A balanced study of Mr. Waugh

By W. J. IGOE
EVELYN WAUGH: Portrait of an Artist, by Frederick J. Stopp. (Chapman Si Hall 21s.).
THE trouble one has in review
ing this very good book comes from a personal taste which admirers of Mr. Waugh's writings will understand Our worlds are peopled by his characters.
I like best Mr. Scott-King, to whom I burn candles in my imagination whenever I read a political speech on education, finding myself praying that in a school somewhere a heroic figure, shining ever so dimly, is winning happy immortality by making Mr. Scott-King his exemplar.
How thus, cherishing the little way of that wise and holy man, can I convey to the reader that, more than abundant entertainment, in the collected works of Evelyn Waugh I find a spiritual quality, an attitude consonant with the demands of Christianity ?
Crouchback, the man with the Cross on his back. has been dismissed as a mere romantic. One's sympathies warm to . him, the crusader manqué, who could not see war in terms of social engineering.
His reviewers
MALICIOUSLY one sees the re viewers who used the youthful books to chastise the mature become more and more like characters from the books they absentmindedly praise. Mr. Puffwas it in the " New Statesman "? -advising Mr. Waugh to cease
being landed and a gentleman, becomes the mass-mind articulate, having been to school.
And Mr. Puff-that was in the "New Yorker"-the American branch of the family, one sees (unable to improve on a self-sketch) brooding in Westminster Abbey on the inability of the British to forgive his forefathers for throwing off the colonial yoke. Books revenge themselves on reviewers.
Mr. Stopp's book is a balanced study which will clarify the opinions of those who have read Mr. Waugh. It was not an easy task he set himself, an attempt to present a portrait in true proportions of an artist whose recent books have been inadequately reviewed, at best, and, more often, stupidly.
Evelyn Waugh is an uncommon phenomenon among British novelists: while he is comparable, in some aspects, with Dickens, in others with Wodehouse and the painter Hogarth (in the logic of his early satire) and other traditional artists, part of his quality is rooted in a profound respect for scholarship.
I was interested to read in Mr. Stoop's book that he went to Oxford as an historian. Some years ago I apeculatively deduced that appreciation of his sense of history is essential to a larger appreciation of his books.
A sense of history T" beautiful, Jamesian opening. for example, of " Men at Arms " whispers graceful echoes out of history into the England Gervase Crouchback's grandson found in 1939. Catholics justly have praised his "Edmund Campion"; have we given anything like due consideration to "Helena" which reflects a more mature and disciplined craftsman ?
It is a book, I believe, future generations will treasure for the quality of the author's workmanship, the marvellous (the word is chosen carefully) control of the time-dimension, humorous use of anachronism and the context given the portrait by his unsentimental (a rare quality) understanding of the nature of sanctity. Mr. Waugh has written rewarding words on the subject in his " The Holy Places."
Mr. Stopp sketches the relevant details of his subject's life and reexamines the books, revealing the designs, the plottings, and the characters in a lucid and stimulating way. I should like to think his book will be recommended for inclusion in every public lib rary where good books are made available