September 2011 Print

Dr. David Allen White

In Part 6 of Dr. White’s lecture on Brideshead Revisited, he continues his analysis of the novel, focusing on character development and the artistic depth of the plot.

Part 6

This part is going to focus on the whole question of art and architecture within the novel. And of course, this is absolutely central in the obvious ways. The title of the book is about a very large family estate and particularly that castle, Brideshead. And our hero’s vocation is that of an artist. Given those two facts as Waugh constructs the novel, it is clear his interests must be in art and architecture because they are central to so many different aspects of the novel. When I was giving you a brief history of his life [see Part 3 in the May 2011 issue], I made the point that he started out wanting to be an artist and was an illustrator. In fact, he did many of the jacket covers for his first novels; and he himself did some illustrations for them. You can find these drawings; they are really quite remarkable. He was extremely talented. He could have pursued that, I think, and been successful at it. But instead of being an artist, he winds up being a writer–a shifted vocation.

Waugh’s interest in art began when he was quite a young man, when he was still in his teens. In fact, when he was only about 14 years old, he made the discovery of art and was going to some of the museums that were available to him in London, and was particularly fond of modern art. At the age of 14, he writes a little essay called “In Defense of Cubism,” in which he praises the glories of the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. He loved post-impressionism. He loved futurism. He loved anything that was modern. And part of this, of course, would impel him then into that association with the bright young people of London, who loved all things modern. And also, when he starts out in Oxford, he is very much concerned with the movements in modern art–being up to date, being progressive, what’s the latest, what are the new artists doing, and praising them for it. By 1947, just three years after Brideshead is written, he is signing many of his letters with the catch-phrase, “Death to Picasso.”

So we can say there has been a change over the 30 years from the time he is a young man until his later years. But while he was bold and forthright in that little closing salutation–you find it in many of his letters–he wasn’t just attacking to no purpose. He wrote to a friend at one point explaining his dislike of Picasso and particularly cubism and everything associated with modern art: “There is an Easter sense in which all things are made new in the Risen Christ. A tiny gleam of this is reflected in all true art.” What he believed the artist was doing was representing nature and allowing us by looking at the painting, if it was true art, to see that glimpse of the “Risen Christ,” a tiny gleam of it that would allow us to look to the painting, back to the real world of nature, and appreciate it in a new way. This is an idea of the artist as teacher, and what the artist is doing is teaching the eye; and through a great painting or even a good painting helping us to understand what that world of nature is about so that when we turn back to it, we turn back with an educated eye and can see that more clearly.

What had happened–and I’ll just take Picasso as the example–with the coming of cubism, of course, is that the cubist artist takes the human face or a pitcher, some oranges, apples, some musical instruments, and looks at what the artist calls the “planes of light,” the way the light hits and then fragments that face, those objects, so that we are not seeing the whole. We are simply seeing a shattered, fragmented version of it, in which chunks are put together, jigsaw-puzzle-like, but completely out of kilter with anything from nature. And what we are looking at is the brilliance of the artist, and you cannot in any way turn from that back to the world of nature and see more clearly.

What Waugh came to believe is that that sort of painting assaulted the eye; it taught the eye nothing. There is nothing one could learn from that. It was in no way tending toward the beautiful, the representational, and this became an obsession with him: that the painting had to show something, attempt to be a picture of something. He spoke out in defense of the whole school of Victorian painters who had fallen out of favor because at least they had subject matter. They were painting pictures that were recognizable and even had a little story in it; we’ll see one such moment in Brideshead. He uses one of those paintings in Brideshead for an express purpose. We’ll come to that later.

 

Waugh said that tumultuous, aesthetic heresies had come from all over the continent to destroy all that previous generations had understood as art. He referred to it as a kind of heresy. In fact at one point in another of his letters he went even further and said, “Perhaps in the Providence of God, the unqualified hideousity of modern art has been sent to us to scourge us for just this aberration of confusing art with religion.” And of course what was happening at the same time, and it had begun in the 19th century, was the belief that since no one had faith any longer, no one could believe in those old religious ideas, you would substitute art. Art became the religion; the artist became god. You find it in music in Richard Wagner, who builds the shrine to himself at Bayreuth and writes his sacred, religious drama festival Parsifal, where those who love him can go and worship with his music the man–a false god. You get it in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and in a way, Brideshead is an anti-portrait of the artist as a young man. Joyce’s artist, Stephen Dedalus, deserts his family, leaves his country, abandons God, and places himself in the godlike position of the artist recreating the world. In this book, Charles Ryder finds family, comes to appreciate his country, and indeed paints it as some of the old structures that are vanishing, and comes to know, love, and serve God. It is an “anti-portrait of the artist as a young man,” it is anti-Joyce if you will, and Waugh was fully aware of what he was doing. It’s everywhere in the arts: the artist as God, art as the substitute for religion.

