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.

It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster—the period of soya beans and Basic English—and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendors of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful.

It seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the sixteenth century. So I piled it on rather, with passionate sincerity.

It is offered to a younger generation of readers as a souvenir of the Second War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties, with which it ostensibly deals.

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old.

In half an hour we were ready to start and in an hour we started.

They were too old and they didn’t know and they wouldn’t learn. That’s the truth.

I left under what is called a cloud, you know—I can’t think why it is called that; it seemed to me a glare of unwelcome light;

The languor of Youth—how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth—all save this—come and go with us through life.

languor—the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding—that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

“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.”

“The city is crawling with Anarchists, but an American woman tried to sit here the other night with bare shoulders and they drove her away by coming to stare at her, quite silently; they were like circling gulls coming back and back to her, until she left. Our countrymen are much less dignified when they attempt to express moral disapproval.”

Cara enlisted as guide a midget Venetian nobleman to whom all doors were open, and with him at her side and a guide book in her hand, she came with us, flagging sometimes but never giving up, a neat, prosaic figure amid the immense splendors of the place.

I was drowning in honey, stingless.

of melon and prosciutto on the balcony in the cool of the morning; of hot cheese sandwiches and champagne cocktails at Harry’s bar.

And how has she deserved all this hate? She has done nothing except to be loved by someone who was not grown up.

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. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood—innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that.

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 realized that in fact I was being drawn into intimacy by swift, imperceptible stages, for she was impatient of any human relationship that fell short of it.

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. That was the part for which his mother, in all our little talks, was seeking to fit me.

He was sick at heart somewhere, I did not know how, and I grieved for him, unable to help.

I kept coming back to that one thing; he was so unhappy.”

“He’s ashamed of being unhappy,” I said.

The unhappiness, the running away—these made up her sorrow, and in her own way she exposed the whole of it, before she was done.

I was no fool; I was old enough to know that an attempt had been made to suborn me and young enough to have found the experience agreeable.

“I believe God prefers drunkards to a lot of respectable people.” “For God’s sake,” I said, for I was near to tears that morning, “why bring God into everything?” “I’m sorry. I forgot. But you know that’s an extremely funny question.” “Is it?” “To me. Not to you.”

It seems to me that without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man.” “It’s arguable,” said Brideshead. “Do you think he will need this elephant’s foot again?”

a dressing-room and had been changed to a bathroom twenty years back by the substitution for the bed of a deep, copper, mahogany-framed bath, that was filled by pulling a brass lever heavy as a piece of marine engineering; the rest of the room remained unchanged; a coal fire always burned there in winter. I often think of that bathroom—the water colors dimmed by steam and the huge towel warming on the back of the chintz armchair—and contrast it with the uniform, clinical, little chambers, glittering with chromium-plate and looking-glass, which pass for luxury in the modern world.

Thus with Julia and Lady Marchmain I reached deadlock, not because we failed to understand one another, but because we understood too well.

“Moral obligation—now you’re back on religion again.” “I never left it,” said Brideshead.

one of those needlehooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake.

(In his kindest moments Rex displayed a kind of hectoring zeal as if he were thrusting a vacuum cleaner on an unwilling housewife.)

“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.

The soup was delicious after the rich blinis—hot, thin, bitter, frothy.

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.

sentences came breaking in on my happiness, recalling me to the harsh, acquisitive world which Rex inhabited. He wanted a woman; he wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her at his own price; that was what it amounted to.

Then came the cognac and the proper hour for these confidences.

On my side the interest was keener, for there was always the physical likeness between brother and sister, which, caught repeatedly in different poses, under different lights, each time pierced me anew; and, as Sebastian in his sharp decline seemed daily to fade and crumble, so much the more did Julia stand out clear and firm.

wherever she went, always in her own little circle of intimates, she brought a moment of joy, such as strikes deep to the heart on the river’s bank when the kingfisher suddenly flares across the water.

untroubled by love, taken aback by the power of her own beauty, hesitating on the cool edge of life; one who had suddenly found herself armed, unawares; the heroine of a fairy story turning over in her hands the magic ring;

If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence;

But wherever she turned, it seemed, her religion stood as a barrier between her and her natural goal.

There could be no eldest son for her, and younger sons were indelicate things, necessary, but not to be much spoken of.

From being agreeable, he became indispensable to her; from having been proud of him in public she became a little ashamed, but by that time, between Christmas and Easter, he had become indispensable. And then, without in the least expecting it, she suddenly found herself in love.

I think Mr. Mottram a kind and useful friend, but I wouldn’t trust him an inch, and I’m sure he’ll have very unpleasant children.

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.

All through her life mummy had all the sympathy of everyone except those she loved.

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.