Sooner or later the critic who wishes to be taken seriously must say his
word about Derain. It is an alarming enterprise. Not only does he run a
considerable risk of making himself absurd, he may make a formidable
and contemptuous enemy as well. "On ne peut pas me laisser tranquille!"
grumbles Derain; to which the only reply I can think of is--"on ne peut
pas."
Derain is now the greatest power amongst young French painters. I would
like to lay stress on the words "power" and "French," because I do not
wish to say, what may nevertheless be true, that Derain is the greatest
painter in France, or seemingly to forget that Picasso's is the
paramount influence in Europe. For all their abjurations most of the
younger and more intelligent foreigners, within and without the gates of
Paris, know well enough that Picasso is still their animator. Wherever a
trace of Cubism or of _tête-de-nègre_, or of that thin, anxious line of
the "blue period" is still to be found, there the ferment of his unquiet
spirit is at work. And I believe it is in revolt against, perhaps in
terror of, this profoundly un-French spirit that the younger Frenchmen
are seeking shelter and grace under the vast though unconscious
nationalism of Derain.
For the French have never loved Cubism, though Braque uses it
beautifully. How should they love anything so uncongenial to their
temperament? How should that race which above all others understands and
revels in life care for an art of abstractions? How, having raised good
sense to the power of genius, should France quite approve æsthetic
fanaticism? What would Poussin have said to so passionate a negation of
common sense? Well, happily, we know the opinion of Molière:
La parfaite raison fuit toute extrémité,
Et veut que l'on soit sage avec sobriété.
Did ever Frenchmen sympathize absolutely with Don Quixote? At any rate,
because at the very base of his civilization lies that marvellous sense
of social relations and human solidarity, a French artist will never
feel entirely satisfied unless he can believe that his art is somehow
related to, and justified by, Life.
Now, Picasso is not Spanish for nothing. He is a mystic; which, of
course, does not prevent him being a remarkably gay and competent man of
the world. Amateurs who knew him in old days are sometimes surprised to
find Picasso now in a comfortable flat or staying at the Savoy. I should
not be surprised to hear of him in a Kaffir kraal or at Buckingham
Palace, and wherever he might be I should know that under that urbane
and slightly quizzical surface still would be kicking and struggling the
tireless problem. That problem his circumstances cannot touch. It has
nothing to do with Life; for not only was Picasso never satisfied with a
line that did not seem right in the eyes of God--of the God that is in
him, I mean--but never would it occur to him that a line could be right
in any other way. For him Life proves nothing and signifies not much;
it is the raw material of art. His problem is within; for ever he is
straining and compelling his instrument to sing in unison with that
pitiless voice which in El Greco's day they called the voice of God.
Derain's problem is different, and perhaps more exacting still.
It seems odd, I know, but I think it is true to say that Derain's
influence over the younger Frenchmen depends as much on his personality
as on his pictures. Partly this may be because his pictures are not much
to be seen; for he is neither prolific not particularly diligent, and
always there are half a dozen hungry dealers waiting to snap up whatever
he may contrive to finish. But clearly this is not explanation enough,
and to appreciate Derain's position in Paris one should be, what
unluckily I am not, a psychologist. One should be able to understand why
his pictures are imitated hardly at all, and why his good opinion is
coveted; why young painters want to know what Derain thinks and feels,
not only about their art, but about art in general, and even about life;
and why instinctively they pay him this compliment of supposing that he
does not wish them simply to paint as he paints. What is it Derain wants
of them? I shall be satisfied, and a good deal surprised, if I can
discover even what he wants of himself.
A year or two ago it was the fashion to insist on Derain's descent from
the Italian Primitives: I insisted with the rest. But as he matures his
French blood asserts more and more its sovranty, and now completely
dominates the other elements in his art. Assuredly he is in the great
European tradition, but specifically he is of the French: Chardin,
Watteau, and Poussin are his direct ancestors. Of Poussin no one who saw
_La Boutique Fantasque_ will have forgotten how it made one think. No
one will have forgotten the grave beauty of those sober greys, greens,
browns, and blues. They made one think of Poussin, and of Racine, too.
