most 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.
IV
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, T. S. Eliot whom he calls "about the best of our living poets," James Joyce whom he woefully 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
