Transcriber’s Note

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The 7 Lively
Arts
by
Gilbert Seldes

The Custodians of the Keystone. By Ralph Barton

THE SEVEN
LIVELY ARTS

By
Gilbert Seldes

“... 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.”

—Walter Pater

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXXIV

THE SEVEN LIVELY ARTS
Copyright, 1924
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U. S. A.
First Edition
B-Y

TO MY FATHER

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTE

This book was written while on holiday some three thousand miles away from data, documents, and means of verification. It is written from memory and, although I have had time and have tried to check up, I feel sure that the safest thing is to let it go as cautious merchants do when they send out statements—with the caveat: E. and O. E.—errors and omissions excepted. I haven’t tried to write a history of any of the lively arts, nor intended to mention all of those who practice them. I should, however, feel sorry if I have omitted anyone who has given me intense pleasure, even though the omission has not, in any way, the countenance of a slur.

Everything else that properly belongs in a preface has found its way into the two chapters: The Great God Bogus and Before a Picture by Picasso—and the acknowledgments are numerous and serious enough to need a place for themselves in the appendix.

G. S.

Ile St Louis — New York City
March 1923 — February 1924

The Keystone the
Builders Rejected

THE KEYSTONE THE BUILDERS REJECTED

For fifteen years there has existed in the United States, and in the United States alone, a form of entertainment which, seemingly without sources in the past, restored to us a kind of laughter almost unheard in modern times. It came into being by accident; it had no pretensions to art. For ten years or more it added an element of cheerful madness to the lives of millions and was despised and rejected by people of culture and intelligence. Suddenly—suddenly as it appeared to them—a great genius arose and the people of culture conceded that in his case, but in his case alone, art existed in slap-stick comedy; they did not remove their non expedit from the form itself.

Perhaps only those of us who care for the rest know how good Charlie is. Perhaps only the inexpressive multitudes who have laughed and not wondered why they laughed can know how fine slap-stick is. For myself, I have had no greater entertainment than these dear and preposterous comedies, and all I can do is remember. The long, dark, narrow passage set out with uncomfortable chairs; the sharp almond odours, the sense of uncertainty, and the questionable piano; and then upon the screen, in a drab grey and white, jiggling insecurely, something strange and wonderful occurred. It was mingled with dull and stupid things; but it had a fire, a driving energy of its own—and it was funny! Against all our inhibitions and habits it played games with men and women; it made them ridiculous and mad; it seemed to have no connexion with the logic of human events, trusting to an undecipherable logic of its own. A few scholars found the commedia dell’arte living again; a few artists saw that the galvanic gestures and movements were creating fresh lines and interesting angles. And a nation cared for them intensely until the remorseless hostility of the genteel began to corrupt the purity of slap-stick. That is where we are now: too early to write an epitaph—late enough to pay a tribute.

Lest the year 1914 should be not otherwise distinguished in history, it may be recorded that it was then, or a year earlier, or possibly a year later, that the turning point came in the history of the American moving picture. The first of the great mergers arrived—an event not unforeseen in itself, a “logical development” the press agents called it—seeming to establish the picture as a definitely accepted form of entertainment. It was a moment when a good critic might have foretold the course of the moving picture during the next decade, for at that time the Triangle of Fine Arts (D. W. Griffith), Kay-Bee (Thomas H. Ince), and Keystone (Mack Sennett) was formed. Two of these names were already known, and of the two one was to become, for a time, the most notable name in the profession; the third was hidden behind the obscure symbol of the Keystone; it represented one who had acted in, and was now directing, the most despised, and by all odds the most interesting, films produced in America. Mr Griffith was already entered on that road which has since ruined him as a director; he was producing Intolerance, and, if I may borrow a phrase from the Shuberts, his personal supervision was not always given to the Triangle-Fine Arts releases; Mr Ince was presently to meditate upon the possibility of joining the word “super” to the word “spectacle,” thus creating the word “superspectacle”; and Mr Sennett—by a process of exclusion one always arrives at Mr Sennett. He is the Keystone the builders rejected.

I know nothing more doleful as a subject of conversation than the social-economics of the moving picture; what was remarkable about the Triangle was not its new method of distribution, its new hold on the timid exhibitor, or its capacity for making or losing fortunes. The thing to note is that the two “serious” producers, and the hard-headed business men who invested money in their efforts, thought it well to associate with themselves the best producer of vulgar slap-stick comedy. More than that, they combined in a peculiar ratio for the scheme provided that there was to be released each week either a Fine Arts or an Ince picture; and that with each of these was to be shown a Keystone comedy. So that those who were perpetually being caught in the rain, or missing the eleven-o’clock from Philadelphia to New York, saw twice as many Keystone comedies as (a) Fine Arts or (b) Kay-Bee releases. The recent all-hailing of Mr Chaplin as an artist because of his work in The Kid, the bright young reputations of Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, indicate that most critics of the moving picture caught the train and missed the shower. They certainly missed the comedies; for the Fine Arts and Ince pictures were in their time the best pictures produced; and the Keystone comedies were consistently and almost without exception better.