Now, Waugh had fallen into this for some time as a young man. He was very much aware of it. There were certain artistic theories about that he had held to in his youth, that he came to remove himself from and thoroughly disbelieve in two names. They show up in the novel: Clive Bell and Roger Fry, who were theorists of art, writing books on aesthetics, and we’ll see he actually quotes one of them at one point. And he had bought into this. You’ll find it stated in the novel: it’s what is called the “Theory of Significant Form.” It went basically like this: if you look at a canvas, the canvas can raise some sort of high emotion in you. That is, art is basically emotional in nature and is creating an aesthetic response. It is doing so through form, color, shapes, design, but there is no need for any subject matter. Subject matter is not necessary. What you are getting on the canvas is simply a matter of design, color, and form that can be a medieval Madonna and Child, because that’s color, that’s form; there is some design. Or a Jackson Pollock, where he literally just threw and dripped paint on the canvas. It’s accidental, but we end up with color and form and he’s designing as he drips and they are the same thing and they are to be examined the same way. Waugh quotes a lecture that Fry once gave in which he was doing an analysis of a painting of the Crucifixion of our Lord. I don’t know which painting it was, but he had a slide of it up on the screen. He was talking to his students and pointed to the body of our Lord on the Cross and supposedly said, “You see this important mass of color here?” And of course in saying that, what he is saying is that that “mass of color” could be anything. It could be the body of our Lord, it could be one of Cézanne’s apples, or it could just be a blob of paint put on a canvas next to another blob of paint, and what is important is the form and arrangement of the color, not the subject matter! So that even in a great religious painting, the body of Our Lord is “this important mass of color.”

Now, this was a seductive idea at the time and one that Waugh fell into until some of the people that he met at Oxford jarred him out of it. Turn to page 28 in the novel: This is a tiny moment, but it’s hugely significant in terms of what’s happening in the book. It was indeed at Oxford that Waugh had this nonsense knocked out of him, and very quickly. And he had it knocked out of him, indeed, by some of his friends–one in particular, Harold Acton, who is one of the models for Anthony Blanche, who becomes very important in teaching Charles aesthetics. But there were others as well, and Waugh puts the basic attack on Clive Bell in the mouth of Sebastian. “At Sebastian’s approach, these grey figures seemed quietly to fade into the landscape and vanish, like highland sheep in the misty heather” (p. 28). That’s all those old theories of art he had with the people he was hanging out with.

Collins had exposed the fallacy of modern aesthetics to me: “...The whole argument from Significant Form stands or falls by volume. If you allow Cézanne to represent a third dimension on his two-dimensional canvas, then you must allow Landseer his gleam of loyalty in the spaniel’s eye—” (p. 28)

So it’s being shaken a bit, okay? If we can say we’re pretending to see a third dimension in Cézanne, who’s drawing in two dimensions, then why not say that the spaniel is a real object?–it’s representing a spaniel, and the gleam in the spaniel’s eye has real meaning. What is it? It’s a dog with a gleam in its eye! Why can’t we say that? And if we look at simply the number of paintings that have been representational, they far outweigh (what he means by volume) the number of paintings that have been done with just “blobs of color” on a canvas. So he was leaning that way:

but it was not until Sebastian, idly turning the page of Clyde Bell’s Art, read: “‘Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?’ Yes. I do,” that my eyes were opened.

The notion is that aesthetics are not just about created objects, cathedrals, paintings; that art is somehow superior to nature; that art is separated from nature, superior to nature, and the artistic object, whatever it is, raises an aesthetic response that is far superior to anything we can find out in the world. Sebastian teaches a very simple lesson. Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture? “Yes. I do,” says Sebastian–I love a butterfly! A flower can move me as much as a painting–and Charles says his eyes were opened.

This may seem silly, but this is hugely important. What does it mean? It means that Charles can finally, in having his eyes opened, literally see the world around him and respond to it. There’s a world out there! It’s a world of beauty. It is an enormous first step on the road to truth, to be able to see what’s there. And not just to assume it’s a created thing and the created thing is the only thing that can draw up emotion from inside of us.

