Chapter Commentary of Brideshead Revisited - Study Guide by Evelyn Waugh

Charles’ mind, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity", as he looks back over his memories, of the early days of Arcadia, of his relationship with Julia, of the houses that he has painted.

She talks of her family and their religion, of her father, Sebastian and Julia all "gone" from the church but she is confident, "God won’t let them go for long, you know". She reminds him of the story that her mother had read to them, "Father Brown said something like 'I caught him' (the thief) 'with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the earth and still bring him back with a twitch upon the thread’" (212). Incidentally the story referred to is "The Queer Feet" in The Innocence of Father Brown by G K Chesterton. She talks of Bridey and vocation, "If you haven’t a vocation it’s no good however much you want [one]; and if you have a vocation, you can’t get away from it, however much you hate it".

Finally, she talks of her late mother, "I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated mummy…Well, you see she was saintly, but she wasn’t a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can’t really hate God either, When they want to hate him and his saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it’s God and hate that. I suppose you think that’s all bosh" (213). "I heard almost the same thing once before - from some one very different", Charles replies, remembering his conversation with Cara in Venice: "He hates her (Lady Marchmain); but you have no conception how he hates her…Sebastian hates her too…they are full of hate - hate of themselves…When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating (99f.)". Charles remembers this but the inspiration that he experienced painting Marchmain house that afternoon has overwhelmed him, "I had felt my brush take life that afternoon; I had had my finger in the succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening -". The romantic in him had once again been awoken, " of Browning’s renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen stars through Gallileo’s tube…". There is no part for God, his grace or his will, in this fantasy, in the pie of creation that he has got hold of, "…spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair- splitting speech" (213).

BOOK THREE: A TWITCH UPON THE THREAD

The third book is set ten years later than his dinner with Cordelia. Charles’ career as an architectural artist takes off and he is very successful. He publishes three folios, Ryder’s Country Seats, Ryder’s English Homes, Ryder’s Village and Provincial Architecture. Though, as he says, "I seldom failed to please, for there was no conflict between myself and my patrons; we both wanted the same thing" (216), he refers to this period later as the "dead" (243). He and his patrons were living in a changing world and adapting to it. Their houses were being pulled down, he was painting them as a record of the lost past. "But, as the years passed, I began to mourn the loss of something I had known in the drawing-room of Marchmain house and once or twice since, the intensity and singleness and the belief that it was not all done by hand - in a word, the inspiration" (216). He had been living in the "world of three dimensions", his five senses serving him well. He married Celia, sister of ‘Boy’ Mulcaster and they had two children. He had gone abroad, to Latin America, an escape "In quest of this fading light…two year’s refreshment among alien styles" (216). On his return, he is not enthusiastic: "It’s just another jungle closing in", he says (221). Then he meets Julia. This book charts the consummation of their relationship, a latent love that had murmured unheard since their first meeting, "as I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers, I caught a thin bat’s squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me" (74).

They are on the same boat back to England from America. As Charles wanders around the ship, surveying the lavish décor, he is reminded of Cordelia’s quote, "Quomodo sedet sola civitas", "Here I am, back from the jungle where wealth has no splendour and power has no dignity" (225) and it is among this splendourless wealth that he bumps into Julia. "…she spoke as though it were a matter of weeks rather than of years; as though, too, before out parting we had been firm friends…dead contrary to the common experience of such encounters…Here, she and I, who were never friends before, met on terms of long and unbroken intimacy" (226). Their conversation is no outpouring, no tearful confessions of love, but rather the normal humdrum biographical update between people that have not seen each other a long time. They remark