“Too much living has driven him from life,” Dorn thought, “and killed his lusts. So he sits and reads books--the last debauchery: strange, twisted phrases like idols, like totem poles, like Polynesian masks. He sits contemplating them as he once sat drunkenly watching the obscenities of black, white and yellow-bodied women. Thus, the mania for the rouge of life, for the grimace that lies beyond satiety, passes in him from bestiality to asceticism and esthetics. Yesterday a bacchanal of flesh, to-day a bacchanal of words ... the posturings of courtezans and the posturings of ornate phrases become the same.” The heroine of this discouraging book resembles the hero. She too is uncertain, lost, wandering through the maelstrom of life. Dorn, according to the American critic who wrote the preface[58] is obviously a rascal, but extenuating circumstances may be pleaded. If Dorn is a rascal, we are told, that is the fault of Society. (America knows its Rousseau well.) Dorn is “déclassé” through his own frankness as regards himself and his fellow men; his “head is the parasite of his heart.” (Should it not be the other way around?) Dorn is a sick man. He can no longer react to external stimuli.[59] He lives on the margin of life, in a mechanical fashion. He is a _dissociated_ being. He has lost all conviction and become a sophist. Ideas are his amusements. Words fascinate him. Experiences are for him but an excuse to displace adjectives. He considers doctrines, dogmas and ideals as ridiculous efforts to impose upon life, which is ever changing, little tags which never vary. The sole reality for him is intelligence, and this is how he defines it: “Intelligence is a faculty which enables man to glance at the chaos of ideas--and end up nowhere at all.” Far be it from me to take these paradoxes for truths and to mistake reality for those extreme views, _ab uno disce omnes_. One should be wary of placing upon Young America the grimacing mask of a Middle Western Faust. However, under all this melodramatic claptrap, we perceive the unrest, the moral confusion, and the necessity for a rejuvenation, characteristic of the younger generation. * * * * * Ben Hecht’s efforts to find in æsthetics a derivative and an issue for suppressed energies are not isolated efforts. On all sides the renaissance of ideas has made imperative the need for a revolution in art and in literature. Those who have been disillusioned by life seek a refuge in art, and bring with them their taste for originality and eccentricity at any cost. The new American literature quickly acquired a tone that was ironic, immoralistic and rebellious. The revolter became Bohemian. Those who formerly inhibited now turned æsthetes, somewhat later than the French whom they believed to be sincerely following. America is young and naïve.