do not react in a passionate attempt to save the future, that they do not rise up against this absurdity, this is perhaps the thing which has most of all enlightened me on human inertia.

The exploitation in literature of the heroism which she admires so much is anathema to her, and the eloquence and emotional elegiacs of armchair critics fan the flame of her indignation. "It is no more among peoples than among armies that we should oppose wars, it is among the non-combatants, writers, diplomatists, politicians, financiers. I will no longer fear war on the day when there are no more non-combatants to make it." While thus on the one hand she revolts against the easy acceptance of war, the lack of will to protest, the æsthetic exploitation of suffering and death, on the other hand she gives all her sympathy to the men on the field; her admiration for their heroism is unbounded, her longing to help is full of the self-immolation of her younger days. Held back by physical disabilities from personal service, she devotes all the more passionately her pen to their service and dedicates to them—

my greatest effort, my greatest work, a piece of which I know nothing yet, except that it may be called La Paix and that I progress towards it, preparing myself religiously as for a vocation, for I want it to have effect-it is not as an artist that I exploit this catastrophe. Since I have been cheated out of doing my work as a woman among your agonies, I will strive so that in future you may not be massacred.

The work to which she here refers and which was recently published was destined to be her last, for she died of influenza in September, 1918, and thus never saw the attempted "guarantees of peace" of which she was so skeptical.

The journal of Marie Lenéru is of quite exceptional interest both for its value as a human document which reveals unusual depths of physical and mental suffering, and for its form, especially for its many short phrases of pregnant thought and puissant expression. It is curious, too, as a manifestation of twentieth century thought in France, although in many ways it is not typical. The classical tradition is strong in it, the roots of thought in the past are clear and obvious. But side by side with a love of harmony and balance, a supreme respect for the reason, there are the elements of fanaticism. The whole trend of Marie Lenéru's being

impels her towards the sacrifice of self in some great devotion which will use up mind, heart and person. At one time she longs for the vigour and silence of the cloister, the spirit of a St. Theresa, the self-prostration of a Pascal; then the world surges in with its unrest, its changefulness, its questioning skeptical spirit, its intense respect for life. Its claims are in the end the stronger, and the longing for self-immolation gives place to an ardent desire for selfrealization. But when the question arises which part of herself she is to cultivate the woman or the artist, present enjoyment or future fame she chooses once more the harder path; the woman cedes her place to the author, and henceforth Marie Lenéru accepts the asceticisms of the conscientious artist.

DOROTHY MARTIN.

IFFLEY THE UNSPOILED

BY ROBERT P. TRISTRAM COFFIN

THE only proper way into the Village Unspoiled is along the Thames, through the meadows that Arnold's Scholar Gypsy loved, past fishermen who fish for the joy of the thing and not for fish, who might serve as models for "patience on a monument save for noses that are perpetually red. One has the consolation of goodly English precedent behind the claw-like hand that reaches forth from the tiny toll house to take the halfpenny which is the price of entering Iffley the ideal way; Roman denarii, together with Saxon coins, have been found on the river bottom beneath the bridge. Hard by the toll house are the broken paddles of the mossy waterwheel, and an idle millstone, of the mill that had ground a century of grists in Chaucer's time and that ground on down to a decade ago when fire took it.

Up a cobbled hill and under lime trees the lane winds to a gate beneath a chestnut tree; one is in the heart of England. Here is one of the hundred churchyards within footing distance of Oxford where one may live Gray's Elegy. Iffley Church is Norman and is as old as the singing monks sailing by, down stream to Abingdon. The lichens and the love of eight hundred years are in its walls rising from the green benediction of graves. It must be easy and pleasant to sleep here, with the earliest snowdrops starring the turf, and roses at the floodtide of the year. With its half effaced, zigzag bordered arches set with beaks of queer birds from mediaval bestiaries, which bite and vex their own wings to prove their ancient lineage, the church is as lovely as it is old. The wide tower and round topped windows are full of the naïve frankness of folk who have found the holiness of simplicity. Inside the sunlight carpets the floor with the same patterns that made beautiful the feet which rest these centuries under the green outside. All the honest and humble prayers of the devout of many years seem to sweeten the plain white walls. One thinks of the

long sunbeams of many children's hair reaching back from today at the ancient carven font into the yesterdays. Here are holy things time cannot touch, the truce of God, faith in gold and gray, precepts of happiness, precepts of peace.

