Wordsworth, Tennyson or Eliot or something else

The Season of Brideshead
Epilogue
Perhaps the strongest similarity between Brideshead and Proust is the way people in both books keep trying to make their lives rise to the level of art and failing. They have a problem and the proposed solution to their problem is art—they believed that human life could achieve a wholeness if we managed to make our living it into a work of art. But art keeps failing us. We get powerful hints that the aesthetes ideal of wholeness can't be achieved through life as art but can, instead, be achieved through a relationship with God. (A conclusion not a few aesthetes before Waugh also arrived at.)

To flash back a bit. When Julia tells Charles about her marriage to Rex, she sums up by quoting Father Mowbray:

'You know Father Mowbray hit on the truth about Rex at once, that it took me a year of marriage to see. He simply wasn't all there. He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle. an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was whole.'

Later, when Charles pulls a Gauguin (someone who looked for primitive savagery and brought something ghhastly with him) and goes to Latin America to find an artistic redemption there he says of himself,

But despite this isolation and this long sojourn in a strange world, I remained unchanged, still a small part of myself pretending to be whole.

Wordsworth
There are echoes of great poetry throughout this book as people keep trying to behave like art.

In chapter one of book one, just out of the prologue, Charles tells us that he had been to Brideshead for the first time "more than twenty years ago". Now we can date that Eights Week when he makes his first visit to 1923. The novel was written (mostly) between February and June of 1944 and that gives us our latest possible date for Charles return. In fact, it gives us our only possible date: the spring of 1944, I would guess April. And he left after parting from Julia in 1939. That makes five years.

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain springs
With a soft inland murmur ...

Only Charles hears no waters for the fountain has been close up and circled off with wire. His ending is more like the following

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
if there were water we should stop and drink

Over and over again, the characters in the novel strive for some Romantic past and end up in a waste land.

The first hint of Wordsworth is in the title. Purists will object that there  is no poem called "Tintern Abbey Revisited" and they would be, of course, correct. But that was the short hand title for the poem for years. Nowadays, just "Tintern Abbey" is more common.

If we are going to be really purist about it, that should bother us too for Tintern Abbey never appears in the poem. It makes a brief appearance in the title and there only as a place marker. The poem is about a spot on the banks of the Wye a few miles from Tintern Abbey.

And yet ...

Suppose I told you that the first girl I ever fell in love with, back in grade six, lived just off Regent Street, past the corner where Baskin Robbins was. Those could be purely geographic details or I might just be using "Regent" and "ice cream" to tell you something about the nature of the not-quite-relationship I had with Anne McCreary.

And that is the puzzle of Tintern Abbey. Why mention the Abbey at all? And the poem concerns itself with a sort of religious feeling that Wordsworth feels in the presence of nature a few miles from a ruined church! He goes back and refinds something there.

In the preface, Waugh tells us that he had though the great English country houses doomed in 1944. And he goes on to say,

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.

So the parallel was in his mind.

At the opening, the farmlands where the first camp is located is described like this:

The camp stood where, until quite lately, had been pasture and ploughland; the farmhouse still stood in a fold of the hill and had served us for battalion offices; ivy still supported part of what had once been the walls of a fruit garden; half an acre of mutliated old trees behind the wash-houses survived of an orchard. The place had been marked for destruction before the army came to it. Had there been another year of peace, there would have been no farmhouse, no wall, no apple trees. Already a half a mile of concretete road lay between clay banks, and on either side a chequer of open ditches showed where the municipal contractors had designed a system of drainage. Another year of peace would have made the place part of a neighbouring suburb.

Compare that with what Worsworth describes

The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door ...

Yup, Waugh has slated Wordsworth's little cottage plot for development into a suburb. All it would have taken is "another year of peace": How's that for irony?

The character whose dreams are most Wordsworthian is Sebastian. He talks about burying the pot of gold. And that golden treasure is echoed in very Wordsworthian terms when Charles returns to his rooms that Sebastian has filled with flowers and he thinks,

'Nothing, except the golden daffodils seemed to be real.'

Finally, Sebastian, flipping through Clive Bells reponds as follows,

'"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.'

But does Charles ever manage this?