This is not the place to discuss the shortcomings of the feature film; for the moment, let the dreadful opulent gentility of a Cecil De Mille production serve only to sharpen the saucy gaiety of the comic, the dulness of a Universal set off the revelry of slap-stick. There is one serious point which a good critic (Aristotle, for example) would have discovered when he regarded the screen as long ago as 1914 and became aware of the superiority of the comic films. He would have seen at once that while Mr Griffith and Mr Ince were both developing the technique of the moving picture, they were exploiting their discoveries with materials equally or better suited to another medium: the stage or the dime novel or whatever. Whereas Mr Sennett was already so enamoured of his craft that he was doing with the instruments of the moving picture precisely those things which were best suited to it—those things which could not be done with any instrument but the camera, and could appear nowhere if not on the screen.

This does not mean that nothing but slap-stick comedy is proper to the cinema; it means only that everything in slap-stick is cinematographic; and since perceiving a delicate adjustment of means to end, or a proper relation between method and material, is a source of pleasure, Mr Sennett’s developments were more capable of pleasing the judicious than those of either of his two fellow-workers. The highly logical humanist critic of the films could have foreseen in 1914—without the decade of trial and error which has intervened—what we see now: that the one field in which the picture would most notably declare itself a failure would be that of the drama (Elinor Glyn-Cecil De Mille-Gilbert Parker, in short). Without a moment’s hesitation he would have put his finger on those two elements in the cinema which, being theoretically sound, had a chance of practical success: the spectacle (including the spectacular melodrama) and the grotesque comedy. Several years later he would have added one word more, that grotesque tragedy might conceivably succeed. For it is not only the fun in the Keystones which makes them successful: it is the method of presentation.

The rightness of the spectacle film is implicit in its name: the screen is a place on which things can be seen, and so long as a film depends upon the eye it is right for the screen—and whether it is right in any other regard depends upon taste and judgment and skill. Omit as irrelevant the news reels, animated cartoons, educational and travel films—all of them good; omit equally those printed jokes and clippings from the Literary Digest which are at once the greatest trial and error of the screen. What remains? The feature film and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. This—the only film of high fantasy I have ever seen—is the seeming exception which proves the rule, since it owes its success to the skilfully concealed exploitation of the materials and technique of the spectacle and of the comic film, and not to the dramatic quality of its story. The studio settings in distortion represent the spectacle; they are variations of scenery or “location”; the chase over the roofs is a psychological parallel to the Keystone cops; and the weak moment of this superb picture is that in which the moving picture always fails, in the double revelation at the end, like that of Seven Keys to Baldpate, representing “drama.”

No. The drama film is almost always wrong, the slap-stick almost always right; and it is divinely just that the one great figure of the screen should have risen out of the Keystone studios. He came too early; Chaplin spoiled nearly everything else for us, and he is always used by those who dislike slap-stick to prove their case. Their case, regrettably, is in a fair way to be proved, for slap-stick is in danger. The hypothetical critic mentioned above has not yet occurred; Mr Bushnell Dimond, the best actual critic of the movies, is without sympathy for Mack Sennett and calls him a Bourbon, in the sense of one who forgets nothing and learns less. What Mr Sennett has needed long since is encouragement and criticism; and stupid newspaper critics (who write half-columns about a new Gloria Swanson picture and add “the comedy which ends the bill is Down in the Sewer”) have left slap-stick wholly without direction.[1] At the same time the tradition of gentility, the hope of being “refined,” has touched the grotesque comedy; its directors have heard abuse and sly remarks about custard pies so long that they have begun to believe in them, and the madness which is a monstrous sanity in the movie comedy is likely to die out. The moving picture is being prettified; the manufacturers and exhibitors are growing more and more pretentious, and the riot of slap-stick seems out of place in a “presentation” which begins with the overture to Tannhäuser, and includes a baritone from the imperial opera house in Warsaw singing Indian Love Lyrics in front of an art curtain. In Paris there are one or two Chaplin films visible nearly every day; in New York the Rialto Theatre alone seems to make a habit of Chaplin revivals and of putting its comic feature in the electric sign. The Capitol, the largest, and rapidly becoming the most genteel, of moving picture palaces (but who ever heard of an opera palace?) frequently announces a programme of seven or eight items without a comedy among them; and you have to go to squalid streets and disreputable neighborhoods if you want to see Chaplin regularly. He could ask for no finer tribute, to be sure; but it is not much to our credit that the greatest mimic of our time has no theatre named after him, that it was in Berlin, not in Chicago or New York, that the first Chaplin festival took place, and that Tillie’s Punctured Romance, a film intensely important in his development, was last billed in a converted auction room on the lower East Side of New York, where Broadway would find it vulgar.

