ese masterpieces created by boys barely escaped from
college can be appreciated by the youngest Argentine beauty at the Ritz.
Jazz is very young: like short skirts, it suits thin, girlish legs,
but has a slightly humiliating effect on grey hairs. Its fears and
dislikes--for instance, its horror of the noble and the beautiful--are
childish; and so is its way of expressing them. Not by irony and
sarcasm, but by jeers and grimaces does Jazz mark its antipathies. Irony
and wit are for the grown-ups. Jazz dislikes them as much as it dislikes
nobility and beauty. They are the products of the cultivated intellect,
and Jazz cannot away with intellect or culture. Niggers can be admired
artists without any gifts more singular than high spirits; so why drag
in the intellect? Besides, to bring intellect into art is to invite home
a guest who is apt to be inquisitive and even impartial. Intellect in
Jazz circles is treated rather as money was once in polite society--it
is taken for granted. Nobility, beauty, and intellectual subtlety are
alike ruled out: the first two are held up to ridicule, the last is
simply abused. What Jazz wants are romps and fun, and to make fun; that
is why, as I have said, its original name Ragtime was the better. At its
best Jazz rags every thing.

The inspiration of Jazz is the same as that of the art of the _grand
siecle_. Everyone knows how in the age of Louis XIV artists found in
_la bonne compagnie_ their standards, their critics, and many of their
ideas. It was by studying and writing for this world that Racine,
Moliere, and Boileau gave an easier and less professional gait to French
literature, which--we should not forget--during its most glorious period
was conditioned and severely limited by the tastes and prejudices of
polite society. Whether the inventors of Jazz thought that, in their
pursuit of beauty and intensity, the artists of the nineteenth century
had strayed too far from the tastes and interests of common but
well-to-do humanity I know not, but certain it is that, like Racine and
Moliere, and unlike Beaudelaire and Mallarme and Cesar Franck, they
went to _la bonne compagnie_ for inspiration and support. _La bonne
compagnie_ they found in the lounges of great hotels, on transatlantic
liners, in _wagons-lits_, in music-halls, and in expensive motor-cars
and restaurants. _La bonne compagnie_ was dancing one-steps to ragtime
music. This, they said, is the thing. The artists of the nineteenth