n. It is an
idiom, perhaps a "set or series of colloquialisms," similar to those
that have added through centuries and through natural means, some
beauty to all languages. Every language is but the evolution of slang,
and possibly the broad "A" in Harvard may have come down from the
"butcher of Southwark." To examine ragtime rhythms and the syncopations
of Schumann or of Brahms seems to the writer to show how much alike
they are not. Ragtime, as we hear it, is, of course, more (but not much
more) than a natural dogma of shifted accents, or a mixture of shifted
and minus accents. It is something like wearing a derby hat on the back
of the head, a shuffling lilt of a happy soul just let out of a Baptist
Church in old Alabama. Ragtime has its possibilities. But it does not
"represent the American nation" any more than some fine old senators
represent it. Perhaps we know it now as an ore before it has been
refined into a product. It may be one of nature's ways of giving art
raw material. Time will throw its vices away and weld its virtues into
the fabric of our music. It has its uses as the cruet on the
boarding-house table has, but to make a meal of tomato ketchup and
horse-radish, to plant a whole farm with sunflowers, even to put a
sunflower into every bouquet, would be calling nature something worse
than a politician. Mr. Daniel Gregory Mason, whose wholesome influence,
by the way, is doing as much perhaps for music in America as American
music is, amusingly says: "If indeed the land of Lincoln and Emerson
has degenerated until nothing remains of it but a 'jerk and rattle,'
then we, at least, are free to repudiate this false patriotism of 'my
Country right or wrong,' to insist that better than bad music is no
music, and to let our beloved art subside finally under the clangor of
the subway gongs and automobile horns, dead, but not dishonored." And
so may we ask: Is it better to sing inadequately of the "leaf on Walden
floating," and die "dead but not dishonored," or to sing adequately of
the "cherry on the cocktail," and live forever?

6

If anyone has been strong enough to escape these rocks--this "Scylla
and Charybdis,"--has survived these wrong choices, these under-values
with their prizes, Bohemias and heroes, is not such a one in a better
position, is he not abler and freer to "declare himself and so to love
his cause so singly that he will cleave to it, and forsake all else?
What is this cause for the Americ