There were always elements in the Keystone which jeopardized its future—it lacked variety, it was often dull, its lapses of taste were serious. (I transfer the name of Keystone to the genre of which it was the most notable example; it was for long, and may still be, superior to most of the others.) But, while there is still time, its miraculously good qualities can be caught and possibly preserved. The ideal comedy of Mack Sennett is a fairly standardized article; too much so, perhaps, but the elements are sound. They include a simple, usually preposterous plot, frequently a burlesque of a serious play; more important are the characters, grotesque in bulk, form, or make-up; and, finally, the events which have as little connexion with the plot as, say, a clog dance in a musical comedy. In the early days of the Keystone, it is said, the plot was almost nonexistent in advance, and developed out of the set and the props. The one which was called, in revival, The Pile Driver, must have been such a film, for its plot is that two men meet a pretty girl near a river and they find a huge mallet. It is a film full of impromptus—not very brilliant ones, as a matter of fact—in which Sennett and Chaplin and Mabel Normand each occasionally give flashes of their qualities. A few years later you see the same thing when the trick of working up a film from the material in hand has become second nature. His Night Out presents Ben Turpin and Charlie Chaplin as equal comedians: two men on a drinking party, stumbling into a luxurious hotel, reverting automatically to the saloon from which they have been thrown, mutually assisting and hindering each other in a serious effort to do something they cannot define, but which they feel to be of cosmic importance. Later, one finds a more sophisticated kind of comic. Bright Eyes has to do with a gawky young man, reputed rich, received into a wealthy family, engaged to the daughter, denounced as an impostor, reduced to the kitchen, flirting there with the maid, restored to favour, and, nobly refusing the daughter’s hand, marrying the maid. Here Ben Turpin had good moments, but much of the gaiety of the film depended upon Chester Conklin (or one who much resembles him) as another servant in the house, bundling himself up in furs like Peary in the Arctic, bidding farewell at an imaginary outpost of civilization, and striding into—a huge refrigerator, to bring back a ham before the adoring eyes of the cook.

The comic film is by nature adventurous and romantic, and I think what endears it to us is that the adventure is picaresque and the romance wholly unsentimental—that is, both are pushed to the edge of burlesque. For the romance you have a love affair, frequently running parallel to a parody of itself. The hero is marked by peculiarities of his own: the Chaplin feet, the Hank Mann bang and sombre eyes, the Turpin squint, the Arbuckle bulk; against these oddities and absurdities plays the serene, idle beauty of a simple girl (Edna Purviance or Mabel Normand in her lovely early days), and only on occasions a comic in her own right like Louise Fazenda or Polly Moran. In some five hundred slap-stick comedies I do not remember one single moment of sentimentality; and it seems to me that every look and gesture of false chivalry and exaggerated devotion has been parodied there. The characteristic moment, after all, is when the comedy is ended, and just as the hero is about to kiss the heroine he winks broadly and ironically at the spectators. Our whole tradition of love is destroyed and outraged in these careless comedies; so also our tradition of heroism. And since the moving picture, quite naturally, began by importing the whole baggage of the romantic and sentimental novel and theatre, the moving-picture comedy has at last arrived at burlesquing its silly-serious half-sister. Two years before Merton of the Movies appeared, Mack Sennett, with the help of Ben Turpin’s divinely crossed eyes, had consummated a burlesque of Messrs Griffith, Ince, and Lubitsch, in A Small Town Idol, far more destructively, be it said, than Chaplin in his Carmen, and with a vaster fun than Merton.

Everything incongruous and inconsequent has its place in the unrolling of the comic film: love and masquerade and treachery; coincidence and disguise; heroism and knavishness; all are distorted, burlesqued, exaggerated. And—here the camera enters—all are presented at an impossible rate; the culmination is in the inevitable struggle and the conventional pursuit, where trick photography enters and you see the immortal Keystone cops in their flivver, mowing down hundreds of telegraph poles without abating their speed, dashing through houses or losing their wheels and continuing, blown to bits and reassembled in midair; locomotives running wild, yet never destroying the cars they so miraculously send spinning before them; airplanes and submarines in and out of their elements—everything capable of motion set into motion; and at the height of the revel, the true catastrophe, the solution of the preposterous and forgotten drama, with the lovers united under the canopy of smashed motor cars, or the gay feet of Mr Chaplin gently twinkling down the irised street.

