ABSTRACT
Mr. David Jones's books are strongly marked by his personality, but at the core his thinking is founded on assumptions not only familiar but essential to the production of the kind of art most people are prepared to call important. Mr. Jones's primitivism is of the Romantic tradition; it would have seemed painfully odd neither to Joyce nor to Yeats, whose belief that art must be 'constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times'. He is a Catholic, and obsessed with the Romanitas of the Welsh tradition. These and other interests give Mr. Jones's writing a personal flavour; he is almost as mannered as Yeats, though much less skilful, and sometimes negligent in exposition and ugly in style. His most important essay, 'Art and Sacrament', is, however, blameless in these respects, and at his best Mr. Jones is a remarkably powerful writer.
