JAZZ AGE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 238, 7 October 1932, Page 9

JAZZ AGE.

The Victorian age has become a phrase. Will these last decades be called the age of jazz? How vain it all has been, writes Ferdinand Tuoliy, in "The Queen." The unification of these latter years lives after them —years when the one thing to do was to attract attention. How fundamentally false was so mucli of it! Take the fable of marvellous youth—pure newspaper stunt. By giving our latter day adolescents an inflated idea of their own importance we put them on a pedestal upon which they posed and were insolent and shed the convenances. Now that it is no longer either funny or Original to bo haphazard and shameless, to give a portrayal of essence of ginned vacuity, the tendency is fading out. In point of fact, observation leads me to suppose that the younger generation is developing interests we never had and is finding something to do when and j where it can. So do let us leave it alone. And also that second sprouting of post-war fancy, "the modern girl." Hollywood taught her to be prettier, tlio astonishing years made her more aware and gave her self-reliance. Otherwise, no change. Indeed, lam not sure it sholdn't be "Conservative gain," judging by the impertinently perched little Victorian hats and the craze for fine needlework, and the waltz and early marriage! It is possible that some day the late epoch may be sentimentally recovered from the past and regretted even as have been the good old days. We do not know what severities we may not be steering into. The gay abandon of the gone years, for all their crudity and over-emphasis, their idiocy and their fake, may stand ever more vividly out, like "the dancing after Waterloo." And there is i

ever a danger, when the pendulum swings, lest it swing too far. Such a case was the ultra-seriousness of Protectorate England; such another, the debauchery of the Restoration. The special point now is that, willy-nilly, we are moving to calmer, more earnest and solid times; also into a period of less blatant modes and gentler manners. Living within our means. That alone is irreconcilable with what has gone before. Of course, we shall still continue to enjoy life. But things will be different.