And yet the ballet was intensely modern; always you were aware that
Derain had been right through the movement--through Fauvism, Negroism,
Cubism. Here was an artist who had refused nothing and feared nothing.
Could anyone be less of a reactionary and at the same time less of
an anarchist? And, I will add, could anyone be less _gavroche_? _La
Boutique Fantasque_, which is not only the most amusing, but the most
beautiful, of Russian ballets, balances on a discord. Even the fun of
Derain is not the essentially modern fun of Massine. Derain is neither
flippant nor exasperated; he is humorous, and tragic sometimes.
English criticism is puzzled by Derain because very often it is
confronted by things of his which seem dull and commonplace, to English
critics. These are, in fact, the protests of Derain's genius against
his talent, and whether they are good or not I cannot say. Derain has a
super-natural gift for making things: give him a tin kettle and in half
a morning he will hammer you out a Summerian head; he has the fingers
of a pianist, an aptitude that brings beauty to life with a turn of the
wrist; in a word, that sensibility of touch which keeps an ordinary
craftsman happy for a lifetime: and these things terrify him. He ties
both hands behind his back and fights so. Deliberately he chooses the
most commonplace aspects and the most unlovely means of expression,
hoping that, talent thus bound, genius will be stung into action.
Sometimes, no doubt, Achilles stays sulking in his tent. I suppose
Derain can be dull.
But what does he want this genius of his to do? Nothing less, I
believe, than what the French genius did at its supreme moment, in the
seventeenth century, what the Greek did in the fifth. My notion is that
he wants to create art which shall be perfectly uncompromising and at
the same time human, and he would like it none the worse, I dare say,
were it to turn out popular as well. After all, Racine did this, and
Molière and La Bruyère and Watteau and Chardin and Renoir. It is in the
French tradition to believe that there is a beauty common to life and
art. The Greeks had it, so runs the argument, and the Italians of the
high renaissance, but the English poets tended to sacrifice art to
beauty, and the moderns--so Derain may think--sacrifice beauty and
grandeur to discretion. The motto "Safety first" did, I will confess,
just float across my eyes as I walked through the last _salon
d'automne_. And, then, Derain may feel that there is in him something
besides his power of creation and sense of form, something which
philosophers would call, I dare say, a sense of absolute beauty in
things, of external harmony. However we may call it, what I mean is the
one thing at all worth having which the Greeks had and the Byzantines
had not, which Raphael possesses more abundantly than Giotto. In Derain
this sense is alive and insistent; it is urging him always to capture
something that is outside him; the question is, can he, without for one
moment compromising the purity of his art, obey it? I do not know. But
if he cannot, then there is no man alive to give this age what Phidias,
Giorgione, and Watteau gave theirs.
The French are not unwilling to believe that they are the heirs of
Greece and Rome. So, if I am right, the extraordinary influence of
Derain may be accounted for partly, at any rate, by the fact that he,
above all living Frenchmen, has the art to mould, in the materials of
his age, a vessel that might contain the grand classical tradition. What
is more, it is he, if anyone, who has the strength to fill it. No one
who ever met him but was impressed by the prodigious force of his
character and his capacity for standing alone. At moments he reminds one
oddly of Johnson. He, too, is a dictator, at once humorous and tragic
like the mirific doctor, but, unlike him, infinitely subtle. He, too, is
troubled, and not by any sense of isolation nor yet by the gnawings of
vanity and small ambition. It is the problem that tortures him. Can he
do what Raphael and Racine did? Can he create something that shall be
uncompromising as art and at the same time humane?
