The Seven Lively Arts — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Keystone Foundation

The opening chapter, 'The Keystone the Builders Rejected,' immediately signals Seldes's contrarian stance. He treats the Keystone Film Company—producers of early slapstick shorts—as foundational to American comedy, a claim that would have seemed audacious in 1924. The excerpt shows him analyzing the physical comedy of the Keystone Kops not as mere chaos but as a disciplined form: 'the lurch and the fall are worked up into a complete arc of dance steps.'

Seldes's method is to isolate a single performer's gesture and trace its effect. Of Leon Errol's drunk act, he notes the 'loping dance step into which he converts the lurch of the drunkard.' The observation is precise: the comic moment is not the stumble itself but the transformation of that stumble into rhythm. This attention to the craft of popular performance recurs throughout the book.

Voices and Timing

In the excerpt on Bert Savoy, Seldes demonstrates his ear for vocal nuance. He describes Savoy's 'buzz and pause in the voice—'you muzzt com'over ... you don't know the ha-ff of it, dear-ie'—and notes that 'the interpolations are funnier than the climax.' This is not a general praise of comic timing but a specific observation about Savoy's technique: the digression becomes the point.

Similarly, Seldes praises Harry Kelly's handling of a single word: 'For precisely a minute and a half Kelly played with the word 'bulk'—one saw it registered in his brain, saw an idea germinating.' The analysis treats the performer as a conscious artist, making choices about pause, inflection, and repetition. Seldes's vocabulary—'germinating,' 'conflict of pride and avarice'—borrows from literary criticism, elevating the vaudeville stage to the level of dramatic literature.

The Comic Strip as Art

Seldes devotes two chapters to newspaper comics, a medium then largely ignored by critics. The excerpt on Krazy Kat (the chapter title: 'The Krazy Kat That Walks by Himself') treats George Herriman's strip as a sustained poetic creation. Seldes's approach is to identify the strip's unique logic: the shifting backgrounds, the invented language, the eternal triangle of Krazy, Ignatz, and Officer Pupp.

He does not summarize plots but instead points to the strip's 'independent commonness'—a phrase he also applies to George Monroe's charwoman. The connection suggests that for Seldes, the vitality of popular art lies in its refusal of refinement. Krazy Kat's 'wildness' and 'unrestraint' are not flaws but the source of its 'immortal' quality. The chapter likely argues that the comic strip, like jazz or vaudeville, achieves a kind of formal perfection through its very roughness.

Jazz and the Lyric Theatre

Several chapters address music: 'Say It with Music,' 'Tearing a Passion to Ragtime,' 'Toujours Jazz.' Seldes treats Irving Berlin and George Gershwin as serious composers, analyzing their rhythmic innovations and their debt to African American musical traditions. The excerpt on Berlin's 'Bananas' (appended to the main text) suggests Seldes's willingness to examine individual songs in detail.

His 'Plan for a Lyric Theatre in America' proposes a synthesis of these popular forms—jazz, vaudeville, comic opera—into a distinctively American art. The excerpts do not reveal the plan's specifics, but the ambition is clear: Seldes wants to build a critical framework that can accommodate both the Ziegfeld Follies and the Metropolitan Opera. The book's structure, moving from Keystone to Krazy Kat to jazz, enacts this integration, treating each form as a 'lively art' worthy of the same attention given to painting or poetry.

Seldes's book rewards a reader who follows his method: watch for the specific gesture, the repeated phrase, the moment of transformation. The excerpts offer a series of close readings—of a drunkard's dance, a comedian's pause, a cartoon cat's walk—that together build a case for the aesthetic seriousness of popular entertainment. A first-time reader might start with the chapters on performers they already know (Chaplin, Jolson, Gershwin) and then follow Seldes's connections to less familiar figures. The book is not a history but a set of arguments, and its pleasure lies in watching a critic make his case with precision and enthusiasm.

Seldes found such tenderness in Charlie Chaplin’s grace, the way a circus clown’s fragile dignity outshone the grand stage. That same fond mischief lives in Inside the Classic, where familiar heroes stumble into affectionate mockery. Parodies of the works of English & American authors, vol. IV — Inside the Classic holds its own quiet wink at seriousness, a shared, knowing smile across the decades.