Another novel, The Raft, followed The Garden Without Walls.  The nature of his life now seemed fixed.  To the task of novel-writing he had brought a temperament highly idealistic and romantic, a fresh and vivid imagination, and a thorough literary equipment.  His life, as he planned it, held but one purpose for him, outside the warmth and tenacity of its affections—­the triumph of the efficient purpose in the adequate expression of his mind in literature.  The austerity of his long years of preparation had left him relatively indifferent to the common prizes of life, though they had done nothing to lessen his intense joy in life.  His whole mind was concentrated on his art.  His adventures would be the adventures of the mind in search of ampler modes of expression.  His crusades would be the crusades of the spirit in search of the realities of truth.  He had received the public recognition which gave him faith in himself and faith in his ability to achieve the reputation of the true artist, whose work is not cheapened but dignified and broadened by success.  So he read the future, and so his critics read it for him.  And then, sudden and unheralded, there broke on this quiet life of intellectual devotion the great storm of 1914.  The guns that roared along the Marne shattered all his purposes, and left him face to face with a solemn spiritual exigency which admitted no equivocation.

At first, in common with multitudes more experienced than himself, he did not fully comprehend the true measure of the cataclysm which had overwhelmed the world.  There had been wars before, and they had been fought out by standing armies.  It was incredible that any war should last more than a few months.  Again and again the world had been assured that war would break down with its own weight, that no war could be financed beyond a certain brief period, that the very nature of modern warfare, with its terrible engines of destruction, made swift decisions a necessity.  The conception of a British War which involved the entire manhood of the nation was new, and unparalleled in past history.  And the further conception of a war so vast in its issues that it really threatened the very existence of the nation was new too.  Alarmists had sometimes predicted these things, but they had been disbelieved.  Historians had used such phrases of long past struggles, but often as a mode of rhetoric rather than as the expression of exact truth.  Yet, in a very few weeks, it became evident that not alone England, but the entire fabric of liberal civilisation was threatened by a power that knew no honour, no restraints of either caution or magnanimity, no ethic but the armed might that trampled under blood-stained feet all the things which the common sanction of centuries held dearest and fairest.