Harry Haller’s Records

and emotion on the latest craze in dances or the sentimental cloying song of a jazz singer as one of us on Nietzsche or Hamsun. Maria talked to me about the handsome saxophone player, Pablo, and spoke of an American song that he had sung them sometimes, and she was so carried away with admiration and love as she spoke of it that I was far more moved and impressed than by the ecstasies of any highly cultured person over artistic pleasures of the rarest and most distinguished quality. I was ready to enthuse in sympathy, be the song what it might. Maria’s glowing words and her eager effusive face made large rents in my aesthetics. There was to be sure a Beauty, one and indivisible, small and select, that seemed to me, with Mozart at the top, to be above all dispute and doubt, but where was the limit? Hadn’t we all as connoisseurs and critics in our youth been consumed with love for works of art and for artists that today we regarded with doubt and dismay? Hadn’t that happened to us with Liszt and Wagner, and, to many of us, even with Beethoven? Wasn’t the blossoming of Maria’s childish emotion over the song from America just as pure and beautiful an artistic experience and exalted as far