er. Assuredly, Mrs. Woolf is not
of the company on whose banner is inscribed "No discrimination!" "No
culture!" "Not much thought!" She is not of that school whose grand
object it is to present, as surprisingly as possible, the chaos of any
mind at any given moment.

The Jazz theory of art, if theory there be, seems stupid enough--as do
most. What matters, however, are not theories, but works: so what of the
works of Jazz? If Stravinsky is to be claimed for the movement, Jazz has
its master: it has also its _petits maitres_--Eliot, Cendrars, Picabia,
and Joyce, for instance, and _les six_. Oddly enough, _les six_ consist
of four musicians--Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Poulenc, and Germaine
Taillefer [Z]--chaperoned by the brilliant Jean Cocteau. All five have
their places in contemporary civilization: and such talents are not to
be disposed of simply by the present of a bad name. For it is not
enough to call an artist "extremist" or "reactionary," "Cubist"
or "Impressionist," and condemn or approve him as such. These
classifications are merely journalistic or, if you will, archaeological
conveniences. It is the critic's business to inquire not so much whether
an artist is "advanced" or "Cubist" or "Jazz," as whether he is good,
bad, or interesting; and that is what most critics fail to do. One's
general opinion of a movement or school ought not to affect one's
opinion of any particular work. One may, for excellent reasons, dislike
a movement; one may hold that it hampers or sets on a false scent more
artists than it serves; that it induces students of promise to waste
time and energy on fruitless problems; that it generally fails to
get the best out of its most gifted adherents, while it pumps into a
multitude of empty heads so much hot air as to swell them to disquieting
proportions. This is pretty much what I think of Cubism; but I am not
such a fool as to deny that, experimenting in these very problems which
seem to me to lead most artists into a rather unprofitable world of
abstractions, Picasso and Braque have produced works of the greatest
beauty and significance, while those of Fernand Leger, Jean Metsinger,
and other avowed Cubists are of extraordinary merit and deserve the most
careful attention. I can think of no movement except that called "Art
nouveau," which has not contributed something to the world's artistic
capital and to the great tradition. Only, to realize this, one must be
able to distinguish not