metaphysical melancholy as latent in the great industrial world 
of the metropolis. The Pierrot figure is as crucial in the poetry 
of Laforgue as it is in the art of Picasso or the music of Satie. 
Is not the mechanical at its best a remarkable approximation 
to the organic? And is not a great industrial civilization able to 
produce anything in abundance for everybody? The answer is 
“Yes.” But Chaplin and the Pierrot poets and painters and 
musicians pushed this logic all the way to reach the image of 
Cyrano de Bergerac, who was the greatest lover of all, but who 
was never permitted the return of his love. This weird image of 
Cyrano, the unloved and unlovable lover, was caught up in the 
phonograph cult of the blues. Perhaps it is misleading to try to 
derive the origin of the blues from Negro folk music; however, 
Constant Lambert, English conductor-composer, in his Music  
Ho !, provides an account of the blues that preceded the jazz of 
the post-World War I. He concludes that the great flowering of