But I do know enough to be
able to say that the wild asses who with their jazz-bands "stamp o'er
our heads and will not let us sleep" (slightly to amend my old friend
FitzGerald) are nothing less than musical Trotskys.
Music was once regarded as the staple nourishment of the tender passion,
and in my younger days the haunting strains of "The Blue Danube"
assisted many a budding love-affair to blossom. But these non-stop
stridencies of the modern ballroom, even if they left a man with breath
enough to propose, would effectually prevent the girl from catching the
drift of the avowal. You can't roar, "Will you be mine?" into a maiden's
ear as if you were conversing from the quarterdeck, and if you did she'd
only think you were ecstatically emulating the coloured gentleman in the
orchestra with the implements of torture and the misguided voice.
I will pass over in the silence of despair such other symptoms of
national decadence as zigzag painting, whirlpool poetry, cinema
star-gazing and the impossibility of procuring a self-respecting Stilton
(which assuredly is not "living at this hour").
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