Face to face with that problem Derain stands for what is to-day most
vital and valid in France--a passionate love of the great tradition,
a longing for order and the will to win it, and that mysterious thing
which the Athenians called [Greek: _spoudiotês_]; and schoolmasters call
"high seriousness." He accepts the age into which he has stumbled with
all its nastiness, vulgarity, and cheek. He accepts that woebegone,
modern democracy which could not even make its great war fine. He
believes he can make something of it. Because he has a first-rate
intellect he can afford to mistrust reason; and so sure is he of his own
taste that he can brush refinement aside. Yet neither his scepticisms
nor his superstitions alienate the intelligent, nor are the sensitive
offended by his total disregard of their distinctions. And though all
this has nothing to do with painting, on painters, I surmise, it has its
effect.
"PLUS DE JAZZ" [Y]
[Footnote Y: 1921]
On the first night of the Russian ballet in Paris, somewhere about the
middle of May, perhaps the best painter in France, one of the best
musicians, and an obscure journalist were sitting in a small _bistrot_
on the Boulevard St. Germain. They should all have been at the
spectacle; all had promised to go; and yet they sat on over their
_alcools_ and _bocks_, and instead of going to the ballet began to abuse
it. And from the ballet they passed to modern music in general, and from
music to literature: till gradually into the conversation came, above
the familiar note of easy denigration, a note of energy, of conviction,
of aspiration, which so greatly astonished one, at least, of the three
that, just before two o'clock--the hour at which the patron puts even
his most faithful clients out of doors--he exclaimed, with an emphasis
in him uncommon, "Plus de Jazz!"
It was the least important of the three who said it, and, had it been
the most, I am not suggesting that, like the walls of Jericho, a
movement would have tottered at an ejaculation. Jazz will not die
because a few clever people have discovered that they are getting sick
of it; Jazz is dying, and the conversation to which I have referred is
of importance only as an early recognition of the fact. For the rest it
was unjust, as such conversations will be; the Jazz movement, short and
slightly irritating though it was, having served its turn and added its
quota to the tradition. But Jazz is dead--or dying, at any rate--and the
moment has come for someone who likes to fancy himself wider awake
than his fellows to write its obituary notice. In doing so he may,
adventitiously, throw light on something more interesting than the
past; he may adumbrate the outline of the coming movement. For always
movements are conditioned partly by their predecessors, against which,
in some sort, they must ever be reactions.
The Jazz movement is a ripple on a wave; the wave--the large movement
which began at the end of the nineteenth century in a reaction against
realism and scientific paganism--still goes forward. The wave is
essentially the movement which one tends to associate, not very
accurately perhaps, with the name of Cézanne: it has nothing to do with
Jazz; its most characteristic manifestation is modern painting, which,
be it noted, Jazz had left almost untouched. "Picasso?" queries someone.
I shall come to Picasso presently. The great modern painters--Derain,
Matisse, Picasso, Bonnard, Friesz, Braque, etc.--were firmly settled on
their own lines of development before ever Jazz was heard of: only the
riff-raff has been affected. Italian Futurism is the nearest approach to
a pictorial expression of the Jazz spirit.
The movement bounced into the world somewhere about the year 1911.
It was headed by a Jazz band and a troupe of niggers, dancing.
Appropriately it took its name from music--the art that is always behind
the times. Gavroche was killed on the barricades, and it was with
his name that Jazz should have been associated. 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. "The Ragtime movement" would have
been the better style, but the word "Jazz" has passed into at least
three languages, and now we must make the best of it.
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. And from this determination issues the grateful
corollary--thou shalt not be tedious. The best Jazz artists are never
long-winded. In their admirable and urbane brevity they remind one
rather of the French eighteenth century. But surprise is an essential
ingredient. An accomplished Jazz artist, whether in notes or words,
will contrive, as a rule, to stop just where you expected him to begin.
Themes and ideas are not to be developed; to say all one has to say
smells of the school, and may be a bore, and--between you and me--a
"giveaway" to boot. Lastly, it must be admitted there is a typically
modern craving for small profits and quick returns. Jazz art is soon
created, soon liked, and soon forgotten. It is the movement of masters
of eighteen; and these masterpieces created by boys barely escaped from
college can be appreciated by the youngest Argentine beauty at the Ritz.