Now, if Collins gave him a bit of a hint there, at the same time, Collins becomes part of the problem on page 44. (Collins is dismissed early on; we don’t hear much of him later.) We find out that Collins made notes for a little thesis pointing out the inferiority of the original mosaics to their photographs. Collins has gone nuts too, okay? The picture of the art is superior to the art itself.

Waugh wrote a fascinating little essay in which he talked about how photography destroyed painting; that, once any idiot could pick up a camera and pretend to capture reality with a camera and say it was a work of art, there was no longer any need for the artist. The artist felt incapable of representing reality as accurately as the photographer did and stopped trying; and therefore, in order to do something different, starts throwing blobs of paint at a canvas because no photograph can capture that because it’s just sheer mess, if you will.

Now we learn as well that as a result of this, there is a complete collapse in the study of art. Charles (p. 152), once he’s been in Paris studying and trying to train, to learn to be an artist, he talks [to Sebastian] about the other students: “I told him about...the art school, and how good the old teachers were and how bad the students.” The old teachers are still teaching art in Paris, but the students are bad.

“They never go near the Louvre,” [Charles] said, “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. Half of them are out to make a popular splash like Picabia; the other half quite simply want to earn their living doing advertisements for Vogue and decorating night clubs. And the teachers still go on trying to make them paint like Delacroix.”

There has been a total collapse. Art itself is not being learned, it’s not being studied, the students don’t want to find out about it. They either want to be hugely popular–the reason for art is not the art, but so you can make a name for yourself–or make a whole lot of money in some way. And then comes the glorious moment.

“Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modern art is all bosh isn’t it?”

“Great bosh.”

“Oh, I’m so glad! I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn’t try and criticize what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.”

But what we get there of course, is that Charles does know something about art. He has been trained. He is trying to learn to represent on the canvas something real that the eye can respond to, that will allow one then to look and see what is out there more clearly. This means that the first step, then, is to break away from modern theory, finally freeing oneself from all the crackpot, modern theory that really requires no academic training–you just pick up the theory in the air and spout it, no real training, no real study, and it will allow you to appreciate anything.

And, by the way, that whole idiocy is why primitive art becomes hugely popular. Because all you have there is a form. It’s just a form, it can be anything. It can be hacked out of a hunk of wood by a savage, but it’s a form and therefore it has meaning, and we can talk about it as an object that creates some sort of aesthetic response. Now, it’s really a lousy, old piece of primitive art and Waugh would reject it out of hand.

After Charles goes to the first luncheon at Sebastian’s, he comes and redoes his room. One of the things he does–he has a screen that has a Fry painting on it, you know, whatever–and he sends it off. The wonderful thing is that his scout Lunt, as he takes it out, says, “Well, I never liked it much anyway.” And you have a wonderful sense of the sort of common sense on the part of Lunt. ...Waugh is not one to praise the common man, but he does have an awareness that there is common sense in anybody. And Lunt didn’t like that screen, and out goes the screen as well. And he’s going to replace it with different objects. The point: distrust theory, get free from whatever is the contemporary academic jargon and vogue, because it’s probably meaningless; the simple sense of recognizing what the function and purpose of art is: to make us see the world better, but also being able to appreciate the world on its own, to look clearly at it and to see that. So there is a purpose to art. There is a reason for it.

The world that we’re entering in the prologue to the novel shows the two dangers, if you will; …and we have a sense of both art and architecture falling into disrepair. It is a time of collapse.

“The camp stood where, until quite lately, had been pasture and ploughland; the farm-house still stood in a fold of the hill and had served us for battalion offices” (p. 3). Please notice wherever the battalion moves, they take over what’s there. They took over the farmhouse; we move to Brideshead, and they’ve taken over Brideshead. They’re taking over these buildings. “...Ivy still supported part of what had once been the walls of a fruit garden; half an acre of mutilated old trees behind the wash-houses survived of an old orchard.” That sense of arranging nature, building structures to contain nature, which is sort of a step between nature and architecture– it’s mutilated, it’s gone, all of that is fallen. “The smoke from the cook-houses drifted away in the mist and the camp lay revealed as a planless maze of short-cuts, superimposed on the unfinished housing scheme” (p. 7). We don’t have an actual city, we don’t have a place where people can live in an organized era of some beauty.

