Brideshead Revisited, less a satire than a romance, marks the first accomplishment of the second stage of Evelyn Waugh's career. Though something of the old, hard brilliance remains, there is a new tone of lush nostalgia in this work, the first of Waugh's novels in which his Roman Catholicism is pervasive. Indeed, excepting Helena, it is Waugh's only novel to date in which a religious theme has been dominant; although Guy Crouchback is a Catholic and Roman Catholicism figures constantly in Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender, the essential theme of these three volumes is the total collapse of civilized values which is the concomitant of war. In effect, in Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh turned from the nihilistic rejection of his early satires to an affirmative commitment; to satisfy the other impulse of the artist-rebel, as Albert Camus has described him, Waugh affirmed a vision which he believed gave unity to life. Brideshead Revisited was his "attempt to trace the divine purpose in a pagan world."

Reviewing Brideshead, Edmund Wilson [see excerpt above], who had most highly praised the earlier satires, concluded that in this more normal world the novelist "no longer knows his way"; he found the novel to be "disastrous." By contrast, a reviewer for the Catholic World judged Brideshead "a work of art." (p. 98)

A novel which has provoked such diverse views deserves consideration. It may be an imperfect work; it can scarcely be a vapid one. Since the apologetic nature of the work is an issue, we should, before analyzing the effects of the subordination of satire to romance, determine whether Evelyn Waugh's vision has given life a form it does not have.

In honesty to the novel, we must note at once that if by "apology" we mean a systematic and reasoned defense of a theological system, then Brideshead is not an apology for anything. It is not a preachy book. To be sure, the Catholicism of the Flytes is sometimes discussed. But, if we turn to the longest discussion of a theological nature in the novel, one provoked by Bridey's insistence that his dying father must receive Extreme Unction, we find not didacticism but, instead, satire. The course of the conversation proves that most of the family are confused about the issue. (pp. 99-100)

Over this entire scene Waugh has cast his satirical irony; the scene exists for novelistic rather than dogmatic reasons, since it prepares for an important event in the action (Lord Marchmain's conversion), satirizes the varied and confused nature of religious faith among these people, and indicates a significant stage in the development of Ryder's character. Waugh must surely be absolved of apologetic didacticism.

Similarly, if by "apologetic novel" we mean one that crudely or even subtly simplifies experience and glosses over certain of life's complexities so as to flatter a fixed system of belief, then again Brideshead cannot be classified as such a work…. Indeed, the author gives us no reason to believe that he is making a case for his Catholics qua Catholics, for the lives of the Marchmains and of Charles Ryder are not pretty ones, and their Catholicism is no easy consolation. Only Cordelia, the younger daughter, finds an honest contentment in faith. Her elder brother's religion is narrow adherence to system (which Waugh ridicules); and her mother's is resignation to suffering. The others—Lord Marchmain, Sebastian, Julia, and Ryder—know no rest.

Only if we choose to equate apologetics with the presentation of Catholics and Catholicism, through a "Catholic" vision of life, may we argue that the novel is an apology. (pp. 100-01)

If we grant that Brideshead is no mere work of apology, if we grant that its purpose is pre-eminently aesthetic rather than didactic, and if, as surely we must, we grant a writer the choice of a Catholic view of life, how do we account for the fact that Brideshead does not fulfill the promise of its brilliant satirical opening? I believe that Sean O'Faolain is illuminating on this point when he suggests that "the theme … is universally valid; the treatment is not." Perhaps an exploration of Waugh's "treatment," which depends upon the relation between his satire and his values, will pinpoint the reason for the failure.