Jazz is very young: like short skirts, it suits thin, girlish legs,
but has a slightly humiliating effect on grey hairs. 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. Niggers can be admired
artists without any gifts more singular than high spirits; so why drag
in the intellect? Besides, to bring intellect into art is to invite home
a guest who is apt to be inquisitive and even impartial. Intellect in
Jazz circles is treated rather as money was once in polite society--it
is taken for granted. Nobility, beauty, and intellectual subtlety are
alike ruled out: the first two are held up to ridicule, the last is
simply abused. What Jazz wants are romps and fun, and to make fun; that
is why, as I have said, its original name Ragtime was the better. At its
best Jazz rags every thing.
The inspiration of Jazz is the same as that of the art of the _grand
siècle_. Everyone knows how in the age of Louis XIV artists found in
_la bonne compagnie_ their standards, their critics, and many of their
ideas. It was by studying and writing for this world that Racine,
Molière, and Boileau gave an easier and less professional gait to French
literature, which--we should not forget--during its most glorious period
was conditioned and severely limited by the tastes and prejudices of
polite society. Whether the inventors of Jazz thought that, in their
pursuit of beauty and intensity, the artists of the nineteenth century
had strayed too far from the tastes and interests of common but
well-to-do humanity I know not, but certain it is that, like Racine and
Molière, and unlike Beaudelaire and Mallarmé and César Franck, they
went to _la bonne compagnie_ for inspiration and support. _La bonne
compagnie_ they found in the lounges of great hotels, on transatlantic
liners, in _wagons-lits_, in music-halls, and in expensive motor-cars
and restaurants. _La bonne compagnie_ was dancing one-steps to ragtime
music. This, they said, is the thing. The artists of the nineteenth
century had found _la bonne compagnie_--the rich, that is to
say--dancing waltzes to sentimental _Olgas_ and _Blue Danubes_, but they
had drawn quite other conclusions. Yet waltzes and waltz-tunes are just
as good as, and no better than, fox-trots and ragtime. Both have their
merits; but it is a mistake, perhaps, for artists to take either
seriously.
Be that as it may, the serious artists of the nineteenth century never
dreamed of supposing that the pleasures of the rich were the proper
stuff of art; so it was only natural that the twentieth should go to the
hotel lounges for inspiration. 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, along with the children and
savages whom in so many ways they resembled, were the possessors of
natural, uncorrupted taste. They first had appreciated ragtime and
surrendered themselves to the compelling qualities of Jazz. Their
instinct might be trusted: so, no more classical concerts and
music-lessons; no more getting Lycidas by heart; no more Bædeker; no
more cricking one's neck in the Sistine Chapel: unless the coloured
gentleman who leads the band at the Savoy has a natural leaning towards
these things you may depend upon it they are noble, pompous, and
fraudulent. And it was delightful, too, for people without a vestige of
talent--and even then these were in the majority--people who could just
strum a tune or string a few lines of doggerel, to be told that all
that distinguishes what used to be called "serious art" from their
productions was of no consequence whatever, and that, on the contrary,
it was these, if any, that ought to be taken seriously. The output of
verse, which was manifestly much too easy to write and difficult to
read, went up suddenly by leaps and bounds. What is more, some of it got
printed: publishers, and even editors, bowed the knee. Naturally, the
movement was a success at the Ritz and in Grub Street, Mayfair. On the
other hand, because to people who reflected for an instant it seemed
highly improbable that fox-trotters and shimmy-shakers were sensitive or
interesting people, that Christy Minstrels were great musicians, or
that pub-crawlers and _demi-mondaines_ were poets, there sprang
simultaneously into existence a respectable, intelligent, and
ill-tempered opposition which did, and continues to do, gross injustice
to the genuine artists who have drawn inspiration, or sustenance at any
rate, from Jazz.
During the last ten years Jazz had dominated music and coloured
literature: on painting, as I have said, its effect has been negligible.
