since it doesn't matter what their admirers think of themselves—it is what jazz and Rostand and Michael Angelo are in themselves that matters. I have always used the word art in connexion with jazz and jazzy things; if any one imagines that the word is belittled thereby and can no longer be adequate to the dignity of Leonardo or Shakespeare, I am sorry. I do not think one has given encouragement to "fatuous ignorance" by praising simple and unpretentious things at the expense of the fake and the faux bon. I suggest that people do what they please about the gay arts, about jazz; that they do it with discrimination and without worrying whether it is noble or not, or good form, or intellectually right. I am fairly certain that if they are ever actually to see Picasso it will be because they have acquired the habit of seeing without arrière-pensée, because they will know what the pleasure is that a work of art can give, even if it be jazz art. Here is Mr Bell's conclusion, with most of which I agree:
"Even to understand art a man must make a great intellectual effort. One thing is not as good as another; so artists and amateurs must learn to choose. No easy matter, that: discrimination of this sort being something altogether different from telling a Manhattan from a Martini. To select as an artist or discriminate as a critic are needed feeling and intellect and—most distressing of all—study. However, unless I mistake, the effort will be made. The age of easy acceptance of the first thing that comes is closing. Thought rather than spirits is required, quality rather than colour, knowledge rather than irreticence, intellect rather than singularity, wit rather than romps, precision rather than surprise, dignity rather than impudence, and lucidity above all thing: plus de Jazz.}}
It is not so written, but it sounds like "Above all things, no more jazz!" A critic who would have hated jazz as bitterly as Mr Bell does, wrote once, alluding to a painter of the second rank:
"But, beside those great men, there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere; and these, too, have their place in general culture, and must be in-