And all of this is done with the camera, through action presented to the eye. The secret of distortion is in the camera, and the secret of pace in the projector. Regard them for a moment, regard the slap-stick as every moment explains itself, and then go to the picture palace and spend one-third of your time reading the flamboyancies of C. Gardner Sullivan and another third watching the contortions of a famous actress as she “registers” an emotion which action and photography should present directly, and you will see why the comic film is superior. There is virtually no registering in the comedy, there is no senseless pantomime, and the titles are succinct and few. In Bright Eyes, as the marriage of convenience is about to take place, the mother sweeps in with these words, “Faint quick—he’s dead broke.” An absurd letter or telegram is introduced to set the play going; the rest is literally silence.

What I have said about Chaplin regards him as a typical slap-stick comedian.[2] The form would have succeeded without him and he has passed beyond the form entirely. The other practitioners of the art come out of his shadow, and some of them are excellent. What makes Chaplin great is that he has irony and pity, he knows that you must not have the one without the other; he has both piety and wit. Next to him, for his work in His Bread and Butter and a few other films, stands Hank Mann, who translates the childlike gravity of Chaplin into a frightened innocence, a serious endeavour to understand the world which seems always hostile to him. He was trained, I have been told, as a tragic actor on the East Side of New York, and he seems always stricken with the cruelty and madness of an existence in which he alone is logical and sane. If he, walking backward to get a last glimpse of his beloved (after “A Waiter’s Farewell,” as the caption has it), steps on the running board of a motor instead of a street car, he is willing to pay the usual fare and let bygones be bygones. His black bang almost meets his eyes, and his eyes are mournful and piteous; his gesture is slow and rounded; a few of the ends of the world have come upon his head and the eyelids are a little weary. He is the Wandering Jew misdirected into comic life by an unscrupulous fate.

His most notable opposite is Harold Lloyd, a man of no tenderness, of no philosophy, the embodiment of American cheek and indefatigable energy. His movements are all direct, straight; the shortest distance between two points he will traverse impudently and persistently, even if he is knocked down at the end of each trip; there is no poetry in him, his whole utterance being epigrammatic, without overtone or image. Yet once, at least, he too stepped into that lunatic Arcadia to which his spirit is alien; not in Grandma’s Boy, which might just as well have been done by Charles Ray, but in A Sailor-made Man. Here the old frenzy fell upon him, the weakling won by guile, and instead of fighting one man he laid out a mob from behind; something excessive, topsy-turvy, riotous at last occurred in his ordered existence. He is funny; but he has no vulgarity; he is smart. He amuses me without making me laugh, and I figure him as a step toward gentility.

Ben Turpin has progressed, fortunately without taking that step. In Bright Eyes he was mildly absurd; in His Night Out, with Chaplin, he was tremendously funny; and what he learned there of the lesson of the master he imported into his private masterpiece, A Small Town Idol. Like Chaplin, he disarms you and endears himself; unlike him, and often to Turpin’s advantage, he knows how to be ridiculous. One always sees Chaplin’s impersonations as they see themselves. Is he a count or a pretender, or an English gentleman, or a policeman, or a tramp, the character is completely embodied; Chaplin never makes fun of himself. The process of identification is complete and, apart from the interest and the fun of the action, your chief pleasure is in awaiting the inevitable denunciation. Ben Turpin, who has only a talent for Chaplin’s genius, makes the most of it and lets you see through him. His exaggerations do more than reveal—they betray, and above all they betray the fact that Turpin is aware of the absurdities of his characters; you see them objectively, and through him you see through them.

When he returns home as the Wild West screen hero, and his own picture is shown before those who so recently had despised him, his deprecating gesture before the screen on which his exploits are being shown is so broad, so simple-silly, that it is more than a description of himself as he thinks it is, and lets us perceive his absurdity. He is exactly a zany.

Three other buffoons of the old Keystone days retain their capacity to be amusing: the galvanic, jack-in-the-box, Al St John; Mack Swain, and Chester Conklin; they are exactly as they were ten years ago, and one fancies they will never be great. The difficult person to be sure about is Buster Keaton, who came to the pictures from vaudeville, and has carried into his new medium his greatest asset, an enormous, incorruptible gravity. He never smiles, they say, and I have sat through some of his pictures—The Boat, for one—without seeing any reason why he should. It was a long mechanical contrivance with hardly any humour, and was considered a masterpiece; while The Paleface, in which Keaton played an entomologist captured by Indians, passed unnoticed. It had nearly everything a comic needs, and there were certain movements en masse, certain crossings of the lines of action, which were quite perfect. Keaton’s intense preoccupation and his hard sense of personality are excellent. In Cops he took a purely Keystone subject and multiplied and magnified it to its last degree of development: thousands of policemen rushed down one street; equal thousands rushed up another; and before them fled this small, serious figure, bent on self-justification, caught in a series of absurd accidents, wholly law-abiding, a little distracted. I do not think one will soon forget the exquisite close of that picture: the whole police force forming a phalanx, hurled as one body into the courtyard of the station—and then the little figure which, having been trapped within, seems doomed to arrest, coming out, itself accoutred in uniform, and quietly, quietly locking the huge doors behind it. It, yes; for by that time Keaton has become wholly impersonal. So affecting Larry Semon has never been; nor Clyde Cook; and behind them, but longo intervallo, come the misguided creatures who make the kind of slap-stick which most people think Sennett makes. I am sure there are other good comedians; but I am not trying to make a catalogue. No one, in any case, has been able to impose himself as these few have; and most of the others are so near in method and manner to these that they require nothing fresh to be said of them.