He has his shot at a Wordsworthian return in Book 3, Chapter 3 which begins with Charles and Julia musing about how long it has been, how many summers, how many Christmases  it had been. (Not incidentally, he and Julia leave Brideshead for the exact same number of Christmases that Charles got to visit Brideshead with Sebastian.) But it doesn't work and the memories, we quickly realize are a desperate attempt to deny what they both know, that their peace cannot last.

By the way, Tintern Abbey has its own echo of the Song of Songs and I think we can see Sebastian very clearly in it.

Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the things he loved.

From Tennyson to Eliot
As much as Waugh might use Wordsworth, some sort of break is inevitable for he could not, as we should not, embrace the following pagan stupidity as Wordsworth does:

Knowing that nature never did betray
The heart that loved her ...

Death will come and, when faced with death, characters resort to another kind of art: the art of heroic chivalry. We cannot miss the link between Lord Marchmain's soliloquy and this sort of poetry:

So all day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the wnter sea;
Until King Arthur's table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonesse about their Lord,
King Arthur: then, because his wound was deep,
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him,
Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights,
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chnacel with a broken cross.,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.

It's the barren waste land that keeps winning though (And Eliot has to have had Morte d'Arthur in mind when he wrote The Waste Land). Waugh keeps peppering Lord Marchmain's reminiscences with allusions to Eliot's great poem. Notice how he recalls the hill where the old castle used to be before it was torn down to build the new house:

You can see where the old house stood near the village church: they call the field "Castle Hill", Horlick's field where the ground's uneven and half of it is waste, nettle, and brier in hollows too deep for ploughing. They dug to the foundations to carry stone for the new house; the house that was a century old when Aunt Julia was born. Those were our roots  in the waste hollows of Castle hill, in the brier and the nettle; among the tombs in the old church and chantry where no clerk sings.

It's hard not to think of passages like this in Eliot:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

With the dead in a dead language
 In the end, Waugh isn't quite like Eliot either though. Waugh had a counter-reformation mind. The aesthetic education Charles goes through is not accidental. He goes from Gothic Oxford (irrecoverable as Lyonnesse), to Renaissance Italy to Baroque Brideshead. He then makes a brief sojourn in modernist Paris before coming back to Brideshead. What matters to Waugh is not western civilization itself, and it is very much civilization and tradition that matters to Eliot. What matters most of all to Waugh is a purpose compared to which the problems of three little people don't add up to a hill of beans.

'Something quite remote from anything the builders intended, has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time; a small red flame—a beaten copper lamp relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.

"It could not have been lit but for the builders and tragedians": that is what the priest is for; to gather the builders and tragedians. And note that the priest at the end is himself a shelled wreck. For Wordsworth, Tennyson and Eliot, a ruined chapel would do provided the right kind of spirit blew through it. For Waugh that would never do. For him it must be a working church, a consecrated space and God's priest in it:

Nobis quoque peccatoribus, famulis tuis, de multitudine miserationum tuaram sperantibus, partem aliquam, et societatem donare digneris, cum tuis sanctis Apostolis et Martyribus: cum Joanne, Stephano, Matthia, Barnaba, Ignatio, Alexandro, Marcellino, Petro, Felicitate, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucia, Agnete, Caecillia, Anastasia, et omnibus Sanctis tuis: intra quorum nos consortium, non aestimor meriti, sed veniae, quaesemus, largitor admitte. [Translation* follows the video.]

(I love the placement of the Beata Beatrix to correspond with the one and only uplifting musical line in that section.)

* To us also, who are sinners, thy servants, trusting in thine infinite mercy, grant of thy goodness a place in the fellowship of thy holy Apostles and Martyrs: with John, Stephen, Matthias, Barnabas, Ignatius, Alexander, Marcellinus, Peter, Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, and with all thy Saints. Admit us to their company, we beg thee, not weighing what we deserve but generously pardoning us.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

There will be no next post 'cause this is the end on the sixth day in the Octave of Christmas, 2010.

If you want one more thing to ponder, there is this: The Serpentine One notes that the sanctuary lamp when we first see it is brass. Here at the end it is copper. Is that a mistake that no one noticed? Did Waugh simply mean "a copper alloy" i.e. brass by "copper" at the end? Or has the brass been purified as in an oven to give us copper?