Why is it that Roman works of architecture and sculpture, for all their power and facility, are less impressive, less moving, less significant formally than the Greek? Many have thought about this problem, and the other night an answer came to me in dream that I would offer now as a major illumination. It is this: that in a small community like Athens the relationship of the creative artist to the local social leaders would be forthright and direct, they would have known each other since boyhood; whereas in such a community as, say, our modern New York, London, or Paris, the artist who would be known has to go to cocktail parties to win commissions, and those who win them are the ones who are not in their studios but at parties, meeting the right people and appearing in the right places. They have not been quite enough engaged in the agony of solitary creative work to press beyond their first acquisitions of marketable styles and techniques. And the next consequence is "instant art," where some clever individual with as little formal agony as possible simply renders something unforeseen—which is then criticized and either advertised or suppressed by either friendly or unfriendly newspaper folk, who have also had a lot of socializing to attend to and, with insufficient time for extracurricular study or experience, find themselves baffled before anything really complex or significantly new.