1Quite rare in France, architectural painting is one important, and still operative component of English pictorial art. Let us remember for instance the publication, in the last years of the 20th century, of a most distinguished book, Piper’s Places, the fruit of John Piper’s painstaking labour and enduring passion, the passion of a man who devoted his life to the reproduction, and illustration of the United Kingdom’s best edifices. For some sixty years, he painted, he painted all of England’s architectural heritage—from the Palladian manors to the Sussex cottages—inserting them, through programme instalments into the Shell Guides to the English and Welsh Counties whose editorship he shared with the poet John Betjeman. Wash drawings, watercolours, oil paintings, etchings, collages conjured up both an enlightened eclecticism and the wealth of a national heritage representative of British history and civilisation. As to John Betjeman, poet-laureate and a close friend of Evelyn Waugh’s, the responsibility he endorses in the series of tourist guide-books suggests the passion of a whole generation for its architectural heritage which the sequels of the war and the invasion of modern mercantilism menaced.

2Evelyn Waugh had been acutely conscious of the danger since the very beginning of his career in the twenties. His press articles (‘Cities of the Future’, review of Le Corbusier’s The City of Tomorrow), his travelogues (Labels: a Mediterranean Journal) and the ten pages or so focusing on Gaudi (Labels 172–82), his novels, all testify to the interest he bore to the first of the arts. King’s Thursday in Decline and Fall (1928), Anchorage House in Vile Bodies (1930), Hetton Abbey in A Handful of Dust (1934), or Boot Magna Hall in Scoop (1938) became obsessive metaphors which cast a new light on the importance Waugh assigned to architecture. In Brideshead Revisited (1945), the eponymous edifice is conferred a still more symbolical role. Charles Ryder, the narrator-protagonist, captivated by its serene and sublime grandeur, himself becomes an architectural painter whose creations mark the stages of his progress towards maturity and enlightenment. Besides, the war, which Waugh actively engaged in, strengthened his conviction that the architecture of a country illustrates its greatness, that England was victimised by the conflict, sullied and nearly destroyed by it. The ‘New Preface to the Revised Edition’ (1959) confirms the now obsolete fears of the novelist: ‘It was impossible to foresee, in the spring of 1944, the present cult of the English country house. 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’ (Waugh 16).

3The calamitous contrast between a discomposed and miserable present and a homogeneous and prestigious past is underlined as early as the prologue of the novel in an epiphany which suddenly dazzles the protagonist and changes his intuitions into certainties. On the one hand, we find the following evocation: ‘A cart-track, once metalled, then overgrown, now rutted and churned to mud, followed the contours of the hill-side [. . .] and on either side of it lay the haphazard litter of corrugated iron, from which rose the rattle and chatter and whistling and catcalls, all the zoo noises of the battalion beginning a new day’ (Waugh 24). This stands in contrast with the following lines: ‘Beyond and about us, more familiar still, lay an exquisite man-made landscape [. . .] The woods were all of oak and beech [. . .] they made a simple, carefully designed pattern with the green glades and the wide green spaces [. . .], a Doric temple stood by the water’s edge, and an ivy-grown arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs. All this had been planned and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might be seen in its maturity’ (Waugh 24–25). The memorialist, as one can see, records the scene with the eye of a painter. The reflexions of the mature man, the confirmed artist, now turned into a soldier, clearly result from his evolution from adolescence to the precise moment when he recollects a life whose inanity he suddenly fathoms.

4Who, then, is Charles Ryder, a man who, at the age of thirty-nine, starts on a quest for his past and initiates a research which will eventually enable him to be reborn into true life? Even though Ryder’s artistic career never appears as the major trend in the foreground of the plot, precise references suggest the artist’s progress and the three major stages of his (belated) coming of age. The two Oxford years (‘Arcadia’) present the young man’s apprenticeship from nineteen to twenty. Momentarily deserted by Sebastian Flyte, he travels to Ravenna with his friend Collins for whom the experience will prove crucial.’ Here was planted the seed of what became his life harvest’ (Waugh 54), Charles remark, without ever realising that an identical process is being started for him. Will he not decide to leave Oxford a few months later? ‘I thought of putting in some time at an art-school—in the life class’ (Waugh 74), he announces his father who mocks the ‘life class’ phrase. The next Christmas he repairs to Brideshead where his real education commences. ‘It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls [. . .] which stood unchanged, as [they] had been designed 250 years before’ (Waugh 92). He begins by painting the fountain in the style of Piranese, then comes across Lady Marchmain’s paintbox and fails in his attempt to paint the office: ‘This elaborate pastiche was too much for me’ (Waugh 95). Thus it goes with the ups and downs of apprenticeship.

