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?