Such is the meeting of Adrian Leverkühn, the demonic composer of Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, with the Devil, who has come to make the traditional bargain for a soul.

It is not by accident that Adrian Leverkühn is reading Kierkegaard’s essay on Mozart’s Don Juan in Either/Or. We might even hazard a guess as to which lines Leverkühn was reading when the Devil appeared:

I find it very difficult to enter into an adequate debate with Mrs Haughton over the whole field of her argument. It is impertinent for me to do so, since I do not recognize the reality which to her is predominant. She says,

I could go so far with her, though I would need to argue about the exact meaning of ‘repentance’, ‘incongruous’ and ‘evil’. I would argue that the last word tells us more about those that use it than the quality or condition it is supposed to describe. But debate in this dimension would for me be valid. However, Mrs Haughton opens up a whole other dimension when she says

. . . the prophetic calling involves repudiation of much more than unworthy and unloving behaviour. It sees that everything in the life of the flesh—the world as we know it—is futile and useless as a means of accomplishing the will of God. The truth of the world is so distant an approximation to the naked truth of the spirit, as perceived in the moment of revelation, that it can only be discarded (p. 118).

Mrs Haughton is not, I think, characterizing this as a particular view of the prophet: she assumes it as a necessary attitude for her whole argument.

‘. . . Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nor desirable.’

(Report of the Newcastle Commission, 1861.)

‘. . . Even if it were possible, I doubt whether it would be desirable, with a view to the real interests of the peasant boy, to keep him at school till he was 14 or 15 years of age. But it is not possible. We must make up our minds to see the last of him, as far as the day school is concerned, at 10 or 11. We must frame our system of education upon this hypothesis; and I venture to maintain that it is quite possible to teach a child soundly and thoroughly, in a way that he shall not forget it, all that is necessary for him to possess in the shape of intellectual attainment, by the time he is 10 years old. . . .’

The process by which the enduring reputation of one writer emerges among many of (at the time) apparently equal merit is mysterious. We do not so much change our minds as discover them; no dramatic reversal is involved but a gradual enlightenment makes it clear that (as in the present case) David Jones is such a figure. The supreme quality of his art (using the word in its inclusive sense, for it would be impossible, so closely related is the technique of his drawing to that of his use of words, to say that David Jones is an artist who also writes, or the reverse) has long been apparent to an inner circle of his friends, which included T. S. Eliot; but he has never at any time been a widely read, still less a fashionable writer, nor is he ever likely to become so, for his work is too fine and subtle and learned for popular taste. To ‘discover’ David Jones is to enter an elite.

It was for a time possible for my generation to persuade ourselves that ‘the late Yeats’ was a different and incomparably better poet than ‘the early Yeats’ in order to justify what was really a change in ourselves and not in the poet. In the case of David Jones nothing of the kind would be possible. In the current number of Agenda there are several pieces of recent writing (or recently completed, for David Jones has a habit of laying aside pieces of work for years and then getting them out and working over them) but these are not technically different from, or necessarily better or worse than, In Parenthesis, his poetic novel, or epic poem, of the first World War.