It seemed for a moment, in 1922, that if a confessed murderer were set free by a jury, he or she went into the movies; but if a moving-picture actor was declared innocent, he was barred from the screen. The justice of this I cannot discuss; yet a protest can be made against the æsthetically high-minded who said that the real reason for barring the films of “Fatty” Arbuckle was their vulgarity and their dulness. For “Fatty” had gone over to a comedy more refined than slap-stick long before 1922; and in 1914 he was neither stupid nor dull. Once indeed, in Fatty and Mabel Adrift (Mabel being Miss Normand) he came near to the best of slap-stick, and the same picture was as photography and printing, for sepia seascapes and light and shade, a superior thing entirely. The fatuous, ingratiating smile was innocent then, in all conscience, and as for vulgarity—

Let us, before we go to the heart of that question, look for a moment at the comedy which was always set against the slap-stick to condemn the custard-pie school of fun—the comedy of which the best practitioners were indisputably Mr and Mrs Sidney Drew. In them there was nothing offensive, except an enervating dulness. They pretended to be pleasant episodes in our common life, the life of courtship and marriage; they accepted all our conventions; and they were one and all exactly the sort of thing which the junior class at high school acted when money was needed to buy a new set of erasers for Miss Struther’s course in mechanical drawing. The husband stayed out late at night or was seen kissing a stenographer; the wife had trouble with a maid or was extravagant at the best shops; occasionally arrived an ingenuity, such as the romantic attachment of the wife to anniversaries contrasted with her husband’s negligence—I seem to recall that to cure her he brought her a gift one day in memory of Washington’s birthday. These things were little stories, not even smoking-room stories; they were acted entirely in the technique of the amateur stage; they were incredibly genteel, in the milieu where “When Baby Came” is genteel; neither in matter nor in manner did they employ what the camera and the projector had to give. And, apart from the agreeable manners of Mr and Mrs Sidney Drew, nothing made them successful except the corrupt desire, on the part of the spectators, to be refined.

Nothing of the sort operated in the far better (feature film) comedies which Douglas Fairbanks made when he was with Fine Arts. To suit his physique, they were almost all adventurous; they were always entertaining. Flirting With Fate[3] presented a young man who had decided to die and gave “Automatic Joe,” a gunman, his last fifty dollars to “bump him off” unexpectedly. Once the agreement was made, the tide of fortune turned for the young man, and, desiring earnestly to live, he felt the paid hand of the assassin always upon his shoulder. At the same time the gunman had reformed; his one object was to return the unearned fifty dollars. And the cross-purposes, the chase and flight, were within short distance of high farce. The comedies of Charles Ray were also unpretentious, and also used the camera. These and others were always perfectly decent; but none of them was refined.

And there, essentially, we are back at slap-stick; for the refined comedy was pretentious, and what is pretentious is vulgar in any definition of the word; while slap-stick never pretended to be anything but itself and could be disgusting or tasteless or dull, but it could not be vulgar. I consider vulgar the thing which offends against the canons of taste accepted by honest people, not by imitative people, not by snobs. It is equally bad taste, presumably, to throw custard pies and to commit adultery; but it is not bad taste to speak of these things. What is intolerable only is the pretense, and it was against pretentiousness that the slap-stick comedy had its hardest fight. It showed a man sitting down on a lighted gas stove, and it did not hesitate to disclose the underwear charred at the buttocks which were the logical consequence of the action. There was never the slightest suggestion of sexual indecency, or of moral turpitude, in the Keystones; there was a fuller and freer use of gesture—gesture with all parts of the human frame—than we are accustomed to. The laughter they evoked was broad and long; it was thoracic, abdominal; it shook us because it was really the earth trembling beneath our feet. The animal frankness and health of these pictures constituted the ground of their offense. And something more.

