by Unknown
ALEXANDER’S TRIUMPH
Following closely on Alexander came a tune, Everybody’s Doing It, which testified to the completeness of the revolution. They were, and still are. The Republic succumbed completely to the new dances and the new music. Mr. Berlin and his confrères were indefatigable and they were handsomely rewarded. Everything was “ragged”. Old songs were exhumed. Even sacred ditties were not inviolable. Everything, from “Home, Sweet Home” to the scale, was grist for this syncopated, rhythmic mill.
In time the popular ear became ready for the complete assimilation of the undiluted music of the negro bands. One heard orchestras which erupted into climaxes of wailing trombones, shrieking whistles and farmyard noises of a chromatic sort, which resembled nothing that had ever been heard before. This was Jazz. The complete lack of restraint and the frequent degeneration of this music into mere noise made it impossible to listen to it for any length of time, and it enjoyed only a short and brazen popularity. Its points of excellence were abundant, however, and these were subsequently refined and developed into the extraordinary expression which is the Jazz of today.
In this development and refinement the trained executants played a significant part. The absorption in the new dances created a new situation for musicians. Heretofore the dance orchestras were recruited from among players of small talent whose equipment was inadequate to the demands of a Symphony Orchestra, or even of a good theater or hotel. The demand for good jazz bands and the inability of the old-time dance musicians to satisfy the yearning for more piquant rhythms and more variety in the accompaniments and middle voices, inevitably brought a better class of musicians into the field. These organized bands of their own. On the material at hand they lavished the resources of executants well-trained in the musical classics.
The printed music was found to be less complex than the skill of the players. The men began to ornament the melodies, to fill in the inner voices. Unconsciously, they aimed at a presentation approximating the ingenuity and complexity of a symphonic performance. The raucous brasses, though not deprived of their chromatic setting, were muted to a silver pianissimo. Drums and all noisy accessories were discarded and the business of the old, inflexible, Negro-spiritual rhythm, which remained, as ever, the foundation, was given to banjo and piano and the profound double-bass. The oboe, clarinet and saxophone roamed in rich freedom the wide area between the melody and the bass, enveloping and clouding the angular frame in suave, elastic, melodious counterpoint, while muted horns blew a soft contour, like a wind which fills a sail . . .
New and startling rhythms were essayed and seemed to confuse the accustomed steps of the dancers not at all. Though alarming at first, these excursions were found not to interfere with the recurrent one-two beat. As it shuffled along, the public ear was assailed by bizarre and exotic harmonies. People danced along in a sensuous dream to music tricked out in a haunting splendor which had no musical counterpart. The inflexible negro rhythm, a freedom of treatment unheard of in a dance form, and a diabolical ingenuity in orchestration, had achieved a beauty in form and presentation, if not in content, quite new to musical art.
MUSICAL EDUCATION
Through the development of dance music—the evolution I have described covered somewhat over twenty years—the American people acquired what may be termed a musical literacy. Through it they became aware of rhythm, and rhythm is the life of music. Secure on this basis they were free to assimilate the strange harmonies, the sudden modulations, of contemporary jazz. The man in the street, transplanted suddenly from the Palais Royal to Carnegie Hall, where a symphony was in progress, would experience a sense of familiarity with the external, the structural form of the symphony, hitherto possible to trained musicians only.
Not long ago, the harmonies of Debussy, Ravel and other modern extremists, outraged the sensibilities of a formidable number of excellent musicians. These harmonies now sound quite natural and almost simple to the habitués of dance-halls and the owners of phonographs! A person who can hum Stumbling for example, with its difficult alternation of violently contrasting rhythms, will find no difficulty with Brahms. Of course I mean technical difficulty; the same person will not therefore be able to surmise the emotional content of a Beethoven quartette. But there his limitation is only that of the performer who has sufficient technique to play a great concerto but is lacking in the mental equipment to envisage the ideas in it. Brahms’s Wiegenlied is simplicity itself compared to Everybody Step, yet the former is beautiful music while the latter is only extremely clever jazz . . .
It is an interesting indication of the pervasion among the masses of this sort of musical sophistication, a musical literacy, that the virtuoso bands of the hotels and dance-salons are now used as “acts” in vaudeville houses. People are happy just to sit and listen. And these are really virtuoso bands: they produce a tone often mellower and richer than one hears in the concert halls. The audiences that listen to these bands are acquiring more than a sophisticated musical idiom; they are beginning to sensitize their eardrums, a difficult and subtle educational process.
OUR CONTRIBUTION TO MUSIC
But this music needs no apology. Created—and recently again stimulated—by the musical talent of the negro, it constitutes the musical contribution of this country and it is a genuine and legitimate contribution. In Shuffle Along its verve, simplicity and ardor have again rejuvenated the spineless and degenerate American musical-comedy. Besides the usual negro rhythmic buoyancy, the music of this show revealed lyric and dramatic qualities of a high order. The setting of Kiss Me, for example, is amazingly dramatic, passionately sincere. (These qualities are totally absent, of course, from the crude lyric.)
That large body of songs known as “The Blues”, of infinite variety, is an interesting by-product; they reflect the various reactions of the soul to a not altogether perfect Universe. They have here an emotional, as well as the rhythmic, kinship with the old negro spiritual. The rhythm is distinct, though languid; the “blue” state is indicated by an appropriate monotony of melody.
The negro genius has been chiefly responsible for whatever musical development America can boast. It is that genius which has produced the American jazz, the only distinct and original idiom we have. It, and not the music of MacDowell and Foster and a host of imitators of the German and French, is the musical speech of this country.
POEMS
T. S. ELIOT
FROM JULY 1923
MORNING AT THE WINDOW
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
SWEENEY AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES
Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.
