ART
The Mystic and the Myth
DAVID JONES'S hooks are complex word- patterns, shot through with more or less esoteric allusions to Celtic myth and medimval legend, the teachings of the Catholic Church and the recollection of moments of personal revelation. The surface realities of life, the men and events, say, of the Western Front, become as it were transparent; through them may be sensed their ancestors and their echoes back through time. In David Jones's paintings may be found precisely the same dissolving image, shimmering with the sympa- thetic harmonics it has set up in the artist's mind. In Parenthesis has thirty-four and a half pages of notes to assist the reader's car to become aware of these undertones and over- tones. That the paintings have no comparable aid, and that in all probability their outer registers are fully apparent only to the artist himself, seems to me unimportant. It would be a dull eye that could find no delight in the retrospective exhibition of his work now at the Tate. The hundred-odd exhibits cover every aspect of his rare talent—engravings and illustrations, animal drawings, inscriptions and water-colours (some of them very recent).
One is forced to use somewhat visionary terms with which to describe David Jones's painting, for he is in that line of English eccen- trics of whom Blake was the greatest. To a degree which Blake never achieved, however (hut which in a completely different way an artist like Klee did), David Jones has merged vision and technical means so that neither could exist without the other. The vision is poetic, its structure as insubstantial as a sum- mer breeze. Through his trees birds can fly and the tree in turn makes its sheltering presence felt through man-made wall; ships sail through the midst of foreground flowers, curtains join hands with clouds. The multi- tudinous world is seen in all its detail with all the apparent incoherence of simultaneity; accents of tone and colour (the sudden weight given to the lip of a jug, the extraordinary importance given to an ear) seem arbitrary. Yet, usually, these drawings have grown as organically as a flower. Their unity has not been imposed from without but springs from the inner necessity of their rhythmic line, and the fragile veil of iridescent colour that links those rhythms.
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Though George Morland, the 150th anni- versary of whose death is marked by another Arts Council exhibition in an adjoining room. was the creator of a popular image of rural England so powerful that it is with us still, this kind of personal response to nature is utterly absent from his painting. Content to work within a tradition inherited from Teniers and Greuze and coloured by Rousseauism, he roistered his way to an early, debt-ridden death, turning out sentimental commonplaces about apple-checked village maidens, • kind squires and subservient but contented farriers, to stave off while he could another visit to the spunging-house. His strength lay in a•capability for worktnanlike thoroughness and a technical lack of affectation; his weakness in an absence of direct observation. Thus his composition is nearly always satisfactory but lacks any clement of surprise (note, for example, the adequate but dull breaking of the verticals in a picture like Reading. the News), while he would rely upon formulce for the recurrent ingredients of his pictures—branches,• thatch, the features of the human face and so on. He was capable of observing with some sharpness A Cat Drinking Milk in his own studio, but also of painting the merry-go-round horse of The Huntsman. On the whole his squandered talent shows most happily in his smallest and simplest work, like Calm off the Coast of the Isle of Wight. or in such purely rural moments as Bird Nesting.
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