisticated himself--he is merely callous to some beauties and afraid of others, and by dint of being in revolt against a serene and classic beauty pays it unconscious tribute. (I fear also that Lewis imagines the “Wedding March” classic in more senses than one.) It may be noted also that the tone of travesty is not correct for contemporary America; we require neither that nor irony. Parody, rising to satire, is our indicated medium--Mr Dooley, not _Ulysses_.

The orchestra of Vincent Lopez I take as an example of the good, workmanlike, competent, inventive, adequate band. It plays at the Hotel Pennsylvania and in vaudeville, and although Lopez lacks the ingenuity of Lewis in sound, he has a greater sense of the capacities of jazz, and instead of doing a jazz wedding he takes the entire score of “that infernal nonsense, _Pinafore_,” cuts it to five characteristic fragments, and jazzes it--shall I say mercilessly or reverently? Because he likes Sullivan and he likes jazz. And the inevitable occurs; _Pinafore_ is good and stands the treatment; jazz is good and loses nothing by this odd application. The orchestra has verve and, not being dominated by an excessive personality, has humour and character of its own. I trust these moderate words will not conceal a vast admiration.

Jim Europe seemed to have a constructive intelligence and, had he lived, I am sure he would have been an even greater conductor than Whiteman. To-day I know of no second to Whiteman in the complete exploitation of jazz. It is a real perfection of the instrument, a mechanically perfect organization which pays for its perfection by losing much of the element of surprise; little is left to hazard and there are no accidents. Whiteman has been clever enough to preserve the sense of impromptu and his principal band--that of the Palais Royal in New York--is so much under control (his and its own) that it can make the slightest variation count for more than all the running away from the beat which is common _chez_ Lewis. Like Karl Muck and Jim Europe, Whiteman is a bit of a _kapellmeister_; his beat is regular or entirely absent; he never plays the music with his hand, or designs the contours of a melody, or otherwise _acts_. I know that people miss these things; I would miss them gladly a thousand times for what Whiteman gives in return. I mean that a sudden bellow or a groan or an improvised cluck is all very well; but the real surprise is constructive, the real thrill is in such a moment as the middle of Whiteman’s performance of _A Stairway to Paradise_ when a genuine Blues occurs. That is real intelligence and the rest--is nowhere. The sleek, dull, rather portly figure stands before his orchestra, sidewise, almost somnolent, and listens. A look of the eye, a twitch of the knee, are his semaphoric signals. Occasionally he picks up a violin and plays a few bars; but the work has been done before and he is there only to know that the results are perfect. And all the time the band is producing music with fervour and accuracy, hard and sensitive at once. All the free, the instinctive, the wild in negro jazz which could be integrated into his music, he has kept; he has added to it, has worked his material, until it runs sweetly in his dynamo, without grinding or scraping. It becomes the machine which conceals machinery. He has arrived at one high point of jazz--the highest until new material in the music is provided for him.

* * * * *

The title of this essay is provoked by that of the best and bitterest attack launched against the ragtime age--Clive Bell’s _Plus de Jazz_. (In _Since Cézanne_.) “No more jazz,” said Mr Bell in 1921, and, “Jazz is dying.” Recalling that Mr Bell is at some pains to dissociate from the movement the greatest of living painters, Picasso; that he concedes to it a great composer, Strawinsky, and T. S. Eliot, whom he calls “about the best of our living poets,” James Joyce whom he wofully underestimates, Virginia Woolf, Cendrars, Picabia, Cocteau, and the musicians of _les six_,--remembering the degree of discrimination and justice which these concessions require, I quote some of the more bitter things about jazz because it would be shirking not to indicate where the answer may lie:

Appropriately it (the jazz movement) took its name from
music--the art that is always behind the times.... Impudence
is its essence--impudence in quite natural and legitimate
revolt against nobility and beauty: impudence which finds its
technical equivalent in syncopation: impudence which rags....
After impudence comes the determination to surprise: you shall
not be gradually moved to the depths, you shall be given such a
start as makes you jigger all over....

