I have deferred until last the discussion of jazz, which seems the clearest of all signs of our age’s deep-seated predilection for barbarism. The mere fact of its rapid conquest of the world indicates some vast extent of inward ravage, so that there were no real barriers against the disintegration it represents.

Jazz was born in the dives of New Orleans, where the word appears first to have signified an elementary animal function. It was initially a music of primitivism; and we have the word of one of its defenders that “jazz has no need of intelligence; it needs only feeling.” But jazz did not remain primitive; something in the Negro’s spontaneous manifestation of feeling linked up with Western man’s declining faith in the value of culture. The same writer admits that “if one examines the fields of activity which have been reserved for art, one perceives that the creative work of our ancestors was under the impulse of a harmonious equilibrium between reason and sentiment.” Jazz, by formally repudiating restraint by intellect, and by expressing contempt and hostility toward our traditional society and mores, has destroyed this equilibrium. That destruction is a triumph of grotesque, even hysterical, emotion over propriety and reasonableness. Jazz often sounds as if in a rage to divest itself of anything that suggests structure or confinement.

It is understandable, therefore, that jazz should have a great appeal to civilization’s fifth column, to the barbarians within the gates. These people found it a useful instrument for the further obliteration of distinctions and the discrediting of all that bears the mark of restraint. Accordingly, it was taken up in a professional way and was sophisticated by artists of technical virtuosity so that it became undeniably a medium of resourcefulness and power. That is all the more reason for recognizing its essential tendency.

The driving impulse behind jazz is best grasped through its syncopation. What this can achieve technically we need not go into here; what it indicates spiritually is a restlessness, a desire to get on, to realize without going through the aesthetic ritual. Forward to the climax, it seems to say; let us dispense with the labor of earning effects. Do we not read in this another form of contempt for labor? Is it not again the modern fatuity of insisting upon the reward without the effort? Form and ritual are outmoded piety, and work is a sacrifice. The primitive and the bored sophisticate are alike impatient for titillation.

As dissent breeds further dissidence, so the emancipation which is jazz gives rise to yet greater vagaries. In “swing” one hears a species of music in which the performer is at fullest liberty to express himself as an egotist. Playing now becomes personal; the musician seizes a theme and improvises as he goes; he develops perhaps a personal idiom, for which he is admired. Instead of that strictness of form which had made the musician like the celebrant of a ceremony, we now have individualization; we hear a variable into which the musician pours his feeling and whimsy more freely than the Romantic poets laid bare their bleeding hearts.

Jazz has been compared to “an indecent story syncopated and counterpointed.” There can be no question that, like journalism in literature, it has helped to destroy the concept of obscenity.