Stage III — Brideshead & First Love : Beauty Awakens Desire
- Ken Kalis
- 15 hours ago
- 3 min read
Last week, we lingered at Oxford — that season of innocence when friendship, laughter, and beauty seemed sufficient for a lifetime. This week, Evelyn Waugh moves us forward, gently but decisively, into Stage III — Brideshead & First Love.
Oxford was a garden of youth. Brideshead is something else entirely.
Here, Charles Ryder encounters beauty on a larger scale — not merely aesthetic pleasure, but a place that awakens longing, attachment, and a sense of destiny.
Long before Julia Flyte becomes the object of his affection, Brideshead itself claims his heart.
Arrival at Brideshead
Charles’s first visit to Brideshead is not dramatic. Waugh does not announce its importance with thunder or revelation. Instead, the house appears almost quietly --- approached, entered, absorbed.
Yet everything changes.
The symmetry, the grandeur, the light on stone and water — Brideshead is not simply impressive; it feels ordered, complete, rooted in a history Charles does not share but instinctively desires.
Unlike Oxford, which feels temporary and playful, Brideshead feels permanent, established, belonging to itself.
Charles does not yet know that he is falling in love. But he is.
First Love Before Romance
This is one of Waugh’s great insights: first love is often misrecognized.
Charles believes he is responding to beauty, to friendship, to culture. In truth, he is responding to a world that seems to promise meaning — a coherence his own life lacks.
Brideshead represents continuity, inheritance, tradition, and depth. It is a place where the past still speaks.
Only later will that longing take human form.
Only later will Julia step fully into the foreground.
For now, she remains a shadowed presence — glimpsed, sensed, not yet possessed. And that restraint matters. Waugh allows love to grow out of place before it grows toward a person.
Innocence Deepens — But Does Not Disappear
If Oxford was innocence untested, Brideshead is innocence complicated.
There is still delight here, still freedom, still laughter — but now there are expectations, histories, and moral gravity beneath the surface.
Charles is still unaware of grace. But he is no longer untouched by it.
Brideshead is a Catholic house, not only because of its chapel, but because of its weight — the sense that life is not self-invented, that actions echo, that beauty is never neutral.
Charles feels this intuitively, even if he cannot yet name it.
Why This Stage Matters
Spiritually, this stage marks a transition many readers recognize:
from pleasure to attachment
from freedom to longing
from innocence to vulnerability
First love always carries risk. To love is to expose oneself to loss. And Charles, standing in the sunlight at Brideshead, has no idea how costly this love will become.
But he also has no idea how necessary it is.
Looking Ahead
Next week, love will take clearer shape. Relationships will intensify. Conflicts will emerge. And the beautiful world Charles has entered will begin to demand more than admiration.
For now, we remain at the threshold — with Brideshead before us, radiant and inviting — and with a young man just beginning to learn that beauty, once loved, never releases us unchanged.
Reader’s Note
This reflection is meant to accompany, not replace, Evelyn Waugh’s own prose. For the fullest experience of this stage, readers are encouraged to read Book I: “Et in Arcadia Ego,” Chapters 3–5, which cover Charles Ryder’s first visits to Brideshead and the awakening of his first love.
As Charles stands at the threshold of Brideshead, caught between wonder and unknowing, we are reminded of a question the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins once asked — a question that echoes through Waugh’s novel and through every human encounter with beauty:
The Leaden Echo How to kéep — is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, Láce, latch or catch or key to keep Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, … from vanishing away?
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