That Ruskin quote

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter 3

'Julia,' I said later, when Brideshead had gone upstairs, 'have you ever seen a picture of Holman Hunt's called "The Awakened Conscience"?'

'No.'

I had seen a copy of Pre-Raphaelitism in the library some days before; I found it again and read her Ruskin's description. She laughed quite happily.

'You're perfectly right. That's exactly what I did feel.'

By way of background, here is the painting in question and, below it, the full quote from Ruskin.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES,

Sir,–Your kind insertion of my notes on Mr. Hunt’s principal picture encourages me to hope that you may yet allow me room in your columns for a few words respecting his second work in the Royal Academy, the "Awakening Conscience." Not that this picture is obscure, or its story feebly told. I am at a loss to know how its meaning could be rendered more distinctly, but assuredly it is not understood. People gaze at it in a blank wonder, and leave it hopelessly; so that, although it is almost an insult to the painter to explain his thoughts in this instance, I cannot persuade myself to leave it thus misunderstood. The poor girl has been singing with her seducer; some chance words of the song "Oft in the stilly night" have struck upon the numbed places of her heart; she has started up in agony; he, not seeing her face, goes on singing, striking the keys carelessly with his gloved hand.

I suppose that no one possessing the slightest knowledge of expression could remain untouched by the countenance of the lost girl, rent from its beauty into sudden horror; the lips half open, indistinct in their purple quivering, the teeth set hard, the eyes filled with the fearful light of futurity, and with tears of ancient days. But I can easily understand that to many persons the careful rendering of the inferior details in this picture cannot but be at first offensive, as calling their attention away from the principal subject. It is true that detail of this kind has long been so carelessly rendered that the perfect finishing of it becomes matter of curiosity, and therefore an interruption to serious thought. But, without entering into the question of the general propriety of such treatment, I would only observe that, at least in this instance, it is based on a truer principle of the pathetic than any of the common artistical expedients of the schools. Nothing is more notable than the way in which even the most trivial objects force themselves upon the attention of a mind which has been fevered by violent and distressful excitement. They thrust themselves forward with a ghastly and unendurable distinctness, as if they would compel the sufferer to count, or measure, or learn them by heart. Even to the mere spectator, a strange interest exalts the accessories of a scene in which he bears witness to human sorrow. There is not a single object in all that room, common, modern, vulgar (in the vulgar sense, as it may be), but it became tragical, if rightly read. That furniture, so carefully painted, even to the last vein of the rosewood–is there nothing to be learned from that terrible lustre of it, from its fatal newness; nothing there that has the old thoughts of home upon it, or that is ever to become a part of home? Those embossed books, vain and useless–they also now–marked with no happy wearing of beloved leaves; the torn and dying bird upon the floor; the gilded tapestry, with the fowls of the air feeding on the ripened corn; the picture above the fireplace with its single drooping figure–the woman taken in adultery; nay, the very hem of the poor girl’s dress, which the painter has laboured so closely, thread by thread, has story in it, if we think how soon the pure whiteness may be soiled with dust and rain, her outcast foot failing in the street; and the fair garden flower, seen in the reflected sunshine of the mirror–these also have their language–

"Hope not to find delight in us, they say,

For we are spotless, Josy–we are pure."

I surely need not go on. Examine the whole range of the walls of the Academy; nay, examine those of all our public and private galleries, and, while pictures will be met with by the thousands which literally tempt to evil, by the thousand which are devoted to the meanest trivialities of incident or emotion, by the thousand so the delicate fancies of inactive religion, there will not be found one powerful as this to meet full in the front the moral evil of the age in which it is painted, to waken into mercy the cruel thoughtlessness of youth and subdue the severities of judgement into the sanctity of compassion.

I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant,

THE AUTHOR OF "MODERN PAINTERS."

Denmark hill.

