Jaz is not only a form of dance: it is the characteristic of the youth of this age. America, they have jazz shirts, jazz ties and all sorts of jazz fripperies. They call the melodies jazz and they dance in jazzy sort of way. The thing is said to have originated with one JJazbo Brown, a negro minstrel in the Middle West, who went about singing songs of the negro, [songs which are a curious blending of pathos and mirth, In reality, the father of jazz is Irving Berlin, a product not of the southern plantation but of' the East Side of New York, a sen not of a negro slave but of a Jewish cantor. In a word, American jazz is really not so. negro as it is characteristic of the American melting pot, medley of everything, a mixture of whatever is at hand,. some minors thrown among the majors, 2 few pathetic chords bassing it amid the most blatant mirth. Jazz in dancing is much the same, no regularity of step or form, but a wildish sort of movement toward an end. In the latest expression of jazz, the Charleston, one just whirls and twirls ina Dervish sort of way, in the hope, perhaps, that the saxophofte will end its pitiful wail. For curiously enough, one never laughs while one jazzes. One might laugh and shriek with Pleasure during a polka or a Virginia reel or any of the older Gances, but one jazzes to the demeanour of a serious clergyman talking about the end in view.
Jazzy shirts and ties—perhaps one might include the Oxford trousers in this category, are not so surprising. They give a man a chance to get away from the greys and dullness of Vietorian clothes The brown dinner jacket reported from Paris and the brocaded pyjamas, which men affect in America, stir perhaps a longing for the good old days when men dressed in silks and satins and wore the loveliest fof buckles beneath a well-turned ankle, Those were days of leisure, when one drank one's wine in peace and took chocolate in bed. But to imagine men in fripperies in an era of undergrounds and subways, in the bustle of the time clock and the efficiency expert, who measure the number of Strokes a clerk makes with his pen to determine the cost of the overheads of aa enterprise, is almost as much jazz as "Yes, we have no ban gas," and its equally grotesque successors. The dream of colour, like a Stravinsky symphony, comes with the primitive man, with the longing perhaps to cover the form with the wisp of a cloud at sunset or the Graperies of a peacock. Men, like women, love these things, but man lost the art except objectively, for in recent years he has not been alite to do more than to decorate his lady, or sit and gaze upon the beauties of cther ladies. He himself has been a drab figure, at night, in black and white, with a full yard of starched front to hold off the world and to remind him of his proprieties. Jazz broke down some of these conventions, For who could really jazz in a long tail or with starched shirts, So, the dinner jacket became the fashion except on the most formal occasions and even the starch went before a daintily silken shirt, perhaps alittle toned by a brocaded flower or a pleat. The older folks still frown upon these liberties, but youth will have its way and then the youth of to-day, ace customed to the lightness of Jazzy clothes, may object to the revolt of future generations when they revert to the staider Therein perhaps lies the moral of the thing: jazz is not so muck song or a dance as it is a habit of mind. The American who gets his politics out of a New York paper's headlines, or the Briton who is satisfied with 8 penny frightful; the all-knowing who take their wisdom in small doses in popular magazines or who discover their science in the motions of a scientific detective; the mother who brings up her child on predigested break. fasts and the teacher who spares the rod—all these things are products of a jazzy age, an age. of the surface, frightfully serlcus like a Bernard Shaw text, yet withal having its little joke jon the side. Politics is much the same. One speaks of an end to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.