What, for want of a better name, I must call the Cézanne movement was
too profound a stream to be modified by so shallow a current. All the
great contemporary painters are extremely serious; they make no faces at
their predecessors, or at anyone else. They are not _gavroche_. Surprise
is the last emotion they wish to arouse. And, assuredly, they have
neither gone to the hotel-loungers for inspiration nor shown the
slightest desire to amuse them. This is as true of Picasso as of
Derain: only, Picasso's prodigious inventiveness may sometimes give the
impression of a will to surprise, while his habit of turning everything
to account certainly does lead him to cast an inquisitive eye on every
new manifestation of vitality. I have seen him enthusiastic over _la
politique_ Lloyd-George, and I should not be in the least surprised if
he found something in it to serve some one or other of his multifarious
purposes. If, however, surprise were what Picasso aimed at he could go a
very much easier way about it. He could do what his tenth-rate imitators
try to do--for instance, he could agreeably shock the public with
monstrous caricatures and cubist photography--those pictures, I mean,
which the honest stockbroker recognizes, with a thrill of excitement at
his own cleverness, as his favourite picture-postcards rigged out to
look naughty. But Picasso shows such admirable indifference to the
public that you could never guess from his pictures that such a thing
existed: and that, of course, is how it should be. He never startles for
the sake of startling; neither does he mock. Certainly, unlike the best
of his contemporaries, he seems almost as indifferent to the tradition
as he is to the public; but he no more laughs at the one than he tries
to startle the other. Only amongst the whipper-snappers of painting
will you discover a will to affront tradition, or attract attention by
deliberate eccentricity. Only, I think, the Italian Futurists, their
transalpine apes, a few revolutionaries on principle, but especially
the Futurists with their electric-lit presentation of the more obvious
peculiarities of contemporary life and their taste for popular
actualities can be said definitely to have attempted a pictorial
expression of Jazz.
On music, however, and literature its influence has been great, and here
its triumphs are considerable. It is easy to say that the genius of
Stravinsky--a musician, unless I mistake, of the first order and in the
great line--rises superior to movements. To be sure it does: so does
the genius of Molière. But just as the genius of Molière found its
appropriate food in one kind of civilization, so does the genius
of Stravinsky in another; and with that civilization his art must
inevitably be associated. Technically, too, he has been influenced much
by nigger rhythms and nigger methods. He has composed ragtimes. So, if
it is inexact to say that Stravinsky writes Jazz, it is true to say that
his genius has been nourished by it. Also, he sounds a note of defiance,
and sometimes, I think, does evince a will to insult. That he surprises
and startles is clear; what is more, I believe he means to do it: but
tricks of self-advertisement are, of course, beneath so genuine an
artist. No more than Picasso does he seek small profits or quick
returns; on the contrary, he casts his bread upon the waters with a
finely reckless gesture. The fact is, Stravinsky is too big to be
covered by a label; but I think the Jazz movement has as much right
to claim him for its own as any movement has to claim any first-rate
artist. Similarly, it may claim Mr. T.S. Eliot--a poet of uncommon merit
and unmistakably in the great line--whose agonizing labours seem to have
been eased somewhat by the comfortable ministrations of a black and
grinning muse. Midwifery, to be sure, seems an odd occupation for a lady
whom one pictures rather in the rôle of a flapper: but a midwife
was what the poet needed, and in that capacity she has served him.
Apparently it is only by adopting a demurely irreverent attitude, by
being primly insolent, and by playing the devil with the instrument of
Shakespeare and Milton that Mr. Eliot is able occasionally to deliver
himself of one of those complicated and remarkable imaginings of his:
apparently it is only in language of an exquisite purity so far as
material goes, but twisted and ragged out of easy recognition, that
these nurslings can be swathed. As for surprise, that, presumably, is an
emotion which the author of _Ara Vos Prec_ is not unwilling to provoke.
Be that as it may, Mr. Eliot is about the best of our living poets, and,
like Stravinsky, he is as much a product of the Jazz movement as so good
an artist can be of any.