I'd only add, I don't think the painting works at all. I like some of Hunt's stuff but this painting is a failure.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

What Waugh didn't like about Julia's speech

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter 3
For many critics, the big problem with Brideshead is that it is not realistic. But realism is a nebulous thing. There is. for example, a site on the web that offers students information for essay writing that says the following with great authority

... and one Anthony Blanche, a ridiculous character who, as scholars say, embodies every gay stereotype of Waugh’s era. He also speaks with an affected stutter.

I don't know which "scholars" are supposed to have said this but Anthony Blanche is a very realistic portrayal of a guy named Brian Howard and there are other verbal portraits of him that confirm Waugh's. It is the scholars who are deluding themselves because they so desperately want to believe that these are just stereotypes. All gay men are not now, and were not then, like Anthony Blanche but there are people today who fit the type and it isn't hard to find them. And they are not, as the supposedly "unbiased" author of the above would have it "ridiculous".

Imagine if I wrote the story of an ordinary middle class kid who never did anything to change the world but I had as one character in his life a supreme court judge whom this kid knows and talks to. You might be inclined to think, what  a crock, ordinary kids don't get to confide with supreme court judges. But that story is very real for you see it is my story. Every famous person knows some ordinary people.

The point being that one of the most common criticisms of Brideshead is bogus. It is often said that the people portrayed are not realistic because they are not typical. And while it is true they are not typical, they were very real. Every character in this book is like people Waugh actually knew. In one sense at least, this is very much a realistic book.

The other criticism is that Waugh is too close, too enamoured about the people he is writing about to be realistic. And yet, if we actually read the book, we can see that this too is unfair. The presentation of these people is not sycophantic or fawning, it's actually quite cold and critical.

So what is it that bothers critics? Well, a big part is the fact that the novel is Catholic and, little as they like to admit it, many critics don't want a novel in which a man is convincingly converted to Catholicism. But, more than that, the novel uses some of modernism's favourite techniques to undermine modernism. It isn't the snobbish story of aristocratic glory that critics attack but it is very much a capital-R Romanticism we are reading here.

Romanticism
Seen from enough distance, patterns begin to emerge that cannot be seen from close up. That, at least, is the ideology. And the standard story that goes with it is like this: for a long time the people lived in darkness and then came the Enlightenment and scientific and political progress; but the Enlightenment had excesses and in response to that there arose a movement called Romanticism; and Romanticism, however, was slowly overcome by Modernism; eventually Modernism itself was replaced by Postmodernism. The story gets a bit murky here, however, because nobody really knows what Modernism was supposed to be about and that makes defining Postmodernism difficult.

As I've said before, you can see the problem right in the word "Postmodernism" which, like Post-Impressionism from which it descends, tries to define something by a negative quality. People only do that when they don't know what to say and decide to get by by faking it.

But the whole idea that we see things better from a distance, that is dispassionately, is an Enlightenment idea. The whole idea that history divides into periods that represent a progress from darkness to greater and greater levels of ... well of enlightenment is an Enlightenment idea.

Romanticism, on the other hand, has never really gone away. If you think it has, I have two words for you: Harry Potter. Or the Lord of the Rings, or teenage-girl vampire fiction. In fact, perhaps the most embarrassing secret for those who wish to be modern or enlightened is that Romanticism has always been the art of the modern era.

In many ways we might say that far from moving from Enlightenment to Romanticism to Modernism to Postmodernism, we've actually been having the same argument between a kind of Progressivism and Romanticism. People keep buying Romanticism even while our betters keep pushing us to accept an art they feel is more in accord with the modern world.

Through it all, the rallying cry of the Progressives is that we must see things dispassionately, from a distance, so we can see them as they really are. They accuse Romantics for failing to do this and, therefore, of embracing a past that never was.

And Waugh?
We can see the contradictions in reactions to Waugh. Here is Charles Rolo in The Atlantic of October, 1954.

