Brideshead Revisited, less a satire than a romance, marks the first accomplishment of the second stage of Evelyn Waugh's career. Though something of the old, hard brilliance remains, there is a new tone of lush nostalgia in this work, the first of Waugh's novels in which his Roman Catholicism is pervasive. Indeed, excepting Helena, it is Waugh's only novel to date in which a religious theme has been dominant; although Guy Crouchback is a Catholic and Roman Catholicism figures constantly in Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender, the essential theme of these three volumes is the total collapse of civilized values which is the concomitant of war. In effect, in Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh turned from the nihilistic rejection of his early satires to an affirmative commitment; to satisfy the other impulse of the artist-rebel, as Albert Camus has described him, Waugh affirmed a vision which he believed gave unity to life. Brideshead Revisited was his "attempt to trace the divine purpose in a pagan world."
Reviewing Brideshead, Edmund Wilson [see excerpt above], who had most highly praised the earlier satires, concluded that in this more normal world the novelist "no longer knows his way"; he found the novel to be "disastrous." By contrast, a reviewer for the Catholic World judged Brideshead "a work of art." (p. 98)
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