... Its fears and dislikes--for instance, its horror of the
noble and the beautiful are childish; and so is its way of
expressing them. Not by irony and sarcasm, but by jeers and
grimaces, does Jazz mark its antipathies. Irony and wit are
for the grown-ups. Jazz dislikes them as much as it dislikes
nobility and beauty. They are the products of the cultivated
intellect and jazz cannot away with intellect or culture....
Nobility, beauty, and intellectual subtlety are alike ruled
out....

... And, of course, it was delightful for those who sat
drinking their cocktails and listening to nigger bands, to be
told that, besides being the jolliest people on earth, they
were the most sensitive and critically gifted. They ... were
the possessors of natural, uncorrupted taste.... Their instinct
might be trusted: so, no more classical concerts and music
lessons....

The encouragement given to fatuous ignorance to swell with
admiration of its own incompetence is perhaps what has turned
most violently so many intelligent and sensitive people against
Jazz. They see that it encourages thousands of the stupid and
vulgar to fancy that they can understand art, and hundreds of
the conceited to imagine that they can create it....

It is understood that Mr Bell is discussing the whole of the jazz movement, not ragtime music alone. I do not wish to go into the other arts, except to say that if he is jazz, then Mr Joyce’s sense of form, his tremendous intellectual grasp of his æsthetic problem, and his solution of that problem, are far more proof than is required of the case for jazz. Similarly for Mr Eliot. It is not exactly horror of the noble that underlies Mr Joyce’s travesty of English prose style, nor is it to Mr Eliot that the reproach about irony and wit is to be made. In music it is of course not impudence, but emphasis (distortion or transposition of emphasis) which finds its technical equivalent in syncopation, for syncopation is a method of rendering an emotion, not an emotion in itself. (Listen to Strawinsky.) Surprise, yes; but in the jazz of Lewis and not in that of Whiteman, which does not jeer or grimace, which has wit and structure--_i.e._, employs the intellect. Nobility--no. But under what compulsion are we always to be noble? The cocktail drinkers may have been told a lot of nonsense about their position as arbiters of the arts; precisely the same nonsense is taught in our schools and preached by belated æsthetes to people whose claims are not a whit better--since it doesn’t matter what their admirers think of themselves--it is what jazz and Rostand and Michelangelo are in themselves that matters. I have used the word art throughout this book in connexion with jazz and jazzy things; if anyone imagines that the word is belittled thereby and can no longer be adequate to the dignity of Leonardo or Shakespeare, I am sorry. I do not think I have given encouragement to “fatuous ignorance” by praising simple and unpretentious things at the expense of the fake and the _faux bon_. I have suggested that people do what they please about the gay arts, about jazz; that they do it with discrimination and without worrying whether it is noble or not, or good form or intellectually right. I am fairly certain that if they are ever actually to see Picasso it will be because they have acquired the habit of seeing--something, anything--without _arrière-pensée_, because they will know what the pleasure is that a work of art can give, even if it be jazz art. Here is Mr Bell’s conclusion, with most of which I agree:

Even to understand art a man must make a great intellectual
effort. One thing is not as good as another; so artists
and amateurs must learn to choose. No easy matter, that:
discrimination of this sort being something altogether
different from telling a Manhattan from a Martini. To select as
an artist or discriminate as a critic are needed feeling and
intellect and--most distressing of all--study. However, unless
I mistake, the effort will be made. The age of easy acceptance
of the first thing that comes is closing. Thought rather than
spirits is required, quality rather than colour, knowledge
rather than irreticence, intellect rather than singularity,
wit rather than romps, precision rather than surprise, dignity
rather than impudence, and lucidity above all things: _plus de
Jazz_.