Brideshead Revisited is elaborately architectonic, as are other later Waugh novels. Subtitled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, the novel beings in the profane modern world and ends in the sacristy of the chapel at Brideshead. In the prologue and the epilogue, which represent the present, we find the novel's most sustained satire. As the bitterly ironic prologue opens, Charles Ryder, a captain in the British Army during World War II, is shifted from one army camp to a second locale. Arriving at night, he does not discover until morning that his new headquarters are the baroque country seat of the Flytes. This discovery moves Charles in Book I to memories of his undergraduate days and of his warm friendship with Sebastian; and in Book II, wherein Sebastian, Lord Marchmain, and Julia are all drawn back to their faith by the urgency of God's will, to memories of his love affair with Lady Julia. Book I takes place in the middle twenties and Book II in the late thirties; the intervening years are sketched in so that continuity, in the chronological sense at least, is not impaired. In the epilogue, surrounded by the "sudden frost" of the modern age, Ryder enters the chapel at Brideshead, where he is revivified by the sight of a "small red light," the sacristy lamp, signifying to him the redemptive survival of faith in a pagan world. The prologue and the epilogue are something more than a mechanical use of the frame technique; they are not merely a device for setting off the memories, but a means of expressing Waugh's emotional attitude toward the past and his satirical view of the present.

Waugh's satirical-ironic projection of a sordid present against the rich traditions of the past is strikingly effective. The landscape of the prologue, bringing into relief the traditional values which Waugh associates with Brideshead, has symbolic force. (pp. 102-03)

For all these depressing satirical contrasts of the prologue and epilogue, however, and for all the pleasing parallels of several returns to faith, which we find in the body of the novel, the structure of Brideshead is not a success. A brief examination of the organization of the two major divisions may provide an explanation of this failure. Book I, composed of eight chapters, contains 201 pages; Book II, having five chapters, occupies 116 pages. So the first book of Brideshead is well over half again as long as the second book…. Is it possible that Brideshead has what Henry James called a "misplaced middle," that having extended himself in sentimentally recreating the glories of a vanished past and particularly of youth, Waugh then scanted what ought really to be the center of the novel, the religious conflict engendered by the love of Julia and Ryder? Perhaps Waugh himself answered this question when he revised Brideshead (1960), and divided the original two books into three, apparently in an attempt to emphasize Julia's role and to subordinate the Sebastian-Oxford part to the whole.

More disturbing even than the structural flaw of Brideshead is the novelist's tendency so to romanticize experience that his tone degenerates into sentimentality. Nowhere is this tendency more pronounced than in the Julia-Ryder love affair, a relationship which provokes one purple passage after another. (pp. 105-06)

The consequences of the subordination of satire to sentiment are particularly evident in the point of view—that of the first-person narrator, Charles Ryder—from which Waugh has chosen to present the novel. This fictional device, whatever its merits, has also its dangers. Not only has the first-person narrator contributed to the structural defect, but his presence has nearly banished from the novel the objective, ironic, satirical detachment which had hitherto distinguished Waugh's art. In Brideshead, Waugh is totally committed to his hero's, and his own, strengths—a love of the past, a sense of beauty, a moral awareness of the sterility of much contemporary life. But Waugh is also committed to Ryder's weaknesses—snobbery, smugness, narrowness of sympathy, and superficial idealizations. (pp. 106-07)

The terrible weaknesses of the Marchmain family are fully developed, but so many excuses are made for them (which is not done for the nonupper-class, minor characters, nearly all of whom are satirized), so extravagant are Ryder's claims for them, so romanticized is their class position, so much nostalgia is lavished on the life they were able to lead before the war, so many indications are given of their exclusive right to consideration, so much of Ryder's smugness and self-satisfaction permeates the whole, that the novel seems to accept Brideshead and everything it entails totally and at the expense of all other beings.

But the last words on Brideshead really belong to Evelyn Waugh. In the preface to the revised edition—itself a comment on the original—Waugh left no doubt at all as to his dissatisfaction with this work, which had damaged his reputation at the same time that it brought fame. He frankly admitted that its "rhetorical and ornamental language" had become "distasteful" to him. Indeed, in the very act of offering the revised novel to a new generation of readers, as "a souvenir of the Second War rather than of the twenties or of the thirties with which it ostensibly deals," he seemed to be unconvinced that he had greatly improved it. And, it must be said, the revised novel is not a success. Although Waugh did curb some of the excesses of the original, he did not obliterate its grosser qualities. (pp. 109-10)