5At the beginning of his second year at Oxford the young man had already engaged into some sort of artistic study, beginning with the discovery of ancient sculpture: ‘I started my second year by joining the Ruskin school of art; two or three mornings a week we met [. . .] among the casts from the antique at the Ashmolean museum. My drawings were worthless’ (Waugh 120, my emphasis). During the Easter recess he paints a new panel at Brideshead ‘in the little garden room in the colonnade’ (Waugh 145), for which he is complimented by Lady Marchmain ‘everyone loves your painting in the garden room. We shall never forgive you if you dont finish them’ (Waugh 152, my emphasis). He then decides to go down from Oxford without a degree in order to become a full time artist and follow what must be named his ‘calling’. ‘It might be best to start now on what I intend doing’ (Waugh 163): such is the closing sentence of Book I, that of apprenticeship, and also Arcadia.

6This initiatory stage—apprenticeship—is prolonged in Book II, ‘Brideshead Deserted’, which stages the coming of age of the artist in a solitude propitious to practice and meditation. Away from Sebastian, Ryder, in his Parisian exile, acknowledges the discipline of the ancients and the laxity of his contemporaries, the sincerity and depth of the past and the superficiality of the present:

I told [Sebastian] how good the old teachers were and how bad the students. ‘They never go near the Louvre. . . or, if they do, it’s only because one of their absurd reviews has suddenly ‘discovered’ a master who fits in with that month’s aesthetic theory’,

7which Cordelia aptly sums up by claiming that [Modern art is] ‘all bosh’ (Waugh 172–73).

8Ryder, fortified by his newborn certainties, drudges harder than ever to acquire culture and technique: ‘On every visit to Brideshead I painted a medallion on the walls of the garden room [. . .] there were three finished medallions now, each rather pretty in its way, but unhappily each in a different way, for my tastes had changed and I had become more dexterous in the eighteen months since the series was begun. As a decorative scheme they were a failure’ (Waugh 182). Despite these groping experiments, Ryder has taken his decision: ‘I told [Cordelia] I had taken up architectural painting’ (Waugh 232).

9Brideshead, the palazzo in Venice, Marchmain House in London all are authentic masterpieces of the past which it behoves the artist to immortalise. Is Marchmain House, like other venerable London mansions, not about to be dismantled, surrendered to ravenous estate agents, the likes of Mrs Beaver in A Handful of Dust? ‘Would you like to paint this house . . . ? Four small oils; that is what my father wants done for a record, to keep at Brideshead’ (Waugh 241–42). No proposal could have come at a better time: the first order received by the would be artist confirming him in his calling. ‘This was my first commission, those four paintings are particular favourites of mine, and it was their success, both with myself and others, that confirmed me in what has since been my career’ (Waugh 242).

10On close examination, the success alluded to may not be the sole, nor the real, reason for the professional commitment of the protagonist. Let us bear in mind that he has just visited Sebastian in Fez, and that a reflexion of his friend may have unwittingly influenced him. The metaphor of the planted seed which will sprout later (‘Has it begun to sprout?’) remains omnipresent in the novel: ‘And then [Sebastian] added what, if I had paid more attention, should have given me the key I lacked; at the time I heard and remembered it, without taking notice. ‘You know, Charles,’ he said, ‘it’s rather a pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me’ (Waugh 239–40).

11Here lies the key to Charles Ryder’s artistic commitment, in the sacred mission he is entrusted with; accepted by the Marchmains when still a teenager, the adult he becomes is in duty bound to preserve their memory for posterity. Once Marchmain House has disappeared, only the artist he has grown into can preserve and revive its memory, testify to the past grandeur of a decadent England. ‘You know it’s being pulled down? My father’s selling it. They are going to put up a block of flats here [. . .] we can’t stop them apparently’ (Waugh 242).

12For the first time in his life, and like his friend Sebastian—but in a different domain—Ryder finds himself engaged in a war, compelled to defend a cause with the arms of the artist. ‘I had to work against time, for the contractors were only waiting for the final signature to start their work of destruction’ (Waugh 242). Thus he becomes the defender of a past which he saves from oblivion. Ut pictura poesis? Or rather the contrary, Ut poesis pictura. His art provides the only possible fecund representation of a nearly extinct world. For the first time, through this mission, he discovers not only the technique, but also the breath, the inspiration (in the etymological sense of the word) essential to the artist: ‘I could do nothing wrong. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There were no difficulties [. . .] each brush stroke, as soon as it was completed, seemed to have been there always’ (Waugh 243).

13Book II then can close on the song of triumph of one who has suddenly, and as if by magic, become a new man. ‘I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening—of Browning’s renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo’s tube, spurned the friars, with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech’ (Waugh 246–47).