For the Keystone offended our sense of security in dull and business-like lives. Few of us imagined ourselves in the frenzy of action which they set before us; none of us remained unmoved at the freedom of fancy, the wildness of imagination, the roaring, destructive, careless energy which it set loose. It was an ecstasy of comic life, and in our unecstatic lives we fled from it to polite comedy, telling ourselves that what we had seen was ugly and displeasing. Often it was. I am stating the case for slap-stick, but I do not wish to make myself responsible for the millions of feet of stupidity and ugliness which have been released as comic films. I have seen Ham and Bud and the imitators of Charlie Chaplin; I have seen an egg splattered over a man’s face with such a degree of nauseous ugliness that it seemed I could never see a comic again. But as like as not, on the same bill was the James Young screen version of The Devil with George Arliss, or Geraldine Farrar in Carmen, or the “‘Affairs of’ Anatol.” And when people who have seen these “artistic” films, or the barber-shop scene in a Hitchcock revue or Eddie Cantor in a dentist’s chair, exclaim (falsely) that moving-picture comedians do nothing but throw pies, I am moved to wonder what on earth they are expected to throw. They are using the eternal materials of their art, precisely as Aristophanes used them and Rabelais, with already far too many concessions to a debased and cowardly and artificial taste. At the two extremes simple and sophisticated people have looked directly at the slap-stick screen and loved it for itself alone; in between are the people who can see nothing without the lorgnettes of prejudice provided by fashion and gentility. The simple ones discovered and prospered the slap-stick screen long before the sophisticated were aware of its existence; they took it for what it was and cared nothing for the fact that it was made by inartistic people and shown in reeking rooms for a nickel. For long the poison of culture was powerless to enter; but not long enough.

I feel moderately certain that the slap-stick comedy is a good thing for America to have; yet, being neither an apostle of pagan joy nor a reformer, I have to put my plea for slap-stick on personal grounds. It has given me immeasurable entertainment and I would like to see it saved; I would like to see a bit more of its impromptus, its unpremeditated laughter; I would like to do something to banish the bleak refinement which is setting in upon it.

Seven years ago, in an imaginary conversation, I made Mr David Wark Griffith announce that he would produce Helen of Troy, and I made him defend the Keystone comedy. It seemed to me then as now that there is nothing incongruous in these subjects; properly made, they would be equally unrefined, but Helen of Troy, being in the grand manner, would be called “artistic.” Mr Griffith has not made Helen of Troy, and the pre-eminent right to make it has passed from his hands. The Keystone, with its variations, needs still an authoritative defender and an authoritative critic. It is one of the few places where the genteel tradition does not operate, where fantasy is liberated, where imagination is still riotous and healthy. In its economy and precision are two qualities of artistic presentation; it uses still everything commonest and simplest and nearest to hand; in terror of gentility, it has refrained from using the broad farces of literature—Aristophanes and Rabelais and Molière—as material; it could become happily sophisticated, without being cultured. But there is no fault inherent in its nature, and its virtues are exceptional. For us to appreciate slap-stick may require a revolution in our way of looking at the arts; having taken thought on how we now look at the arts, I suggest that the revolution is not entirely undesirable.

An Imaginary
Conversation

AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION

The theatre of Dionysos. A great crowd is just leaving the amphitheatre and as the attendants roll back the heavy awnings and unleash the tent-poles, the moon, which has been excluded for the performance, begins to filter in, and presently the stone begins to throw off faint shimmers, and dark shadows fall across the stage. The builded temple, which has been screened, is now revealed, and its colours glow again, albeit in shades not known to the light of day. The porticos of temples look down upon the theatre, and olive trees stand dark and beautiful on the hills. From afar the bustle of the town dies away, and, perhaps, in a moment of unutterable stillness, the murmur of the many-sounding sea can be heard.

The spectators of the strange entertainment have at last departed, and the long e’s, ungrateful to the ear of the Attic scholar, are heard no more. In the far centre of the theatre a man is taking apart a mechanism—that from which the deus sprang in this evening’s play. Two other men remain. One walks musing and absorbed, looking toward that entrance whereby Orestes was wont to make his way to the stage. The other walks slowly round about the theatre, marking its aspects, and thinking of practical things. Presently they meet at the spot where once the choragus stood. They salute each other.

Mr Griffith

I am sorry that you should have been here to-night. To you, I suppose, this has been only a sacrilege. I am sorry that you should feel that I am gloating over my success. But perhaps I am mistaken. Are you, or are you not, Walter Pritchard Eaton?

Mr Eaton

I am. And you are David Wark Griffith, are you not? [D. G. nods.] We are well met, then—if I may make use of a phrase which the drama, and not your métier has made famous. By the way, ought I to “register” pleasure in any conventional way?

D. G.

Score one for you. I have sinned. But since you say we are well met, can’t we chat for a moment about things? You see, I am not altogether unaffected by this scene—the light, and the ancient theatre, and the memories of it all.

W. P. E.

They would all do admirably for a picture—for one of those extraordinary scenic effects which you create as no other man can create them. But the memories—those at least are mine. Surely you are not thinking of—

D. G.

No. Not just now. I am humble at times. But let us say that you are the great antagonist of the movies, and I the protagonist. I want very much to understand what you mean when you attack them. I remember you said that my spectacle, The Birth of a Nation, was violently unfair because it was wordless. Am I not right?