The paradox, in fact, is that when Waugh is being comic, he makes luminous the failures of his age, confronts us vividly with the desolating realities; and when he is being serious, he is liable to become trashy. For without the restraints of the ironic stance, his critical viewpoint reveals itself as bigoted and rancorous; his snobbery emerges as obsessive and disgusting; and his archaism involves him in all kinds of silliness. 

Rolo is only one of many critics who keep telling us this about Waugh. And he is only one of many who keeps telling us that we shouldn't like the side of Waugh that we like the most, that is the Romantic side. Back in 1954, Rolo was obliged to admit the following:

Despite the fact that Brideshead Revisited -- which introduces the "later" or "serious" Evelyn Waugh -- has sold many more copies in the United States than all of Waugh's other books put together, his name, at least among the literary -- is still most apt to evoke a singular brand of comic genius. 

It is now more than five decades since Rolo wrote that and the gap between sales of Brideshead and all of Waugh's other books put together has grown. And, to be rude about it, the reputation of our betters—"the literary" as Rolo would have it—has plunged to the point that their very future is in doubt. Humanities, once the largest faculty at most universities, now attracts about one in ten students. Magazines such as The Atlantic have a very uncertain future and only survive because of cost-cutting and patronage.

The contradictions of realism
In one way or another, the anti-Romantics have always been realists of a sort. They have always accused the Romantics of embracing not just illusions but, and this is the more important part, embracing illusions that have no place in the modern world. One of the early moves was straight realism. If art could simply represent the world as it was, it would conquer Romantic illusions.

It didn't work out as planned.

Here are two paintings of the Annunciation. Neither is a realist painting but the second might be said to be more realist than the first.

And here we see a number of paradoxes here. The first is that the more realist of the two paintings is the second one that is more likely to give us a sense that a supernatural event like the Annunciation could actually take place. Rossetti's Mary has a Halo and Rossetti's angel's feet are not actually touching the ground and yet everything else is close enough to real that we can imagine the picture without either of those two supernatural details. In a modern movie, the Angel could be a guy who just shows up in Mary's room.

The Burne Jones painting, on the other hand, is clearly mythological. And yet, Burne Jones, as I've remarked before, can be more honest in his portrayal than Rossetti as we will note that his Mary, as we would expect in a young woman, has very nice, touchable-looking breasts. Rossetti's Mary (his sister was the model if I remember correctly) doesn't seem to have entered puberty yet.

And those are the contradictions of realism. It seems to subvert its own aims in that you can use very realistic representations to make the unreal more convincing. Realism always turns out to be just a series of stylistic conventions that promise honesty.

Conversely, non-realist art can often be honest in ways that realist art cannot. Even today, you would cause scandal if you crossed the two paintings. If someone re-did the Rossetti painting above but gave Mary a convincing sexual presence–imagine her bra-less breasts pressing through that thin fabric and you will see the problem. It is only by making her mythological that Burne Jones can get away with painting Mary as a fully sexed woman.

Waugh plays with these paradoxes all the time. As Rolo dimly recognizes, it is in the exaggerations for comic effect that Waugh is most bluntly honest. But he fails to see that Waugh is not deluding himself when he writes more realistically. Rolo may mock Waugh for being a snob with a taste for the archaic and things aristocratic but he could not possibly mock Waugh more mercilessly than Waugh mocks himself for these things. When Waugh writes realistically, as he does in Brideshead, he does so with the explicit intention of undermining our sense of the real. And he lets us know this is plain language when Charles tell us (in "Brideshead Deserted", chapter 1):

I had left behind me—what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, 'the Young Magician's Compendium', that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double, and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.

'I have left behind illusion,' I said to myself. 'Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses.'

I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.

His goal is quite clear here. Charles is embracing the real only to find that the real isn't real; it is only realism which is to say it is just a  series of stylist conventions.