14Collins’s, Bridey’s intuitions come true, Anthony Blanche’s too: ‘You see, my dear Charles, you are that very rare thing, An Artist. Oh yes, you must not look bashful. Behind that cold, English, phlegmatic exterior you are An Artist [. . .] the artist is the eternal type, solid, purposeful, observant and, beneath it all, p-p-passionate, eh, Charles?’ (Waugh 62) Collins, Bridey, Anthony are not totally wrong. Yet Charles Ryder, artist as he may have become, is not aware that his rebirth, real as it may appear, remains superficial. No wonder that he cannot end his triumphal song without displaying his impatience with the ‘convent chatter’, the ‘dusty tomes’, and the ‘crabbed, hair-splitting speech of the friars’ (Waugh 247). In fact he has only travelled part of his road to Damascus, which will take him eventually to a genuine renaissance in the third book of Brideshead Revisited, ‘A Twitch Upon the Thread’.

15Has Charles learned anything at this point? After all, he may not be completely mistaken in believing in some sort of renaissance. Through painting he has been able to wrench himself from the materialism and superficiality of the world in which his fellow-beings get stuck, to free himself from the ephemeral and become aware of the importance of time. ‘Vita brevis, ars longa,’ so to speak. ‘It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls, to wander from room to room [. . .] to the great tapestry-hung hall, which stood unchanged, as it had been designed 250 years before’ (Waugh 92).

16The reader might think that the apprenticeship is drawing to its end, that life opens in front of the now mature artist. ‘Welcome, O life, I go to encounter thee [. . .]’, he could exclaim and resolutely turn towards a promising future. On the contrary Book III ‘A Twitch Upon the Thread’ opens on the theme of the past and of memory. Stephen Dedalus’s triumphant accents are obliterated by a genuinely elegiac melancholy: ‘My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time’ (Waugh 251).

17The introspection, the recollection, favoured by the bleakness of military billets in this winter of discontent and of war awake the narrator to the barren dreariness of the ‘ten dead years’ he has gone through, a ‘waste land’ individual as well as collective, where his ‘last love had died.’ (Waugh 11). For the last ten years, Charles Ryder has drifted, like flotsam, and agonised: ‘For nearly ten dead years [. . .] I was borne along a road outwardly full of change and incidents, but never during that time, except sometimes in my painting—and that at longer and longer intervals—did I come alive’ (Waugh 25). His personal life is wrecked, his marriage broken. Celia Mulcaster, his wife, has obtained the custody of their children, for whom, in fact, he felt utterly indifferent. Julia, whom he loved, has left him, so that he remains alone, ‘homeless, childless, middle-aged, loveless, Hooper’ (Waugh 380), a sentence in which the ultimate apostrophe, ‘Hooper’, of this desperate admission becomes a scathingly accusing epithet.

18The artistic life, the painting, to which he had momentarily clung and through which he had acquired social and material recognition, now appear as patent failures. Far from being ‘a man of the Renaissance’, he is but a ‘Hooper’. After the publication of his first three folio books (Ryder’s Country Seats, Ryder’s English Homes, Ryder’s Village and Provincial Architecture), which bring him fame and wealth, his enthusiasm and vitality wane. ‘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 the singleness and the belief that it was not done by hand—in a word, the inspiration’ (Waugh 252).

19He then flees England and, for two years, scours South America in search of a new inspiration ‘among alien styles’ (Waugh 252). In spite of the change of scene, the long absence, the research on the volume which is to become Ryder’s Latin America, the artist laments his lost power (Waugh 254), an intuition confirmed when Anthony Blanche bluntly asserts ‘Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you’ (Waugh 301).

20Let us open a parenthesis here to remark that, in the course of the novel, all the characters go through the ordeal of suffering, failure, or some other sort of ‘death in life’ (Waugh 254), which they only overcome when ‘grace’ touches them: Lord Marchmain in extremis—as the phrase goes—, Sebastian and Julia at the end of a long and painful personal progress, Charles in the shock caused by the unexpected return to Brideshead and the suppressed recollections it releases, in the passage from the painting of monuments to the writing of ‘profane memories’, each of them eventually reaching what can legitimately be named after Proust’s phrase the ‘past recaptured’.

21Lord Marchmain’s decision to await death in the Chinese drawing-room may well result from an ‘awakened memory of childhood; a dream in the nursery’ (Waugh 347). Julia in despair: ‘All I can hope to do is to put my life into some sort of order’ (Waugh 320) falls asleep praying, ‘her pale lips moved on the pillow [. . .] to murmur a prayer—a jingle of the nursery that came to her now in the twilit world between sorrow and sleep; some ancient pious rhyme that had come down to Nanny Hawkins from centuries of bedtime whispering, through all the changes of language from the days of pack horses on the Pilgrim’s Way’ (Waugh 322).

