Massine, unable to continue any longer with the Monte Carlo Ballet Russe management, severed his connection with the company he had made, in 1942. Save for a few undistinguished creations, de Basil was skating along as best he could on his Diaghileff heritage; classicism was being neglected in the frantic search for “novelties.” Both companies were making productions, not on any basis of policy, but simply for expediency and as cheaply as possible. Existing productions in both companies were increasingly slipshod. While it is true that a good ballet is a good ballet, it is something less than good when it receives niggardly treatment or when it is given one less iota than the strictest attention to detail. That is exactly what happened when the companies split, and split again: the works suffered; this, together with the recurring internal crises, boded ill for the future of ballet. There was the ever-present need for money for new productions. Diaghileff had one Maecenas after another. By the beginning of the third decade of the twentieth century, a Maecenas was becoming a rare bird indeed. Today he is as dead as the proverbial Dodo. I had certain definite convictions about ballet, I still have them. One of them is that the sound cornerstone of any ballet company must be formed of genuine classics. But these must never take the form of “modern” versions, nor additionally suffer from anything less than painstaking productions, top-drawer performances, and an infinite respect for the works themselves. Ballet may depart from the classical base as far as it wishes to experiment, but the base should always be kept in sight; and psychological excursions, explorations into the subconscious, should never be permitted to obscure the fact that the basic function of ballet is to entertain. By that I do not mean to suggest ballet should stand still, should chain itself to reaction and the conservatism of a dead past. It should look forward, move forward; but it must take its bearings from those virtues of a living past, which is its heritage: all of which can be summed up in one brief phrase--the classical tradition. There are increasingly frequent attempts to create ballets crammed with symbols dealing with various aspects of sex, perversion, physical and psychological tensions. In one of the world’s great ballet centers there have been attempts to use ballet as a means to promulgate and propagandize political ideologies. I am glad to say the latter have been completely unsuccessful and they have returned to the classics.