And we see that happening in this chapter (A Twitch on the Thread" Chapter 3) as we see Charles, admitting even in the seemingly Idyllic moments that open the chapter that he "feared to break the spell of memories." As the chapter goes on we see Charles, the one who is trying to be realistic, increasingly forced to resort to artistic images to try and deal with what is troubling Julia by using art to explain reality. The height of which is his pulling out Ruskin's description of Holman Hunt's painting to try and convince Julia that her reaction to Bridey's comment about "living in sin" was just something psychological and his attempts to bring about a reconciliation between he and Julia by comparing their lives to a drama.

And that, for Waugh, is the problem with Julia's speech. It does not follow realistic conventions. Waugh knows full well that the problem is not whether a person might or might not say such a thing in real life but whether we would accept it as realistic. As he writes in the preface:

I have been in two minds as to the treatment of Julia's outburst about mortal sin and Lord Marchmain;'s dying soliloquy. These passages were never, of course, intended to report words actually spoken. They belong to a different way of writing from, say, the early scenes between Charles and his father. I would not now introduce them into a novel which elsewhere aims at verisimilitude.

His goal was to write in a  style that appears to be real as a way to undermine realism. As such, these two speeches don't really belong here. Both are much liked by some readers as Waugh points out. I feel that way about Lord Marchmain's dying soliloquy. But I'm not sure about Julia's outburst. I'm going to linger on it a while. More this afternoon.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

Me too sometimes

"But, my dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all."

"Can't I?"

"I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings
and the ox and the ass."

"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."

"But you can't BELIEVE things because they're a lovely idea."

"But I do. That's how I believe."

A small break

The Season of Brideshead
Running out to the fountain

Note: On Tuesday, traffic dropped to half of what it usually is and then, yesterday, it dropped to about one tenth. People are obviously traveling for Christmas. I'm not traveling because I already live in a perfect place but I will be taking a little break. Brideshead blogging will resume on Monday.

Meanwhile, here is the question: What is wrong with the fountain scene?

When he revised the book, Waugh noted that two of the speeches—Julia at the fountain and another by Lord Marchmain coming up—simply had no place in a realistic novel. He had a point. Both are more like soliloquies than like real speech.

And yet neither harms the novel; and this is odd because they both seem crucial.

But it seems to me that there is a bigger problem with the Julia speech and that is that it isn't psychologically plausible. It's the wrong emotion. Julia simply would not break down like that. It's not that some people wouldn't react that way but Waugh has done nothing to prepare us for this. It doesn't fit the Julia we know. And in the end it is another emotion, anger, that actually makes the difference.

Anyway, much more on that and on Tintern Abbey starting Monday.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

Contra Mundum

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter two
The expression "contra mundum" has a history by the way (almost everything in this novel has a history). It is associated with Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria who "won" the Council at Nicea. He won in the sense that he managed to convince the Council to support the doctrine that God the Father and Christ had both always existed as opposed to the belief that God the Father had created Christ at a particular time in history, a view known as Arianism. And thus the Nicene Creed.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.

Athanasius was famous for taking on the whole world and never once flinching in his opposition to Arianism. He suffered exile and abuse rather than give in. Although the decision at Nicea went his way, he was shortly afterward sent into exile because of the political enemies he made. So much so that the expression "Athanasius contra mundum" came to mean going a little crazy in the defence of truth as you see it.

Which is not what we imagine Sebastian as having been up to is it? But he is. You might say that he stands no matter what the cost against what his mother was, in Cordelia's words, striving to be saintly instead striving to be a saint.

The temptation when we read Julia saying, 'Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world?' is to think, 'Well, this can't really be love; love is a good thing and will have good effects.' But a certain kind of Christian can never believe that love will necessarily have good effects in this world.


The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

"You see, it's all happened before"

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter two
One of the deceptive things about reading any old book is that things change. The last chapter, for example, was set on a grand old ocean liner. We look back on such a thing with nostalgia, everything acquires a brown tint like an old photograph. At the time, however, the ocean liner was the latest thing. It was the symbol of everything that was new and stylish. Waugh underlines this by having Julia say that there is something about it that makes everyone behave like a film star. He underlines this by having the Hollywood director and Celia's suggestion that Charles talk to him about set design while describing the boat itself like a Hollywood film set. And he underlines this by talking about the modern conveniences such as there only being chilled or hot water on board.

