Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

happy collaborationists who had given up the unequal struggle, all doubts resolved, all duty done, the undisputed heirs-at-law of a century of progress, enjoying the heritage at their ease.

as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife;

when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom.

She was stripped of all enchantment now and I knew her for an uncongenial stranger to whom I had bound myself indissolubly in a moment of folly.

Gallipoli, Balaclava, Quebec, Lepanto, Bannockburn, Roncevales and Marathon—these, and the Battle in the West where Arthur fell, and a hundred such names whose trumpet-notes, even now in my sere and lawless state, called to me irresistibly across the intervening years with all the clarity and strength of boyhood,

In the weeks that we were together Hooper became a symbol to me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting “Hooper” and seeing if they still seemed as plausible.

“Oh, I don’t want much you know. Just enough to say I’ve been in it.”

“What’s this place called?” He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.

lest the eye wander aimlessly, a Doric temple stood by the water’s edge, and an ivy-grown arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs. All this had been planned and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might be seen in its maturity.

exhaled the soft airs of centuries of youth.

“Just the place to bury a crock of gold,” said Sebastian. “I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

‘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,”

There was also a kind of insane and endearing orderliness about Sebastian’s choice, in his extremity, of an open window.

To understand all is to forgive all.”

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that gray city.

He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

noticed Sebastian and then myself with a polite lack of curiosity which seemed to say: “We should not dream of being so offensive as to suggest that you never met us before.”

But you, my dear Charles, whether you realize it or not, have gone straight, hook, line and sinker, into the very worst set in the University.

Anthony Blanche—now there’s a man there’s absolutely no excuse for.”

“Et in Arcadia ego”

to the hard bachelordom of English adolescence, the premature dignity and authority of the school system, I had added a sad and grim strain of my own. Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.

I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

I had my secret and sure defense, like a talisman worn in the bosom, felt for in the moment of danger, found and firmly grasped.

His love for Sebastian is his world-overcoming secret… but will it last? It is his response to the moralism of contemporary Britain—his replacement for faith in God.

there was a bluster and zest in Anthony which the rest of us had shed somewhere in our more leisured adolescence, on the playing field or in the school-room;

‘Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind.

the artist is an eternal type, solid, purposeful, observant—and, beneath it all, p-p-passionate, eh, Charles?

So you see there was really very little left for poor Sebastian to do except be sweet and charming.

She refuses to divorce him because she is so pious.

Jesus specifically allows divorce in cases of sexual immorality or adultery

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.

all in the summer sunshine going to the temples of their race.

all the catalogue of threats to civilized life rose and haunted me;

She so much resembled Sebastian that, sitting beside her in the gathering dusk, I was confused by the double illusion of familiarity and strangeness.

the predominating emotion of vexation, rather than of relief, that I had been bilked of my expectations of a grand tragedy.

The languor of Youth—how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!

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

The brush seemed somehow to do what was wanted of it.

We warmed the glass slightly at a candle, filled it a third high, swirled the wine round, nursed it in our hands, held it to the light, breathed it, sipped it, filled our mouths with it, and rolled it over the tongue, ringing it on the palate like a coin on a counter, tilted our heads back and let it trickle down the throat.

“Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning. “Yes, I think so.” “I think so too.”

You seldom go to see cricket?” “Never,” I said, and he looked at me with the expression I have seen since in the religious, of innocent wonder that those who expose themselves to the dangers of the world should avail themselves so little of its varied solace.

Later, too, I have come to accept claims which then, in 1923, I never troubled to examine, and to accept the supernatural as the real. I was aware of no such needs that summer at Brideshead.

“Who was it used to pray, ‘O God, make me good, but not yet’?”

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

“So you see we’re a mixed family religiously. Brideshead and Cordelia are both fervent Catholics; he’s miserable, she’s bird-happy; Julia and I are half-heathen; I am happy, I rather think Julia isn’t; mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and papa is excommunicated—and

“When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood—innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. A woman has not all these ways of loving.

“Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His teddy-bear, his nanny… and he is nineteen years old…”

as he found himself increasingly hemmed in, where he once felt himself free, he became at times listless and morose, even with me.

She accepted me as Sebastian’s friend and sought to make me hers also, and in doing so, unwittingly struck at the roots of our friendship.

Of the University he said: “No, I was never here. It just means you start life three years behind the other fellow.”

raising Cain.