By the way, Waugh once said, “The single greatest work of art ever created in the world is not a painting or a novel, it’s the city of Venice.” Wonderful idea. The greatest work of art in the world is the city of Venice. And he had a sense of– Because what you have there is a thing of great beauty that had been built for people to live in. It was a city, it was a community...

“The camp lay revealed as a planless maze of short-cuts…” There’s the modern world, “…superimposed on the unfinished housing-scheme, as though disinterred at a much later date by a party of archaeologists.” It looks like something old that’s been dug up from the past.

And then we get an imaginary description of what they’ll say when they dig it up. “The Pollock diggings…”–there’s a little jibe at Jackson Pollock–

…provide a valuable link between the citizen-slave communities of the twentieth century and the tribal anarchy which succeeded them. Here you see a people of advanced culture, capable of an elaborate draining system and the construction of permanent highways, overrun by a race of the lowest type. The measure of the newcomers may be taken by the facts that their women were devoid of all personal adornment and that their dead were removed to burying places a great distance from the settlement—a sure sign of primitive taboo. (p. 7)

It’s wonderful, it’s funny. But again, please note, what have we got? We’ve got a comic tone on serious ideas. One: the city, which I talked about last night. Here we have no permanent city; nevertheless, we can build cities of beauty which are habitable. And the whole notion of death, and what happens at the moment of death and following death as being an indication of the level of civilization in any given time and place.

This is the moment… They’ve arrived in the night, he doesn’t know where he is. He shaves, comes out in the morning, walks out the door of the little hut he’s stationed in. And he asks the second-in-command, “What’s this place called?” He doesn’t know where he is.

He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long-forgotten sounds—for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight. (p. 15)

I just had to read that because I love it. That’s beautiful, beautifully written prose! However, he’s come back to Brideshead, it’s there. The memories come flooding back. The response is overwhelming, but notice the description. The word “Brideshead” is a conjuror’s name. We are calling something up, we are calling up memory. A conjuror does not conjure up anything real, and that’s our first little warning. There’s a second one. He is walking through the valley; there it is, he sees it: “Beyond and about us, more familiar still, lay an exquisite man-made landscape” (pp. 15-16). It is a case where, beautifully arranged, man has gone in and arranged the landscape and made something beautiful out of it.

It was a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced in a single, winding valley. Our camp lay along one gentle slope; opposite us the ground led, still unravished, to the neighbourly horizon, and between us flowed a stream—it was named the Bride and rose not two miles away at a farm called Bridesprings, where we used sometimes to walk to tea; it became a considerable river lower down before it joined the Avon–which had been dammed here to form three lakes…. (p. 16)

It’s lovely, but that flowing river, the Bride, has been dammed up, the water has stopped. Watch through the novel when water is flowing and when water is stopped, when we have fountains running and fountains stopped, when we have springs bubbling up or the image of springs bubbling up and then they run dry. But of course, the Bride comes from Bridesprings and is where the original Brideshead was built, and there’s no mistaking it: who the Bride is–it’s that ultimate Bride in a sense, the Bride of Christ: we’re talking about the Church. It somehow has become dammed up and isn’t reaching anymore where it should, and then we find out that Brideshead has been moved. It no longer stands where it used to stand. We are told (by Sebastian) that they moved the house about 250 years ago. They took it down and moved it and rebuilt it stone by stone, here rather than where it originally stood. Of course they made some changes, and they built it a slightly different way. And now the place where the original house stood, Brideshead near Bridesprings on the Bride, is waste land, we learn. There’s nothing there now, it’s overgrown waste land.

Of course, we get the other reference to waste land, that’s the poem that Anthony Blanche shouts out the window at Sebastian’s luncheon. It is a vision of waste land everywhere in England because that old structure near the Bride, if you will, that old Church, that true Church, was taken down and rebuilt in a different spot in a different way. It’s very clear what’s going on; we get an architectural parallel to the apostasy of England that quite literally took apart the old Church, pretended to build a new church, but it’s all “higgelty-piggelty” now. They moved it, they set it someplace else, and they moved it away from the Bride. And it’s still called “Brideshead,” but it’s in a different spot, and it’s a magnificent palace, but it’s become a palace of art. And Charles’s first attraction to it is the sheer beauty of it, and Charles will be seduced by Brideshead and the artistic beauty of Brideshead before eventually he can get back to the real source: The Bride, that is, the Church itself, by his conversion at the end of the novel.