It is not so written, but it sounds like “Above all things, no more jazz!” A critic who would have hated jazz as bitterly as Mr Bell does, wrote once, alluding to a painter of the second rank:

But, beside those great men, there is a certain number of
artists who have a distinct faculty of their own, by which
they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we
cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in
general culture, and must be interpreted to it by those who
have felt their charm strongly, and are often the objects of a
special diligence and a consideration wholly affectionate, just
because there is not about them the stress of a great name and
authority.

--and beside the great arts there is a certain number of lesser arts which have also a pleasure to give; and if we savour it strongly and honestly we shall lose none of our delight in the others. But if we fear and hate _them_, how shall we go into the Presence?

_Mr Dooley,
Meet Mr Lardner_

MR DOOLEY, MEET MR LARDNER

One of the most illuminating things Van Wyck Brooks ever said, about himself, was that Mr Dooley is already forgotten. It was particularly illuminating because Mr Brooks was in England when he made that statement, and it was some time before 1914--and it happens that it was in England, in 1917 that I was made to understand how living Mr Dooley is, how relevant to affairs and situations of the moment, and how much English men and women consider him as one of the better items in the heritage of Americans. The writer of _The Ordeal of Mark Twain_ is an invaluable critic for America; yet one wishes that he, too, could see Mr Dooley’s place in our literature; one still hopes that he will begin to enjoy Ring Lardner.

The juxtaposition of these two names would be reasonable even if both of them did not write in slang, for one is the greatest of our retired satirists and the other has every chance (if not every intention) of becoming the greatest of our active ones. I should like to say at once that I am not addressing an open letter to Dear Mr Lardner, bidding him, while there is yet time, to think on higher things. I do not want him to forswear for a moment his hold on the popular imagination, nor to write for a more judicious _clientèle_. I am satisfied to have Mr Lardner amuse me; if the strain of satire in him is an accident and he prefers to go on with his slang humour--I can always read Mr Dooley or Dean Swift. But if the growing vein of satire in all of Lardner’s work is what I think it is, he has much to learn from Mr Dooley. I shall presently come to Mr Dooley and indicate what it is Lardner can learn in those beautiful pages; the main thing is that he is probably the only man in America with the capacity of learning the lesson of the master, and happily he can learn it without ceasing for a moment to live in his own world. I do not wish to force upon him the ordeal of being worried about.

There may have been a time when Mr Lardner gave cause for worry. Perhaps when _You Know Me, Al_ had run as long as it needed to run, one might have feared that Mr Lardner, having discovered the American language as his medium, simply didn’t know what to do with it. If his humour was going to depend for ever on “1-sided” and “4-taste” and odd misspellings, it might cease to be funny. It was necessary, in short, that Mr Lardner should have something personal to say. He has answered the question of his future by showing the beginnings of a first-rate satirist, continuing the tradition of Mark Twain and Mr Dooley. And having these tentatives in mind we can begin to look back and wonder whether he wasn’t always something of a satirist, unconsciously.

The dates may confound my argument, so I will omit them; substantially Lardner began writing the letters of a busher just when the more serious magazines were exploiting the intellectual idea of “inside baseball.” Those were the days--and they must have been funny, we feel _circa_ 1923 when the bought and sold world’s series and the letters of the fishing pitcher and suchlike scandal are in our memories, carefully tucked away because the honour of the national game is safe in the hands of a dictator--those were the days when the manager of a baseball team was regarded as a combination of a captain of finance (later events rather justified that assumption) a Freud, and an unborn Einstein. A fine body of college graduates, clean-living, sport-loving, well-read boys were the players; and a sport-loving, game-for-the-game’s sake body of men the enthusiasts. Hughie Fullerton and Paul Elmer More might be seen any day in the same column, and John J. McGraw, who allowed himself to be called Muggsy to show what a good democrat he was, lunched daily at the President’s table. Into this pretentious parade Mr Lardner injected the busher--and baseball has never recovered. The busher was simply a roughneck and a fool, a braggart and a liar; he was on occasions a good ball player, and he seemed to be inflated with the hot air which had been written about him. He pricked the bubble, and I do not wonder that Heywood Broun, despairing of making interesting his accounts of a recent world’s series, publicly prayed to God to change places with him for duration. Nothing short of divine power could save them.

