Brideshead Revisited: Stage IV — Sebastian, Julia, and the Cost of Loving
- Feb 6
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 12
By the time love begins to take clearer shape in Brideshead Revisited, it has already been announced, tested, and wounded.
That preparation has a name.
Sebastian Flyte.
Before Julia becomes the object of Charles Ryder’s desire, Sebastian is the one who opens the world of Brideshead, the one through whom Charles first learns what it means to love — and what it costs to love something fragile.
If Julia will later represent love resisted, Sebastian is love given — and broken.
Sebastian: The First Love
Charles’s attachment to Sebastian is immediate and consuming. Through him come Oxford’s delights, Brideshead’s beauty, and a sense of life suddenly enlarged beyond anything Charles has known.
Waugh does not sentimentalize this bond, but he does not disguise its depth:
“I was in search of love in those days, and I went full tilt at everything.”
Sebastian is the embodiment of that search — radiant, witty, wounded, and already beginning to flee from pain he cannot name.
Through loving Sebastian, Charles learns how to give himself without calculation. It is an education that will leave him exposed — and changed.
Sebastian’s Flight
What becomes unmistakable in this stage is that Sebastian cannot remain.
He drinks not for pleasure, but for escape. He runs not from discipline, but from the unrelenting moral memory of Brideshead — its faith, its expectations, its God.
Where Charles is drawn inward by beauty, Sebastian feels himself judged by it.
Waugh allows us to see this collapse quietly, painfully, without melodrama. Charles watches with growing helplessness as joy gives way to exile.
Sebastian goes first.
First into disintegration. First into wandering. First into loss.
In this sense, Sebastian is not merely a tragic figure; he is the precursor — the one who bears the weight of Brideshead before the others can.
Julia After Sebastian
Only after Sebastian begins to recede does Julia Flyte come clearly into focus.
This matters.
Julia is not Charles’s first love. She is his second, and therefore a more dangerous one. She enters a heart already wounded, already educated in longing and frustration.
Where Sebastian collapses under the weight of inheritance, Julia learns to negotiate with it.
She is controlled, intelligent, guarded — resistant not through weakness, but through will.
Charles is drawn to her precisely because she promises beauty without surrender. But love does not remain manageable for long.
The Moral Architecture Revealed
At this stage, Charles begins to sense — dimly but unmistakably — that Brideshead is not neutral.
It is not merely beautiful. It is ordered. It remembers God.
Waugh makes this clear in Charles’s reflections on the Flytes:
“They were not as other men, nor lived by the same code.”
Sebastian’s failure is not merely personal weakness. Julia’s resistance is not mere independence. Both are responses — different, but related — to a world where grace presses quietly but relentlessly upon the soul.
Charles, loving them both, is drawn into that pressure without yet understanding its source.
Innocence Gives Way to Cost
This is the stage where innocence finally fractures.
Charles can no longer drift. He wants. He waits. He is disappointed. Love now involves jealousy, restraint, and loss — not as abstractions, but as lived experience.
Waugh is showing us something precise and unsparing:
Love is never merely emotional.It is always moral.
Charles does not yet understand this truth. But he is already being shaped by it.
Why This Stage Matters
Stage IV is where Brideshead Revisited ceases to be nostalgic and becomes tragic.
Love now has:
a face
a history
a cost
Nothing that follows will be accidental.
What is lost will be lost because it was loved.
And yet, in Waugh’s world, even broken love is never wasted.
Looking Ahead
Sebastian will fade, but he will not disappear. Julia will intensify, but she will never escape the shadow of what came before.
And Charles will carry both loves forward — into wandering, exile, and eventual reckoning.
For now, we stand at the moment where love has taken shape — and where its demands can no longer be ignored.
Reader’s Note:
For Sebastian’s deepening fracture, Julia’s clearer presence, and the pressure of Brideshead’s moral world, read Book I, Chapters 3–5.
*********************
When I Was One-and-Twenty
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.
---A.E. Housman
Source: Father: An Anthology of Verse (EP Dutton & Company, 1931)
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