vivien noakes
this helplessness with a sense of growing, almost unsupportable, despair is clear
froma letter he wrote to Edward Marsh at the end of January 1918, two months
before his death, in lines cancelled by the censor: ‘what is happening to me now
is more tragic than the ‘‘passion play’’. Christ never endured what I endure. It is
breaking me completely.’^38
Rosenberg wrote of the artist’s attempt ‘to connect the inner with the outer by
means of a more spontaneous and intelligent understanding of the actual’.^39 To
an even greater extent this is true of the work of David Jones. In the post-war
years, before he wroteIn Parenthesis, he was much influenced by the writings of the
French Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, whose works were first translated
into English, under the auspices of Jones’s friend Eric Gill, in 1923. InThe Philosophy
of ArtMaritain wrote:
Art, in so far as ordered to Beauty, does not, at least when its object permits, stop at forms
or at colours, nor at sounds, nor at words taken in themselves andas things,butittakes
them also as making known other things than themselves, that is to sayas signs.^40
Jones saw man, from earliest times, as a sign-maker ‘whose nature is to make
things’ that ‘are of necessity the signs of something other’.^41 He believed painting
and poetry to be sacramental acts which show forth, under another form, existing
realities, making the universal shine out from the particular. Creating a single
artefact, a whole, from the chaos that is modern war presented huge problems, for
he was ‘faced with the profoundest contradictions and he must resolve them all,
not losing one, and still create delight’.^42 In order to bring unity to confusion, he
turned to what T. S. Eliot called ‘the mythic method’, a means of ‘controlling, of
ordering, of giving shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility
and anarchy which is contemporary history’.^43
Jones believed that the creations of the past lived still within the culture of a
people in a line of unbroken artistic interpretation. By weaving the threads of this
shared culture—dense in association—through the texture of his poem, he was
able to re-present to his modern readers artistic riches that were their inheritance,
drawing on earlier interpretations of warfare, courage, endurance and loss in order
to throw light on the present situation and to reveal how this was not new, but
part of a continuum of human experience. There was an added urgency in drawing
(^38) Rosenberg to Edward Marsh, n.d. [postmarked 26 Jan. 1918], in Berg Collection of English and
American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations. 39
Rosenberg, ‘Art’, 293.
(^40) Jacques Maritain,The Philosophy of Art: Being ‘‘Art et Scholastique’’ by Jacques Maritain,trans.
Revd. John O’Connor (Ditchling: St Dominic’s Press, 1923), 83–4. 41
Jones, ‘Art and Sacrament’, inEpoch and Artist: Selected Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood
(London: Faber, 1959), 150.
(^42) Jones, ‘Art in Relation to War’, 141.
(^43) T. S. Eliot, ‘Ulysses, Order and Myth’ (1923), inSelectedProseofT.S.Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode
(London: Faber, 1975), 177.