It is a long time since the days of the busher and when Lardner returned to baseball it was clear that the subject interested him in no degree, and that he had changed much as a writer. It is not necessary to belittle the earlier work; only to note that in 1922 the Lardner touch was much more deft, that the language was both richer and more accurate, and that he was continually writing parodies, sometimes of a phrase, often of a whole style. Three or four of the reports he wrote for the New York _American_ were jewels--and, although they had little to do with baseball, they must have been written in the few hours which intervene between the end of a game and the moment of going to press. The whole series of articles ought to be reprinted; I am limited to snatches from two of them. The first set the theme: that Lardner had promised his wife a fur coat from his winnings--he had bet on the Yankees. The headline was

Rings’ Mrs.
_Outa Luck_
On Fur Coat

and then followed:

Well friends you can imagine my surprise and horror when I
found out to-night that the impression had got around some way
another that as soon as this serious was over I was planning
to buy a expensive fur coat for my Mrs. and put a lot of money
into same and buy a coat that would probably run up into
hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

Well I did not mean to give no such kind of a impression and
I certainly hope that my little article was not read that way
by everybody a specially around my little home because in the
first place I am not a sucker enough to invest hundreds and
hundreds of dollars in a garment which the chances are that
the Mrs. will not wear it more than a couple times all winter,
as the way it looks now we are libel to have the most openest
winter in history, and if women folks should walk along the st.
in expensive fur coats in the kind of weather which it looks
like we are going to have, why, they would only be laughed at
and any way I believe a couple can have a whole lot better time
in winter staying home and reading a good book or maybe have a
few friends in to play bridge.

Further and more, I met a man at supper last night that has
been in the fur business all his life and ain’t did nothing you
might say only deal in furs and this man says that they are a
great many furs in this world which is reasonable priced that
has got as much warmth in them as high price furs and looks a
great deal better.

For inst. he says that a man is a sucker to invest thousands
and thousands of dollars in expensive furs like Erminie,
mule-skin, squirrel skin and Kerensky when for a hundred
dollars, or not even that much, why a man can buy a owl skin or
horse skin or weasel skin garment that looks like big dough and
practically prostrates people with the heat when they wear them.

So I hope my readers will put a quietus on the silly rumour
that I am planning to plunge in the fur market. I will see
that my Mrs. is dressed in as warm a style as she has been
accustomed to but neither her or I is the kind that likes to
make a big show and go up and down Fifth ave. sweltering in a
$700 hog-skin garment in order so as people will turn around
and gap at us. Live and let live is my slocum.

If this were not funny its secondary qualities would not be worth noting. The single sentence which makes up the second paragraph is a miracle of condensation, for it contains the whole mind and character of the individual created behind it (it is not Ring Lardner, obviously) and at the same time it is a miracle of the ear, for the rhythm and intonation of the American spoken language is perfectly caught and held in it. What is the use of _Babbitt_ in five hundred pages if we have Lardner in five hundred words? The fur episode was continued two days later, the Yankees continuing to lose and three kittens--“three members of what is sometimes referred to as the feline tribe”--out at Mr Lardner’s “heavily mortgaged home in Great Neck ... is practically doomed you might say ...” because Mr Lardner has met a man “who has did nothing all his life but sell and wear fur coats” and who assured him that catskin garments no bigger than a guest towel were all the rage and had been seen on “some of the best-dressed women in New York strolling up and down Tenth avenue....”

“These 3 little members of the feline tribe is the cutest and best behaved kitties in all catdom, their conduct having always been above reproaches outside of a tendency on the part of Ringer to bite strangers’ knuckles. Nowhere on Long Island is there a more loveable trio of grimalkins, and how it pierces my old heart to think that some day next week these 3 little fellows must be shot down like a dog so as their fur can be fashioned into a warm winter coat for she who their antics has so often caused to screech with laughter.”