W. P. E.

I said some such thing.

D. G.

And you are a defender of the theatre. May I assume that The Clansman, which was a spoken drama, was more fair than my spectacle?

W. P. E.

At least, in the play, there was a reply in kind to every attack. The dumb-show for which you are responsible showed only one side.

D. G.

Then you are attacking the movie for being a propaganda, and are displeased with the propaganda because it is one-sided. May I say that possibly the movie was made as an artistic spectacle, and had no such object? And do I not recall the surprise with which such a play as Strife was received because it did show two sides? After all, I did not make it impossible for you to put on Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a reply to me.

W. P. E.

It would be fruitless to continue the discussion on this point. I spoke of your movie in passing, because I am always hearing about it. For the most part let us admit that it was not cheap. Can you say as much for the others?

D. G.

No. The movie is a vulgar art—it is the vulgar art. And certainly I do not purpose to rob that statement of its effectiveness by saying that the word must be taken in its best, or even in its original, meaning. It must be taken in its worst meaning. The movie is vulgar, but it is art. The best of it is none too good—yet. But the worst of it is not so bad as you think.

W. P. E.

I am willing to grant you that in the representation of spectacle, in the realm of trick photography and in the preservation of the events of the moment, the movie has its place. I question it only when it invades the drama. There you must pardon me. I have the drama close to my heart.

D. G.

You have been warming the viper quite a long time. It is about to sting. I am willing to grant you that in musical comedy, in purely intellectual engagements, and in the exploitation of sound, the drama has its place. But I have noticed in your own complaints that in the things that touch the heart, in the grand manner, in the projection of high emotion, you find the drama of to-day a pretty sad affair.

W. P. E.

Who is to blame for it?

D. G.

Who killed Cock Robin? Not I. I had not heard that the Comédie-Française was seriously affected by the activities of Pathé Frères. I have yet to learn that music has been driven into hiding by the movies, although I have heard that the ride of the Valkyries is more familiarly known to-day as the “Klan-theme” from The Birth. Didn’t your theatre die—if it has died—because it stifled itself? Hadn’t you noticed the decline ten years ago?

W. P. E.

I am not blaming the movie. I am deploring it. I do not think that it is good for people to be eternally fed on whatever is cheapest, nearest, easiest of comprehension. I object to it all the more when something high and fine is butchered to make a movie holiday.

D. G.

I deplore that as much as you. I do not think that Cabiria was cheap, or easy of comprehension. There was enough on the surface to make it popular. But there was also enough in the depths to make it grand.

W. P. E.

The movie is still two-dimensional, Mr Griffith. Can we speak of depths?

D. G.

Ah, you say “still”! Then we have a future. In the theatre there was a long succession of little known men, and then came the men whose plays made these stones sacred to you. There were many Elizabethans before Shakespeare. Will you call me the Marlowe of the movies? I believe in them enough to hope for a Shakespeare. But don’t you see that we are young; we are without conventions—

W. P. E.

Pardon me. You are with far too many. I remember that in the early days, when you went about on tiptoe for fear of waking up the revengeful Muses, you employed actors without any technique. There was an uncouth, a delightful freshness, about your work. I had hopes then that you would contribute to the stage. Instead you have taken from it. You have borrowed all its worst conventions. And you have added some of your own. There is the dreadful convention of registering.

D. G.

Isn’t that from the stage?

W. P. E.

Hardly.

D. G.

Your actors and actresses register.

W. P. E.

Not as yours do. The long training in the expression of emotions has developed a suitable medium, the slightest variation on which becomes inestimably precious. In the moving picture the variation is unknown. And, although I am the last person to want to advantage the movie, let me tell you why. I can hear the voice of the director, just as the misguided husband leaves his wife—a favorite situation in the movies and very novel—I can hear him crying out, “Register grief!” If he does not cry out, the inner voice of the actress cries out. Not “feel,” not “express the feeling,” but express the semblance of grief. It is an art of superficies. Perhaps your actresses—and why, dear sir, do you choose such impossibly blond, pretty and stupid actresses?—have worked out a new expression, a new registration. At the terrible moment they forget. They register as they, or another actress as well paid and as hotly advertised, registered six months before. I am as tired of heaving breasts and eyes turned to heaven as I am tired of Charlie Chaplin’s walk when he does not walk it. Conventions? There is no end to them. What your art, as you call it, lacks, is limitations.

D. G.

You mean there are no limits to it? That is a strange remark for you to make.

