ing something which he qualified with the name "Jazz Americain." A great many ladies heard, and seemed greatly edified at having finally gotten the real right thing. But some friends, American—persuaded Cocteau to desist. And still, jazz is the American music, or the chrysalis of American music. And the machine and its products—must be accepted.
This Gerald Stanley Lee, Marinetti categorical imperative, has no importance for any one doing work either in the field of mechanics or that of art. The creative mechanic no more than the artist "accepts" the machine. Like his poetical brother, he has in his mind an ideal objective. And for the purpose of approaching that objective, he makes friends with his instrument, and drives it relentlessly to the limit of its capacities. There have always been machines, since ever the first humanoid took up a club and began freeing his mind; and between the man who drives the machine relentlessly to its limit and the man who tells a perfect story, there is no opposition. Both are driven by the selfsame need, the need of things of quality enrooted in the living human breast. Both are moving toward the same ideal goal. Neither is responsible for the mess rotting modern life. Responsible for that are, far more, the people moved by no ideal objective. The good-enough people in the field of machine-work. And the people who sit about, and talk.
Whether French people wanted us to be savages or no would be of no matter in the United States; all the talk of skyscraper primitive art would be harmless, were work proceeding here, and voices calling. The existing machinery, jazz, Charlie Chaplin, would find the artist, for the artist never has to go find the raw stuff of nature. But there is no faith among the American workers; and in all ages wanting inner direction, a subjective sense of inferiority drives men to searching for ready-made formulae before starting off on their adventures; and to playing up to the eyes of certain people whom they take pleasure in conceiving as superior to themselves. It is for this reason that the charming fantasies of contemporary France seem to us to contain a principle dangerous to the young art-men in America. These fantasies are supplying a number of embryonic artists with cheap formulae, keeping them from working from their sensibilities. They are also persuading a number of incipient advertising-men that they have something to
