Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh

Its theme—the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters—was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it.

Hooper had no illusions about the Army—or rather no special illusions distinguishable from the general, enveloping fog from which he observed the universe.

Hooper was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert’s horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all save poetry—that stoic, red-skin interlude which our schools introduce between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man—Hooper had wept often, but never for Henry’s speech on St. Crispin’s day, nor for the epitaph at Thermopylae. The history they taught him had had few battles in it but, instead, a profusion of detail about humane legislation and recent industrial change. 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, sounded in vain to Hooper.

He was not at ease with me, and much of his bluster rose from timidity, but I thought none the better of it for that.

None of them had a book.

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.

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.

“It’s where my family live”;

an ominous chill at the words he used—not, “that is my house,” but “it’s where my family live.”

Long hours of work in her youth, authority in middle life, repose and security in her age, had set their stamp on her lined and serene face.

“I’m not going to have you get mixed up with my family. They’re so madly charming. All my life they’ve been taking things away from me. If they once got hold of you with their charm, they’d make you their friend not mine, and I won’t let them.”

Sebastian’s life was governed by a code of such imperatives. “I must have pillar-box red pajamas,” “I have to stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows,” “I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne tonight!”—except,

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.

The masters who taught me Divinity told me that biblical texts were highly untrustworthy. They never suggested I should try to pray.

But later I recognized some such spirit in myself. 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.

“Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.” “But my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.” “Can’t I?” “I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.” “Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.” “But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.” “But I do. That’s how I believe.”

“Has your father given up religion?” “Well, he’s had to in a way; he only took to it when he married mummy. When he went off, he left that behind with the rest of us. You must meet him. He’s a very nice man.”

Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want….

Who is us? Charles and Bridey or Charles and Sebastian?

“You take art as a means not as an end. That is strict theology, but it’s unusual to find an agnostic believing it.”

Why?

I was first struck by his normality, which, as I saw more of him, I found to be studied.

he is a volcano of hate. He cannot breathe the same air as she. He will not set foot in England because it is her home; he can scarcely be happy with Sebastian because he is her son. But Sebastian hates her too.”

And how has she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except to be loved by someone who was not grown up. I have never met Lady Marchmain; I have seen her once only; but if you live with a man you come to know the other woman he has loved. I know Lady Marchmain very well. She is a good and simple woman who has been loved in the wrong way.

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

All that term and all that year Sebastian and I lived more and more in the shadows

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. That is the single reproach I have to set against her abundant kindness to me.

?

I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it. By the time that she left I had promised to spend all next vacation, except Christmas itself, at Brideshead.

Rex Mottram exerted himself to make an impression. He was a handsome fellow with dark hair growing low on his forehead and heavy black eyebrows. He spoke with an engaging Canadian accent.

At length Julia arrived, unhurried, exquisite, unrepentant. “You shouldn’t have let him wait,” she said. “It’s his Canadian courtesy.”

the sergeant in charge was smoking also. Rex stood in the charge-room looking the embodiment—indeed, the burlesque—of power and prosperity; he wore a fur-lined overcoat with broad astrakhan lapels and a silk hat. The police were deferential and eager to help.

with the slightest perceptible nuance he opened the way for bribery and quickly covered

he rejoiced in his efficiency.

particularly one Celia; she is the sister of our old companion in adversity, Boy Mulcaster, and wonderfully unlike him. She has a bird-like style of conversation, pecking away at the subject in a way I find most engaging, and a school-monitor style of dress which I can only call ‘saucy.’

but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things.

since Sebastian counted among the intruders his own conscience and all claims of human affection, his days in Arcadia were numbered.

closed the door behind me, shutting out the bondieuserie, the low ceiling, the chintz, the lambskin bindings, the views of Florence, the bowls of hyacinth and potpourri, the petit-point, the intimate feminine, modern world and was back under the coved and coffered roof, the columns and entablature of the central hall, in the august, masculine atmosphere of a better age.

Seems to be using architecture as an element

“It’s no good, Charles,” she said. “All you can mean is that you have not as much influence or knowledge of him as I thought. It is no good either of us trying to believe him. I’ve known drunkards before. One of the most terrible things about them is their deceit. Love of truth is the first thing that goes.

Sebastian certainly did look ill; five months had wrought the change of years in him. He was paler, thinner, pouchy under the eyes, drooping in the corners of his mouth and he showed the scars of a boil on the side of his chin;

Sebastian's decline

“Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?” “Great bosh.”

“I shall never go back,” I said to myself. A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden. I had come to the surface, into the light of common day and the fresh sea-air, after long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed.

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.

Ma Marchmain won’t do anything about it. I suppose it’s something to do with her crack-brain religion, not to take care of the body.” The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it.

Those were the kind of things he heard, mortal illness and debt, I thought. I rejoiced in the Burgundy. It seemed a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his.

Is Charles escaping into food enjoyment contrasts with the bad news

recalling me to the harsh, acquisitive world which Rex inhabited.

picture

Julia's ideal man

I can’t get anywhere near him. He doesn’t seem to have the least intellectual curiosity or natural piety.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.

He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only

this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.