of the Jazz movement as so good
an artist can be of any.

In literature Jazz manifests itself both formally and in
content. Formally its distinctive characteristic is the familiar
one--syncopation. It has given us a ragtime literature which flouts
traditional rhythms and sequences and grammar and logic. In verse its
products--rhythms which are often indistinguishable from prose rhythms
and collocations of words to which sometimes is assignable no exact
intellectual significance--are by now familiar to all who read. Eliot is
too personal to be typical of anything, and the student who would get a
fair idea of Jazz poetry would do better to spend half an hour with a
volume of Cocteau or Cendrars. In prose I think Mr. Joyce will serve as
a, perhaps, not very good example: I choose him because he is probably
better known to readers than any other writer who affects similar
methods. In his later publications Mr. Joyce does deliberately go to
work to break up the traditional sentence, throwing overboard sequence,
syntax, and, indeed, most of those conventions which men habitually
employ for the exchange of precise ideas. Effectually, and with a will,
he rags the literary instrument: unluckily, this will has at its service
talents which though genuine are moderate only. A writer of greater
gifts, Virginia Woolf, has lately developed a taste for playing tricks
with traditional constructions. Certainly she "leaves out" with the
boldest of them: here is syncopation if you like it. I am not sure that
I do. At least, I doubt whether the concentration gained by her new
style for _An Unwritten Novel_ and _Monday or Tuesday_ makes up for the
loss of those exquisite but old-fashioned qualities which make _The Mark
on the Wall_ a masterpiece of English prose. But, indeed, I do not think
of Mrs. Woolf as belonging properly to the movement; she is not imbued
with that spirit which inspires the authentic Jazz writers, whether of
verse that looks oddly like prose or of prose that raises a false hope
of turning out to be verse, and conditions all that they produce. She
is not _gavroche_. In her writings I find no implicit, and often
well-merited, jeer at accepted ideas of what prose and verse should
be and what they should be about; no nervous dislike of traditional
valuations, of scholarship, culture, and intellectualism; above all, no
note of protest against the notion that one idea or emotion can be more
important or significant than anoth