Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

He was the acid test of all these alloys.

In her spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day; her autumnal mists, her gray springtime, and the rare glory of her summer days—such as that day—when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear over her gables and cupolas, exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth.

You want either a first or a fourth. There is no value in anything between. Time spent on a good second is time thrown away.

Beware of the Anglo-Catholics—they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents. In fact, steer clear of all the religious groups; they do nothing but harm….

Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?’ Yes. I do,”

later he said, “I must go to the Botanical Gardens.” “Why?” “To see the ivy.” It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him.

to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the foot-lights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then—phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.”

Why? Why,” he repeated petulantly, “should alpine scenery be thought conducive to study?”

What does it matter when it was built, if it’s pretty?”

“But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.” “But I do. That’s how I believe.”

“When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating.

now the gold lace and velvet were packed away and returned to the costumier and the drab uniform of the day put on in its stead.

He did not fail in love, but he lost his joy of it, for I was no longer part of his solitude. As my intimacy with his family grew, I became part of the world which he sought to escape; I became one of the bonds which held him.

It was touching to see the faith which everybody put in the value of a day’s hunting.

the subject was everywhere in the house like a fire deep in the hold of a ship, below the water-line, black and red in the darkness, coming to light in acrid wisps of smoke that oozed under hatches and billowed suddenly from the scuttles and air pipes—with

“I have left behind illusion,” I said to myself. “Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses.” I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.

“That’s one thing your Church can do,” he said, “put on a good show. You never saw anything to equal the cardinals. How many do you have in England?”

Up, down, and round the argument circled and swooped like a gull, now out to sea, out of sight, cloud-bound, among irrelevances and repetitions, now right on the patch where the offal floated.

All good chaps like the dead chaps.”

they and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves in separate magnetic systems; a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance;

I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

“What is it?” “His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word.”

No one could have made it clearer, all his life, what he thought of religion. They’ll come now, when his mind’s wandering and he hasn’t the strength to resist, and claim him as a death-bed penitent. I’ve had a certain respect for their Church up till now. If they do a thing like that I shall know that everything stupid people say about them is quite true—that it’s all superstition and trickery.” Julia said nothing. “Don’t you agree?” Still Julia said nothing. “Don’t you agree?” “I don’t know, Charles. I simply don’t know.” And, though none of us spoke of it, I felt the question ever present, growing through all the weeks of Lord Marchmain’s illness; I saw it when Cordelia drove off early in the mornings to mass; I saw it as Cara took to going with her; this little cloud, the size of a man’s hand, that was going to swell into a storm among us.

“Do any of you Catholics know what good you think this priest can do?” I asked. “Do you simply want to arrange it so that your father can have Christian burial? Do you want to keep him out of hell? I only want to be told.”

“Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame—a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.”