Poets and novelists are not political beings because they are not essentially rational. Political intelligence, based though it is in the revolutionary’s case upon a deep idealism, demands a scientific and pragmatic armor, and subordinates itself to the pursuit of strictly defined social ends. The artist, on the contrary, is always delving for his raw material in the subconscious, in the preconscious, in intuition, in a lyrical inner life that is rather hard to define; he does not know with any certainty either where he is going or what he is creating. If the novelist’s characters are truly alive, they function by themselves, to a point at which they eventually take their author by surprise, and sometimes he is quite perplexed if he is called upon to classify them in terms of morality or social utility. Dostoevsky, Gorky, and Balzac brought to life, all lovingly, criminals whom the Political Man would shoot most unlovingly. That the writer should involve himself in social struggles, have enriching convictions, that his potency will increase to the extent that he identifies himself with the rising classes, thus communicating with masses of individuals who carry within them a precious potential all this does not significantly alter the simple psychological truths that I set out above. [...]