Waugh continued to maintain that he was not interested in an investigation of character, but regarded writing as ‘an exercise in the use of language’; it was ‘speech, drama, and events’ that interested him. Doubtless this was true. Nevertheless, from Brideshead onwards, and most certainly in the Sword of Honour trilogy, one can see that themes and content have come to matter more to him. He is now as interested in what he has to say as in how he says it. The aesthete has not been suppressed by the moralist, but he is yoked to him.
In that Firbank essay he wrote of the novelist being ‘fettered to cause and effect’, just as ‘in painting till the last generation the aesthetically significant activity of the artist had always to be occasioned by anecdote and representation’ — precisely the kind of paintings that Waugh would collect in middle age. He had come by then a long way from the boy who wrote ‘In Defence of Cubism’ and declared that ‘the resemblance to life does not in the least concern the merits of the picture’.
It is natural, perhaps because it is reassuring, to suppose that one’s taste improves, one’s appreciation deepens and one’s judgment becomes wiser as one grows older; natural to think that one becomes a better reader. Sometimes we may. In How Fiction Works James Wood says, ‘I know from my own old books, wantonly annotated 20 years ago when I was a student, that I routinely underlined for approval details and images and metaphors that now strike me as commonplace, while serenely missing things which now seem wonderful.’ No doubt this also is true. Yet, with the passing of time, a fresh and generous response to literature may be lost. If, for example, Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay now seems to me verbose, ponderous and too often tiresome, does this mean I am wiser than my 18-year-old self who found it entrancing? If Swinburne no longer delights as he did when I was young, does this signify that he is a lesser poet than I thought him then, or am I perhaps lesser than I was when the choruses of ‘Atalanta in Corydon’ sent the spirit dancing? If poets, Swinburne among them, may deteriorate with age, perhaps we, as readers, may do so also? Was Waugh’s 1929 delight in Firbank a sign of immaturity or is the middle-aged novelist’s rejection of him evidence of a form of critical arterio-sclerosis?
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