Waugh's Rossetti book

I've finished it now. It's uneven. There are bits, especially when Waugh moves from straight narrative to critical analysis that are weak enough to justify his embarrassment. But it's a treasure trove for Brideshead fans. Here are three examples.

1. In Brideshead we get Collins' refulation of modern aesthetic theory:

Collins had exposed the fallacy of 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'...

In Rossetti we get not the same argument but one that closely parallels it. Waugh defends the literary quality of Rossetti's painting. What he means by that is that Rossetti's paintings often refer to some "literary" moment. This need not be to some particular existing bit of literature but just the sense that there is some story behind the image. Our grasp of Rossetti's painting The Beloved, for example, to some extend depends on our grasping that this is a painting of a bride and her attendant women.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Roger Fry would have us look at a painting like that oblivious of any content and merely study the form. Our considering that this is a woman, that she is a bride, that she is not any bride but the bride from the Song of Songs et cetera would, in Fry's view, only cheapen our appreciation, would make it impure. That is what Waugh means by literary painting. With that background, you can see how this argument from the Rossetti book is very close to what Collins says in Brideshead:

It seems to me that the defence for 'literary' painting, if defence is needed—and not only for Rossetti, but for the sermonising of Hunt and even the chattiness of Frith—lies in the very word used in its condemnation. Why of the Arts should literature alone be expected to be 'impure'? Why, because we are accustomed to expressing our daily wants in words, shall poetry be allowed to traffic with other emotions besides the aesthetic emotion? If I may legitimately be frightened by The Ancient Mariner, why may I not also be by Wiertz?

2. At the very end of the Rossetti book Waugh condemns Rossetti and then finds some sort of special inspiration at work in him.

There is a spiritual inadequacy, a sense of ill-organization about all that he did. ...

... The problem is that here and there in his life he seems, without ever feeling it, to have transcended this inadequacy in a fashion that admits of no glib explanation. ... so Rossetti's art, at fitful moments, flames into the exquisite beauty of Beata Beatrix. It is the sort of problem that modern aesthetics does not seem capable of coping with.

A bit earlier he says,

The truth, as has been suggested before, is that Rossetti was unrestrained, as no artist of importance had been before, by any adequate system either devised by himself or imposed on him by convention. He was guided entirely by his own momentary preferences for a face or piece of patterned stuff, and by those of his clients, but there was in him errant and erring, streak of the purest genius, and it is typical that his next work ... [Emphasis added]

Let's leave his next work on hold for a moment and return to Brideshead and Charles' description of his experience painting Marchmain House just before it's destruction:

I held back from painting, like a diver on the water's edge; once in I found myself buoyed and exhilarated. I was normally a slow and deliberative painter; that afternoon and all the next day, and the day after, I worked fast. I could do nothing wrong. At the end of each passage I paused, tense, afraid to start the next, fearing, like a gambler, that luck must turn and the pile be lost. Bit by bit, minute by minute, the thing came into being. There were no difficulties; the intricate multiplicity of light and colour became a whole; the right colour was where I wanted it on the palate; each brush stroke, as soon as it was complete, seemed to have been there always.

That is a painter who is very like Rossetti in some ways. Charles has an errant and erring streak of genius. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes it leads him to produce good art, other times it leads him to South America.

3. Saving the most obvious parallel for last, there is the next work from above, the Beata Beatrix:

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Waugh quotes Rossetti describing his painting,

"You will remember how Dante dwells on the desolation of the city in connection with the incident of her [Beatrice's] death ..."

That probably feels familiar to anyone who has read Brideshead. Dante quotes a passage from the Lamentations of Jeremiah and Rossetti had these words carved into the frame of the Beata Beatrix:

Quomodo sedet sola civitas! 'How doth the city sit solitary that was so full of people; how she is become a widow that was great among the nations.'

In the novel, after sitting watching Charles paint Marchers, Cordelia describes the chapel that is no longer a chapel using the same quotation.

"... I stayed there until he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't a chapel theer any more, just an oddly decorated room, I can't tell you what it felt like. You've never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?"

"Never."

"well, if you had, you'd know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas ... it's a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear it."

Of course, Charles is also a very different painter. His passion turns to buildings and the reasons they were built. Rossetti, and I'm with him on this, always turns to women.

Waugh's Rossetti book ...

... is finally available again. This is cause for celebration among Brideshead fans everywhere.

Rossetti: His Life and Works was Waugh's first book. It was published because Waugh had a connection to a publisher through Anthony Powell. Waugh had no special qualifications to write the book and it is highly unlikey that he would have been chosen to write it without that connection. Even within the circle of Waugh and Powell's friends there were several people better qualified to write the book.

Not surprisingly, Waugh was embarrassed by the work once his career was established he never allowed it to be printed again.

But now Penguin is setting about publishing the complete Waugh and volume one is the Rossetti book. I got an electronic copy.

It's better than you would think reading Waugh's own assessment of the book. It's not the best book if you want to know about Rossetti but you won't go far wrong in reading it either.

And it is a great book if you want to know how the young Waugh thought about aesthetics and art. And that is something really useful if you want to deepen your understanding of Brideshead Revisited.

Anyone who has read Brideshead more than once will have noticed that there is an aesthetic argument underlying the whole thing. When Charles says he went from the puritan asceticism of Ruskin to that of Fry, he (and Waugh) are assuming a whole language, a language that is drawn from aesthetic arguments from Waugh's youth.

Short version, Waugh didn't like the moderns but he didn't like classicism either. He liked art that was passionate and Rossetti was a key figure in the story for him. He doesn't revere Rossetti but he sees something very right about him. And Rossetti was clearly a major figure in Waugh's artistic development.

I'm on the second last section but I can already concluded that this book is well worth the time of anyone who loves Brideshead.

Attendance is voluntary

Waugh's gets in many digs at Anglicans in Decline and Fall. Here is one. Paul Pennyfeather has landed in jail and gets his first visit from the prison chpalain.

Are you Church of England? [He is.] Services are voluntary—that is to say, you must either attend all or none.

If you are familiar with churches where attendance is voluntary that is the way it works. Attend regularly and you will get odd looks any time you miss a Sunday. Attend not at all and you will be greeted warmly every time you are met in the hopes that you will start coming but no one will ever make you feel guilty about it out of fear of putting you off. But attend sporadically—which, if "voluntary" means anything at all, you should be entitled to do—and you will be treated like Charles Manson out on bail every time you darken the door of your church.

Catholics never get this even though the rules are stricter in our case. Miss the service you regularly attend and everyone charitably assumes you went at some other time.

My theory about this is that churches like the Anglican are very much driven by a sense of being a community. A big part of your membership there is an obligation to be a part of that community and there is nothing voluntary about being part of a community. You are either all the way in or all the way out.

We tell our friends that their love for us is voluntary too but just try being a friend on those terms. We like to see our friends regularly and we greet long lost friends with enthusiasm but the semi-dependable friend who is there sometimes and sometimes not, him or her we don't quite like so much.

Waugh Day

I can't believe I almost missed this. Today would have been Evelyn Waugh's 107th birthday.

I know this is a minority opinion, but I believe that Brideshead Revisted is the greatest novel of the twentieth century.

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? ... The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned wisdom than his.

I will be celebrating with rib eye steak with a creamy sauce, broccoli, baked potatoes and some bloody Burgundy.