 

We get a warning right at the start of the dangers of worshipping art in that little phrase, “…opposite us the ground led, still unravished, to the neighbourly horizon….” It’s a direct quotation from the first line of John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. “Thou still unravished bride of quietness”; the Ode on a Grecian Urn is a magnificent ode in praise of art and making the claim that art is what is eternal. Man fades, man dies, but art goes on forever. And as Keats looks at that Grecian urn and the little stories that are on it, he compares the permanence of art with the temporary nature of man and sings the praises of art. It is a beautiful poem. It does touch on the fact that art lasts longer than man. But in quoting that little phrase, Waugh is giving us a warning, because Waugh is going to make a very different point.

We are going to be seduced by the romanticism of this novel just as Charles is seduced by the romanticism of Brideshead and the beauty of this wonderful palace he can wander through, and the wonderful vision of romance that opens up to him first with Sebastian and then with Julia. But whenever he falls for a false love, he ends up back at Brideshead. That’s the place where that false love is somehow fulfilled. That glorious summer with Sebastian, frolicking around the grounds, bringing the wine up from below, and he says, “I thought I had been given a little bit of heaven.” Well, it’s not heaven; it’s a false heaven, not the real heaven. And when he is in this adulterous relationship with Julia, they take possession of Brideshead. They’re wandering through Brideshead. We learn they’re living there for two years. And it should be absolutely wonderful and some sense that it is everything Charles could possibly dream of, and yet somehow, it’s not enough. And Julia herself at one point talks about hoping to find “some peace”:

“I want to marry you.”

“One day; why now?”

“War…this year, next year, sometime soon. I want a day or two with you of real peace.”

And Charles says, “Isn’t this peace?” And Julia doesn’t answer. She already knows it’s phony, that life there cannot last. What they have there cannot last, it’s not possible. And having learned that, it comes back again when Charles says to her, at the time her father is lying dying, “Can’t they even let him die in peace?” And Julia says, “They mean something so different by peace.” Clear reference to, “My peace I give to you, not as the world gives.” That only peace is the peace that comes from above.

(It’s a mistaken assumption that many people have about that quotation from Our Lady’s message at Fatima. I was talking just yesterday with Michael Mancuso about this, the notion that “My Immaculate Heart will triumph and peace will be granted to the world”: well, if peace is granted to the world, it won’t mean that there’s not going to be a lot of wars breaking out. So it’s going to be a period of true peace, which means, the world’s going to have to be Catholic. The world is going to have to worship Christ the way it’s supposed to. An astonishing promise, not peace as the world gives.)

The peace Julia is seeking is not the peace of living comfortably at Brideshead. In that beautiful palace, with that beautiful art, and all the wine that you want, all the wonderful meals…no. She’s seeking for a different kind of peace. And she knows that her father needs a different kind of peace, a higher peace. But Charles is seduced; he thinks he’s found it. He’s fallen, if you will, for the Grecian urn nonsense which is, and I quote the end of the poem: “When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe / Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, / ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’–that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”; and Waugh is saying, “Not by a long shot.”

Art is not adequate. It is beautiful, there are some truths that are to be found there. But it is not “all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” It’s the reason why, when Charles describes first arriving with Sebastian to see Brideshead, walking up to it the first time:

“I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were white with fool’s-parsley.... (p. 21)

I love it. Charles first walks up to the house and there’s beauty all around him in nature, and as he’s walking to Brideshead, what’s around him? Fool’s-parsley. It’s wonderful; it’s nature and it’s beautiful, but that’s not accidental: …and meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, such as our climate affords once or twice a year, when leaf and flower and bird and sun-lit stone and shadow seem all to proclaim the glory of God. That is the converted Charles writing afterward.

 

He has made that huge change in his life. He first comes thinking he’s going to find art. It’s a beautiful day around him, but what is it all proclaiming? It’s proclaiming the glory of God, and there he’s quoting Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, a different poet. We can’t quite call him romantic, because what Fr. Hopkins is looking at is a very different order of beauty. And in the space of that first paragraph in Chapter One, we go from, if you will, the initial view of the fool’s-parsley to all of nature proclaiming the glory of God. And that’s going to be the shape of the whole book. Charles will first be a fool for art, a fool for love, make huge mistakes, but at the end he will come to recognize there is that greater glory. That’s what nature is proclaiming. That’s what art should proclaim, because that is the only thing permanent, real, and lasting. Art itself is going to go.

