There is little to be said about Jean Cocteau that he has not said himself—about himself. ‘The last word in modernity, the most brilliant mind of this generation,’ said Clive Bell of him, and to be noticed by the capricious pen of that critic does indeed stamp him as ultra-modern.

As poet, critic, novelist, draughtsman, Jean Cocteau has been known in Paris for the last thirteen years, but owing to our regrettable isolation from movements and ideas beyond our own shores, we in England have hardly realised his many achievements. This year he has published Le Rappel à l’Ordre, a collection of former articles in which he analyses his activities as the leader of a group of young musicians and writers of the very latest modern tendencies, together with the motives and significances of his own writings. Another sign of his great activity was the production of his last play Orphée at the Théatre des Arts during four nights in last July. Two scenes of this attempt to clothe a classical theme in modern dress (he did the same in Andromaque and in the ballet Romeo and Juliet which has Strawinsky’s music) are given in the Revue des Jeunes of July 28th. It is a mere fragment, but in it are found all the ‘Cocteau’ elements, fantasy, mystère, modern implements (such as Death’s india-rubber gloves), symbolising elements in human life, besides much beauty of movement and charm of words. Respectfully criticising the play in The Times of July 14th, the writer speaks of M. Cocteau’s conversion as being ‘amongst the recent phenomena of Paris life.’

A French Catholic who holds a very influential position in the Catholic movement expressed to me a few weeks ago such strong views on the recent condemnation of the Action Française by Cardinal Andrieu, and subsequently by the Pope himself, that the gist of his argument is worth placing on record. He attached so much importance to the crisis which has been precipitated by the Cardinal’s condemnation that he believed it to mark the beginning of a phase which would lead, after a short period of acute crisis in France, to an immense consolidation of all the Catholic forces in this country, which have hitherto been divided hopelessly by the tendencies towards violent anti-constitutional action on the part of the neo-royalist movement.

The origin of the trouble may be briefly stated. It has been well known to everyone familiar with the various factors of the Catholic movement in France. Broadly speaking, the older generation of Catholics were, at the beginning of the present century, still largely royalist in their sympathies. The tradition of plunder and spoliation under the Republic still carried with it vivid memories for many people; and most of the older clergy and nearly all the Catholic aristocracy were still profoundly hostile to the Republic, which they regarded as being only the latest phase in the series of political crises through which France had passed since the Revolution, with alternating republics and monarchies. But by the beginning of the century it had become quite clear to those who viewed the situation without traditional and personal feelings that the restoration of the monarchy in France had become an impossibility.

What of this or that, as you move through a county or two, which has appeared to modify the face of the land for the good of those who live upon it; the new bridge, as perhaps at Witney, with curves and gradient indicated by all laws, or nearly all, and not unworthy balustraded parapets; a new expression of stateliness in what should now be called motor-gates, abolished railings and screens, treeless drives and cunning choice of building site; house-shortage houses; long-legged concrete water-tanks; circus-like pump colonies; or what time has consecrated : the built mass, intricate in unity, upon its green plinth, the close such service ennobles; structures, age on age agglomerate, heterogeneous, like the glorious tangle of Winchester; an agricultural tessellation, if you wish the fields by thousands, seen from the precipitous foreground of Lord Hereford’s Knob, lying north and south between Radnor Forest and the dim heights of Brecon; man’s motive in changing his natural surrounding by adaptation and addition, that is the question ever present to the meditative, seldom answered conclusively.

Or the mind rests willingly from irritated criticism, as of a man’s own house, be it ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ or neither; or that in which he gives thanks to God. Its consecrated purpose is assumed to release any usual building from the thraldom of time; that it exists and is for the present indispensable answers sufficiently all but impertinent questions. It need be neither cowardice nor languor which admits that the church is pleasing in which indeed there is nothing to please.

A Century ago, a violent controversy raged upon the subject of the limitation of the families of the poor; the two chief protagonists in this contest were the Rev. T. Malthus and William Cobbett. As the dispute has been revived during the present age, it is not without interest to re-trace the arguments of the debate.

In those days the fight centred upon the economic question; Malthus based his position upon the theory that population had a tendency to increase faster than subsistence; whilst Cobbett pointed out that under natural conditions there was ample means of providing for an increase in numbers in this country.

To-day, the question still remains of vast and vital importance, inasmuch as both advocates and opponents of Birth Control admit that married couples nowadays are compelled by reason of economic conditions to consider whether they can afford to maintain a family or not. Both Malthus and Cobbett agreed that modern industrial conditions were unsatisfactory in the extreme; Malthus desired to remedy social conditions by demanding that the proletariat should restrict the number of their children by means of ‘moral restraint’ and by this means increase the amount of food-supply available; Cobbett on the other hand regarded this demand as an outrage upon human liberty and saw in a return to natural conditions the only way out of the ‘impasse’ into which Industrialism had plunged the people of this country.