This is the note I have tried to emphasise, the note that sounds clear
in my mind when I think of anything beyond the purely personal aspects
of my story.
It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly
aimless swelling, of a bubbling up and medley of futile loves and
sorrows. But through the confusion sounds another note. Through the
confusion something drives, something that is at once human achievement
and the most inhuman of all existing things. Something comes out of
it.... How can I express the values of a thing at once so essential and
so immaterial. It is something that calls upon such men as I with an
irresistible appeal.
I have figured it in my last section by the symbol of my destroyer,
stark and swift, irrelevant to most human interests. Sometimes I call
this reality Science, sometimes I call it Truth. But it is something we
draw by pain and effort ont of the heart of life, that we disentangle
and make clear. Other men serve it, I know, in art, in literature, in
social invention, and see it in a thousand different figures, under a
hundred names. I see it always as austerity, as beauty. This thing we
make clear is the heart of life. It is the one enduring thing. Men and
nations, epochs and civilisation pass each making its contribution I do
not know what it is, this something, except that it is supreme. It is,
a something, a quality, an element, one may find now in colours, now in
norms, now in sounds, now in thoughts. It emerges from life with each
year one lives and feels, and generation by generation and age by age,
but the how and why of it are all beyond the compass of my mind....
Yet the full sense of it was with me all that night as I drove, lonely
above the rush and murmur of my engines, out upon the weltering circle
of the sea.
Far out to the northeast there came the flicker of a squadron of
warships waving white swords of light about the sky. I kept them
hull-down, and presently they were mere summer lightning over the
watery edge of the globe.... I fell into thought that was nearly
formless, into doubts and dreams that have no words, and it seemed good
to me to drive ahead and on and or through the windy starlight, over
the long black waves.