The rejection of beauty in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.(Evelyn Waugh)(Critical essay)

I have written elsewhere about Waugh's complex narrative of conversion in Brideshead Revisited, about the multilayered process by which Waugh brings his disillusioned protagonist and first-person narrator, Charles Ryder, to embrace a Christian worldview. (1) In this essay, I would like to explore not so much what Waugh plainly rejects in this novel but rather what Charles Ryder, and, by extension in this highly autobiographical novel, Waugh himself, find most tempting, what desires and passions are hardest to subdue. It is easy, after all, to set out what Waugh hated. Throughout his career he showed a reckless willingness to eviscerate in public much of what the cognoscenti valued most. As he wrote of a character based on himself in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold,

 
   his strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, 
   sunbathing, and jazz--everything in fact that had happened in his 
   own lifetime.... There was a phrase in the thirties: 'it is later 
   than you think,' which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was 
   never later than Mr. Pinfold thought. (11-12) 

For Waugh, giving up Picasso or jazz was not hard. What was hard was giving up beauty, and its corollary modernist aesthetic, the view that artistic creation itself holds preeminent value. Brideshead Revisited charts for its protagonist what Waugh sees as morally necessary, learning that art and beauty cannot substitute for religion.

Curiously, Waugh's rejection of modernist aesthetics comes in tandem with his appropriation of modernist rhetorical ploys. Waugh, after all, was entirely familiar with both the outlines of emerging modernity as well as with the literary effects that registered that modernity--though he came to detest both (Hitchens 108). Aesthetically he was one of the earliest writers to learn from Eliot's poetry, and was willing to acknowledge the debt in his 1934 A Handful of Dust, both through the novel's title, taken from The Waste Land ("I will show you fear in a handful of dust" [1.30; 30]), and its epigram, taken from Eliot's "The Hollow Men." His modernist effects are pervasive, and not merely in the early novels. Even in the late Sword of Honour trilogy, we find the masterful use of an array of modernist devices: contrapuntalist montage and other cinematic techniques, flatness and extreme objectivity of reportage, mockery of sentiment, ironic deflation achieved through the juxtaposition of high and low rhetoric, and the use of the "stage properties of modernity," such as "cocktails and car-racing ... aeroplanes, films, [and] telephone chatter" (Patey 34). Waugh complements his modernist rhetorical repertoire with a pervasive atmosphere of post-war futility and fatigue, accompanied by the exposure of conventional pieties on a scale worthy of Lytton Strachey.

Waugh's mastery of certain manoeuvres of modernist rhetoric, his attacks on Victorian shibboleths, and his depictions of modernist angst, however, had no effect on his rejection of a key premise of modernist aesthetics: that art can substitute for religion. As we know, high modernist writers commonly used the symbols and language of religion to claim that art was the ground of being, or even that life matters only to the degree that it works as art. In their own ways, figures as disparate as Joyce, Woolf, Stevens, and Yeats follow Nietzsche, who in The Birth of Tragedy unfurls the modernist banner: "Only as an aesthetic phenomenon are human existence and the world eternally justified" (52, 141, qtd. in Bell 243). As Michael Bell writes, "Modernist mythopoeia characteristically functions under [the] aesthetic sign" (243).

For Waugh as a Catholic, such a position is anathema, and not merely because such a position can be used to endorse unsavory moral choices, given the artist's putative freedom to violate "bourgeois" morality. Rather, the preeminence of the "aesthetic sign" puts the artist in God's place. To renounce this worldview, however, Waugh also finds himself renouncing the temptations of the artist's life, the artist's desire to live for beauty alone. For Waugh this is no little thing. He himself was an artist early in his career; his first book was an appreciation of Rossetti; and he was a lifelong collector and lover of Pre-Raphaelite canvases. As Douglas Patey has argued,

 
   Waugh treasured the beautiful works of mail; indeed his house at 
   Stinchcombe was crowded with them. But he resisted the temptation 
   to see them as ends in themselves, and could always relinquish 
   them in favour of a higher beauty (171). 

Charles Ryder represents the artist and the art-lover in Waugh, and Waugh constructs his narrative so as to make his artist fail. Waugh's portrait of the artist as a young man ends with Charles finding ultimate value, not in beauty, but in God; not in the sweep of the Baroque found at Brideshead Castle but in a chapel lamp of more-than-ordinary ugliness, a "beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design" (351). (2) To put the carnal love of art and beauty aside is the hard path Charles must follow. As Jeffrey Heath notes, "[Art], unflaggingly seductive, ... is Charles's first profane love, and she is the last to go" (169).

Brideshead Revisited sets out this theme, the education of an artist to look beyond art, through a sustained polemic about art, beauty, and ultimate value. Waugh fires the first salvos in the early pages of Book One as the narrative both invokes and then implicitly repudiates those famous promoters of modern art and modernist aesthetics, Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Waugh would, of course, have been antagonistic to both men because they were key members of the Bloomsbury melange. Beyond this, as a nay-sayer to Post-Impressionism, Waugh would also have deplored Bell and Fry as the joint sponsors of the first two exhibitions of Post-Impressionist art in London in 1910 and 1912. In Brideshead Revisited, however, he singles them out specifically to rebuke their aesthetic theories. The first to be dismissed is Roger Fry. As a mark of how callow and undiscriminating Charles is as an undergraduate, we learn that Charles decorated his first-year rooms at Oxford with a …