The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the horned gate.
Gloomy Orion and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeney’s knees
Slips and pulls the table cloth
Overturns a coffee-cup,
Reorganized upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;
The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in ora
nges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;
The silent vertebrate in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel née Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;
She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eves
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,
Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;
The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid droppings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
A COOKING EGG
En l’an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues . . .
Pipit sate upright in her chair
Some distance from where I was sitting;
Views of the Oxford Colleges
Lay on the table, with the knitting.
Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,
Her grandfather and great great aunts,
Supported on the mantelpiece
An Invitation to the Dance.
. . .
I shall not want Honour in Heaven
For I shall meet sir Philip Sidney
And have talk with Coriolanus
And other heroes of that kidney.
I shall not want Capital in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond:
We two shall lie together, lapt
In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.
I shall not want Society in Heaven,
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;
Her anecdotes will be more amusing
Than Pipit’s experience could provide.
I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
In the Seven Sacred Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will conduct me . . .
. . .
But where is the penny world I bought
To eat with Pipit behind the screen?
The red-eyed scavengers are creeping
From Kentish Town and Golders Green;
Where are the eagles and the trumpets?
Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.
Over buttered scones and crumpets
Weeping, weeping multitudes
Droop in a hundred A. B. C.’s
THE BOSTON EVENING TRANSCRIPT
The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.
When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.”
LA FIGLIA CHE PIANGE
0 quam te memorem virgo . . .
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.
AN ESSAY ON BEHAVIORISM
BERTRAND RUSSELL
FROM OCTOBER 1923
Although the word “Behaviorism” has grown familiar during the last few years, the ordinary layman has no very definite idea as to what it means. Behaviorism is in the first instance a method in psychology, and only derivatively a psychological theory. It is possible to accept the method without accepting the theory, although the one leads by a natural development to the other.
There are few full-fledged behaviorists; the chief is Mr. John B. Watson, formerly a professor at Johns Hopkins University. But many men who are not prepared to go the whole length are willing to go a considerable distance with the behaviorists, and to admit that their contentions are very important. The present writer is among those who are sympathetic to behaviorism, without accepting it in its entirety. In considering it, it will be well to begin with the method.
As a method, behaviorism is distinguished by the fact that it rejects “introspection” as a special source of knowledge about mental processes. Whatever various philosophers may have believed, it has been customary in scientific practice to suppose that there are two different ways in which we become aware of occurrences: there is the way of the senses, which tells us what is going on in the world about us, or in our own bodies, and there is the way of introspection, which tells us what we are thinking or feeling or desiring. We know our own “thoughts”, so it seems, directly, whereas we can only guess the thoughts of others by what they do or say. We can remember our own dreams, but we only know what other people have dreamed when they tell us. We know when we feel pleased or displeased, but if we choose to behave so as to conceal our feelings, other people cannot know them.
• • •
In this way there comes to be a world of private knowledge apparently open to each one of us about himself, but not directly accessible about other people. This private inner world we think of as our “mind”. It is supposed to be the distinctive business of psychology to study “minds”, and its distinctive method is supposed to be that peculiar knowledge of our own mental processes which is called “introspection”.
The behaviorist does not, of course, deny that we know things about ourselves which we do not know so easily about other people. We cannot help knowing when we have a toothache, whereas it is easy not to know when other people’s teeth ache. What the behaviorist denies is not the fact of this knowledge but the supposed peculiarity of the method by which it is acquired. Our senses tell us more about what is happening in a room in which we are than about what is happening at a distance; but the knowledge is of the same kind in both cases. Similarly, our senses tell us more about what is happening in our own body than about what is happening elsewhere. We have not only the senses of sight and hearing and so on by which we become aware of external things, but also organic sensations which have specially to do with our physiological “inside”. But all the knowledge we obtain in this way may be regarded as knowledge of something physical, not of something “mental”. It may be said that it is our bodies which we come to know by means of physiological sens
ations, only that the knowledge is fuller than in the case of external bodies.
The behaviorist denies that there is any knowledge of a different kind from our knowledge about tables and chairs. And he holds that everything we can know about ourselves could, theoretically, be known by an external observer, provided he had suitable instruments for observing and adequate skill in drawing inferences. He rejects altogether the special method of “introspection”, as being fallacious and misleading. Psychology, he maintains, should be concerned with the “behavior” of a human being or an animal (as the case may be), that is to say, with something displayed in actions which are visible to the onlooker, or at least may be so if he is a sufficiently skilled observer. Hence the name “behaviorist”. This name denotes a person who thinks that behavior, rather than mental states, should be studied by the psychologist.
• • •
Considering this question practically, without troubling ourselves about possible metaphysical implications, it must be admitted that there is a very great deal to be said for the view that the psychologist should confine himself to behavior. There is first of all the wide field of animal psychology, which is very instructive in regard to the psychology of human beings, and also full of interest on its own account. It is clear that animals cannot tell us the results of their introspection, even supposing they indulge in it. We can only know about animal psychology what is to be discovered by observing how animals act. It is a mistake, scientifically, to state the results of our observation in language involving inference to mental processes. We know that a dog wags his tail when he sees his master, but we do not know that he feels pleased. We see that cats spit and arch their backs in the presence of dogs, and we infer that they hate dogs, but the inference is not very well founded. Nothing is really added to our knowledge by such inferences, which are always precarious. It is better to confine ourselves to observing and correlating the external facts of animal behavior, which we can ascertain with scientific precision, rather than to indulge in doubtful dramatic interpretations of their acts, which may be as misleading as they would be in the case of an actor on the stage, whose object is to simulate emotions which he does not feel.