How do we know it? At the end of the book, he goes back, and the very paintings he has done for the house are destroyed, heads knocked off statues, the fountain is shut down, no water running there. There’s nothing; the house is desolate. The house is absolutely desolate. He still finds something there. It’s when he goes into the chapel and he sees the red light burning, meaning that that which is permanent and lasting in the house is there. They may have torn the house down, and they may have moved the house, and they may have loaded it with art, and the soldiers may have come, and they may have shut the house down and knocked the heads off the statues, but despite all of that and despite the passage of centuries and the passage of time, and the chapel even being shut for a while–there’s the red light burning again. That’s where we’re going to end, that’s what we’re moving toward, that is the lesson he must learn.

By the way, there’s another wonderful thing in that long paragraph on page 16, with the quotation from Keats, at the very end:

From where I stood the house was hidden by a green spur, but I knew well how and where it lay, couched among the lime trees like a hind in the bracken. Which was the mirage, which the palpable earth? The reference to the hind is an allusion to another great English poem–I’ll stop here, I’m not going to do all the poetry references in Brideshead; it’s packed with them–but that is a reference to a very great and unknown poem that you should know called The Hind and the Panther, by John Dryden, written after his conversion from the Anglican Church to the Roman Catholic Church, in which the Hind becomes a beautiful image of Mother Church. So we go in that same paragraph from the Keats reference: “art is everything, art is eternal,” to the end of the paragraph in the reference to the Hind coming from Dryden, a poet who converted and found there was something more important than poetry, and something more important than the Anglican Church, and comes to the truth, and writes a wonderful poem about it. The Hind and the Panther, I recommend the poem; nobody knows it. You’ll be ahead of all English Lit. scholars. As I mentioned it to His Excellency this afternoon, he said, “Well, written by a Roman Catholic convert, a great English poet, they sent it down the sinkhole.” And that’s exactly what happened. For that reason, nobody reads it; nobody knows it. But I recommend it to you. It’s a beautiful poem. Waugh knew it. The reference to the “hind” at that moment is a reference to Roman Catholic conversion, and that’s what is going to happen to Charles again at the end.

Now, let’s move for a moment to Anthony Blanche, because Anthony in a sense is the representative of the Keats point of view: that art is everything. Anthony, for all his peculiarities, would not fall into the trap of bad, sentimental, popular, romantic rock music: “All You Need Is Love.” Anthony would change it and say, “All You Need Is Art.” Insofar as Anthony Blanche is a representative of some of those æsthetes that Waugh met at Oxford, who did teach him something, we get an Anthony Blanche, a man who is at the same time very off-putting. He’s not someone you want to go out to dinner with, and at the same time, he’s very funny and, in some ways, very appealing. And he is a truth-teller in one area–criticism and aesthetics. When he passes a judgment, he passes a judgment and he means it.

So this is the first time they’re together; he’s gone out to dinner with Charles. “I want to introduce you to a lot of my friends. I have told Cocteau about you. He is all agog.” He is a French writer, a bad French writer.

He is all agog. 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. I have seen those little drawings you keep hidden away in your room. They are exquisite. And you, dear Charles, if you will understand me, are not exquisite; but not at all. Artists are not exquisite. I am; Sebastian, in a kind of way, is exquisite; but the artist is an eternal type, solid, purposeful, observant–and, beneath it all, p-p-passionate, eh, Charles? (p. 52)

Notice the way Waugh uses rhythm of language to create a character. It’s brilliant. Anthony has his own rhythms, his own patterns. But Anthony Blanche knows art. When he says to Charles, “You’re an artist,” notice it’s based on the fact: I saw some of your work. He’s not flattering him, he’s seen his work. That’s real work, he says. But personality-wise, you’re nothing, is basically what he says, you have no personality! Nevertheless, you have talent.

Notice the definition here; we could take this as real. This is Waugh’s definition of the artist: solid, purposeful, observant, and beneath it all, passionate. That’s just magnificent. That is a fascinating combination of characteristics. I don’t have time to go into it, but let’s just say, we get a very real definition of art there and a definition of art that will continue throughout the novel.

 

Dr. David Allen White taught World Literature at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, for the better part of three decades. He gave many seminars at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Minnesota, including one on which this article is based. He is the author of The Mouth of the Lion and The Horn of the Unicorn.