22At the beginning of the narrative Charles himself, and England in general, are at a personal and national dead end with no possible way of escape. In his works Charles has painted the monuments designed by architects of genius, the tokens of Britain’s past grandeur, without grasping their real significance. From painting to writing, from reproduction to self-analysis, he finally comes to the apprehension of the causes of his failure, as ‘we possess nothing certainly except the past’ (Waugh 251). This appropriation of the past is achieved through meditation and writing. To remember is indeed a chance procedure, a long-term inquiry, a mosaic of disconnected facts put together, re-assembled in an attempt to reach complete conviction. Truth is a palimpsest; memory (‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, according to Wordsworth) remains the only experience which makes it possible for an individual to re-assess his past from two different perspectives, that of the re-composed instant and that of the past considered at a remove.

23Hence the discovery by Charles, at once protagonist and narrator, painter and writer, that ‘je est un autre’, ‘I am not I: thou art not he or she; they are not they’ (Waugh, Author’s Note), Waugh inscribed as the epigraph to his novel. Here is revealed the complexity, opacity of the being that each character displays successively: Sebastian for sure, but also Julia who doubts ‘How do I know I shan’t suddenly turn out to be somebody else’ (Waugh 333) or rebels ‘Surely I was made for some other purpose than this’ (Waugh 341). Finally Ryder himself is swept away, against his will, by an ‘avalanche’, ‘[. . .] when the wind dropped and the sun came out on the ice slopes and the thaw set in a block would move, slide and tumble, high above, gather weight, till the whole hillside seemed to be falling, and the lighted place would open and splinter and disappear, rolling with the avalanche into the ravine’ (Waugh 341), and completed later ‘The avalanche was down, the hillside swept bare behind it; the last echoes died on the white slopes; the new mound glittered and lay still in the silent valley’ (Waugh 373).

24At this moment Charles Ryder becomes ‘un autre’ (another one). His life, like the hillside, is swept bare, the last echoes of his past die away, the scales fall from his eyes, he is reborn into a new life. Waugh, let us admit it, does not skimp on the metaphors to voice his message, that of the veil of the temple being rent, and also that of the painting by Holman Hunt, ‘The Awakening Conscience’, whose title he strangely modifies into ‘The Awakened Conscience’ (Waugh 319), probably to alert the reader to the importance of his message. Charles at last understands that art only provides imperfect solutions, that religion is the basis on which man must found the edifice of his life. Art taught Charles the sense of duration, religion gives him the sense of eternity.

25Let us conclude with Proust whose Remembrances Waugh had certainly read: ‘The real life, the life at last discovered and clarified (my emphasis), consequently the only life really (my emphasis) lived, is literature, the life which, in a sense, dwells all the time in all men as well as in the artist. But they cannot see it because intelligence never developed them [. . .].’ If we only replace the word ‘literature’ by ‘religion’, the word ‘artist’ by ‘believer’ we obtain a working definition of the narrator’s enterprise in Brideshead Revisited. Let us now continue Proust’s page and modify it likewise: ‘Through religion [art, Proust writes] only can we get out of ourselves, know what another one sees of this universe which is not the same as ours, and whose landscapes would have remained as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon [. . .]. All things considered this so complicated religion [art] is precisely the only living one [the only living art]. Alone it expresses for the others, and makes us see for our selves our own lives, those lives which cannot be ‘observed’, whose appearances need to be translated and often read backwards [my emphasis] and painfully deciphered [. . .].’

26The phrases ‘read backwards’ and ‘painfully deciphered’ exactly coincide with Charles Ryder’s experience when he re-visits Brideshead and comes to an understanding of his life. Each of the events of this life have contributed to drive him ‘with a twitch upon the thread’ (Waugh 250 et passim) to the ultimate conversion. Ryder thus accedes to revelation by dint of an art which intimates him the superficiality of an ephemeral Arcadia and the superiority of a lasting art. Yet the art of Ryder, architectural painter and protagonist-narrator of a novel subtitled ‘the sacred and profane memories of Captain Charles Ryder’ is a mere profane stage on his Road to Damascus and in the discovery of the ‘sacred’ for this twentieth century Paul. Ryder, the immature painter, saw himself as ‘a man of the renaissance’, Ryder, the new convert, has become ‘a man of the resurrection’.

27Brideshead Revisited is not a ‘Künstlerroman’; Waugh is not Proust. Although his novel somehow illustrates the ‘ars memoriae’ theme, it also, and more profoundly, develops an ‘ars aeternitatis’ which, since 1930, had been at the source of the novelist’s inspiration.