When militarism was finally overthrown, democracy made safe, and a permanent peace established by the victorious and united Allies, he was ready to stay on a little longer in Paris, and to participate in the joys of La Rotonde and Les Deux Magots. There for a brief spell he breathed the same air as the Dadaists, met Picasso and Philippe Soupault, and allowed Ezra Pound to convince him that the French nation was aware of the existence of Jean Cocteau, Paul Morand, Jean Giraudoux and Louis Aragon. From those who had nothing to say on the subject when Marcel Proust published “Du Côté de Chez Swann” in 1913 he now learned what a great man the author was, and formed those friendships which caused him eventually to join in a tribute to Proust by a group of English admirers who would have stoned Oscar Wilde had they been old enough to do so when it was the right thing to do. The time was not ripe for his repatriation, and so, with the same critical equipment in French as in English, but with a still imperfect control of the language as a complication, the now complete æsthete returned to New York and descended upon Greenwich Village. His poems of disenchantment were in the press, his war novel was nearly finished.... Both his prose and verse were remarkable chiefly for typographical and syntactical eccentricities, and a high pressure of unidiomatic, misprinted French to the square inch. His further contributions (if any) to the art of prose narrative have consisted of a breathless phallic symbolism--a sex obsession which sees the curves of a woman’s body in every object not actually flat, including, I need hardly say, the Earth, our great Mother.... Mr. Boyd is rather malignant, but the portrait resembles the original. In the last analysis the æsthete may be diagnosed as the literary counterpart of the traditional American tourist in Paris. He is glamored by the gaudy spectacle of that most provincial of great cities. Paris obsesses and holds the American æsthete. He has learned all about “cineplastics” from the French æsthetes. The faithful are called upon by a French expert to admire the films of William S. Hart and Jack Pickford, and some one carefully translates the poetic rhapsodies inspired in him by the contemplation of their masterpieces. Two souls dwell in the breast of the æsthete, and his allegiance is torn between the sales manager’s desk ... and the esoteric editorial chair where experiments are made with stories which discard the old binding of plot and narrative, the substitute being the structural framework which appeals to us over and above the message of the line. * * * * *