In literature Jazz manifests itself both formally and in
content. Formally its distinctive characteristic is the familiar
one--syncopation. It has given us a ragtime literature which flouts
traditional rhythms and sequences and grammar and logic. In verse its
products--rhythms which are often indistinguishable from prose rhythms
and collocations of words to which sometimes is assignable no exact
intellectual significance--are by now familiar to all who read. Eliot is
too personal to be typical of anything, and the student who would get a
fair idea of Jazz poetry would do better to spend half an hour with a
volume of Cocteau or Cendrars. In prose I think Mr. Joyce will serve as
a, perhaps, not very good example: I choose him because he is probably
better known to readers than any other writer who affects similar
methods. In his later publications Mr. Joyce does deliberately go to
work to break up the traditional sentence, throwing overboard sequence,
syntax, and, indeed, most of those conventions which men habitually
employ for the exchange of precise ideas. Effectually, and with a will,
he rags the literary instrument: unluckily, this will has at its service
talents which though genuine are moderate only. A writer of greater
gifts, Virginia Woolf, has lately developed a taste for playing tricks
with traditional constructions. Certainly she "leaves out" with the
boldest of them: here is syncopation if you like it. I am not sure that
I do. At least, I doubt whether the concentration gained by her new
style for _An Unwritten Novel_ and _Monday or Tuesday_ makes up for the
loss of those exquisite but old-fashioned qualities which make _The Mark
on the Wall_ a masterpiece of English prose. But, indeed, I do not think
of Mrs. Woolf as belonging properly to the movement; she is not imbued
with that spirit which inspires the authentic Jazz writers, whether of
verse that looks oddly like prose or of prose that raises a false hope
of turning out to be verse, and conditions all that they produce. She
is not _gavroche_. In her writings I find no implicit, and often
well-merited, jeer at accepted ideas of what prose and verse should
be and what they should be about; no nervous dislike of traditional
valuations, of scholarship, culture, and intellectualism; above all, no
note of protest against the notion that one idea or emotion can be more
important or significant than another. Assuredly, Mrs. Woolf is not
of the company on whose banner is inscribed "No discrimination!" "No
culture!" "Not much thought!" She is not of that school whose grand
object it is to present, as surprisingly as possible, the chaos of any
mind at any given moment.
The Jazz theory of art, if theory there be, seems stupid enough--as do
most. What matters, however, are not theories, but works: so what of the
works of Jazz? If Stravinsky is to be claimed for the movement, Jazz has
its master: it has also its _petits maîtres_--Eliot, Cendrars, Picabia,
and Joyce, for instance, and _les six_. Oddly enough, _les six_ consist
of four musicians--Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Poulenc, and Germaine
Taillefer [Z]--chaperoned by the brilliant Jean Cocteau. All five have
their places in contemporary civilization: and such talents are not to
be disposed of simply by the present of a bad name. For it is not
enough to call an artist "extremist" or "reactionary," "Cubist"
or "Impressionist," and condemn or approve him as such. These
classifications are merely journalistic or, if you will, archæological
conveniences. It is the critic's business to inquire not so much whether
an artist is "advanced" or "Cubist" or "Jazz," as whether he is good,
bad, or interesting; and that is what most critics fail to do. One's
general opinion of a movement or school ought not to affect one's
opinion of any particular work. One may, for excellent reasons, dislike
a movement; one may hold that it hampers or sets on a false scent more
artists than it serves; that it induces students of promise to waste
time and energy on fruitless problems; that it generally fails to
get the best out of its most gifted adherents, while it pumps into a
multitude of empty heads so much hot air as to swell them to disquieting
proportions. This is pretty much what I think of Cubism; but I am not
such a fool as to deny that, experimenting in these very problems which
seem to me to lead most artists into a rather unprofitable world of
abstractions, Picasso and Braque have produced works of the greatest
beauty and significance, while those of Fernand Léger, Jean Metsinger,
and other avowed Cubists are of extraordinary merit and deserve the most
careful attention. I can think of no movement except that called "Art
nouveau," which has not contributed something to the world's artistic
capital and to the great tradition. Only, to realize this, one must be
able to distinguish not only between movements, but between the artists
of a movement. That is what angry critics will not do. That is why the
admirable Mr. Dent--whose brilliant lacerations of _les six_, and other
exponents of Jazz, I sometimes have the pleasure of translating to his
victims--knew no better, the other day, than to bracket Poulenc with
Miss Edith Sitwell. Confusions of this sort seem to me to take the sting
out of criticism; and that, I am sure, is the last thing Mr. Dent would
wish to do. He, at any rate, who comes to bury Jazz should realize
what the movement has to its credit, _viz._, one great musician, one
considerable poet, ten or a dozen charming or interesting little masters
and mistresses, and a swarm of utterly fatuous creatures who in all good
faith believe themselves Artists.