The annihilation of the whole Black Beauty-Beautiful Joe style of writing in the last sentence is complete, and is accomplished with the retention of Lardner’s own peculiarities. It may shock Mr Lardner to know that he has done in little what Mr Joyce has done on the grand scale in _Ulysses_.

Indeed I feel that there must be hidden parody in the earlier writings of Mr Lardner, too, because he is so clean in handling it now. Satire in detail he had--there is a dictionary of it in his one word “he-ll.” Elsewhere, in a series later than _You Know Me, Al_ he has described a half-fatuous, half-hardheaded roughneck dragging his silly and scheming wife and sister-in-law through the hotels and apartments of the backwash of society, and the story grew more and more sardonic, more and more entertaining; little of the aimless, sickly, trivial life of the merely prosperous escaped him. Unlike Mr Dooley, his chief concerns were private ones; it is only recently that he has touched upon public affairs. For a long time his only “universal” was baseball--a form of entertainment which now bores him exceedingly. He is also bored, I gather from an interview in the New York _Globe_, with the sort of fiction he has been writing, and amuses himself with writing plays. But as a satirist he is turning slowly towards matters of pith, and the question of his ultimate rank depends on this: Can he, as he broadens out, retain the swift, destructive, and tremendously funny turn of phrase, the hard and resistant mind, the gaiety of spirit which have made him a humorist? Can he, in short, learn from Mr Dooley and remain Mr Lardner? For many reasons I think he can.

Between the busher and these newspaper reports Mr Lardner has written much; among his ephemera, even, there are many pages not to be lost. I shall return to them after drawing a long course with Mr Dooley as my centre, for it is one of the significant things about Mr Dooley that you must always keep him in your eye when you are scanning the horizon for an American satirist.

Mr Dooley was a satirist of the highest order and an excellent humorist. The combination is interesting. Psycho-analysts may determine at a later date that the reason he wrote in dialect was that he was afraid to attack the American people directly; I prefer to believe that the good sense of his creator (Finley Peter Dunne, to be sure; but one always thinks of Martin Dooley in his independent existence) saw that a benevolent humour was the correct medium for a satire adequate to America. And that is America’s good fortune. Read the criticism of American warfare and politics as developed in the satire of Mr Dooley and compare it with the satire of French politics and warfare as expressed in the irony of Anatole France; without measuring the quality of the one by the other, think only that each is _adequate_ to the subject. Less than the bitterness of _Penguin Island_ and the _Histoire contemporaine_ would not have served for France; more than the laughter of Dooley would have been disproportionate and unmanly for us.

Satire is like parody in admitting the integrity of the subject; it is a pruning knife applied for the good of the tree; and irony is a dagger with corrosive poison at the tip. Satire is proper to America because essentially the satirist believes that life is all right, and that only the extravagances and frailties of American life, at the moment of writing, need correction or are subject to mockery. The Frenchman, in a highly organized society, which he takes to be not only the best expression of life, but life itself, turns to irony as his natural mode when he is confronted with the ineluctable vision of its evil.

The danger is, to be sure, that our satirists remain superficial. When the thing is done roughly, without much humour, with no rich sense of the vastness and variety of the comic carnival, we get little more than the eternal “wise crack”; and the wise crack is no more entertaining in misspelled English than it is in capital letters, no more in pidgin than in Yiddish. I do not mean that George Ade and Wallace Irwin and Bill Nye and Montague Glass haven’t each a special quality which makes for amusement; I do mean that they lack the great general qualities of knowing and understanding which create humour. An illustration will do more than any defining to make the difference clear. The Japanese Schoolboy used to begin his letters, “To Hon. Editor” and Ring Lardner is, I suppose, the only man in America who can begin, “Well, friends....”