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 maitres—­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, archaeological 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 Leger, 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.