GEORGE WATSON
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conservative should be more optimistic than the radical. But
Brides–
head
does not end in Orwellian despair. Its hero has lost wife,
mistress, and even the cause he is fighting for, since the war against
dictatorship lost most of its point for Waugh on the day Hitler in–
vaded Russia. Even the great house he had hopelessly loved as an
outsider has been ruined by military occupation, and the army that
has ruined it, as he bitterly recognizes, is his own. "I have been here
before" is his echoing cry, as in the deprivation of war and middle
age he remembers his time with Sebastian twenty years ago: two
youths in love, one clutching a teddy bear to recall the lost Eden of
his infancy.
And so Charles Ryder, now a convert, goes to mass, at the
family chapel he in agnostic youth had admired only as a work of art
in a strange and alien style. To borrow Sebastian's words, he has
buried something there and wants to find it. "I should like to bury
something precious in every place where I have been happy," Sebas–
tian once had told him after wine and strawberries on a summer
hilltop, "and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could
come back and dig it up and remember." Charles is back to dig it up.
He has lost everything and gained a faith, and in the chapel at
Brideshead a flame burns for him, "farther, in heart, than Acre or
Jerusalem." No wonder a fellow officer remarks how cheerful he
looks when he comes back. Too late, perhaps, after the critical drub–
bing this novel has borne down the years for its snobbery of tone and
preciosity of style, to rescue its claim to greatness now. Even Waugh
regretted ii, in part, when he came to revise it in 1960. But at least
he could· see, as Orwell could, that the task of our mature years is to
forgive -the follies of our youth: to forgive ourselves for loving too
much, too often, and too soon.
