The artist's solitude

A great artist is like a fig-tree whose roots run a hundred feet underground, in search of tee-leaves, cinders and old boots. Art which is directly produced for the Community can never have the same withdrawn quality as that which is made out of the artist's solitude. For this possesses the integrity and bleak exhileration that are to be gained only form the absence of an audience and from communion with the primal sources of unconscious life. One cannot serve both beauty and power.

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 42