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Playing Tigers. As Englishmen entered into "the last decade of their grandeur," Artist Ryder, with no faith to cling to, desperately sought to recapture his artistic vitality by painting in the Latin American jungles. Result: he became a bigger social success. "Mr. Ryder," the best critics agreed (in one of Waugh's inimitable parodies of claptrap), "rises like a young trout to the hypodermic injection of a new culture . . . focussing the frankly traditional battery of his elegance and erudition on the maelstrom of barbarism. . . . Mr. Ryder has. found himself." But Anthony Blanche could not be fooled.
Ryder made a last desperate snatch at life by falling in love with Lady Julia; lawyers coldly set in motion the legal wheels of divorce that would enable them to marry. But Brideshead revisited, Ryder found, was in as desperate a state as the rest of England. The chapel was closed. Lady Marchmain was dead. Lord Brideshead was married to the widow of an admiral who had also collected matchboxes. Charming Sebastian had wound up as sottish handyman to a kindly abbot in a Spanish monastery. And on the eve of World War II, wicked old Lord Marchmain himself came home to England to die. Propped up in a massive Renaissance bed, his Italian mistress and an oxygen cylinder beside him, he rambled in & out of delirium :
"... Better today. I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately . . . drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets. I shall live long. . . . If I could only breathe. . . . Plender, Gaston, open the windows." "The windows are all wide open, my lord," said the valets.
They sent for a priest. Lord Marchmain threw him out. "Give him time," said the priest cheerfully, "I've known worse cases make beautiful deaths."
How the priest was proved right is the climax to Brideshead Revisited, in which the ageless theme of rebirth through death is used melodramatically by Author Waugh to resurrect the remnants of the tottering family and leave Artist Ryder sadder, wiser, still unmarried to Lady Julia—and a religious man. Soon after, Ryder, now a soldier, watched troops being billeted at Brideshead.
"The builders [of Brideshead] did not know the uses to which their work would descend. . . . Something quite remote from anything [they] 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 . . . relit before the . . . 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 the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones."