I come here now even oftener than I used. Surely death has never appeared so gentle, so much a member of the family, as in these English churchyards with their sweet hominess. It seems fitting that we meet "My sister, the Death of the Body" on these grass-grown paths which wear a look of every day and common happenings. The little river, the lichen-grown stones, the sense of long continuance, give one a feeling that there are no gaps, no fissures between life and death, that the sight of the eyes slips inevitably into the vision of the soul. The sky seems near in England, with the crumbling grey of old Norman tower and churchyard wall touching its veiled blue, and the low white clouds almost within reach; the old home-like look of the flat stones makes one feel as if the sleepers are still, as it were, sitting on the threshold, or on the old bench by the door. There is no sense of distance or separation, no feeling of far away.
It is not sad to leave her here, now when the whole earth seems one great family of the sorrowing, where the children and the grandchildren of many other folk are so near.
May 20. Spring, with the thawing of the icicles, and the sunshine growing warmer on the southern wall of the house,—spring comes back in the old and lovely way to a world never in such anguish before. What an April, to bring the cowardly murder of soldiers in the trenches by volumes of poisonous gas! What a May, to bring the Lusitania massacre of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children at sea! What a Germany, quite, quite mad:
"O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown,
The soldier's, scholar's——"
but I am not quoting correctly and am too busy to look up the lines. I dare not even try to speak of my sense of these things; words are lacking to express it, but surely this marks the parting of the ways. To me it seems that the time has come for the nations of the earth—would that my own would join them—to band together once more in a holy crusade and do battle with the Pagan, not for the tomb of our Lord, but for the faith He taught.
As time goes on, I see more clearly what the real England stands for. My mind works slowly, for I am but a practical American; it isn't as if I were a thinker like yourself, who could reason things out on purely intellectual grounds. The war between my great love of England and my indignant sense of things that are wrong gives way to something more impersonal, as I have more chance to see the way in which her customs serve humanity. Complete fulfillment of her great purposes has not yet been achieved, yet surely the human race has got no further: liberty for the individual, fair play,—these watchwords of England are the hope of the human race. What other land could rule many alien peoples and make them so proudly content? As England has kept faith with the past, she has, barring some great mistakes, kept faith with humanity. The recent magnificent bravery of the Canadians in the battles with flaming gas only intensifies the splendour of the voluntary tribute of England's colonies to England in distress. Earth has not seen the like of this empire resting on the will of man; from the four quarters of the globe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, they come sailing swiftly home, counting it great gain to die for that for which she stands. It means that at the heart of England is something too precious to lose, a faith in the working possibility of human freedom. Crude races, races old and outworn, need to learn at her feet the practical way of making good this immemorial hope of the race. Under her rule, the individual has his chance of self-government; if he fails to take it, falling into the net of sloth and old habit as he often does in England, the fault is his own. His individual conscience is left him; he is not compelled to become a soulless cog in a gigantic conscienceless mechanism.
I do not care what Mr. Asquith has done wrong; what Mr. Joseph Chamberlain did wrong; what King George the Third and all the Georges have done or failed to do: I trust this people as I trust no other. Guilty of sins and blunders they may be and are, but the blunder is followed by the honest effort to find again and do the right; you come down always to a groundwork of character, sincerity, integrity. England has been in a way the conscience of the world. What other race-name is a word to conjure with? All over the earth where confusion comes, it is whispered: "The troubles are dying down; the English are drawing near." And in the councils of the world, her voice has been the great arbiter of right and wrong.
No one here now can doubt that England is going through that great anguish wherein the soul of a people is re-born. The unity, the calm, the quickening determination are part of a great spring-time that will lead, God grant, to harvest days of peace. There is slow knitting up of the sinews of war; more and more her sons respond to the call which still leaves them free to choose; old England is getting ready as ever, resolved, incredulous of defeat; the spring knows it; the rooks know it, busy in their elm tree parliament. The great sorrow and the great endeavour have turned the very soil of the country into holy ground. Among my bonfires of spring,—for I like to keep that old, religious rite of purification,—I burned half a dozen volumes of recent English fiction, decadent, erotic; a volume or two of flippant and sensational criticism; and one of affected futurist poetry, or some brand like unto it. They belong to the England whose follies and foibles are being burned in a great fire of affliction; they are not worthy of this great England that is emerging from the flame.
As I write, the tinkle of the English sheep bells from afar comes like the very sound of peace.