And then the storm to show that even such very modern luxuries are fragile.

And that is perhaps the most important thing for us to remember when reading this book. It describes a period between storms. Between one horrid war and another even more horrid. Millions had died in the first and they had imagined they were fighting a war to end war. And then here we are again.

Painful repetitions haunt the novel.

A blow, expected, repeated, falling on a bruise, with no smart or shock of surprise, only a dull and sickening pain and the doubt whether another like it could be born—that was how it felt ....

We can imagine this a little. We know what it is like to fall into the same bad habit again and again. The sister you always have a fight with and you start off every time meaning not to and then things start to go off the rails like they always do. The frustration we have meaning to change some bad habit, get out and exercise, but we do just what we always do instead.

That's the sense that Waugh is counting on and I think he achieves very well. We read this chapter with an awful sense of dread. That is why people so often remember the first part as being about halcyon days in Oxford and the second about this horrible loss. In fact, there is very little happiness in the first part. There at least seems to be more in the second part. But we read every page waiting for that blow.

And so, we reach the very last page of the chapter and read this:

'Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though all mankind, and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us.'

And we think, 'Oh crap, it's contra mundum again; Julia's demons are haunting her the same way Sebastian's did him and now the same horrid things are going to happen again.' So, from now on, nothing can be as beautiful as those few fleeting moments of bliss in the first part because we've been through this before. Somewhere along the line someone explained to us that 'et in Arcadia ego' was death speaking and he was saying that even in our most blissful moments he is already there and now we can't pretend. We cower like a regularly beaten dog waiting for it all to go wrong again.

The flaneur
In chapter two of book one and again here in book three, Waugh relies heavily on a realist technique originally developed by Flaubert. A flaneur is a like a loiterer only with, as a great Muriel Sparks title has it, someone loitering with intent.

Picture a young woman in a bar. She is hoping something will happen. She wants a magical meeting leading to romance, adventure or maybe just dirty sex. So she sits there in sexy clothes hoping the right person will approach her. Meanwhile she is recording what is happening around her in a bored way. She isn't like a camera because a camera doesn't care and she cares, she just doesn't particularly care about what is happening just now. So she runs through the details of what is happening in an impassive way. The details seem random. The walls were green; a middle-aged woman who didn't look like the type to sit in a bar alone was looking for something in her purse, perhaps money, maybe her cell phone so she could call the friend who was late; over in the corner, two young men were sitting at the table of an older man she thought might be gay and she wondered if they were negotiating something or, and she worried about this a bit, if they were setting him up so they could rob him or even just beat him up; in the background, as if her thoughts had caused them to respond, she heard a police car coming down the boulevard its siren wailing. Suddenly, the siren got louder, and she turned to see that it was because the door had opened and she saw three girls her own age who had wandered in. They stood there at the door and scanned the room. They were girls from her college and they too had somehow decided to enter this bar, a bar the students never went to because it had a reputation. She noticed one of the girls eyes settle on her and felt herself being assessed. The other two girls don't notice her but one of them said, "Let's get out of here," and they all laughed as if they all had simultaneously decided that they could never imagine sitting in such a place; as if they couldn't imagine allowing their skin to touch the upholstery.

That's the style. It's a familiar style now, I just made that paragraph up. It's a realist style

Waugh kicks the style in in a big way this chapter. And so we float along as the Duke of Clarence comes in and we see that he is a twit. And then Mr. Samgrass makes a brief appearance. And then the critics. And then a photographer. And then and then. All the time we are waiting for a moment with Julia again. But then Anthony shows up and delivers another remonstrance just like he does in chapter two of book one. And if you go back to that chapter, you'll notice that Waugh uses the flaneur technique there too.