[Footnote Z: Honegger, I think, was never officially of the band.]
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. All the girls in the "dancings" and sportsmen at the bar who
like a fox-trot or a maxixe have been given to believe, by people who
ought to know better, that they are more sensitive to music than those
who prefer Beethoven. The fact that Stravinsky wants his music to be
enjoyed in the cafés gives pub-loafers fair ground for supposing that
Stravinsky respects their judgement. Well, the music of Brahms is not
enjoyed by pub-loafers; but formerly the concert-goers were allowed to
know better. Stravinsky is reported to have said that he would like
people to be eating, drinking, and talking while his music was being
played (how furious he would be if they did anything of the sort!), so,
when a boxful of bounders begin chattering in the middle of an opera
and the cultivated cry "hush" the inference is that the cultivated are
making themselves ridiculous. Again: if rules were made by pedants for
pedants, must not mere lawlessness be a virtue? And, since savages think
little and know less, and since savage art has been extolled by the
knowing ones (I take my share of whatever blame may be going) as much
as "cultured" has been decried does it not follow that ignorant and
high-spirited lads are likely to write better verses than such erudite
old buffers as Milton, Spenser, and Gray? Above all, because it has been
said that the intellect has nothing to do with art, it is assumed by the
mob of ladies and gentlemen, who if they wrote not with ease could not
write at all, that there is no such thing as the artistic problem. And
it is, I believe, chiefly because all genuine artists are beginning to
feel more and more acutely the need of a severe and exacting problem,
and because everyone who cares seriously for art feels the need of
severe critical standards, that, with a sigh of relief, people are
timidly murmuring to each other "Plus de Jazz!"
And, indeed, there are autumnal indications: the gay _papier-maché_
pagoda is beginning to lose its colours: visibly it is wilting. When,
a few days after the conversation I have recorded, it was rumoured in
Paris that the admired Prokofieff, composer of _Chout_, had said that
he detested ragtime, the consternation into which were thrown some
fashionable bars and _salons_ was as painful to behold as must have been
that into which were thrown parlours and vicarage gardens when Professor
Huxley began pouring cold water on Noah's Ark. We hurried away to the
Southern Syncopated Orchestra, only to find it sadly fallen off. But had
it really changed so much as we? And, more and more, immense musical and
literary activity notwithstanding, people are looking to the painters,
with their high seriousness, professionalism, conscience, reverence, and
vitality as the sole exponents and saviours of "le grand art." Not for
nothing is Derain the most admired of Frenchmen by the young _élite_;
for Derain is humorous without being _gavroche_, respects the tradition
yet is subservient to no school, and believes that all the highest human
faculties are not more than sufficient to the production of the smallest
work of art.
What the pick of the new generation in France, and in England too, I
fancy, is beginning to feel is that art, though it need never be solemn,
must always be serious; that it is a matter of profound emotion and of
intense and passionate thought; and that these things are rarely found
in dancing-palaces and hotel lounges. 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_. Meanwhile, whether the ladies and gentlemen in the restaurants
will soon be preferring sentimental waltz-tunes to flippant ragtimes
is a question on which I cannot pretend to an opinion. Neither does it
matter. What these people like or dislike has nothing to do with art.
That is the discovery.