W. P. E.

No. I do not mean that. I mean that every art, until recent times, has proposed certain limitations, under which it had to work. Goethe—a poet whom you have yet to introduce to your spectators—once wrote, “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister!” And these limitations must be more than physical. There is no reason why a poem should rhyme abbaabbacdcdcd, but the sonnet must rhyme in some such manner, or it will not be perfect. There may be greater poems than these sonnets—that is a matter of taste—but the art of the sonnet has its own perfection because those limitations have been accepted joyously by those who chose to write. You have proposed no limitations to yourself. Your art is chaos.

D. G.

Didn’t I confess as much when I said it was vulgar? It must have its appeal to the very lowest. But because our roots are in the dung and the mire, do you think there shall be no lovely blossoms on the trees in spring and no fruit? If I make a fortune in raw melodrama, shall I not spend it on Helen of Troy?

W. P. E.

Helen of Troy?

D. G.

Why not? The moving picture is always elemental, but it can be grand. What are the essentials of a story: love, beauty, pursuit, coincidence, rescue—

W. P. E.

Tell me, Mr Griffith, is it true that you recite “The Relief at Lucknow” each night before you go to bed?

D. G.

Not now. I am reciting the Iliad now. Can’t you see the battlements of Troy with Helen looking down from her tower—the ruinous face—

W. P. E.

Registering?

D. G.

Again a hit! But I shall overcome it. I shall show you Scamander rising from his bed, and the gods on high Olympus—

W. P. E.

With a close-up of the beard of Zeus?

D. G.

And Patroclus leaping on the Ilian shore, and Achilles sulking in his tent. I shall make Homer live again.

W. P. E.

Dear me. Is he dead? Why wasn’t I informed?

D. G.

Love and battle, heroism and beauty, action and emotion, pity and terror—what more can you ask? All the great sum of Hellenic life, its morning glow and its great noon of enviable beauty, shall be in my picture. It shall mingle humanity with the gods again.

W. P. E.

Through the exquisite agency of cutbacks?

D. G.

As surely as Marlowe’s topless towers—the captions are written for me—rose in the backdrops of your theatres. I shall glorify the mechanics of my art. I shall make them invisible and divine. I shall speak in words of white fire—

W. P. E.

Perhaps. But you will never speak with the tongues of angels—and of men. I will admit the dulness of the theatre if you will grant the absurdity of the mechanics you employ. I will ask you only if the moving picture will ever become human?

D. G.

I do not know. I am not sure that humanity is very translatable. But we have ecstasy. In the projector lies all wonderful adventure, and I go into a dingy, stuffy, moving-picture house with the foreknowledge that something strange and wonderful, though it be at times cheap and vulgar, will be shown me. In a drab world the movie is an instrument of miracles. The gross caricatures are perhaps truer than the realism of the theatre. I see a Rabelaisian madness in the millions of broken plates. In a thousand flying custard pies I recognize an eternal impulse of humankind. In the mad comings and goings of impossible characters I still see some persuasion that life is “wanton and wondrous and forever well.” Here, in this theatre, life was once glorified. But the grandeur has died out and we must restore it as we can.

W. P. E.

Not in my time, I fear. For me the past is not dead, so you cannot restore it. And here, in the end, you have my last objection to the moving picture. You are destroying the imagination of mankind. There are no more mysteries since your work has come into being. Everything is visible. Everything is explained.

D. G.

Except the soul, my dear sir.[4]

“I am Here To-Day”:
Charlie Chaplin

“I AM HERE TO-DAY”: CHARLIE CHAPLIN

For most of us the grotesque effigy dangling from the electric sign or propped against the side of the ticket-booth must remain our first memory of Charlie Chaplin. The splay feet, the moustache, the derby hat, the rattan walking-stick, composed at once the image which was ten years later to become the universal symbol of laughter. “I am here to-day” was his legend, and like everything else associated with his name it is faintly ironic and exactly right. The man who, of all the men of our time, seems most assured of immortality, chose that particularly transient announcement of his presence, “I am here to-day,” with its emotional overtone of “gone to-morrow,” and there is always something in Charlie that slips away. “He does things,” said John S. Sargent once, “and you’re lucky if you see them.” Incredibly lucky to live when we have the chance to see them.

It is a miracle that there should arise in our time a figure wholly in the tradition of the great clowns—a tradition requiring creative energy, freshness, inventiveness, change—for neither the time nor the country in which Charlie works is exceptionally favourable to such a phenomenon. Stranger still is the course he has run. It is simple to take The Kid as the dividing line, but it is more to the point to consider the phases of Charlie’s popularity, for each phase corresponds to one of the attacks now being made upon his integrity. He is on the top of the world, an exposed position, and we are all sniping at him; even his adherents are inclined to say that “after all” he is “still” this or the other thing. One goes to his pictures as one went to hear Caruso, with a ghoulish speculation as to the quantity of alloy in the “golden voice.” It is because Charlie has had all there ever was of acclaim that he is now surrounded by deserters.

Charlie Chaplin. By E. E. Cummings

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.

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.