In the first place. No literature of the past two hundred years is of the slightest importance unless it is "disaffiliated." Only our modern industrial and commercial civilization has produced an elite which has consistently rejected all the reigning values of the society. There were no Baudelaires in BabyIon. It is not that we have lost sight of them in time. The nearest thing in Rome was Catullus, and it is apparent, reading him, that there stood behind him no anonymous and forgotten body of bohemians. He was a consort of the rich, of generals and senators, Caesar and Mamurra, and the girl he writes about as though she was, in our terms, an art-struck tart from the Black Cat, was, in fact, a notorious multimillionairess, "the most depraved daughter of the Clodian line." Tu Fu censured the Emperor, but he wanted to be recognized for it—he wanted to be a Censor. So the Taoism and Buddhism of Far Eastern culture functions as a keel and ballast to the ship of state. The special ideology of the only artists and writers since the French Revolution who deserve to be taken seriously is a destructive, revolutionary force. They would blow up "their" ship of state-destroy it utterly. This has nothing to do with political revolutionarism, which in our era has been the mortal enemy of all art whatever. When the Bolsheviks, for a brief period, managed to persuade the culture bearers, demoralized by the world economic crisis and rising tide of political terrorism, that the political revolutionary and the artist, the poet, the moral vates were allies, Western European culture came within an ace of being destroyed altogether and finally. Capitalism cannot produce from within itself, from any of its "classes," bourgeois, petit-bourgeois, or proletariat, any system of values which is not in essence of itself. The converse is a Marxist delusion. This is why "Marxist aestheticians" have gone to such lengths to "prove" that the artist, the writer, the technical and professional intelligentsia, are not declassés in modern society, but members of the petit bourgeoisie, and must "come over," in the words of Engel's old chestnut, "to the proletariat," that is, become the prostitutes of their brand of State Capitalism. Nothing could be more false. Artist, poet, physicist, astrono-mer, dancer, musician, mathematician are captives stolen from an older time, a different kind of society, in which, ultimately, they were the creators of all primary values. They are exactly like the astronomers and philosophers the Mongols took off from Samarkand to Karakorum. They belong to the ancien régime-all anciens régimes as against the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And so they could only vomit in the faces of the despots who offered them places in the ministries of all the talents, or at least they were nauseated in proportion to their integrity. The same principles apply today as did in the days of Lamartine. Caught in the gears of their own evil machinery, the bosses may scream for an Einstein, a Bohr, even an Oppenheimer; when Normalcy comes back, they kick them out and put tellers in their place. The more fools the Einsteins for having allowed themselves to be used - as they always discover, alas, too late.