blues that preceded the jazz of the post-World War I. He concludes that the great flowering of jazz in the twenties was a popular response to the highbrow richness and orchestral subtlety of the Debussy-Delius period. Jazz would seem to be an effective bridge between highbrow and lowbrow music, much as Chaplin made a similar bridge for pictorial art. Literary people eagerly accepted these bridges, and Joyce got Chaplin into Ulysses as Bloom, just as Eliot got jazz into the rhythms of his early poems. Chaplin's clown-Cyrano is as much a part of a deep melancholy as Laforgue's or Satie's Pierrot art. Is it not inherent in the very triumph of the mechanical and its omission of the human? Could the mechanical reach a higher level than the talking machine with its mime of voice and dance? Do not T. S. Eliot's famous lines about the typist of the jazz age capture the entire pathos of the age of Chaplin and the ragtime blues? When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone. Read as a Chaplin-like comedy, Eliot's Prufrock makes ready sense. Prufrock is the complete Pierrot, the little puppet of the mechanical civilization that was about to do a flip into its electric phase. It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of complex mechanical forms such as film and phonograph as the prelude to the automation of human song and dance. As this automation of human voice and gesture had approached perfection, so the human work force approached automation. Now in the electric age the assembly line with its human hands disappears, and electric automation brings about a withdrawal of the work force from industry. Instead of being automated themselves-