...art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication... - Cyril Connolly

So wrote Pater, calling an art-for-art's sake muezzin to the faithful from the topmost turret of the ivory tower.

It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential.

Mr. Wilson does not write as one who believes in a particular religion but rather as an intellectual who is being forced more and more into accepting religion as the only solution to the problem of the Outsider. In other words, the anxiety and uneasiness, the sheer horror of being oneself in the modern world is not to be cured by reason or even of study of philosophies which set out to explain them, like Existentialism; the unpleasant symptoms have to be lived through, leading to the worst, in order that the final, mystical experience may be attained. The Outsider has it within him to become a saint. Yet, though Mr. Wilson is drawn to religion, and all his arrows point that way, he never departs from his standards of intellectual analysis.