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She was too firmly intrenched in the established to have any sympathy with revolutionary ideas. She had always been used to music, and she had enjoyed opera ever since she was a child, and all her world had enjoyed it, too. Then by what right did Martin Eden emerge, as he had so recently emerged, from his rag-time and working-class songs, and pass judgment on the world's music?
They played mostly syncopated airs of the United States, popular at the time. All primitive people, or those less advanced in civilization or education, prefer the rag-time variants of the American negro or his imitators, to so-called good or classical music. It is like simple language, easily understood, and makes a direct appeal to their ears and their passions.
And she knew that she couldn't turn Flip-Flops and break Furniture and play Rag-Time along after Midnight until she had become a Respectable. Married Woman. So she had her Distress Signal out and used to drop very Broad Hints, when she was chatting with the Lads who happened to be in the Soda-Water Resort when she dropped in.
When I went over the folk made way for me. I entered, sat down, and found that they were crowded around a cheap gramophone which was hawking, spitting and screeching some awful rag-time music and nigger jigs. I could forgive the traders for bringing in the gramophone, but why, oh, why, did they not bring some of the simple world-wide human songs which could at least have had an educational effect?
Hazelton invited them in second hall to supper in the games study; the gramophone played rag-time choruses. Gordon sang all of them. Everyone was gloriously, unutterably happy. Meredith sent a wire: "Well done, House: now for the Two Cock." In the dormitory Hazelton was talking over the match. "By Jove, when that side is the Three Cock, we shall win by fifty points. Lord, I do envy you, Caruthers!
Vance had draped a Neapolitan scarf; an upright piano, upon which Emmanuel Day, or, as he was known to the cross-roads of Broadway and Forty-second street, "Mannie" Day, provoked the most marvelous rag-time, an enlarged photograph in crayon, of Professor Vance, in a frock coat and lawn tie, a china bull dog, coquettishly decorated with a blue bow, and, on the mantel piece, two tall beer steins and a hand telephone.
There is a kind of music called rag-time, vulgar music, with catchy tunes catchy to those who do not know nor care for things better. There are men satisfied with rag-time music, with rag-time theatres, with rag-time politics, rag-time knowledge, rag-time religion. "It was my duty to have loved the highest."
Civilization is a process of making life more complex and subtle. We have the piano, the violin, the orchestra. Yet we also have rag-time, which is a reaction from the nervous tension of American commercial life, a swinging back to the old days when man, though a brute, was free.
As I emerged into a broader thoroughfare, my ears were smitten with the sound of minstrelsy. It is true that the tune was changed. It was unmistakably rag-time.
It is not great art, it is not profoundly significant, it is often frankly third-rate, but it is genuine; and therefore I rate the artisans of the Ecole Martine with the best contemporary painters, not as artists, but as manifestations of the movement. I am no devout lover of rag-time and turkey-trotting, but they too are manifestations.
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