Although Waugh moves us much faster here. he takes two whole chapters to get from the two remonstrances in chapter two to the train ride to Brideshead at the end of chapter three with the cutlery jingling. Here that takes only one very short chapter to get from remonstrance to a train ride with, and this repetition is no accident, cutlery jingling. The seeming halcyon days will arrive with chapter three this time. This, of course, increases our sense of doom. The last time we went to hell in a hand cart, this time we're on the express elevator.

Like in book one, the days are significant. This time it's Friday. The entire thing happens on Friday. The key moment is when Charles, sometime mid afternoon on Friday (What other event happened mid afternoon on Friday?) remembers his last exhibition when he had detected Celia in adultery. And he tells us:

 I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest.

Do you believe that? I don't. He has let slip his own, repeated affairs earlier. This sounds more like a man who has convinced himself that he has been wronged when he was really just looking for an excuse to leave Celia all along. That brief, sly lapse of hers. "Manumission" means to be set free from enslavement and Charles was no slave. Following this moment, there is a sort of trip to the underworld and a return.And then a train ride.

But things aren't exactly the same. This time Charles is impervious to Anthony's criticism. Like last time, he recognizes that Anthony has a point but now he doesn't care. It's well-reasoned abuse but the Charles who hears it this time has hardened himself to life.

And I think that is the sleight of hand here. Waugh the conjurer has us paying attention to Julia with his right hand while he pulls a switch with his left. We're all worried about what is up with Julia; with her personal demons and how they are going to tear her and Charles apart. Meanwhile, though, something is happening with Charles; something in him, as Anthony says, has died.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

Revisiting that Bellini

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch on a Thread, Chapter one
 I have finaly gotten around to looking up the iconography of the two Johns: that is Evangelist and Baptist.

John the Evangelist is typically represented with an eagle, sometimes with a cup with a  viper in it and  with a book meant to represent his Gospel.

John the Baptist is represented wearing rough clothing or skins, carrying a long cross in one hand and with either a lamb or with a text showing the words Agnus Dei (Lamb of God).

Knowing that, my earlier suspicions are confirmed: the guy on the left below is obviously John the Baptist. (Okay, it was more than a suspicion but I decided to check anyway, something Wikipedia obviously did not do.)

The image is courtesy of Wikipedia who label him incorrectly as John the Evangelist. As a rule, Wikipedia is always unreliable about controversial issues but this tells us they can get even what ought to be straightforward wrong.

Anyway, why should we care about which saint it is with regards to Brideshead. Well, maybe we shouldn't except that there is this interesting dialogue in this chapter. Julia has just asked Charles why he ever married Celia. He answers:

'Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she's the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian.'

'You loved him, didn't you/'

'Oh yes, he was the forerunner.'

Julia understood.

She did, did she? I think that is one of Waugh's weaker moments. It strikes me as a mind-bogglingly oafish thing for a man to say to a woman and I have a hard time imagining Julia understanding or accepting this. It could easily have been fixed too. All Waugh had to do was have Ryder tell us this thought directly.

In any case, the point I want to make here is that John the Baptist is, in Christian thought, the forerunner of Christ. When I Google "John the Baptist" and "Forerunner" I get 581 thousand hits as of December 21, 2010. (Check for yourself here.) He is the one who rises to prominence and then must diminish in order that Christ can increase. (There is a great sermon by Saint Augustine where he says that John's feast is on June 24, after which the days get shorter, diminish, until the feast of Christ's birth on December 25, after which they increase. He's off by a couple of days but it's a nice metaphor.)

In any case, the point is pretty straightforward: Sebastian is now cast in the role of the Baptist, in which case, Charles is wrong thinking Sebastian was the forerunner for Julia. He is the forerunner for someone just not Julia.

The remaining pictures here are the Annunciation over the top (which occurs in Luke's Gospel not John's), Saint Sebastian in the middle and Saint Anthony of the desert on the right. So, wouldn't it be just too weird if the next iteration we get of Sebastian turned out to be him living a monastic life in North Africa?

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.