Just beyond the wall of the churchyard is the rectory, a refectory of monks in other days. It bears its seven centuries felicitously on eaves hung green with moss and tiles of kindly gray. There is no better place to read the Church Fathers than the rector's oaken panelled study, with bees making the afternoon golden about the pleached pear trees outside and blue English skies that mind of forget-me-nots through leaded casements opened wide. Chrysostom and the sunlight of summer, Ambrose and the scent of honey. Men with gold and honey in their names are at home here; and the windows open on a place very like the New Jerusalem. Indeed, below is the great drawing room with a gold and blue motto for a border promising

manibus non factam domum

Sempiternam in cœlis.

And there is the rector's wife, whose dearly cherished Infant Dionysius of too white marble cannot destroy the atmosphere of ages, pouring the rectory dog his milk and saying over tea things the happy things a rector's wife finds to say. And Audrey, the sporting daughter of the house, the ruddiness of October beagle hunts on her face, is tapping the panels to show you where the secret passage is and perhaps dislodging a pet Dresden shepherdess in her enthusiasm. Winding passages, mysterious stairs down which a friar may walk, and the rector with his puns to take you back with him through the years of his house. But outside in the rectory gardens is the heart of England. The sanctity of an enclosure had never so sweet a demonstration. There are peach trees standing English fashion, to get the ripening heat of the stone, like candelabra against walls; Virginia creeper, to tell the passing of the year in red; ivy, to keep the year immortally green; and beyond the antique sundial seven terraces go down with urns and rose arbors to the swallow-haunted Thames. Best of all, there is a cosy quiet, sounds of village dogs and boys faint and musical beyond high walls, tea and talk, talk and tea, and the

day's shadows growing longer on the grass. If a man is ever going to be a poet, it is in such a place.

But one cannot play the hermit forever. Outside, above the rectory, the hill rises where Hawthorne, come three thousand miles to love Oxford, found his view of the city that turns white with all her towers in the sunshine. Beyond hedges of whitethorn on this hill, in a place I know but will not tell you of, for fear the Iffley boys would find it, are glades yellow with February primroses, and May comes there with miles of bluebells until they look like smoke under the trees. But you shall turn instead into the long village street by Postmistress Blay's little cottage. Mistress Blay is keeper of the mails and the lone telephone that thrusts but this one finger of a rushing age into this quiet place; the watchful gods of Iffley have palsied this one digit, for it is better to trust in leather soles than in this telephone perpetually out of order. The postmistress could put old-fashioned New England housewives to shame; her arms, argent; a scrubbing brush, or, rampant; and of chevrons, sable, none at all. One could eat off her hearthstones. I honestly believe she scrubs the stamps.

Perhaps, across the street little girls in pinafores and martyred hair and boys with apple cheeks, smooched Eton collars, and sturdy bare knees will be filing into the schoolhouse by their separate doors. Under the thatch of the schoolhouse there is more than numbers and knitting for the boys, numbers and plain sewing for the girls. There are dishes for school teas, a floor for dancing and games. May Day sets forth in fine style from this base, attendants bearing flower wreaths before the May King and Queen who have all the morning on their faces, or at least as much of it as soap can put there.

Nearby the milkman lives in the past, though trafficking in the present. His stoop has the sea shell which hides the key just as in New England villages; on the shrine of his parlor table rest his Sunday-go-to-meeting hat and his prayerbook wrapped in a spotless handkerchief. His deliveryman, an ungainly boy in teens, who brings you the buttercups and marigolds of Iffley meadows mistakenly called cream, is a poor Hermes to this Zeus. In the village phrase he is "eleven pence, three farthings", which means