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 siecle.  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, Moliere, 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 Moliere, and unlike Beaudelaire and Mallarme and Cesar 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.