The modern American æsthete has been masterfully portrayed by one of the best-informed American essayists of to-day.[60] Let us examine him as he is destined to go down to posterity in the wake of the dandy, the fatal man, the “fin de siècle” and the flapper. The American æsthete, model 1924, is a child of the twentieth century, according to Mr. Boyd. The Yellow Nineties had flickered out in the delirium of the Spanish-American War when his first gurgles rejoiced the ears of his expectant parents. If Musset were more than a name to him, a hazy recollection of French literature courses, he might adapt a line from the author of _La Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle_ and declare: “I came too late in a world too old.” The 1924 æsthete studied at Princeton, Yale or Harvard, in the early years of the Woodrovian epoch. At this time he was still “classical.” Between two escapades he would go and worship at the tomb of William and Henry James. During his careful education, American literature was revealed to him as a pale and obedient provincial cousin, whose past contained occasional indiscretions, such as Poe and Whitman, about whom the less said the better. Then, the 1924 æsthete picked up a taste for Art after some party in the red-plush drawing-rooms. He severed relations with the rabble who preferred baseball and football to poetry. He was herded into the intellectual fold, and borrowed his sociology and his ethics from the advanced reviews. He discovered simultaneously Socialism and French, or pseudo-French, literature. Then he floated in the rarefied atmosphere of Advanced Thought. Came the War, and with it disillusionment. The enthusiasm of the æsthetes was not to survive the carping remarks of the critics and the pacifistic campaigns. By luck or cunning, the æsthete succeeded in getting out of the actual trenches. He edited his first paper.... Simultaneously with his plunge into arms and letters he made his first venture into the refinements of sex, thereby extending his French vocabulary and gaining that deep insight into the intimate life of France which is still his proudest possession.