DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXIV

"A music-lover who had tired of romantic democracy and popular moral harangues and demanded an art for art's sake, an ambitionless - or in the most exclusive sense ambitious - art for artists and connoisseurs, must have been ravished by this self-centered and completely cool esoterics; but which now, as esoteric, in the spirit of the piece in every way mocked and parodistically exaggerated itself, thus mixing into its ravishment a grain of hopelessness, a drop of melancholy.

Yes, admiration and sadness mingled strangely as I contemplated this music. "How beautiful!" the heart said to itself - mine at least said so - "and how sad!" The admiration was due to a witty and melancholy work of art, an intellectual achievement which deserved the name of heroic, something just barely possible, behaving like arrogant travesty. I know not how otherwise to characterize it than by calling it a tense, sustained, neck-breaking game played by art at the edge of impossibility. It was just this that made one. But admiration and sadness, admiration and doubt, is that not almost the definition of love? It was with a strained and painful love for him and what was his that I listened to Adrian's performance."